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

Write software

[rsilvergun]

that's you're best bet. Just keep writing software. The best way to learn is by doing.

Re:Write software

[jamiesan]

This.

Do older programmers even need help?

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Most programmers I know can pick up a new tech in about two weeks and be average at it automatically then gain mastery of it over time. There's no need to have a tutorial because there are plenty out there already.
Personally, I do so much hands on coding and software engineering that I forget the terminology they used in college. I know how to do the stuff, but I forget the definitions they used. Its kinda embarassing in an interview to not know what they're talking about because I forgot the word they use for something super basic. There's webpages for this too. Not to discourage you, but older programmers can train themselves in just a few days if they want to.
Its not like older programmers today haven't been exposed to OO or something game changing. I'd even imagine older coders can pick up new techs faster than kids out of college just because of a lifetime of experience.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. You and I know it. Just tell it to HR when they find out you're over 50. : (

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

50? I'm in my mid 30's and have personally seen the aversion from HR folks to the idea of a developer very skilled in several areas being able to pick up a new areas in others.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[ShanghaiBill]

Just tell it to HR when they find out you're over 50. : (

If you are over 50 and you are trying to get a job by going through HR, then there is something wrong with you.

Someone with decades of experience should have a deep network, and plenty of ex-coworkers to tap for opportunities. If they don't, that is because those co-workers don't want to work with them again. So why should I hire them?

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving abroad for marriage or other reasons, for example, means you may not have a network in the location where you're looking to work. Poor reasoning on your part.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I second the above... GFY!

If you are over 50 and you are trying to get a job by going through HR,

Every job I've ever gotten, even those where I was hand selected by someone internally and handed to a hiring person who was told "hire this person" or where I happened to send an application directly through their mailing address or web page has involved going through HR... who believe it or not, often have some degree of control in the process.

then there is something wrong with you.

I guess you don't know the joys of job hunting and the games some HR folks like to play: "Here I have a check-list of questions I am required to ask, unless you meet the job description perfectly you won't get the job, and if we think you are lying... you won't get the job."

Someone with decades of experience should have a deep network, and plenty of ex-coworkers to tap for opportunities.

A deep network doesn't automatically mean open positions or those contacts being in such a place in the food chain where they can do much to create available headcount.

If they don't, that is because those co-workers don't want to work with them again.

I've had multiple folks who have bent over backwards for me over the last few months, each of which I know would be happy to work with me. It wasn't their insufficiently super recommendations that sank my candidacy, but the HR folks.

So why should I hire them?

Again... GFY if that is your narrow vision of the hiring process.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[johannesg]

They don't. My Powers of Programming have not diminished as I grew older (and by now I have reached the magic age of 45, i.e. I am entitled to tell you all how I was chased by dinosaurs uphill in my youth - at least that's what employers believe anyway).

But the problem is not that you somehow become less capable technically. The problem is that you become less accepting of bullshit. When I was 25, my boss asked me to fix a problem that required me to _stand_ (not sit) in a cooling cell (4 C; 39 F) for a day because there was a program running there that needed debugging. I did it without asking questions. All around me were guys wearing warm clothing who were carrying boxes in and out of the cooling cell, but noone thought to offer me any protection from the cold. When I walked out to warm up a little every once in a while they would in fact comment on my obvious lack of stamina and suggest I work harder to stay warm (again, this was a programming job).

And a few years after that, at a different employer, they hung a computer from a crane and had me stand next to it for a few days because that was the only way we could reach the relevant hardware - although moving it to a desk would only have been a few hours worth of work. I stood right next to a 10m drop for day, without any kind of safety in place - one wrong step and I would have fallen about 3 floors down.

Would I still do these things? No f'ing way! It's not that I _cannot_ stand for a day, or that my body feels the cold more, or that I'm scared of heights now, it's simply that I no longer think of myself as the lowest peon in the organisation - if they want my services, they need to at least marginally accomodate my needs as well. Also, I discovered somewhere along the line that my job is essentially a mercenary position: I rent out my skills for money, but there isn't any loyalty either way beyond the short term. There are in fact things in life I rate higher than spending hours in the office.

Employers very much prefer someone who only cares for proving himself to the big bad world, and is happy to do idiotic jobs without asking any questions - and has those things as the highest priority in life. Those people are generally speaking below 40, so someone over 40 finds it harder to get a job. And no amount of training or online courses will change this.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Sique]

The problem is not the basic language. The features in different languages are often surprisingly similar, because useful features are ported fast and often. Sometimes you get the features by adding libraries, sometimes it's a useful header file, but in general, it's mostly syntactic sugar. The problem is the set of libraries in a project, the frameworks and the little quirks. This can amount to a lot of arcane knowledge, which you don't get within two weeks. You learn it step by step whenever a problem occurs with a solution that is deeply affected by those libraries, frameworks and sudden bugs caused by the quirks.

What older programmers are good in is their long experience and intuition. They don't overengineer code, but know how to keep the code flexible enough for later changes. They know when looking for a general solution in someone else's code helps, they have an idea for which problem a ready made and well maintained library might exist and know how and where to look for it. They remember when they have stumbled upon a similar problem already and remember how they solved it at the time. So in general, they will be productive more early with new technologies than younger programmers missing the experience. But they might never tap the full potential of said technology, because they use what they need and ignore everything else until they need it.

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.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Hognoxious]

Most programmers I know can pick up a new tech in about two weeks and be average at it automatically

We all *say* we can. I'm not sure it's quite that simple.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[RabidReindeer]

I've seen HR reject because I had experience with similar products from other vendors. I've seen HR reject because my experience was with a newer verson of a product.

HR is brain-dead when it comes to understanding technical qualifications and abilities. And they don't care. There's always someone willing to lie and claim to be a perfect fit despite the fact that HR routinely publishes laundry lists which are statistically unlikely to have anyone on the planet be a point-for-point match.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Mortimer82]

You may be an excellent and perfectly competent developer in your day to day job, but by not knowing (at least certain) terminology for your field, you are lacking a certain degree of professionalism and are certainly restricting yourself in the broader field as you are lacking the ability to effectively converse with others in it.

All different fields have their own set of terminology and at some level it is arbitrary as to what things are called, but when it comes to communicating with others, it is absolutely essential that you all use the same terms for things. When people aren't familiar with standardised terminology for their field, at best they battle a bit when it comes to communication, at worst it leads to a misunderstanding and the wrong thing being done.

Even if your methodologies are exemplary, it is for nought if you are applying the wrong ones simply due to a misunderstanding of what was asked.

My girlfriend is in the process of acquiring a project management certification (PRINCE2) and while part of the certification covers methodologies, an arguably more important aspect of it is the terminology, in particular, the names of different roles that people are assigned to on projects. This is important because she works in a consulting firm and all their big clients expect the consultants to be familiar with these names of roles so that in client meetings, the client could just mention a role name, and everyone in the room will already be on the same page as to the responsibilities and expectations of any person with that role.

At one of my previous jobs, developers were given training on and are expected to at least know the following above and beyond "knowing how to program in general":

• - GOF Design Patterns (at least their intent and how they conceptually solve a given problem)
• - OO Terminology
• - Data Structure Names and what kinds of problems they are appropriate for

And other stuff of course. It of course helped us day to day solving problems, but I imagine that it also helped all of us more readily absorb information at conferences too.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[angel'o'sphere]

Some people are not good at networking.

And frankly it goes both ways, asking an ex colleague about job opportunities (when I'm vacant) is probably the least thing I ever would do.

Also, it is probably a culture problem, but in Germany it is often impossible to bypass HR. So a network would not help. And another culture problem is "friendship". My colleagues are not my friends. Regardless of job I had. I never would invite one to my birthday e.g. And for the same reason: I don't see any point to stay in contact with a colleague after he or I leave the company. Sorry, I'm a developer, not a marketing droid or Dilbert like manager who *needs* a network and is nothing without it. I don't nourish colleagues to have a network, for that I have linkedin and Xing.

If that makes me "non hire able" for you ... I wonder what else you miss :D

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[johannesg]

That lack of enthousiasm is not because we have done it for 30 years, it is because we have put in that effort many times in the past, and received nothing in return for it. I've done my share of heroics - and getting a pat on the back was usually already too much. Financial compensation? Never. Bonus for job well done, above and beyond? Never. Time compensation? Only under the direst of circumstances. Additional carreer prospects? Don't make me laugh - they know I'm a lousy manager and an excellent engineer, so they'll never willingly move me out of engineering.

You are getting some grief from the other posters, but in truth there is nothing that separates you from so many other bosses: you think of engineers not as people, but as tools. And in return they think of themselves not as valued members of the team, but as mercenaries.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

I, sir, am a bona-fide computer geek. I don't have a deep social network. That would require that I actually be social! Did you want to hire a social person or would you rather hire someone who isn't social, but gets the job done?

And when I get laid off, the entire department scatters to the winds and never contacts each other again.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[ranton]

Every job I've ever gotten, even those where I was hand selected by someone internally and handed to a hiring person who was told "hire this person" or where I happened to send an application directly through their mailing address or web page has involved going through HR... who believe it or not, often have some degree of control in the process.

I guess you don't know the joys of job hunting and the games some HR folks like to play: "Here I have a check-list of questions I am required to ask, unless you meet the job description perfectly you won't get the job, and if we think you are lying... you won't get the job."

I've had multiple folks who have bent over backwards for me over the last few months, each of which I know would be happy to work with me. It wasn't their insufficiently super recommendations that sank my candidacy, but the HR folks.

I don't agree with everything the GP said, but by your 50's even a decent network would have plenty of people who can mostly ignore HR folks. By this time it is filled with VP's, directors, and C-level execs. I am only in my 30's and an AVP at my company (financial services, so these silly AVP titles seem to be important) and if HR got in the way of one of my hiring recommendations our CTO would make heads roll. You can have whatever fancy title you want, but if you aren't powerful enough to override HR you have no power (or even respect) in your company.

A deep network doesn't automatically mean open positions or those contacts being in such a place in the food chain where they can do much to create available headcount.

Yes it does, since if no one in your network is at such a place in the food chain by your 50's you have a very shallow network. If after 30 years of experience your entire network is a bunch of senior level developers that is not a deep network.

All of that said, there are still plenty of reasons why even a deep network would not help in finding a job. You could move across the country or to a new country for a spouse's job. You could have mismanaged your career enough to only have skills in a dying niche. You could find yourself without work during a deep recession, where hiring freezes and tightening budgets are the norm.

The overall lack of sympathy of the GP is inappropriate, but his general message is basically correct.

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.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[gweihir]

Most people do not go in that direction. The ones that do notice more and more with growing experience how the pseudo-scientific answers doe not cut it. The others just cling to their (usually mistaken) beliefs harder and harder over time, because the magnitude of their error becomes larger over time and hence harder to admit.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most programmers I know can pick up a new tech in about two weeks and be average at it automatically then gain mastery of it over time.

But you still need three years of experience with that specific toolkit to get past HR.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[WalrusSlayer]

If you are over 50 and you are trying to get a job by going through HR, then there is something wrong with you.

Someone with decades of experience should have a deep network, and plenty of ex-coworkers to tap for opportunities. If they don't, that is because those co-workers don't want to work with them again. So why should I hire them?

Unless they've spent a large chunk of their later career keeping their small startup venture alive and generating revenue, effectively keeping them cloistered while they apply their skill set. Yeah, I've got a small network from when things were more robust and I had to hire out some of the engineering work, but most was done by yours truly. The one thing I could have done better was keep more of those contacts alive, as a lot of them are pretty stale. But that time period coincided with kids showing up on the scene, which triaged that pretty far down the list.

So sure, the side-gigs I've gotten over the past 5-6 years have been solely through my small network, that's a good thing. But as the startup slowly winds down, my small network is not as lucrative as I'd like it to be. I haven't had to go the head-hunter route yet, but that's probably the next stop on this train.

All that said, when/if I'm to the point where I'm considering opportunities that involve an HR dept, then I'd say things would be in a pretty desperate state

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Joe_Dragon]

That HR wants a H1B so they use BS like that to get rid of the USC's.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[fluffernutter]

This basically amounts to getting a job through favoritism and has been frowned upon in every place I have worked. People get labeled as'trying to go through the back door'.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

From a past job:
Peons like worked very long hours to meet a milestone.
Result:
VP : 100k + bonus
Director: 50k bonus
Peons: hotdog lunch in the parking lot, one hotdog per person only please!

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[GLMDesigns]

Not everyone networks well. You can be a good programmer and a poor networker.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[TheRaven64]

If only there were some mechanism by which people in one country could communicate with people in another country.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[layabout]

most of my peers have left the field. my mentors have "retired" as companies paid them to go away

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[jeff4747]

The 'I'm a mercenary' attitude is my biggest peeve against more experienced engineers

Enthusiasm is a two-way street.

Are you enthusiastic about their future? No, you're not. Your enthusiasm is for yourself (indirectly via your product). They're not going to be enthusiastic about you if you are not enthusiastic about them.

And in about 5-10 years after a few more of your dreams have been crushed, you will become them. One of us! One of us!

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[TheRaven64]

Some people are not good at networking

Networking is a form of communication. If they're not good at this form, what others are they bad at? Code monkeys are cheap and plentiful, people who can communicate their designs, collaborate with others, and work on a team where everyone benefits from the specialist expertise that each individual has are rare. The latter are the ones worth hiring.

