Ask Slashdot: What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

brown.dragon is an older programmer moving to Australia. He writes: I want to start an online solution that other programmers find helpful, and right now I'm wondering if I should go with "learning new technologies" or "getting really good at the basics". Both are targeted towards giving a career boost to older programmers...

Would you like to keep in touch with the latest technologies because that's what makes it easy to get jobs? Or would you like to be really good at answering (Google/Facebook/Amazon) algorithmic interview questions?
He asks programmers looking for an online educational tool, "which of these (if any), would interest you?" So leave your answers in the comments. What training do you think would help older programmers most?

Comments

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[jandersen]

The thing is - as an older programmer (which I am very much) it is no longer about programming. but more about other skills, like knowing frameworks and design patterns to a high level of expertise, leadership or even (heaven forbid!) management. I have been listening to a lot of science podcasts recently (not the "Aw, look at that, ain't it awesome" kind of thing, but proper science; they do exist) and one thing that stands out is the growing need for what is loosely called Big Data: the handling and analysis of huge amounts of data. One that I heard about this morning is the experiments they do at CERN - apparently they have something like a million proton-proton collissions per second to analyse in real time, and they expect to find 1 Higgs boson per hour - or was it day or week? Both a huge amount of data, very few events of interest and very little time to analyse it in because there is no realistic way they can store that much. And of course, CERN are not the only ones that produce vast amounts of data - all sciences do, from biology to medicine to physics to just about anything. When you reach my advanced age, you begin to have an outlook on life that makes real science look very, very attractive, I think.

Team facilitation and project management skills

[Bearhouse]

Based on my observation of "older", (I'd prefer to use "senior" or "experienced") programmers, I'd say they fall into two camps:

(a) The guys with 20+ years of experience, who is comfortable with his technical competence and does not want to move into management. They stay current on what they need automatically, and get the job done.
(b) The guys with 1 years experience 20 times. They stopping learning a long time ago, and you cannot help them.

So the first group is your target; what I've often observed is that their meeting and PM skills could be improved; hence their contributions (direct and indirect : how often have you seen a "senior guy" make a quiet suggestion that headed-off disaster?) are persistently under-estimated...

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[mwvdlee]

I want design problems to keep them up at night.

The reality is probably that your personality flaws and the problems they cause are keeping them up at night.

Design problems are fun for everybody, regardless of age.

Dealing with easily avoidable problems caused by dipshits in decission-making positions ignoring or even overriding rational solutions is fun only for those people young enough to not yet have learned the reality of idiot bosses.

You won't believe how many times I've encountered non-issues labeled as "critical" by a manager (because not being able to showcase a feature nobody needs to a new prospective client is somehow "critical") which was promptly forgotten about by same manager a day later.

The only difference is that old engineers have learned to focus on getting stuff done instead of jumping through whatever latest bullshit hoops.