So one guy tries to discredit his competitor, and that's all it takes? I'm not talking about the one guy. One guy didn't pressure the entire show to cancel.
And there is nothing wrong with inviting your friends to your conference. And there's nothing wrong with your friends all being the same colour. It's your conference, you can do with it whatever you like. People aren't forced to attend.
In this case, an overwhelming financial force encouraged a guy to cancel an otherwise on-track conference because of false-optics.
Instead of complaining that a conference is all white, run your own conference and make it as diverse as you want. My experience concludes that most of the time, those who complain don't do anything themselves. They work as peons somewhere, and have never made any decisions on their own.
Start your own business, it's never been difficult. And show that you're better than others. What a great competitive advantage you'll have.
Quit complaining when someone else does what they want. I don't imagine that in this case the organizer turned away non-white speakers. You wanted it to be random, and sometimes random is uniform. So sorry, that's how math works.
Again, be responsible for something of your own, and you'll find that you won't care what others do on their own.
Want to use your name instead of ordering others anonymously? Management doesn't work anonymously. And clearly you're trying to manage me.
But once again, I think there are as many management positions as there are 42 year-old programmers.
And there can be as many as you want, because you can always start your own company -- instead of just assuming that someone else will give you a job, as though jobs are somehow your right in the first place. Quit complaining that there aren't enough jobs, and make one yourself.
And, once again, since I'm stating a fact -- it's the way I choose whom to hire -- I can't be wrong here. I'm also coroberating the original post.
Clearly, you're talent for speaking puts you in the disabled category anyway, so you shouldn't worry about your age; you're an effective 12 year-old anyway.
Fair enough. I hated that corporate ladder too, which is why I chose to create my own venture.
I'll just leave you with the following perspective. That high-risk tolerance you mentioned, it doesn't really exist for the technical entrepreneur. Assuming you're willing to do in business what you do in programming -- seeing what doesn't work, and shifting in favour of what does -- there really is no risk in the way that people think. Being an intelligent technical person, if what you try and sell doesn't sell, something adjacent to it will. You just keep shifting one turn at a time, and you eventually fall into something that works quite well.
Sure, if you go for the multi-billion dollar idea, it's high risk. But if you go for the normal-paying world, there's always some way to adjust to whatever happens.
And in the end, my risk now is virtually nill. I'm not likely to lose all of my clients at once, which means that I can't "lose my job". Sure I have no idea what work I'll be doing next year, nor how much money I'll make next month, but over any long-enough period of time, the fluctuations all even out and I get paid quite well. And, of course, I get to write-off so many things that my effective earnings are far higher than my actual earnings.
And that's what I mean about the whole executive decision-making. You can do exactly what you're doing now, but in an executive capacity, you wind up being able to double your effective earnings. And at 42, with all of the experience that you have, you'd be silly to not trust in your own efforts. It needn't be in your own company where you need to do your own accounting. It can be where you currently are.
So how's this for the question. What's stopping you from going to your current employer and asking to become something of a partner. You'll wait for the client to pay before you take any money on a project. You'll take a percentage of what the client pays. If the client runs away you'll get nothing. You'll sit with the client to determine their needs. And you'll do the work like you always do, but you won't be on any sort of clock. And as a result, your employer will have less "risk", you'll have more accountability. If you screw up some work, obviously you'll be redoing it without any additional money -- and less if you wind up discounting it for the client.
I'd be quite, well, dissappointed, if you said that you don't trust your own work well enough to effectively guarantee it. Especially because that's exactly what your employer is doing with your work anyway. So the fluctuations are simply smoothed out for you, and your employer makes more money off of you when you do well, and slightly less money when you do poorly, and fires you when you do very poorly.
For a 20 year old who hasn't any idea of what they themselves are capable, I can see that. They need management, they need to be told what to do, and they need a process thrust upon them. But you don't need that any more. So why would you want someone else to profit so much off of your success while you get nothing for performing above expected?
I remember as a child, when my father would come home and brag to his wife (my mother) that he just negotiated some cool huge corporate deal that would make the company millions in profits, she'd respond "so how many of those millions do you get" and he'd say something to the effect of "I've secured my annual bonus of $5'000".
Incidentally, and I don't want to mix this up with the actual discussion: I find it odd that an anonymous poster, such as yourself, would order me, by name, to stop posting on a well-populated discussion venue. Aside from the fact that you needn't read every post, you certainly needn't read mine.
Additionally, being 42, I'd have hoped that you'd want to know what business owners think on the issue. Since it affects both of us.
My opinion can't be dribble when I'm actually using it in the industry when considering hiring people of such a demographic. It's reality. It's reality because I make it a reality. You can say that it isn't representative of the rest of the industry, and it may not be, although this discussion started with a post that suggests it is.
So you're objecting to my co-roberating the original post? That doesn't make much sense to me. So I assume that you simply don't like my language, and are objecting to my syntax, and not the content of my post.
Obviously my post was rather direct. I'm a technical person, and I lack many social concerns, so none of that is surprising. But I assume that you've dealt with people of my kind before, especially if you're in this industry. In which case you know that my "tone" is purely in your head, that I'm not upset with you at all.