Also, it is probably a culture problem, but in Germany it is often impossible to bypass H

Bypassing means different things. If a company wants to hire you, then they'll put out a job ad that has a checklist of things for HR to approve that happen to be exactly the same things that you have on your CV.

My colleagues are not my friends. Regardless of job I had. I never would invite one to my birthday e.g. And for the same reason: I don't see any point to stay in contact with a colleague after he or I leave the company.

Maintaining a professional relationship with someone doesn't mean maintaining a close personal relationship with them. Can you name 10 people that you've worked with in the last decade who you'd want to hire? Most competent people know which of their coworkers are also competent and which aren't. If they're given the choice, they'd rather work with someone competent. If you moved jobs, who would you want to come with you and who would you want to leave behind? If none of the people you've worked with recently seem competent to you then either you're in a job below your ability or you're the incompetent one on the team.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

The trick is to not work for anyone large enough to have an HR department. Find a small company where the people that do the work make the decisions.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty harsh but I am 71 and still working largely due to calls from previous clients. Fortunately I work in embedded C/C++ that has hardly changed in many years although I'm slowly using more C++11 features. Fundamentals win over the latest fad. My advice is that if you understand only 10% of Knuth (The Art of Computer Programming) you are still better than 90% of programmers today.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[skids]

Most programmers I know can pick up a new tech in about two weeks and be average at it automatically then gain mastery of it over time. There's no need to have a tutorial because there are plenty out there already.

One thing I'd point out is that older programmers are more used to learning either directly from printed manuals (which used to be thorough) or other print material.

The trend, in contrast, has been towards videos. These can't be easily searched or cross-referenced.

I'd say improving documentation of newer systems to match the quality of documentation older programmers expect would be a great project.

To the point about vernacular, older coders would probably find enjoyable a mildly sarcastic resource that cronicals the evolution of terminology -- especially cases where words flipped meaning entirely (e.g. "foreign code" used to mean calling outside a language. Lately that's now "native code").

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Joe_Dragon]

yes but we save so much + we get people willing work 60-80 hour weeks and more with no compilations

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[supremebob]

Don't forget that there are a bunch of 50+ programmers out there who have become resistant to change as well. I've worked with a few who seemingly refuse to learn new technology because they think that it's "just a fad" and the way they do things now are better.

It seems to be a particular problem in shops that are moving to open source tools, and the developers are stuck in the Microsoft mindset of doing things. Which is odd, because even Microsoft is supporting open source products now.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[skids]

This is also why we, as consumers, are forced to suffer through slipshod products... Only the most desperate, corner-cutting, incautious teams can compete in a market that's all about who released first, and advertising hype. It's the 80's Chinese manufacturing (which eventually improved) problem all over again. Cheapest/fastest to market, made by the hungriest employees most focused on short-term gains, always wins.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[handygm3579]

There is no automatic network. Almost everyone I worked for or with is dead or retired. Somehow that has made me unemployable. Many of the best programmers have very poor social skills. But you expect me to have deep contacts? Then I see I am just supposed to magically branch out on my own? Again with my deep social skills? Ageism is against the law but good luck proving it. My advise to young programmers is, get out the moment you can.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[xtal]

If you know who Knuth IS, you're better than 90% of the programmers out there..

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[s_p_oneil]

"Networking is a form of communication. If they're not good at this form, what others are they bad at? Code monkeys are cheap and plentiful, people who can communicate their designs, collaborate with others, and work on a team where everyone benefits from the specialist expertise that each individual has are rare. The latter are the ones worth hiring."

That's flawed logic. I happen to be great at communicating with my team, support, services, sales, customers, etc. I'm also at the top when it comes to knowledge, skill, and problem solving. My boss usually assigns me to the largest prospects or new customers that must be kept happy at all costs. I answer their questions/concerns and solve their problems, and they couldn't be happier having me as a technical contact.

However, I do absolutely NO networking at all. Normally I'm introverted, and I prefer to keep a few close friends to a bunch of acquaintances. The thought of "shmoozing" with a bunch of other people merely to maintain a network of contacts is as unappealing to me as applying for a job in sales or marketing.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Big Hairy Ian]

HR is brain-dead when it comes to understanding technical qualifications and abilities.

Amen brother! Our HR hired a Programme Manager for a major IT Project (£22M) who's previous experience was running a shoe shop!

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

Absolutely THIS.

'Professional HR' are just a bunch of useless air thieves. HR shouldn't _ever_ hire, they should admin benefits, do exit interviews and shuffle paper to keep the local fascists out of the company's business.

in my experience HR are too incompetent to hire office staff, much less techs, much much less engineers.

If you are working at a company that doesn't have an HR department and they start to hire one, start looking. It's a terrible process, as chair fillers start to infect a team that really worked.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

Perhaps they know something you don't?

Being resistant to change is bad, jumping on every new buzz word soup 'solution' is much worse.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Bigjeff5]

Bypassing means different things. If a company wants to hire you, then they'll put out a job ad that has a checklist of things for HR to approve that happen to be exactly the same things that you have on your CV.

I had this happen to me for the first time recently, and I've got to be honest, it was really freaking cool. Guy was all like "Hey, I've got this position opening up, you should send me your resume. I'm still writing the requirements."

So I sent him my resume, and a day or so after it posted his boss called me up and told me the job was mine if I wanted it. I didn't even have an interview, just an orientation. Easiest hiring process I've ever been through.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Quince alPillan]

HR is brain-dead when it comes to understanding technical qualifications and abilities. And they don't care.

While true, it isn't for the reason you think it is. HR, especially for non-tech companies, has no clue what all of these programming terms or software things mean. You're lucky if you get an HR person that understands anything more than Microsoft Office. They depend upon the managers, who write up the job listing, to tell them what they need.

HR makes the assumption that if you put in a specific version of the software, you really do need an expert on that version of the software. Even if you and I know that it hasn't changed much in the past six versions, HR sees it as something completely different because they don't know better. Even recruiters for technical contracting companies sometimes aren't much better.

HR expects you, the prospective employee, to understand what those terms mean and for you to tailor your resume to what the specific job requirements are. That can mean letting them know that the products are similar or that the newer version is the same as the older version. You can put it in the cover letter.

If HR is posting nonsensical job listings, you can blame the hiring manager for giving them poor requirements. Take that as an opportunity to judge the company communication and/or who you might be working for in the future.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

You are saying you've only worked at shitty places?

It's getting in through the 'side door'. 'Back door' has implications of pillow biting.

_Every_ smart employer knows the difference between favoritism and references.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[fluffernutter]

The ones who are really good do AND teach, thankyouverymuch.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

If HR knows your name before you are 'hired' you are fucked.

Sure you go through HR, in the sense that HR does what it's told and processes the paper.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Half-pint HAL]

yes but we save so much + we get people willing work 60-80 hour weeks and more with no compilations

If you want programmers with no compilations, why not switch to Python?

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[fluffernutter]

I've only worked at places that hire people in a fair and equitable manner, which means going through HR. When you work at a place that hires people though word of mouth, you end up with a bunch of divas that like to talk about themselves a lot but aren't great at getting the actual work done. The dangerous thing about hiring 'networkers' is that these are people who are expert at making themselves sound good and bears no relationship to their actual job performance.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[fluffernutter]

Networking is a more specific form of communication. Networking is more like marketing, which almost always has within it some level of deception or manipulation of the facts in your own favor. People can be great at communication without necessarily being interested in being networkers.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

How long does it take you to learn a new procedural/OO language?

A week is plenty (you'll ether have a good start on mastery or know to run away from the POS). But then you need to learn the libraries. Which will never end.

If a language has its own constellation of 'design patterns' it's a good sign you should avoid it. It was written by kids who never bothered learning the old way before reinventing everything badly (e.g. mySQL).

I've spent some years learning to make _crap_ tools work (dating myself: Dataflex). That time was truly wasted. Nobody cares and the skills are now useless. Don't be a mySQL/Rails/noSQL guru, unless you want to spend your later years searching for pig fucks bad enough they are still stuck with your preferred tool.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[fluffernutter]

If it were me, I would go to that job feeling like I didn't really deserve it and I would continue to feel that way while doing it.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[RabidReindeer]

I doubt that. I have a record for good documentation and clean code even when it's a project where I'm the sole person on it. It's purely self-defense as much as anything else. When something breaks/needs updating, I don't have to drag all the details out of my foggy senile head.

You can communicate effectively with co-workers without having any extra-employment communications with them at all. I once worked for a company where there were dozens of developers in different departments and at the end of the day, they all went home and had nothing to do with each other until the next workday (of course, the fact that they even had an "end of the day" shows my age).

This bunch was a little extreme, perhaps. They didn't have so much as a bowling league. And eventually, they did start having some extra-work interactions - once they'd grown up to about 1000 employees or so.

But the point is, communications skills aren't the same thing as having a network.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[AmiMoJo]

Unless you moved for some reason, then you network might be hundreds of miles away or on the other side of the planet.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[RabidReindeer]

I'm not sure I've ever been hired through HR, and that includes a company whose HR department had standing orders to hire ANYONE who had worked at one of my previous places of employment.

I don't have a social network, but I have enough of a local reputation that occasionally it will get me an inside connection who'll instruct HR on how to hire me, but that's not the same thing as being able to present my credentials directly to HR and get hired. The inside people change the HR requirements to match me, HR doesn't match me to the original requirements.

If I'd managed to be able to get jobs by just talking about myself, I'd be an overpriced consultant, not hired on staff.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[RabidReindeer]

From a past job:
Peons like worked very long hours to meet a milestone.
Result:
VP : 100k + bonus
Director: 50k bonus
Peons: hotdog lunch in the parking lot, one hotdog per person only please!

Peons: Project completed. We're liquidating the team. Exit interviews in Conference Room 3.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Aighearach]

The key hint is that small businesses don't hire an HR consultant; only a payroll accountant. Most of what the corporate role of HR does is related to being a corporation, not related to managing workers. It is just the corporation doesn't have an absolute dictator or team of people who collectively amount to a dictator; a corporation has to hire a professional to make specialized decisions.

Large companies that aren't corporations will have small HR departments with very little power, whose role is just to assist the workers and managers and act as a go-between who can oversee the paperwork. They don't even try to make decisions, or get in the way.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

It's true that one bullshitter will likely give a good reference to another bullshitter.

So take references from bullshitters with a huge grain of salt.

If you have a good team, you will find that most people with references are nothing like you describe.

A good team starts with a team lead that knows how to hire, if your team lead is a bullshitter, you're fucked from day one.

Building working teams is so far beyond HR it's a joke. They can't even tell competence, much less fit.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[tlhIngan]

However, I do absolutely NO networking at all. Normally I'm introverted, and I prefer to keep a few close friends to a bunch of acquaintances. The thought of "shmoozing" with a bunch of other people merely to maintain a network of contacts is as unappealing to me as applying for a job in sales or marketing.

Then don't shmooze with people.

Networking takes many forms. It's person-to-person.

Professional networking is just that, professional. You don't have to visit your coworkers on a weekly basis to maintain a network. But it wouldn't hurt to do some things like learn some basic things - are they married, what's their spouse's name, kids names, what they like to do, etc.

But it doesn't mean you have to do anything with them. You can have a network of coworkers to whom you only see at work, and maybe just say hello if you see them on the street.

At the very worst, you shoot them an email every few months asking how they're doing. That's it. The amount of work to maintain a network is so little, there's almost no reason not to do it. It doesn't involve "going out" or "spending time". It just involves showing a little interest in them. Knowing what company they moved to and what that company does takes far more effort. And if there's a job there you want, your coworker who switched jobs may email you directly about it or if you hear about it, you can shoot them an email expressing your interest.

And applying a job is selling and marketing yourself. You're selling your skills, training and time to a company who's trying to buy those skills, training and time. Having a network makes the sales job just that much easier since instead of trying to sell to jaded people who've seen every sales job in the book, you can get exposure to the people who really matter in the end.

FYI - social media has made networking much easier as well since old coworkers you meet may have changed from when you saw them last so catching those sort of things makes life easier. Especially if you know no one went to a company you really wanted to join, but then someone eventually gets a job there.

The only time to schmooze is if you're trying to expand your network beyond your direct coworkers. And that's generally if you want to impress a boss or a higher-up who doesn't necessarily have direct report to you

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Aighearach]

You need to read all the works of Ayn Rand so that you know how to phrase your "mercenary" attitude as a deep understanding of the individual work ethic. It really aids in communication with managers. It lets you say the same thing, but in a positive way that will gain their respect, admiration, and deference.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[fluffernutter]

I've seen good team leads be fooled by good bullshitters. Also, you're definition of 'bullshit' may differ from mine. For me, if a person is my friend, I can have a beer with them and say something like, "Oh man I had the worst day today, I was on the wrong server and I typed rm -r * by mistake but I quickly restored it and no one was the wiser". To me, this is a natural conversation. People who 'network' on the other hand never talk about faults or mistakes or bad days. Therefore it seems completely fake to me. Any such fabrication or concern over one's self image I call bullshit.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[mvdwege]

Networking is a form of communication.

Call it what it is: nepotism. The fact that so many people put it at number 1 for job search purposes puts the lie to the meritocratic fantasy of the job market.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[s_p_oneil]

My point is still valid that a lack of networking does not imply a lack of communication skills, and I over-simplified my reasons for not maintaining a network.

I agree with your point that everyone has to sell himself when looking for a job, and all too often who you know matters a lot more than what you know. OTOH, hiring managers need to recognize that if they're not filling a sales position, they need to give a higher priority to other traits than an applicant being able to "sell" himself.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[HornWumpus]

Nothing is 100%, which is why you a probationary periods for employment.

Not everybody that has a network is pure bullshit. You can't work with someone for years and not know if they are worth fuck or not.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Aighearach]

From afar the names of things seem important, but there are many layers of depth beyond that that are needed for those mere labels to have semantic value within the context of the problem domain. It doesn't matter if I remember the name of a design pattern, what matters is do I remember it when it is relevant, and do I know how to look it up using whatever I remember?

If terms are the hard part, either your brain is wired in a nonstandard way and the value of the labels appears distorted to you, (which is probably benign) or you just don't understand the level of knowledge and expertise that those others who know the terms also have. (which is more likely)

And that is from a person who had the nickname "Dictionary" (not a compliment, amazingly) in school.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

The problem with older programmers is that the younger programmers keep changing the definitions. There really is nothing new in programming languages but we keep getting new words. Doesn't help that each new language defines its own terms as well. This is nothing new though, we've had "procedure", "function", "subroutine" etc, forever. Just a matter of keeping up with the new slang; the variable used to be called "foo", now it's called "FooFunctorFactory".

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Aighearach]

My goodness, if an employer would replace an existing employee because they didn't have some flavor on their resume, that is one lucky employee to escape without any effort! I mean, serious, what sort of employer is checking your resume when you already work there?

That is certainly not the way to retain high quality developers who understand algorithms well enough to be working on random platforms for the length of a client contract, especially the sort of short-term crap project where they don't even have the engineering staff involved during negotiations. We know just from that detail that it isn't interesting work.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

For every company, you always do better bypassing HR in order to get a job.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Aighearach]

The vast majority of newer tools that I work with have extensive text documents. The exception, amusingly, is the web interface frameworks. But that is such basic work and the algorithms are so simple, not much documentation is needed other than a list of methods and arguments.

Even something like the ESP-8266 platform had English text documents before videos, and the videos are useless without the text.

There is a trend towards videos because a larger portion of the work can be completed without learning anything too technical or precise, just by banging at the example until the test somebody wrote passes. Then when there is an actual bug that isn't obvious, they spend a week on it until a more sr. member of the team spends 10 minutes to fix it. There is a huge amount of that these days, because many products only exist at a high level and can be assembled by plugging and configuring framework extensions.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Yunzil]

I want my staff to have enthusiasm for the work they are doing.

Wait 10 or 15 years and then see how enthusiastic you are.

Every time one of my colleagues bails out promptly at 5pm with a critical issue half complete I wince.

Sorry about your social life.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

People often go into tech because they really have difficulty talking to non-tech people. Networking is a social skill, engineering is not necessarily a social skill. It's definitely a drawback, you can be the best engineer ever and then never get the job if the ones hiring you dislike your personality. Otherwise we could fill up engineering with a bunch of marketing people.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

I have "contacts" who may be VPs, but at really unimportant companies for the most part. And I wouldn't rely on them for a job and I know what they do and I wouldn't want to work at those places :-) People you work with as an engineer are not generally promoted to the VP level and higher, that's extremely rare except in the startup industry where everyone is a chief of something. Sure I have those people on my linkedin, because everyone wants to link to everyone else, but I'm probably not going to use them to find a job even if they do remember me.

Similarly, I'm not the right person for any of my contacts to get a job. I'll probably just pass on the resume to someone else or refer to the online list of open reqs. I've been asked before "what do you think about this person" and I'm stuck, because I often it's someone I only briefly worked with, or for a different field, etc.
  If it's someone I like I'll then I'm in a quandary because I know all the bad things about my company and why would I want to subject someone I like to that environment? I also don't want the up coming recrimination of "why didn't you tell me my boss was going to be a jerk!?"

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

I see people who think they need to work long hours. But they are never asked to put in the long hours for no extra compensation (in US companies). Instead management has figured out how to make the employees voluntarily do this. It may be peer pressure, everyone else stays late so you feel you should also. Or they figure out ways for you to agree to do certain work and then the deadlines aren't feasible. Older workers often tend to push back against this, one reason I think they're discriminated against.

Agile is very good at making me work longer I feel - I voluntarily agree to take on a task and claim I will finish it in two weeks, ie, I promise I will finish in time, then I end up working longer and longer hours in order to make me uphold my promise. Agile has moved me from a relaxed work pace where I get everything done to a hectic and stressful work pace where I feel I am constantly trying to catch up.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[skids]

Consider yourself lucky... hardware interfaces generally tend still be relatively well documented... still not to the standards of yesteryear but a much better sector, because you may be able to tolerate a few mystery registers here and there but you actually need to know what bits raise what gate to get the thing to work. The product documentation I have to work with in the networking sector these days blows chunks. So many "foo enable: enables foo" entries in the manuals it's just enraging, and library APIs seem to have lost any concept of what it means to fully document... nothing to say what's threadsafe or unsafe to acquire with certain locks held... you're lucky to be able to find out whether or not a function may block.

Of course, the vendors all offer "training," but that mostly amounts to a slightly more technical sales presentation.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Aighearach]

I always assume nothing is threadsafe, including the stuff that claims to be.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[TheRaven64]

I happen to be great at communicating with my team, support, services, sales, customers

And yet, in spite of all of that great communication you're doing with these people, if you were looking for a job you wouldn't contact any of them (current customers of your current employer, former employees of your current employer that you were 'great at communicating' with) and ask them if they had any openings? More tellingly, none of them ever get in contact with you and say 'we're hiring and I remember how great it was working with you. I don't know if you're in the market for a new job, but if you are then let me know?' I find that pretty hard to believe, if you're as good at communicating as you claim.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[TheRaven64]

Why? What do you think is a better way of deciding that someone is a good hire:

1. Read their (probably embellished) CV and ask them somewhat contrived interview questions for an hour or two.
2. Have someone you trust and have worked with work with them for a few months and see that they're competent.
3. Work with them for a few months and see that they're competent.

The best way is option 3, though that limits you to a depth of one in your professional network, which is not likely to give you a very large field. The middle option works almost as well: if you work well with someone and are impressed with their work then the people that they work well with and consider to do good work are also probably good hires. The first way is a really poor way of hiring (which is why it often comes with long probationary periods and so on), yet for some reason that's the one that you'd apparently place the most trust in.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[TheRaven64]

Nepotism is what happens when you promote people that you have some non-professional relationship with. Professional networking is what happens when you directly observe competent people and want to keep working with them. You develop a professional network over time without trying if you're competent, because coworkers move on to other companies but remember working with you. If you were annoying to work with, then they'll remember that and not bother to contact you. If you were good to work with then they'll remember that and flag you as a possible new hire when their new employer is looking for someone (or when they start up their own company).

When you go to a new company and your new boss says 'We need to hire three new developers for the project that you're working on. Any recommendations?' then what do you say?

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[TheRaven64]

Who said anything about talking to non-tech people? Professional networking is about talking to people with similar skill sets to you.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

Networking is talking to everyone. The tech people won't get you many new jobs, but the managers might, people in other departments might, and so on. At least in my experience that's where I got the best leads.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[david_thornley]

I find him perfectly believable. I'm the same way. I communicate well, but I'm not suited to the sort of networking you're talking about.

You're talking about maintaining a network of casual connections. That's not how my mind works. I'm an introvert. I have some very good friends, and get along well with my colleagues, I don't do at all well on the sort of connections where I communicate with someone every few months.

This means that I'd have to think about maintaining a network. It would be work, and something I'd have to keep track of. It would sap some of my energy. You may find this sort of thing natural, like many other people, but it isn't natural for a lot of us. It's likely to get dropped when something else comes up, like a child, or a major health problem, and I don't have time and energy for everything.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[david_thornley]

hardware interfaces generally tend still be relatively well documented.

Guess how I know you don't work on the same stuff that I do.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[s_p_oneil]

IMO you're making some broad assumptions without knowing any pertinent details, in much the same way you did with the original comment I disputed. You know nothing about the company I work for (where we've had only 2 employees outside of sales leave in the past 13 years) or the type of customer contacts I work with (enterprise-level, but none closely aligned with software development). What about my wife, my kids, my health problems, and everything else in my life that influences my decisions? I can bring up various points, and you can easily pick them apart because you don't know the rest or don't have the same priorities I do.

For the sake of this argument, it doesn't matter whether I (personally) am a good communicator. Have you never even met anyone who was shy/introverted but could still make a good argument when necessary? Can you not even imagine anyone like that?

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Max Sinister]

This is just like in Dilbert. I am not surprised that some programmers become whistleblowers or such. I'm only surprised it doesn't happen more often.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Max Sinister]

Hm. The more I think about it, the more certain I am that the problem is this: It's hard to predict how long a software project will take (unless it's absolutely trivial). Even if you are a programmer. But the suits have their hands on the money, and the power to fire you, and they decide about the deadlines.

Re: Do older programmers even need help?

[Darinbob]

But programers have the power to leave if they get too stressed. However it doesn't happen as often as you'd think it should happen. Maybe they're concerned that their skills don't translate well to other companies, maybe they believe the myth that their stock options will let them retire early, but I suspect quite of lot of them are convinced that the 60-80 hour work week is "normal" and it will be that way everywhere they go.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[mvdwege]

Nepotism is what happens when you promote people that you have some non-professional relationship with. Professional networking is what happens when you directly observe competent people and want to keep working with them.

That distinction is largely meaningless. The old aristocracy also believed they ruled on merit, not on birth.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[ovanklot]

Networking is a form of communication. If they're not good at this form, what others are they bad at? Code monkeys are cheap and plentiful, people who can communicate their designs, collaborate with others, and work on a team where everyone benefits from the specialist expertise that each individual has are rare. The latter are the ones worth hiring.

Bull. I find networking hard and tasking, but am also one of the best communicators on any team I'm in. They're two different skills - creating new bonds and performing within new ones.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[angel'o'sphere]

Networking is a form of communication. If they're not good at this form, what others are they bad at?
First of all, you have to come to the idea to do networking.
And my first 20 years of being a software developer, that idea never occurred to me.

And after it was several times proposed: I simply refuse to do that. It is a waste of time for me, and frankly I would not know "how to do it".

So, if that leads you to your question: "what others are they bad at?"

I don't know. I only want people to be abel to talk about our software and be able to implement it. I don't need them to be god in networking to Âpull me with them if they leave to another job.

Also: I'm freelancer. I can not simply pull people with me into another job. On top of that, I live in Europe. People rarely change jobs here.

Can you name 10 people that you've worked with in the last decade who you'd want to hire?
Yes, but for that I don't need to network or stay with them in "professional contact".

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[angel'o'sphere]

But it wouldn't hurt to do some things like learn some basic things - are they married, what's their spouse's name, kids names, what they like to do, etc.

You are silly.

Why should I do that with "strangers"?

At the very worst, you shoot them an email every few months asking how they're doing. That's it.
Yeah, and they would file me to the junk mail. Sorry ... if that works in your world: fine. In my world writing an ex colleague every few month "hi how are you doing" would raise extreme suspicious eye brows.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[angel'o'sphere]

And yet, in spite of all of that great communication you're doing with these people, if you were looking for a job you wouldn't contact any of them (current customers of your current employer, former employees of your current employer that you were 'great at communicating' with) and ask them if they had any openings?
Of course I would not ask my ex colleagues if their new company has any openings! Why the fuck would I?

More tellingly, none of them ever get in contact with you and say 'we're hiring and I remember how great it was working with you.
Of course not. That is not how stuff is run in Europe.

Of course it happens that job positions get filled directly by people calling each other, in fact plenty of companies offer bonuses if employees recommend other employees (which stay). But that has nothing to do with networking or the absurd ideas some of our parents have above.

Re:Do older programmers even need help?

[angel'o'sphere]

Any recommendations?' then what do you say?
Then I recommend half a dozen developers with which I never have networked.
Wow, that was easy.

They know it already

[tomp]

Older programmers know the basics and they know how to learn new technologies. Matter of fact, that's precisely what they know. Those who don't move into management before they become "older programmers".

There's always a need for better learning tools. But tools for "old programmers" doesn't make any more sense than tools for female coders.

Re:They know it already

[Half-pint HAL]

Older programmers know the basics and they know how to learn new technologies.

Not necessarily. Older programmers have often gone through a process of learning and forgetting, because lots that they learned during a CS degree wasn't relevant for their first umpteen years as a code monkey coding up other people's specs. So there's lots of information that's been lost in algorithm design, automata etc. These things are worth refreshing.

But the reason there seems to be a gap in the market for training for older coders is that older coders are very much a heterogeneous set; gaps in knowledge are specific to the individual and their background. Training has to be extremely flexible so that it can be tailored to each customer's specific needs. That's a very tall order and hard to justify to accounting, which is why in-house training offered even at IT companies is almost invariably mindless waffle.

Re:They know it already

[david_thornley]

Not necessarily. Older programmers have often gone through a process of learning and forgetting, because lots that they learned during a CS degree wasn't relevant for their first umpteen years as a code monkey coding up other people's specs.

There's also been changes in the field. My old algorithms books didn't cover anything parallel (which is why I got a newer one).

Fuck off

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think the US is bad with respect to tech jobs, then times that by ten.

Not even the hardest Democrat would want you here.

Just. Go. Away.

Re:Fuck off

[HornWumpus]

I've been put on international flights because Australia companies can't find local talent.

What I saw when I got there was the worst IT mess I've ever seen. And that was at power companies, who are usually pretty good about understanding that their shit has to work.