I do hope that unlike the original post suggests, you're gainfully employed, and enjoy your job/career. Especially since I'm not that far from 42 myself, and I may choose to dial-back the whole making-decisions thing in an effort to ease my daily workload. It would comfort me to know that option exists.
I'm not sure if you're being polite, or simply dismissive -- the latter would demonstrate my point. If you're 42, and you're in my industry (web development, business software programming) then your greatest value is in your application of literally decades of experience.
That experience may be actual programming, or it may be knowing what's already been done, or it may be in having seen what happens when certain things are combined, or how they get used. It's a big deal to anyone who lacks that.
We've all seen very skilled programmers make the mistake of thinking that a great idea is good for their employer, but miss a very important perspective. For example, one of my employees had a brilliant idea for how to improve the scalability and performance of my platform, and couldn't understand why I shot him down without even considering it.
His idea, and it was quite innovative, necessitated migrating existing clients in order to reap the benefits. We'd have had to migrate all of the clients at once. Easily done, each client would take about an hour, and we'd be done in three days, lickety-split.
What he failed to realize was that it put me in the position of risk losing each and every single one of my clients all in the same week. It doesn't matter how much better things can get, I'm not going to risk every dollar of my future revenue. Had we screwed up mid-migration, I can't say to 100 clients that I screwed up doing something optional.
By 42, you not only have that kind of experience, but you may also have a solution -- or you'll come at the problem of tweaking the platform from a totally different angle, never wasting a thought on something too risky for your employer.
But hey, if you don't want to contribute in such decisions, and you don't want to take your own risks, and you don't want to be 100% accountable for your mistakes, then that's fine. I don't mind your working for someone, and I don't mind your working for me either. I'll happily hire a 42 year-old programmer.
But there are real advantages to hiring a 20 year-old programmer. And since you've thrown away almost 80% of the advantages to hiring a 42 year-old programmer, then you can't exactly blame an employer for preferring the 20 year-old.
Common advantages to the 20 side are: they can be pushed longer, they can work more hours, they likely don't have a family to support, they likely don't have the funds to go on vacations as often, they'll work weekends, they'll volunteer for after-hours on-call, they'll do more research into new things, they start off more recently-educated, they've got something to prove, they may want to move up, they have fewer expectations, you can groom them to your own ideals, they're in better health, they have fewer expenses, they'll work cheaper, they have fewer outside responsibilities that can distract them from work.
Common advantages to the 42 side are: they depend on the money, they don't struggle with complex things, they don't struggle with complicated things, some things they've done before, they have fewer questions.
Without the decision-making stuff, the typical 42 side is thinner. Plain and simple.
Actually, mine wasn't a metaphor. Straight up, if you're 35+, and you're doing work that a 20 year-old can do, (assuming it's not at a speed or proficiency an order of magnitude greater than the 20 year-old) then you simply aren't contributing to society any more than a 20 year-old can. And since you've got far more experience, and therefore potential ability, one of three things is true:
a) you're lazy; which is fine, by the way b) you simply don't want to act your age; which is even more fine, by the way c) you ignored the opportunity to learn, or are incapable of learning; which is ok too
But no matter which of those three covers your scenario, you can't blame an employer for not wanting to hire you over the 20 year-old. The 20 year-old is none of those three things.
So if, as the post reads, you aren't being treated as "relevant", it's quite possible that you aren't relevant. Makes sense to me. I do own a business, I do have a little experience hiring people in the programming industry, and even when I look at myself I worked much harder when I was 20 than I do now in my 30's. The difference, however, is that now I make most of my money in terms of offering value in experience and decisions and combination solutions. Not in the actual effort of programming. Which also makes sense, since I've programmed for 28 years, and I type fast.
Plain and simple: if you're 35, and you're still being told what to do, then you've forgotten how to grow. You're no longer contributing to society, and you've become a burden. You're no different than a 20 year-old who just can't tie his shoes (injuries and disabilities appreciated, obviously).
By the time you're 35, having years of experience, you'd better be capable of delegating, teaching, instructing, managing, or directing others. It's time for you to be making executive decisions -- since, you know, that the important part of any business. You ought to be accountable at that point. That means taking the risks, having something to lose, using your own dollars and your own decision-making to actually make things happen.
At that point, if you're also the one doing the work, that's cool.
But if you're 35, and aren't making your own decisions, well, maybe you should go back to velcro shoes. They really do make more sense, after all.
Oh, I couldn't agree more. Alas, my clients have specifically asked me to not bill things correctly. They don't want thinks itemized, and they don't want things explained.
Ultimately, they've got good reason. My side is technical, their side is very much not. They need to justify their expenses, which are my actions, up their chain. And because that chain isn't technical, they want me to bundle, summarize, and obscure to the point where every line item references only the initial business-reason for the project.
It's difficult to take "customer service management" and "fielding customer callls" and "recording customer call actions" and then distinguish between storage, delivery, backup, and reliability. My clients simply don't care about the distinctions -- probably because by the time it makes it to their perspectives, there is no distinction.