Wrong question

[Snotnose]

You should ask "I've got this bunch of folks with 10-40 years experience. How do I make them most productive?"

I've been around for, jeez, 38 years now. I'm really good at C, C++, Java, RTOS systems, embedded systems, device drivers, talking to hardware in general, and meeting avoidance. I'm not good at "team building", "Agile development", "Synergy", "open office", "ping pong", "free cokes".

Tell me what you want me to do. I'll give you feedback on how reasonable your desires are. I listen to you, you listen to me, you give me a nice quiet place to work, and stuff happens.

Re:Wrong question

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But... How will the product owner stay in the loop as you work through your backlog items so they know what to put in the plan for you to do during the next sprint?

And what do you mean you just turned off your phone, mail, Slack, Basecamp, Skype and HipChat?

Oh, you just established the requirements and then built something to meet them? Already? Never mind, then.

Re: Wrong question

[arth1]

News flash! If you're old and complaining you can't get a bob, try fitting in socially.

If someone is old and can't get a bob, it's likely because he is bald, you insensitive clod.

Re: Wrong question

[Zontar The Mindless]

And you sound like dead wood. No-one wants to do your work for you while you worry about "fitting in socially".

Re: Wrong question

[Zontar The Mindless]

I'm sorry, this is Slashdot, so you'll have to explain your failed attempt at being clever with a car analogy.

Re: Wrong question

[ruir]

Damn dictionaries.

Re:Wrong question

[angel'o'sphere]

Actually I was modding but if one writes bullshit like this I thought I had to answer:

But... How will the product owner stay in the loop as you work through your backlog items
He has no need to.

so they know what to put in the plan for you to do during the next sprint?
That is not the job of the product owner.

If you have problems with agile methods the main reason might be you don't even grasp the basic nomenclature ...

Re:Wrong question

[gatkinso]

>> I'll give you feedback on how reasonable your desires are.

Lesson one: the customer is always right.

Re:Wrong question

[gatkinso]

"team building" -- silly meetings that are a waste of time but better then traditional meetings
"Agile development" - every day a little meeting where you say what you did yesterday, and a couple of meetings every pay cycle where you plan what you are going to do that pay cycle
"Synergy" - tell someone their idea is great, nothing will come of it anyway
"open office" - sit where you want
"ping pong" - pass, when someone starts playing there will be a complaint about the noise
"free cokes" - what a horrible burden for you

Re:Wrong question

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

You also probably wouldn't use Basecamp, Slack and HipChat together.

Apparently spotting sarcasm is also a skill that changes over time. :-/

Re:Wrong question

[DeVoh]

this guy gets it

Re:Wrong question

[R3d M3rcury]

"free cokes".

Hell, I wish they had free cokes. Nowadays, it's free juice and organic responsibly grown coffee. I have to buy my own cokes because they aren't healthy. "Ooh, all that caffeine and sugar isn't good for you!"

Re:Wrong question

[HornWumpus]

Agile is not scrum.

Agile is a manifesto. The important parts are 'hire competent enthusiastic individuals' and 'people over process'.

If a hiring manager claims 'agile', your first question should be about 'average team compensation'. If they claim 'about industry standards' they are lying about Agile. 'Competent enthusiastic individuals' are paid better than average.

Fake agile shops are in fact 'PHB pulls schedules from ass' shops. Almost all scrum is not, in fact, agile.

Re: Wrong question

[Darinbob]

No one wants to hold your steeing wheel while you put on your makeup.

It's not about the learning..

[ndykman]

It's about the increasing biases in the industry that assumes that older programmers just can't possibly pick up new technology without a lot of help. It's quite the opposite in many cases. As if somebody that started programming hasn't moved from language to language multiple times. They understand the fundaments, and they don't just chase one trend after another. They have a good sense of what is mature enough for consideration and what isn't.
They know that programming all the time not only isn't necessary, it is detrimental in the long term.

Give up

[Gussington]

The simple fact is that as we age we become less able to pick up new things easily. This is a biological limitation that no amount wishing is wasn't so will fix.
But what older people are better at is considered thought, strategy and leadership, so your best strategy is to be fresh and dynamic when you're young, and as you age, play to those strengths.

Re:Give up

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The simple fact is that as we age we become less able to pick up new things easily.

I've yet to see much evidence of that. I see a trend for more experienced people to be less willing to learn lots of new things all the time, but that's partly because they better at recognising potential. They know that a lot of the heavily hyped new things in the tech industry aren't really new at all and/or probably won't last five minutes. They know there will be plenty of time to learn the ones that do have staying power, if and when they need them. In the meantime, they tend to prioritise using and learning those things that will actually help to get the job done or done better. This, grasshopper, is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. :-)

Re:Give up

[arth1]

I find that older people are better at picking up new things. They have a lot more experience and context than someone still wet behind the ears, and if old enough, are also used to figure out things on their own, because there was no training. In fact, they may have a harder time with training than without. Give them a man page, not a teacher.

The main problem I see is letting older people do something new. They tend to be experts at things that requires experience, and which is vital for the business. So they aren't allowed to move away from that.

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

The simple fact is that as we age we become less able to pick up new things easily.

I've yet to see much evidence of that.

You've never seen an old person on a computer or smartphone? Compare that with your average teenager, there is an obvious pattern there.

Re:Give up

[BasilBrush]

The average teen is using Snapchat or whatever this year's trendy messaging app is. The old person is using the phone as a phone to talk to people. Neither has any technical knowledge.

We're not talking about them. We're talking about old programmers and young programmers.

Re:Give up

[angel'o'sphere]

The simple fact is that as we age we become less able to pick up new things easily.
That is a myth. Especially in programming ...
With lots of background information every new thing is easier to pick up and much faster to learn and master than it was when you where younger.

This is a biological limitation that no amount wishing is wasn't so will fix.
That is a myth, too.
Body and mind degeneration starts a few years before you die ... and plenty of people are in perfect health till their last days. It is a matter of lifestyle and food, sports, smoking or not etc. that has a big influence on your health and finally your mind.

Re:Give up

[Anonymous Coward]

In my case, I can say that the main issue for me has been having a child. We have children later in life nowadays and I think some of the problems that people associate with older employees may have less to do with age and more to do with family.

When I did not have a child, I was an extremely reliable employee. I could work the whole weekend in an emergency if something needed to get done. If I told you a problem was going to be solved come hell or high water, it would get solved. I could stay up all night trying to fix it. I would also spend a lot of my personal time learning new technical skills, reading about new trends, working in projects etc. I was very punctual and I was pretty much guaranteed to be in the office at the very same time every single day. Life is completely different now and my child is my number one priority. If she is sick, either my wife or I need to stay at home with her. This can happen at a very short notice. If it is time to pick her up at the daycare, I have to drop absolutely everything in the office and rush out the door. I no longer have any free time available to invest in my hobbies and interests (and learn new things as a result).

These are problems that have long impacted women in the work place. They were less likely to be promoted in part because the employers did not know what kind of commitment women would be able to offer after having a child. Nowadays, we live in a more equitable society so the burden of raising children is split equally between parents. I am not saying this is bad thing but the result is that both parents are no longer able to fully commit to their careers after having children.

I love my child but the reality is that I am a shittier employee after she was born. The reality is also that I no longer care that much about my career. I will not make any sacrifices that could impact my family. If I were a manager, I would probably prefer to hire a younger person with no children simply because I believe I would be able to get more out of them (and perhaps for a lower price).

Re:Give up

[layabout]

then why do my gf's kids ask me to fix configuration problems with their phones?

Re:Give up

[layabout]

at 59 I started leaning Swedish. this year at 60, I started learning hebrew (Israeli GF), brython bottle and bootstrap. Learning more marketing and business development skills. I'm starting to think older developers need to form a coop with some marketing/sales people to sell their skills, extract products out of the contract work and make a future for themselves.

Re:Give up

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's very clear if you look at the studies on what happens to the brain as it ages.

I suppose it depends on what we mean by "older programmers", but if we're talking about a professional in say their 40s or 50s compared to a mid-20s recent graduate, I've never seen anything that suggests a clear reduction in overall performance, other things being equal. Some things improve with experience, some things deteriorate with age, but can you point me to any studies showing that in practice the older programmer is significantly worse off?

Re:Give up

[LionKimbro]

I'm 39, I've been programming since I was 6. I relate to this completely.

I observe, as Alan Kay has observed, that the industry is fad-driven and youth-focused. I remember when Node.js was exploding out, and asking myself, "What's the big deal here?" People were getting insanely excited about... ...call-backs. As if it were this bold new paradigm in programming.

I think what happens is that young people get into programming, discover some idea, and then hype the fuck out of it. Other new programmers hear this idea, their brain explodes, and they start tapping the shoulders of all the other young programmers. Next thing you know, they all want to learn this programming language and it's the best thing in 4ever.

I have a very hard time getting excited about most "new" technologies; I have a very hard time getting excited about most "new" **ideas.** Reason being: I see very little that is new in them, a lot that is very old, and I see terrible implementations behind them most of the time.

I often find myself asking:
* "Why not just use TCP sockets, cron, and a couple hundred LOC, rather than importing this entire massive technology stack?"
* "I hate to be a jerk, but do you know it should only require about 12 bytes of data to store each entry here?"
* "Have you thought about using shared memory here?"

I see far more work going into sorting out and arguing for technology stack X vs. Y, rather than in what the problem actually is, and what would be the simplest and most direct way of solving it. Then our energy is lost in upgrade hell, attack vectors, and work-arounds for simple things that are very basic but didn't happen to be included in the stack.

I have seen more code written in work-arounds and patches and side-solutions and configuration systems, then it would take to simply just write our own solution -- with total control, all versatility required, easier flow, and far fewer places for bugs and attack vectors to arise.

So, I don't care about New Language X, or New Technology Y. I can learn the pieces of it as needed, but I just can't work up the exuberance for it.

Re:Give up

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Your post freaked me out a little, because it's almost something I could have written myself! Our backgrounds are similar, and I too have found myself looking on in horror more than once as literally months of work went by producing little real benefit, until eventually I just gave up and wrote a basic implementation using old school tools or techniques in less than a day, just to make the point.

On the flip side, every now and then there really is a significant change and a chance to develop skills in a different area, and I'd say there have been at least three of those in recent times.

For one, I've been happy to see some of the useful ideas from functional programming entering the mainstream. I believe there's considerable potential to develop better models for programming with the increased awareness of ideas beyond the previous imperative/OOP focus, and as "software is eating the world", I think this has never been more important.

Secondly, the shift in focus back towards remote execution, mostly thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, has created some interesting opportunities and challenges. Once theoretical knowledge around distributed systems, scalability and security now has everyday relevance, and developing software for that sort of environment is quite different to what we faced before in the era dominated by desktop PCs, native applications and LANs.

Thirdly, partly as a consequence of the previous two points, we are doing much more sophisticated and large scale data processing and analysis today. Things that used to be in the realm of supercomputing can now be achieved by moderately large organisations with significant but not exceptional resources. This has potentially horrifying implications for things like privacy and security, but also great promise in areas from improving the efficiency of transport and communications networks to personalised healthcare.

Unfortunately, it's as true as ever that much real world software is basically a simple interface to a simple database, which is mostly pretty dull to develop even if it's quite useful. There's also a crazy amount of wheel reinvention at the moment, but then maybe there always was and it's just not our generation doing it any more. ;-)

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

The average teen is using Snapchat or whatever this year's trendy messaging app is. The old person is using the phone as a phone to talk to people. Neither has any technical knowledge.

We're not talking about them. We're talking about old programmers and young programmers.

But both groups picked up whatever tech was around at a certain point in their lives, because the brain picks up things more easily at that time. Programming or riding horses is no different. Learning new things is easier when you are young.

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

Body and mind degeneration starts a few years before you die ... and plenty of people are in perfect health till their last days.

So why are 99% of professional athletes under 40?

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

then why do my gf's kids ask me to fix configuration problems with their phones?

Because your gf's kids do not represent the entire population. People on average are getting smarter and learning more at earlier ages. There are always exceptions, but the average is going up. That can only happen if younger people are doing more than their parents.

Re:Give up

[BasilBrush]

For sure instinctual and "muscle memory" things are picked up easier when young. If you're going to be a musician or a skier, learn as a child.

But for more intellectual topics that's balanced against how much you already know. For example a old person would pick up a era or culture in history quicker than an equally intelligent kid, because they can tie all the new stuff into a framework, of dates, periods, famous people and cultures that they already know.

Likewise, I'll pick up a new computer language quicker than someone who's at university (given equal time for the task) because I already know many, and concepts are reused.

Re:Give up

[angel'o'sphere]

Because they earned enough money?
Are tired of training 6h aday or more?
Tired of spending the weekend traveling to events/games instead of spending them with family or friends?

There are probaby plenty of reasons.

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

Because they earned enough money? Are tired of training 6h aday or more? Tired of spending the weekend traveling to events/games instead of spending them with family or friends?

There are probaby plenty of reasons.

And all of them are to do with age.

Re:Give up

[angel'o'sphere]

Marathon runners in the age of 35 are faster than those in age of 25.

Martial artists in the age of 70 are better than those in the age of 25, 35 ... or pick your number.

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

Marathon runners in the age of 35 are faster than those in age of 25.

And also faster than marathon runners aged 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100+. See the pattern now?

Martial artists in the age of 70 are better than those in the age of 25, 35 ... or pick your number.

Fucking bullshit. You've been watching too many Kung Fu movies. Fighters also peak around their 30's, as demonstrated by every world champion ever in the sport.

Re:Give up

[angel'o'sphere]

You are an idiot.

I do martial arts since over 35 years. One who has less years of experience than me has not much of a chance against me, regardless of his age.

In most things age is unimportant. Only power peaks are handled better by younger people, but they lack experience, technique and finesse. If you want to do consistent performance, for what ever reason, a 60 year old who practices daily is no difference to a 30 year one who practices daily.

If you believe otherwise you are not only an idiot but rather dumb.

Obviously one at the end of his life span his in less good health, so making "a pattern" from 40 to 100 is idiotic.

Re:Give up

[Gussington]

You are an idiot.

I do martial arts since over 35 years. One who has less years of experience than me has not much of a chance against me,

Talk is cheap. Come down the gym and lets validate that.

If you believe otherwise you are not only an idiot but rather dumb.

More talk. Put up or shut up.

Huh?

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Older programmers like me use the latest tools and technologies.
I predate SQL and I teach it to children.

Get over yourself. The question you ask is arrogant and dismissal.
Us old guys are dong great, and judging by your question? We're making a crapload of money more than you.

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

[xvan]

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

Physical one. Running or even walking would be a grate start.

Disclaimer: didn't RTFS

Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[profke]

I think this question is stupid. I've been in programming for 20+ years. There really is not that much new under the sun. The quasi OOP of JS keeps baffeling me, it is nice to see a move back to procedural programming. And, in general, the mess has gotten bigger and more complicated. But new paradigms etc etc? Mwa...

Re:Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[FryingLizard]

Javascript baffles many "older" programmers, usually it's something along the lines of "Why the fuck is this godawful shit-show of a language so widely used?"

Re:Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[gweihir]

Going on 50, I am one of these older folks that still do some programming. Lua is a very elegant minimalistic modern scripting language and very easy to embed. Python is sort-of the really big version of Python. I like both a lot and use them in daily work, Lua embedded in C, and Python with modules written in C.

Re:Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[gweihir]

Funny. Of course the second is meant to mean Lua. But why somebody cowardly sniping from the dark is expecting to be taken seriously is a mystery.

Re:Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[gweihir]

That makes no difference to people that actually have mastered coding. Incidentally, the indention-method of Python works remarkably well, there are just people that cannot adjust to having their bad practices directly break things.

Re:Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[Max Sinister]

JS has its flaws, but I still like jQuery very much.

Re:Patience with the yonge ones :-)

[FryingLizard]

I know you're joking but (as a huge convert to Python) the whitespace thing seems crazy/annoying for about 20 minutes, then you get used to it, and after a week or two (especially when reading other people's code) you realize how great it is. Consistent formatting is a huge win for productivity, I now love it.

Learn How to Sell

[brian.stinar]

I believe it doesn't matter how awesome you are at the latest and greatest programming language, or how skillfully you can apply a binary search to an interview problem, if you cannot understand why you are applying technology to help someone. If you can understand the need for software, then all of those other points are much easier to improve on, and apply.

For me, what made me a better programmer (past the bachelors, masters, in computer science, and six years of hardcore, full time, programming) was selling. Not taking management classes, and learning about selling but actually selling software. To sell, you have to understand someone else's need. You have to understand it well enough to sell yourself that you can help them, and then sell them on your belief. This is the good kind of sales. Everyone has seen amazing software products that were shelved, because they didn't meet the need of someone evaluating them. If you can understand how to help someone, with technology, and convince them you'll remove their pain, you'll be able to write your own ticket.

Hustle on the terrible online job boards. Compete with the low cost 3rd world at a fraction of what you're currently making. Then, once you can pitch without sounding completely retarded, try it in person. And you'll fail. Again and again. That's the cost of tuition. Eventually, you won't fail at selling. Talk with people that know how to evaluate an offer, and a technical solution. The problems you'll see, once you really understand your customers, are very rarely that complicated, novel, and difficult, and (for my company that is general development without much of a specialization past very general open source) don't usually require much beyond best practices and a very rudimentary knowledge of efficiency. This is because most of the people that can sell are absolutely terrible at coding, and the people that can code are absolutely terrible at selling.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
'I don't much care where -' said Alice.
'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
'- so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk long enough.”

I vote you learn how to sell. You'll be able to sell yourself to an employee much easier, if that is your eventual goal.

Re:Learn How to Sell

[brian.stinar]

As soon as I heard the intro song, I knew things were not going to end well...

Before the video:
        "Brian, want to come to our startup pitch event?"
        "Will each team have an intro song, and it will be crazy high energy for no reason?"
        "No, that's dumb. We're not going to do that."
        "OK cool, I'll come and drink some free beer. Thanks."

After the video:
        "Brian, want to come to our startup pitch event?"
        "Will each team have an intro song, and it will be crazy high energy for no reason, LIKE THIS?"
        .
        .

Thanks for sharing that with me. I am seriously going to use that video when people invite me to startup events.
 

Re:Learn How to Sell

[BasilBrush]

The problem with that idea is that salesmen are scum.

Re:Learn How to Sell

[slew]

The problem with that idea is that salesmen are scum.

With that attitude don't try to sell yourself as a potential employee to a new company or as a potential romantic partner.

Re:Learn How to Sell

[BasilBrush]

It's not a problem. I don't want to be a salesman, or be in any department that deals with salesmen. And I certainly don't want to be romantic with one. Yeuck!

Re:Learn How to Sell

[slew]

It's not a problem. I don't want to be a salesman, or be in any department that deals with salesmen. And I certainly don't want to be romantic with one. Yeuck!

whoosh... I see you haven't gotten the concept of selling yourself yet...

Re:Learn How to Sell

[thebullshitpatrol]

your entire life is a series of salesmanship. work, partners, friends.

seems like a pretty critical skill to not only be lacking, but also be actively against developing.

good luck.

Re:Learn How to Sell

[Max Sinister]

Selling may be necessary, but I neither want to tell lies nor waste my time with fools.

Re:Learn How to Sell

[BasilBrush]

Life really isn't a series of sales jobs. What a very shallow view.

Re:Learn How to Sell

[BasilBrush]

If you think romance is about selling yourself, you may have been listening to those pick-up artist twats. Good luck with THAT.

Potty Training

[surfdaddy]

Sorry, I couldn't resist! And this is being said as somebody who programmed in Fortran many decades ago...you have to be able to laugh at things.

Back to basics...

[sroddy]

As an IT professional who is not necessarily a programmer, but someone who has written some (probably horrible) code, I would appreciate a getting really good at the basics online course. I've been a sysadmin who specialized in Identity Management and also Security, but missed a few of the coding building blocks along the way. It'd be nice if I could have conversations with our developers having a few of those blocks filled in.

Re:Back to basics...

[brown.dragon]

Thanks for the input. I'll work out the details of a "basics" course (and maybe re-target it). Would you like me to get back to you regarding it?

Re:Back to basics...

[sroddy]

Sure!

Need training in ...

[PPH]

... how to deal with younger software managers. Stroking their egos to make them think they are God's gift to the software industry when really not much has changed in the past few decades.

Basics

[God of Lemmings]

Improving the basics improve your overall ability with most programming languages. Learning new technologies doesn't have as much payback, considering how many new things fail to take off..

Re:Basics

[K. S. Kyosuke]

In other words, "basics" are mostly the things that the new technologies got right (because people learned their lessons, such as proper lexical scoping in languages, for example), the things that aren't basics are often things included for the sake of being different that are much more likely to be superfluous, confusing, and often even just plain wrong.

Not really

[s.petry]

Specialties are important. Depends on what GP wants to do for a while. Specialties are easier for older programmers to pick up, but to be good there is always lots to learn.

Training schmaining

[swillden]

Assuming your "older programmers" are indeed programmers with two or three decades of experience under their belt, rather than older people who would like to become programmers (not an unreasonable thing, but I don't know anything about how to train them), they already understand the theory and lots of practice, so all they need to pick up new technologies is to dive in and do stuff with the new technologies. Read books, practice, build stuff, etc.

For being able to do well in the sort of interviews that Google/Facebook/Amazon/etc. do... again, it's just a matter of practice. Brush up on the theory, review your data structures and algorithms course, make sure you understand big-O complexity, etc., then get a good book of practice problems and work your way through it.

Re:Training schmaining

[swillden]

Explain to me why I'd want to interview with Goog/Facebook and the rest of the SV crowd? I make a very comfortable living with my current employer, have a very satisfying career and I don't have to move to that septic tank in northern CA. Goog, facebook and their ilk aren't the be all end all. There are far more satisfying developer jobs that help to produce things that really matter to the world.

You have to decide what you want to do. I like working for Google because I work with a lot of really smart people and do stuff that has significant impact on the whole world.

I'm with you on living in CA, though. I don't, though I do visit from time to time.

Older programmers?

[nyet]

Older programmers that are worth anything already know far more than you, dolt.

If they don't.at this point there's no point in hiring them in the first place; they were probably incompetent younger programmers as well that never got any better.

How to comment

[PopeRatzo]

As an older person, I would like to suggest that training I would appreciate would be in knowing when it's time to trim my nose and ear hairs. As it is, I don't notice it until my wife offers to braid it for me, and by then it's really too late.

Wait, what were we talking about again? How 'bout those Cubs, huh? Did I ever tell how we used to have to punch rectangular paper cards to write programs? Believe you me, those were the days. You had to be half-stoned and drunk to program computers back then without going batshit insane. And when you were done debugging, boy, you knew you had done something, even if it was only sorting a bunch of database entries alphabetically. And we liked it.

Old Programmers Know "It's been done before"

[Nonsanity]

I've been lucky to have been able to ply my trade as a programmer in many wildly different waysâ"from games to military to commercial software to R&Dâ"and I find I'll use the internet whenever I know that "this has been done before." It's not that I couldn't always write code for a particular situation from first principles, but if I know a few clicks away is the fifteen lines of code that I can easily alter to do the job in a tenth of the time, I'll use it. But while the internet does provide this repository of algorithmic knowledge, I've never come across a quality site that is specifically dedicated to it. Stack Overflow is probably the closest, but it's organized around the questions, not the answers. It relies on searchability and isn't particularly amenable to casual browsing. I've always felt that there were established algorithms out there I've never heard of but that would fit my current programming needs perfectly, if only I knew of them. So I'm imaging something like the pre-google hierarchical internet indexes of oldâ"like Yahoo and Altavistaâ"but just for algorithms and other generalized computing solutions. And if anyone knows of such sites they would give a positive review for, I'll be happy to check them out. But I feel that anything worthwhile out the would have come up in my Google-style searching by now, and if it did, it isn't quite what I'm describing here.

I'm 48 - fuck the concept of "older programmer"

[FryingLizard]

..been doing this since I was 16, and I don't think my geekin' skills have degraded in the slightest, and I learn new technology all the time. I've been doing purely contract work for the last decade (for a variety of companies) - where you're judged entirely on the quality of your output, as well as being required to adapt to new things on a regular basis (which is why I like it so much). Personally I'm glad I'm not a long-term employee of a company because that's what causes atrophy IMO, as well as it'd probably make me worry more about job security. As a contractor however I _have_ no illusion of job security, so not a problem :-)

My eyesight has recently started going downhill, but that's what glasses are for (and microscopes, I do embedded systems so lots of soldering 0402's and suchlike). Other than that, doing great. :-)

Re:I'm 48 - fuck the concept of "older programmer"

[FryingLizard]

BTW I've lived in San Francisco since 2000 yet I delight in working from home - I look at all those people commuting the 101 to a cube and think "SUCKERS!" :-)

Rosetta

[Tablizer]

I want to start an online solution that other programmers find helpful

Have you considered rosettacode.org? It has almost 1,000 little problems and puzzles in multiple programming languages.

Been doing this for 30 years

[EmperorOfCanada]

I am shocked at the number of 20 somethings that are a decade or more out of date. I am not talking about jumping on the latest and greatest, node.go or whatever, but simply aren't using the latest version (often off by years) of their existing tools. I am not talking religious wars such as C++ vs Java, but programmers who aren't using testing, not using any code analysis tools, not using patterns properly, using globals like they were bicyclist in a performance enhancing drug mart, and all the usual bad practices.

Then to make it worse they will use "modern" techniques like they are some magic spell. If you way-over apply the technique, then it will magically make up for the lousy choice in just about everything else. Let's use multi inheritance OOP on our single SQL call to the single table in the single database. Or let's use the factory pattern for what should have been a single function that takes one parameter.

I am not leaving older programmers out of this. Usually there are subtle differences. They don't realize that things have massively changed in the last 10 years. Threads aren't bad, the GPU can do stuff, disk is pretty much free, don't conserve memory in your single purpose server with 32GB and your application is only using 2.

My advice for any programmer, young or old, is to be flexible. A great choice may not really be the great choice, it may be an illusion. So be prepared to change. And experiment. Lots and lots of experiments. Try out new languages. Try out new datastores. Try out new OSs. Try out new IDEs. If you see the cool kids doing something that requires a fundamental new skill that you don't have, then learn the fundamental new skill. With ML you need linear algebra and some calculus to really get to the meat of the subject. So learn the libraries and if they seem like your future, learn the fundamentals.

To be a great programmer you have to be both a specialist and a Renaissance man. So nail something like C++ networking(as just one specialist example), but make sure you can configure a database, set up a server, program in Python, etc.

Then there are the domains of knowledge. This is where it can get tricky. Do you perfect the game industry, or do you jump from games, to banking, to engine control units? We all know that having a diverse experience will really help. I am dead certain that what you learn in games could easily bring some wildly creative approaches to engine control units; yet the HR types are "How many years have you been working with ECUs?" I have successfully leapt more than once from pretty fundamental tech to completely different fundamental tech. Not easy, but very worth it.

Re:Been doing this for 30 years

[Lumpy]

dude I HAVE TO use Microsoft's 2008 release because the fucking morons in engineering chose fucking Windows CE as our device OS. Luckily we are stating to abandon Microsoft and their utterly shitty Embedded OS, but that is still at least 5 years away for it to move to the integration processors and is only on the interfaces right now.

Some times we are forced to use old tools because of the idiots at the top

Re:Been doing this for 30 years

[EmperorOfCanada]

Sometimes they do. With the right training, they usually can. The problem is that they get their architecture training from professors, and they get it from companies that want to lock them into their product line.

When to leave

[penguinoid]

How to recognize when a company quietly labels you an "older programmer" rather than an "experienced programmer".

This is what I'm trying

[blindseer]

Let's see, so far in my life I've been a farm hand, a university computer lab monitor and first tier IT support, a soldier in the US Army, electrical engineer doing firmware development and testing, web application developer, and top tier computer support. Now I'm wanting to get back to something closer to software development I took a look at what was offered in training that the Veteran Administration might pay for. I tried those one week "boot camp" classes that would teach what you should need to know to pass one of those tests for certification from places like Microsoft, CompTIA, Cisco, and so on to be a certified something. I started with some network and security certifications and thought I might move on to something like "Certified Microsoft App Developer" or whatever they call it.

In theory the 40 hours of lecture in one week is approximate to the lecture time one would get in a typical three credit semester long course at a college but having the lecture all in one week does make the process very different. The "boot camp" expect that all the material is soaked in during the lecture, with whatever study time you can do each evening, and any self study you can do on your own before taking the "final" that is in the form of your certification test. Depending on what kind of work you want to do, and what kind of training you can find in your area, this may work for some people.

There are several well respected (and some not so respected) schools that offer classes online in software development. These courses can be toward a bachelor degree, a certificate of some sort, or even a masters degree. Where I live there is only one school within commuting distance that offered on campus graduate level software development courses. Half of my "boot camps" were online and I very much preferred having an instructor in the room. I thought, for me at least, I'd best learn in a semester long course where the instructor was in the room with me. So I signed up for courses at the local university.

If anyone is choosing to take courses at a university then make sure you get a good advisor. While the advisor I had at first was perfectly capable of reading my transcripts from my previous schooling many years ago and translate that to course equivalents at the university, and then create a plan that would lead me to a degree plan, she had little knowledge of what was actually taught in the courses. She pretty much left me on my own to figure out the classes and I ended up with a really bad semester, one course was beyond my experience and education, another was on web development and not that difficult but it didn't apply to the degree I was seeking (something I discovered when signing up for courses for the next semester). I got a different advisor, someone that knew the courses better (and actually taught some of them) and did much better the next semester.

Even though the academic advisors are there to evaluate you for the courses it is your job to evaluate the advisors. I had a bit of a runaround with the school since me, being someone returning to school after many years from being in a university before, they didn't know what to do with me. I'll be taking courses that should teach me Java, Perl, and other web oriented languages, so that I can market myself as a web developer again. Things changed since I last did web development so I decided I needed to update my skills and I found a path that works for me. Given my service in the US Army the American taxpayer is paying for tuition.

Having Uncle Sam pay the bill gives me certain freedoms and restrictions that others on this forum may not have. Point is that one needs to decide what is the goal of the training. For me the goal is to learn how to be a web application developer. Decide what kind of learning environment works for you, on-line, on campus, one week "boot camps", or semester long courses. Find out what is available to you, evaluate the costs, and decide how you want to pay for it. Some employers offer compensati

KGFY

[Zontar The Mindless]

I just turned 55, yet in the last 2 years or so I've managed to learn to read and write a couple thousand Chinese characters.

It's amazing the things you can do with 30 minutes a day and a brain that's been properly schooled in how to learn things.

Re: KGFY

[Zontar The Mindless]

Well, good for him, then. I'm sure you're very proud.

Re:KGFY

[TTL0]

I would be interested to learn more about what you consider " a brain that's been properly schooled in how to learn things."

Re:KGFY

[Gussington]

I just turned 55, yet in the last 2 years or so I've managed to learn to read and write a couple thousand Chinese characters.

It's amazing the things you can do with 30 minutes a day and a brain that's been properly schooled in how to learn things.

Question is, how does that compare to a Chinese school child?

Re:KGFY

[BasilBrush]

That has less to do with age than it has to do with immersion. The Chinese child is getting comprehensible Chinese input constantly during their waking hours. He's only getting 30 minutes per day, and undoubtedly in a far less rich learning environment.

Re:KGFY

[angel'o'sphere]

It surpasses a school kid by far.

http://chinese.stackexchange.c...

Re:KGFY

[Zontar The Mindless]

Learning how to leverage one's faculties for pattern recognition has a lot to do with it, at least for me. YMMV.

Re:KGFY

[gatkinso]

Now you've done it - mentioned a personal accomplishment on /. which will then be denigrated by those who haven't so much as attempted such a thing.

Re:KGFY

[Zontar The Mindless]

Now you've done it - mentioned a personal accomplishment on /. which will then be denigrated by those who haven't so much as attempted such a thing.

By someone who went to the trouble of looking through my posting history to find something personal they could drop in, hoping that this would get to me.

Re:KGFY

[Zontar The Mindless]

I've been using various random sources--a couple of Android trainer apps based on HSK, a couple of websites like archchinese.com, some books I picked up in China, and just looking up characters that I encounter--I'm grateful for Google Translate with handwriting recognition, although I've also learnt how to use a Chinese dictionary.

Over the last year and half, I've also been working my way through a dual-language edition of Journey To The West, one of the most thoroughly enjoyable books I've ever read.

I'm not sure of the exact count, but I'm pretty sure it's somewhere between 1500 and 2000. I've had to re-learn some that I've already forgot, though.

I've been concentrating on Simplified, since my in-laws live in Guangzhou, but I've also been trying to learn the Traditional forms, as I often visit Hong Kong as well.

I can't say I'm really literate, but I know enough now that I can find my way around in areas where there's no English/Latin signage, read menus (very important since I'm highly allergic to crustaceans), and understand things like shop signs, bus/train schedules, and newspaper headlines fairly well. I'm almost to the point where I can keep up with TV/movie captioning. (For those who don't know this, nearly all of these are captioned due to the fact that many Chinese are not native Mandarin speakers.) And I know enough components/radicals that I can sometimes guess the meanings of characters I don't already know.

I originally started this project because we visit there for weeks at a time, and I didn't want my wife to be stuck with leading me around all the time. But I've also become fascinated with Chinese writing for its own sake.

And it's very cool when I can walk into a noodle shop, point to what I want on the menu board, say something like, "I want this one, pork dumpling and green onion, thanks", and see eyes open wide in surprise. Most Chinese seem to understand that it can be quite difficult for foreigners to learn their language--the writing, especially--and offer me a lot of praise and encouragement for even making the attempt. Nice folks.

Anyhow, enough about me and my glorious accomplishments. Thanks very much for your post.

Re:KGFY

[Gussington]

That has less to do with age than it has to do with immersion. The Chinese child is getting comprehensible Chinese input constantly during their waking hours. He's only getting 30 minutes per day, and undoubtedly in a far less rich learning environment.

I have some friends from Poland who immigrated 30 years ago. None of them could speak English on arrival, the father is still barely comprehensible 30 year son, the oldest son who was 15 at the time still has an accent, and the younger son who was 11 at the time speaks like a local.
Age also plays a part.

Re:KGFY

[BasilBrush]

Yes we've all seen that. But you are not accounting for the fact that the kid is getting more immersion. The kid goes to school and is chatting with other kids and interacting with the teachers all day. And topics will be everything under the sun.

The father is probably spending more time either alone or in contact with other Poles, or sticking to a narrow line of conversation used in his line of business.

There are Pakistani immigrants who've been here 30 years and don't speak ANY English, because they only converse with their families and other Pakistani immigrants.

I'm not saying that age doesn't play any part, it does. For example accent seems to pretty much stick after the teens are over. I'm just saying that people overestimate the increased learning ability of kids with languages. They actually don't learn languages nearly as efficiently as most people imagine.

Re:Training in Hindi or Urdu

[Zontar The Mindless]

HIndi and Urdu are essentially the same language, genius.

And FWIW, I have numerous Indian colleagues whose English is just fine, no more or less "bad" than that of any of the other dozens of non-native speakers I work with daily. Possibly because English is one of India's official languages.

experience can't be matched, but tech changes

[kvishalk]

Oldies come from era where they have developed themselves from groundup. The processes and OO was evolving. And they've lived this evolution. None of the current generation have this perspective. You can't learn this from a book. That said, technologies are evolving: servers are written differently, there is focus on scale, embedded systems use an OS like Android etc. 16 years into programming post college, I consider myself old enough. I constantly build myself, and due to lack of time, I prefer organized courses: on the lines of udemy / coursera, Slashdot deals. I love watching lectures on subjects that I missed in college (all the open courseware). Talks from conferences on youtube is great too. And I spend an hour watching video's daily, usually play them at 1.5x or 2x. This is quite gratifying.

Re:experience can't be matched, but tech changes

[eWarz]

I beg to differ. Age has nothing to do with it. If you are smart, you've evolved. I'm not THAT old (mid-late 30s), but I came from an era where we did everything ourselves (I've been a developer since I was old enough to read/write...and professionally I've been doing it since 16). That being said, I use a language/framework that relies on others to do pretty much all the work (Ruby on Rails), why? My time is too valuable to be reinventing the wheel unless needed. That being said, I CAN build it myself if I need to...even dropping to C/C++ if i have to...I just try to avoid it. For example, I'm working on something completely original I plan on submitting to the Rails team at some point once it has matured. Mostly original code, but nothing like it exists for Rails (or Ruby), so I had to build something from scratch. I also have a Phoenix/Elixir in my sights as the next big thing.

Re:experience can't be matched, but tech changes

[kvishalk]

You're assuming oldies do not know current tech: wrong. Most of them that I know of keep themselves up to date, and use the right tech for the job. There are a few from specialized domains like telecom who work on legacy systems and may not be looking on later tech. Surely you can write in C/C++. But in my experience, not so experienced do make mistakes in design that we already know of. Ask any tech company what has been the contribution of younger vs older: Its the oldies (smarter amongst them ofcourse) who ensure that you get things right as much as possible the first time.

Re:Training in Hindi or Urdu

[Hognoxious]

HIndi and Urdu are essentially the same language, genius.

That must be why there are no courses on one or the other, just both. *eyeroll*

Sure, if you're good at one you can sort of get by in the other. That doesn't make them the same any more than Italian & Spanish are. No prizes for guessing where you're from.

Let's define old

[hughbar]

I had my 66th birthday, a week ago. So, officially in the UK, I'm retired.

However, I still program and still learn new stuff, at the moment a lot of technology around the Raspberry Pi. I'm also a philosophy undergraduate and, as such, I have to do formal (propositional and predicate) logic, so I'm refreshing my Prolog a little, because we're going to do a workshop for some of the other students.

I don't consider myself to be particularly bright, but I do enjoy technology (and learning, in general) so I'm self-motivated by curiosity. My feeling is that motivation will probably matter more than age, if the person isn't somewhat engaged, they probably are not going to learn. It's one of the big dangers of doing something just because it's well-paid. I've been lucky, working at something I like and it's pretty well-paid as well.

Re:Let's define old

[phantomfive]

. I'm also a philosophy undergraduate

That is so great.

Re:Let's define old

[hughbar]

Thanks! Actually ethics (at least) is very, very relevant to current trends in computer science at the moment anyway, so it's nearly a 'logical' choice. For example, privacy and big data, marginalisation of minority groups via machine intelligence (AKA optimisation, it's often not really 'intelligence') and, of course, AIs/consciousness the most 'obvious' one.

Summaries of new technologies & techniques

[Twylite]

Succinct summaries of new (but proven) technologies & techniques. For me it's less about how to learn, and more about what to learn. Having an idea of what new technologies & techniques have been developed (and/or are becoming popular), what problems they solve for me, what trade-offs are involved, and what alternatives exist, helps to direct my learning. In other words a trade or hobbyist magazine that focuses on focuses on technology in the 'early majority' area of the adoption curve, across programming disciplines.

Re:Summaries of new technologies & techniques

[hraponssi]

This would be great, combined with some reasonable search/presentation hierarchy of types of problems, suitable solutions for those, example code for them on different platforms and some discussion on pros and cons. Clear explanations and reasonable discussion. Maybe more in-depth links for those who need it, but again explained clearly from basics.

Stackoverflow requires me to search for questions, while when learning something new I might not know the right questions yet, or need some background to use them. The internet is full of tutorials that touch a little bit of different parts with various assumptions. Finding the right combination to learn what I need is harder than it needs to be.

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

[MindPrison]

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

Here's your answer: Stop thinking of yourself as older!

When we get older, there are several hurdles we need to pass, one of them is our mindset. If we see ourselves as "older" instead of more experienced, we will often display this trough our actions and our talk with others. People will then also perceive us as "older" rather than experienced.

If youre the "go-getter" type that will rater spend time solving tasks and problems than spend time on age related issues, you will soon forget age. Sure, the occasional aging symptoms like back pains and other irritating signs of age will remind you, but if you try to stay healthy and fit - you need not remind yourself of this and others will take no notice of your "age".

Im in my 50s now, and people often remark how young I am, why? Its my attitude. I get things done, I have fun with my coworkers, and I totally forget my age. In my mind Im not a day over 20.

Those companies who miss out just because of ageism - will lose big money on it, not to mention sour up their own work-culture as everyone will be afraid of becoming older rather than embrance this valuable experience. Those companies have a tendency to fail in other areas too.

Your best training - is your mindset.

Let's do a Generalist/DevOps.series, seriously!

[ErichTheRed]

I'm an "older" IT guy (systems engineer) who doesn't really want to move for a job at this point in my life. From both our branches of the IT world, I do think that the only technical people who will have jobs in the developed world will need to be big-time generalists. And yes, that means the dreaded buzzword DevOps. Otherwise, the future isn't pretty -- IT project management, "architecture" (hand-wavey diagram writer) or remotely managing a set of offshore coders 8 time zones away.

I'm not a straight IT operations person - I'm in systems integration for an IT services company. Therefore, I get to see lots of development work being done by both young and old, onshore and offshore. I have to make the output from the developers work in a real world environment. It's obvious that lots of developers don't understand the systems their code is running on, and IT people don't understand development. At the same time, IT operations is being cloudified and commoditized. I know so many people who've invested decades learning the ins and outs of Cisco networking, Exchange/sendmail and keeping the SAN gods happy. Now SDN, Office 365 and good-enough software-defined storage are eating that whole once-lucrative market. On the dev side it's not much better - you have entire ecosystems being introduced and thrown out in a matter of years, and they're mostly yet another layer of abstraction on top of the old one. And, the introduction of public and private cloud means both groups have to learn an entirely new way of doing things and deploying software. Lots of traditional IT folks I know think this is a fad and won't last past the Second Dotcom Bubble...but I'm not getting that vibe this time. Some of the crazier stuff is going away, but some is going to stick around or take on a slightly different form.

Change is constant, so nailing down any sort of fundamental skill set is difficult when you're only teaching the tools. I've been extremely lucky and have had exposure to lots of different IT environments, companies that do things way differently than the best practices guides show, etc. Because of this, I'm a really good troubleshooter and pick new things up fast. It's kind of what's kept me out of the development world outside of all the scripting, automation and glue coding I have to do as part of my job. I'd rather have the traditional CS education and learn how to learn a new language or architecture, than go the "AngularJS Bootcamp" route and learn a single tool that will be abandoned in 2 years.

One of the things older IT and development folks have is experience to know when something is a "rehash-with-structural-improvements" and learn it from that angle. Any online resource should approach things this way. Look at how many newbie developers think client-side JavaScript or the phone APIs are total magic when they haven't grown up with thick client applications as an example. Or, on the IT side, IT folks treat code as a complete black box that just eats system resources.

In my opinion, a killer solution would be an online DevOps style training class aimed at one side or the other, meeting in the middle, that strips away all the marketing bullcrap. Teach experienced single-stack IT guys to work with developers effectively, and teach developers about the real-world limitations of systems. Like a traditional CS course, teach the fundamentals and not the how-to, and limit leaning on a particular vendor or toolset. Part of the problem is that both sides (IT and dev) are exploding in size now and there are a million snake-oil salesmen trying to peddle products. I do think that someone who is sufficiently motivated to get a solid footing in this new merged world will have a very interesting technical job for quite a while. Let's face it; straight IT guys are being replaced with automation and software-defined stuff, and straight coders are moving offshore at an amazing pace. You might see lots of Silicon Valley startups hiring fresh-faced JavaScript engineers, but regular businesses are outsourcing things as q

Ninjitsu training

[thisisauniqueid]

Apparently to code with kids these days you need to deserve the title of "ninja". So I recommend ninjitsu training.

Re:As an older programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

"see discussions of algorithmic discussions"

Whoah, that's like, meta, man!

Re:Training in Hindi or Urdu

[Zontar The Mindless]

Hm, my Indian colleagues tell me they've no problem understanding Urdu, and it's pretty well known that Pakistanis and Indians watch each others' TV shows. (At least when someone's government isn't blocking the other country's signals.)

Linguists usually describe Hindi and Urdu as being "different registers of the same Hindustani language". There are some differences in vocabulary, but the major difference is that one is written using Devanagari script and the other with Arabic script.

Have you ever visited Italy? The first time I was there, people would speak to me in Italian, I'd reply in Spanish, and I got along quite well. Had little trouble reading the newspapers once I'd twigged to the spelling differences. Can't say whether the reverse would be true, as I don't actually speak Italian. I've had similar experiences in Norway with my Swedish.

And what has where I'm from to do with any of this?

Don't patronise experienced developers ...

[Qbertino]

... treat them like grown-ups. They know what they're doing.
And if they don't,I doubt you're gonna help it.

My 2 cents.

Re:Whose fault is it

[ruir]

The customers of "consultancy" gigs are the dumber part here of paying good money for "consultants" out of college...

Re:As an older programmer...

[Provocateur]

Have you even tried to imagine what those discussions would be like?

"Oh, yeah. This one, I think, is starting to get like, personal."

"No, he has a point. He just came on too strong, to the point of being obnoxious. He strikes me as quite abrasive, had he not brought on his argument about the derivative."

"What were we talking about? Who, the toxic boss, or his underling who logs in anonymously, not knowing that that's his boss."

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:Helping older programmers?

[gatkinso]

The fact that you didn't include transgender programmers makes your post sexist.

Re:Training in Hindi or Urdu

[Zontar The Mindless]

Please don't use words you don't understand. It makes you look silly and uneducated.

Re: Helping older programmers?

[gatkinso]

To be fair, those are your words not the poster's.

However in the US, that's what "minority" usually means. Unless the person saying it is black, in which case it means black.

Heated

[DFDumont]

I read all the comments. Not a one of them answered the question. Rather they picked on the premise. I myself have been programming for 38 years. I can pick up a new syntax (language) in an afternoon so teaching me the latest language du-jour would be a waste of my time. I suspect that along with the others who have posted the real benefit that experienced coders bring to an organization is one of rigor. Since we learned to do things in situations where you didn't dare submit a job for compilation until you were very certain of its efficacy, as in submitting your card deck only to return hours later to 'syntax error on line 330', we have a built in system of checks and balances which younger programmers don't have. They are used to immediate feedback, and even the Agile system tends to lead down the path of spaggetti on the wall.
I think what we need is training on communicating our value. Most of us have spent a large portion of our career dealing directly with hardware. That tends to give us advantages in how we dissect a program, irrespective of it is to be coded in Go, C, or Python. So from that standpoint, I would pick the later of answering algorithmic questions.
I really don't need to be trained in another language. I can work in 23 now. Picking up another out of the needs of the organization or the project team is immaterial. What I need is to be able to pursuade the interviewer that hiring me is a benefit, particularly over and above hiring a newbie right out of college who has all the buzwords on his/her resume.

Two Needs: Overviews of New Tools And New Math

[RandCraw]

As a ~60 year old developer, I've followed two major shifts since I began as a pro (in 1986).

First, Dev tools have become much bigger and more interdependent and mastery of the dev idioms takes longer now and can no longer be learned from books, as was once possible for C/Unix. Frameworks are used a lot more now (for better or worse), and S/W deliverables now depend on mixtures of languages and their libraries / components, third party APIs, and O/S service components / stacks. This requires broader awareness of the S/W ecosystem but allows less time for mastery of each component, since the ecosystem is so vast and the components change often.

Second, there are more forms of computing now that require a "deep dive" technically. These usually demand deeper skills in math, statistics, engineering, and maybe hardware (e.g. DSP, image processing, computer vision, real time O/S and Arduino, music, crypto, machine learning, or graphics). The classic academic CS preparation I got before 1990 did not prepare me to work in this space foundationally, and I've had to learn the math through remedial courses or self instruction.

So I guess I'm suggesting that any resource that can provide a good clear intro overview of A) software stacks and ecosystems, or B) the math and engineering beneath advanced tech subjects, I'd find both of these helpful.

A good example of this is Michael Nielsen's web site "Neural Nets and Deep Learning", which provides an excellent overview of those two topics while minimizing the jargon, arcane math notation, and flummery that so often pervades tech talk. Another example is Lyons' excellent book for non-engineers, 'Understanding Digital Signal Processing'. I'd love to see more material like those.

Weightlifting and regular walks

[mi]

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

Overall decline in health is, what threatens aging professionals the most — not ignorance of the exciting new technology of the week. Learning a particular tool has never been especially valuable — education is supposed to teach you one thing, primarily: how to learn new things on your own. If you are a developer already, you must've mastered that long ago.

So, strength training and regular walks and/or yoga (while still legal).

Help the youngsters to understand...

[QuietLagoon]

... that the older programmers know more and can do more than they are given credit for. That's the training that is required.

Re:As an older programmer...

[Big Hairy Ian]

As an older programmer if I need to learn a technology I learn it! The problem I face is the amount of ageism in this industry! Once you're over 40 most firms just don't seem to be interested.

Management training

[holophrastic]

Programmers suck, and projects fail, often because the person leading the team hasn't any clue about how things are programmed. It would seem logical to for successful programmers to graduate out of programming, and use their experience to actually guide projects.

I'll never forget, some twenty years ago, as a lowly programmer, following a 50+ page specification to build a shitty web-site, that detailed right down to how to spell the word "Login", but never detailed the variable name to be used -- wouldn't be a big deal, except front-end and back-end needed to agree on the variable name, and were two different programmers in two different departments. Another amount of stupid. Project manager had never seen anything but a finished web-page. Big surprise.

Dog Biscuits

[Baldrson]

It doesn't matter what you want to teach an old programmer if you don't offer them dog biscuits.

Give them some worthwhile problem to solve!

[niks42]

The absolute best way of training anyone in a new (technology, language, API, set of bindings, class library, toolset etc) is to give them some worthwhile, engaging and difficult problem to solve.

I'm older than I care to admit, and I am the one who is trying to tempt a bunch of much younger people who think they know better into adopting a new technology, since it solves a problem that they otherwise could only solve by spending a *lot* of money. However, they are now recognising that this "new" technology (FPGA in this case) is the only way to solve a particularly worthwhile and engaging problem - viz, how to crunch clinical exomes from the output of an Next Gen Sequencer without having to move a ton of data across the Internet to a big cloudy HPC, or buying one so they can keep it mildly busy. They are going to learn a whole new set of tools and programming methods, and there is some significant paradigm shifting going on; but the problem is that the problem itself is intractable without such a change.

Its not a zero sum game

[microTodd]

I wonder who else you miss

An important thing to note about building your software team....there is probably no magical must-have person out there. I'm really happy with the team I built, so yeah it doesn't matter who I've missed. I'm sure I've missed lots of good people, but I only have so many slots to fill and there are more good engineers than there are slots.

So for the networking (or rather the reluctance to do it) its not a question of "clueless company misses good people". Its "What do I do personally to maximize my probability of getting a job?". If you're not willing to network, then your probability just went down. As a hiring manager, I don't really care. I already have more resumes than positions to fill.

Internet of things / 3D printing

[iamacat]

Too many experienced programmers are complacent to stay in their current professional area, which is mostly server or mobile these days. But these technologies will be very important in future and even today present great opportunities to start your own company. There are plenty of wealthy folks in Silicon Valley who would cough up dough to have the smartest house on the block.

How to not murder fresh graduates.

[Lumpy]

Honestly the #1 problem I found is the snot nosed punk straight out of college that tries to defend his unholy mess at peer review. Training in how to not print out the programming policy guidelines and beat the shit out of these kids with it is really needed.

I dont care how clever you are, you follow the guidelines. and if you dont comment your code, I'm flagging it as incomplete every....fucking....time.....

Reading & Doing

[luis_a_espinal]

What Training Helps Older Programmers Most?

Reading and doing. Once you accrue a certain amount of expertise, there is really not much that you do in terms of training. You simply read.

Now, there are exceptions when it comes to using new tools or when switching to completely different domains.

If you have been an embedded developer all your life, you will require some specific tool training to become a JEE developer (and viceversa.) But the bulk of programming is based on principles that people simply acquire and master as they become old ponies in this rodeo.

At that point, it's just reading and reading and reading.

Re:As an older programmer...

[hey!]

Same is true in my experience. It doesn't matter what your record of accomplishment is either -- in fact it's almost a handicap to have an impressive resume when you're older.

One thing I noticed is when it started to get harder to get interviews, when I did get an interview everyone would seem excited about bringing me on ... except the hiring manager. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke, but after it happened a number of times I realized: nobody wants to supervise someone with more experience than they have.

So my advice to older programmers is: don't put your hopes in gaining even more expertise. It works against you. Start your own business, or get training in some other kind of job.

Re:As an older programmer...

[cayenne8]

So my advice to older programmers is: don't put your hopes in gaining even more expertise. It works against you. Start your own business, or get training in some other kind of job.

Get into contracting, where experience is very much valued.

If you have a clean record, get into GOVERNMENT CONTRACTING....you can make good money there, and contracts are long lasting (years at a time).

Do make sure to incorporate yourself first.

WAY Too Many Anonymous Cowards Here!!!

[CAOgdin]

If you have a legitimate opinion, why are you so afraid of being identified with it?

Ok, now all you ACs can try to attack me by responding to this post. That's why most Trolls are ACs, and vice versa.

If you won't own your own words, you aren't worth my attention.

Re:As an older programmer...

[Big Hairy Ian]

My current job has a 3 month notice period so unless I quit/get sacked getting into contracting is all but impossible as nobody's going to wait 3 months for some to start a contractor job normally they need you to start ASAP.

Maybe something like this..

[theendlessnow]

Managing Millennials - Retention, Reward and Recognition

Re:As an older programmer...

[HornWumpus]

What country do you live in? That's unenforceable in the USA.

Quit and don't come in the next day. Tell them 'sue me'.

There will be consequences, just not legal ones. Be prepared for them. Make sure you have a friend in related industries to catch them Libeling you.

Weight Training

[utahjazz]

Kidding aside, there is no training that older programmers need that younger programmers wouldn't need more. Older programmers' ability to keep up with new technologies already surpasses that of younger programmers, because they're already seen 99% of those "new" technologies before, 20 years ago the first time they were introduced.

Finish your Bachelors Degree

[MountainLogic]

I know a number of very gifted programmers who did not finishes their bachelors as once upon a time you could sneak in the backdoor without a degree. Today, HR uses the lack of a degree as a club to keep their salaries low. Plus, moving to a new company will be harder than ever these days with so many folks with a BS and MS. Even if it is nothing but journalism degree finish it. HR fill usually just toss any applicant without a degree. If you've been coding for 15 years, what your degree concentration is in will matter much less at most companies. (And if it does matter, then they are probably only hiring new grads from name brand schools like MIT, Stanford, CMU, etc anyway). Don't get me wrong, new grads without a STEM degree face an uphill battle.

Re: Helping older programmers?

[Half-pint HAL]

I think he's making a reference to an Anonymous Coward (or group thereof) whose typical term is a whole lot less wholesome that "minorities"....

Build Tools & Frameworks

[BinBoy]

I have a good understanding of programming itself. I've written code from scratch in many different languages from assembly to C++ to JavaScript. The problem these days is the amount of build tools and frameworks to learn in order to make things "easy." It would be helpful to learn what all the various frameworks and tools do and why I should use them, especially those related to JavaScript development. Will the world end if I keep using nothing more than ES5, a bit of jQuery and source control?

Re:Helping older programmers?

[HornWumpus]

Because minorities and girls are already being helped by dozens of dedicated organizations and are, in fact, way ahead of the game.

training

[Torvac]

meditation and yoga

Re:I knew Java was Crap in 1996 ....

[HornWumpus]

I thought all Android apps had to run on the Java VM. What's the better choice? Don't code for Android?

Re:As an older programmer...

[Aighearach]

The only difference that I've noticed is that kids these days don't read the manual. You want to help old programmers, host lots of manuals. You want to help young programmers, make a video where you tell them how it would feel to actually do it if they actually learned how.

Re:As an older programmer...

[thsths]

That is it right there: paradigms. Older programmers have a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge, a lot of skills, but they may not be aware of shifts in paradigms, what that means, why it is relevant, and why you may or may not want to follow.

That being said, any experienced programmer should be able to figure it out. If not, maybe they are just old, not experienced.

Re:As an older programmer...

[Aighearach]

It may not be age at all, but rather ideology. You might believe that as you get older you're owed perpetually increasing pay, but it might turn out that most developers peak as a mid-level employee and will never actually be 2 or 3 times as useful as the guy with only 5 or 10 years of experience. An "impressive" resume is going to hurt because when they look at it they're going to see large pay demands, and not necessarily additional skills that they need. That is especially true if you have balanced experience, because they want balanced employees but they don't want to pay for multi-discipline experts because they don't need it.

How many older devs show up to the interview, "well, I've been doing the same sort of stuff for decades, but using different tools overs the years. I still enjoy it, I could do this forever! I know I'm at the max pay I can expect since I never jumped to management." Then I think you'd find they don't actually care that about age. How many older programmers sound that way? I don't meet them. The ones I meet either have a bunch of complaints, or want something more/else, or think they're very important people because of their age and experience. And if true, great, important people don't even apply for jobs, they just announce that they're available and then choose an offer. But then we usually loop back to the complaints, usually they start with "gosh nobody understands how important I am."

Re:Whose fault is it

[HornWumpus]

The fact that Accenture, EDS (HP whatever) etc etc can still get meetings is proof that senior management in government and large corporate are completely corrupt and incompetent.

Re:As an older programmer...

[Aighearach]

Right, if you're scared about facing uncertainty with 3 months of notice, do not try to be a consultant. You would probably die of a heart attack the first year. Try to understand: if you had the personality for consulting, that would sound like a great deal to you to just put in your notice and have 3 months to get everything ready. After all, if you have the personality to be a consultant, you already save more of your money, and have some set aside for unexpected externalities. It isn't like a contractor works constantly anyways! You have to be ready all the time not to have a contract, not only after 3 months of preparation.

Re:Coworker gives "old" programmers a bad name

[HornWumpus]

If someone's brain is that bad at 60 they need to see a doctor.

My dad is pushing 90, he is slowing down a lot now. He seems to have forgotten how electromagnetic fields work, unless he actually thinks about it, then it clicks back on.

You've got it backwards

[Tony Isaac]

The best teachers have experience that is burning inside them, straining to get out. They see foolishness around them, know from experience the answers, and want to share what they've learned. THESE are the people we "old guys" want teaching us.

If you start by saying, "I want to teach older programmers something," but you don't already have something in mind that just HAS to be communicated, you're an opportunist. We'll spot you a mile away, and stay away.

Sleep - lots of sleep

[presidenteloco]

that retrains your brain right there.

Seriously though, the most important thing I've meta-learned is to exercise a lot of judgement about which new things to BOTHER to learn.

90% of the new stuff will be flash-in-the-pan. Some small residue of new stuff will actually stick and be important. (How's my metaphoring? 1-800-WRI-TEGD)

So learning the sixth-sense cues about what is going to matter is vital. So knowing you should probably learn Go, containers, ... and not bother with for example the 95% of weird-ass js client-side frameworks which just cause an unmaintainable fur-ball.It's good to look at those things, just in case there's a mind-blowingly important new idea there, but you have to know when to quickly look away.

Re:As an older programmer...

[dak664]

So discussions of discussions is an abstract group that applies to all discussions. It includes itself, does that make it incomplete?

Training that would help this old programmer.....

[VAXcat]

I'm an old programmer (first computer I ever wrote programs on used punched card decks), and ideally the best training for me would actually be training for the hordes of younger programmers who have no real interest in programming except as a paycheck, and who don't have any real deep understanding of how computers work - and who also write very bad code. There was a time, a golden age in computing, where almost all the programmers were college trained engineers, scientists and mathematicians who were really interested in working with computers, and brought all sorts of deep skills to the table. Today, not so much...

Slow(er) learning of new application domains

[cpghost]

As an older programmer (say, 50+), learning new programming paradigms is easy. Hell, absorbing new frameworks, programming languages etc. in a week or two is still a piece of cake. Why? Because that's not too far from the domain you know. BUT, diving into totally new application domains requires a lot more efforts than when you were younger. As an example: if you've never been exposed to an EE education and you suddenly have a project about, say, writing an antennae simulator, you'll have to absorb Maxwell's Equations, and related maths. Even if you've had CS training with maths background in your prime, you'll definitively need a lot more time to wrap your head around this with 50, 60 than if you were in your 30ies. That's not impossible, of course, but the additional time to understand this new domain, and apply it to programming, will slow you down so much that companies will often refrain from hiring you, despite your immense wealth of additional side-knowledge that could be very useful.

Re:As an older programmer...

[ncc74656]

nobody wants to supervise someone with more experience than they have.

My sister's first job out of college was at a public university in the southwest where she hoped to pick up her master's while she worked. Her boss didn't have a degree, and set out to make her life miserable. Skip forward just a few months...mission accomplished. :-P

Re:As an older programmer...

[hey!]

Straw man. After selling my company I would have been happy to take a programming job at $45K instead of the 100K-150K I'd been earning.

Re:As an older programmer...

[Aighearach]

You might want to use more words, perhaps even enough to express an idea. I can tell that you're disagreeing with something, but who knows what!

I'm not really convinced even that you understood me, much less that you identified some sort of logical error that I made.

What happened?

[howlingmad]

Maybe this is just me, but I stumble over a lot of this "old programmers" articles recently. What happened? Well, maybe it's just the Google bubble I live in. *sigh*

Learn before you code always

[rhyous]

They day you stopped learning is the day you become a legitimately "aged" developer.

In my experience, the bias against "aged" developers has been justified, not because of age, but because of complacency. The problem with some "aged" developers (I am turning 40) is that they stopped learning and rely only on existing knowledge for solutions.

  In this industry, there are two types of knowledge:
1. The type that changes quickly: language, syntax, libraries, maven/nuget packages tools, IDEs, plugins, code generators
2. The type that never gets old: good coding practices, architecture, design patterns, decoupling, vast experience, etc.

Young developers usually stay up update to date on the first type, while slowly growing the second type. Usually, a young coder writes their code more quickly and delivers faster, but their code is sometimes less maintainable because of lack of the second type of knowledge.
Aging developers have built up a good store of the second type of knowledge and have learned the first type of knowledge for so long they think they are done.

So some developers give up on the first type of knowledge, become complacent in their first type of knowledge. This is when I would say they have "aged".

Some times these "aged" developers get bitter when a young developer outshines them on the first type of knowledge. I used to do that to old developers all the time. Some of them would try to outshine the young developer with the second type of knowledge. When you do this, instead of bridging the knowledge gap together, you increase the rift. Accept that the young developers are better at the first type of knowledge. Embrace it, cheer it on, and let them go with it. But steer their exuberance with your second type of knowledge. Let them share with you their first type of knowledge, so you learn, then enhance what they taught you with your second type of knowledge, so they learn.

The best developers, the ones who become rockstar developers are usually the ones who are over 40, have a ton of the second type of knowledge, but also keep on the first type of knowledge.

See, no matter how long you have been developing, your current skill level shouldn't be what you use for each project. The world of dev changes every year. You don't need to know everything, but you need to know how to learn.

All developers of any age need to start every iteration/spring with learning time.

Learning Steps
1. Crowd Source.
  - What is the current development world doing in regards to your solution?
  - Of those, which have stuck and why?
2. Has anything new been released that can help you with your current solution.
3. Choose the technology: language, framework, architecture, design patterns, etc.
4. Are there any tools, IDE plugins, etc, that will automate boiler plate code for what I am doing?
5. Would it be faster to write a tool to generate the code or to write the code?

Only then should you implement the work in your iteration/sprint.

If you do this for every sprint/iteration, you will deliver much faster. It seems like learning will add time to your overall solution. It doesn't. It might not save time in every sprint, but in any given year it could save weeks to months of time. Your delivered solutions will feel up-to-date not because you used some new fangled thing shiny toy, but because you increased your toolbox with better tools before you started and used better tools.

Also, since you never stop learning, you never become an "aged" developer.

Yes, agism exists. But I think you will find that it is rare. More often than not that the interviewer noticed during the interview that the candidate has stopped putting effort into learning the first type of knowledge.

Re:Learn before you code always

[micahraleigh]

Two sides here:

Maybe you are *right*:
1) The median age of SW people is 42 years. Right at about where most other professions are. Supposedly.
2) The unemployment rate for SW people is supposedly negative. As in people who aren't looking for work are getting hired.
3) The one guy I interviewed who was 50+ didn't know a lick of the programming language we were hiring for. Didn't hire him.


But ... maybe you are *wrong*!
1) A lot of 50+ year olds report that no matter how much they've learned they can't get work (unless they're in COBOL or stayed in a job for a while or don't met their clients face to face)
2) I've seen statistics showing a lot of software developers switch professions at 35 ... almost none left by 39.
3) Eric Schmitt's email just surfaced showing he thought of himself as entitled to success because he was only going to fresh meat to work on the DNC voter system he pitched. Zuckerberg has explicitly said the same thing (that's google and FaceBook respectively). I've had a boss tell me we can never hire older devs.
4) Talked to a recruiter who told me she wouldn't even talk to anyone over 50. Another recruiter told me they only work with up to 45.

Re:As an older programmer...

[micahraleigh]

He's saying that's not the argument he's making and you're putting words (i.e. a poorly formed argument) in his mouth.

Get Off Teletype?

[tmjva]

Especially weaning off the use of the shift key to code in numbers and the chicken plucker to edit your paper tape.

Entering big software projects a problem?

[Max Sinister]

This is what I've been asking myself in recent times. How hard is it entering a software project with some hundred thousands LoC, hundreds of packages and more than ten years on the market? Could we need a new tool for this? (In fact, I'm working on this idea since I am self-employed, but unless you ask me about it, I won't shill.)

Re:As an older programmer...

[lsatenstein]

Same is true in my experience. It doesn't matter what your record of accomplishment is either -- in fact it's almost a handicap to have an impressive resume when you're older.

One thing I noticed is when it started to get harder to get interviews, when I did get an interview everyone would seem excited about bringing me on ... except the hiring manager. The first time it happened I thought it was a fluke, but after it happened a number of times I realized: nobody wants to supervise someone with more experience than they have.

So my advice to older programmers is: don't put your hopes in gaining even more expertise. It works against you. Start your own business, or get training in some other kind of job.

Perhaps you are being forced into becoming an independent consutant. I would not have a hope whatsover that the government will force a penalty for age discrimination.