So yeah, sometimes, it's up to me to present the option of the cheaper storage and no backup of unimportant data. But it's also up to me to point out that my network services are more reliable when I treat every byte as important, and one day it may become so anyway. So I'd often prefer to have the backup option available on a whim, than to say that engaging backup requires additional resources.
Maybe my clients rely on my to orchestrate the most robust solution meaningful to their scenario, and maybe that's exactly what they're paying for. In which case, it shouldn't matter to you whether they're paying for better storage, or they're paying for possible options and future flexibility. That distinction is of the very same sort that my clients ask me to obscure.
even without how the data is being used, it needs to be there, and it needs to be acquired, capacity-planned, and it's a part of a large network. In my case, there's a limit to how much storage I can put into one web server. And since I divide my multiple clients across multiple web servers, if 25% of them suddenly jump 25% in their usage, I hit the ceiling really quickly. And since I have huge administrative and risk costs to migrating projects from one server to another, or procuring a new server, there are real costs as a result.
I'm not charging for data storage. I'm charging for an entire working solution. Data storage has a impact on that solution in a manner far greater than it's simple cost. Hey, motherboards are more expensive than hard drives. But motherboards can be replaced in an hour without loss of client data, or just about any software configuration. Motherboards can be swapped. But when a hard drive needs replacing (it doesn't need to be broken, it can just be too small), it's a big ordeal to manage that data throughout the process.
2G, 3G, and landlines won't exist in five years. This article talks about police radios going to lte. No one has walkie talkies anymore. Multiple carriers roam on eachothers' networks, and share cell sites. One sector of one tower of one carrier is enough to cover an entire office building. Overlapping towers can quickly become over-saturated in the absense of a single one.
You're correct that it's all FUD. But not because it can't work exactly that way. Only because terrorists are monumentally stupid and can't figure out the most basic ways of getting around security provisions.
For example, getting a device onto a plane requires going through about six layers of security. Standing on the rooftop of the airport parking lot however, watching the same plane take-off about 100 yards away, requires a $4 parking fee. Standing under the path of landing aircraft near the airport, where the plans come by 200 yards over-head, every 2 minutes for hours, requires nothing more than the cost of the helium balloon, pulling a can of red paint.
The point is always the same. If you're going to have emergency personnel using lte for communication, lte simply isn't good enough because it isn't resistant to anything..
You're looking at it all wrong. Terrorists needn't go through the effort of attacking a military might at all. Just take down all communications in a city, and watch the mayhem.
Aside from huge inconvenience, and a whopping expense to resolve the problems, there's so much more. Businesses stop working. Security alarms stop working -- which doesn't matter because the traffic alone will stop any timely response. Here comes the looting, followed closely by the rioting.
It's not the end of the world, and it'll all get resolved in a day or two; but that's a day or two of mayhem, followed by a couple weeks of clean-up. And it all cost $500 to the terrorist -- which can just as easily be a local. Or worse, a local with an imported cellphone, who doesn't know that he's the one causing the mayhem.
And it can be a monthly occurance.
And it can be in ten cities at the same time.
Why oh why would you exchange hard-wired security for wireless broadcast? Dude, convenience is the antithesis of security.
And this is why, you should simply own your own IMAP server. Since it costs next to nothing. If you own it, the storage is yours, and you haven't abandoned anything.
Or, you know, you could let someone else hold onto your stuff forever, which for this law, and logic, means you've abandoned it.
Makes sense. Why weren't you paying the few pennies to own your stuff?
It's one thing to be racist. It's another thing to have good reason to do so. This sort of thing gives large populations an actualy reason to be racist. Between "you didn't work as hard to get here", and "me and every one of my peers", you might as well segrogate the schools, since you've totally segrogates the students.
And what of group projects? Or don't you have those in your country? Why would a white member treat a latino member with any respect in such a group? Moreover, why would the asian guy expect the disabled student to even try? At basically a third of the value, it becomes meaningless: a chasm between them.
There was never anything wrong with a disabled person being a few grades behind. That made sense. It makes sense because those that happen to succeed, get to be proud of doing so. That's true at all levels.
It should never have been "no student left behind". It should have been "no students dragged forward".
Can't even agree on capital punishment. There's no uniform education, no uniform science, no uniform anything. About the only things that are nation-wide (aside from insurance companies of course) are the military, the fbi, and the cia.
Oh, certainly that's all true. Myself included. But I can't imagine that going it on your own would make things any better. That's just not a valid solution. Making the entire thing just straight crazy.
But I'll tell you what would work. You can get your Texan friends to all agree.
Look, I hate the way democracy is handled, and I'm as white as most Texans (though no where near as tall), but this kind of thing doesn't just make your entire country look foolish. Quebec's done that to my country for a while. This makes your country look like 14th century racists. It's not even modern racism.
Haven't you guys had civil wars over this shit already? Aren't there movies and books and statues and abstract rail-roads about all of this?
Way to remind everyone that the USoA isn't a country, it's just a collection of independent states. Quebec doesn't want to "leave" Canada, they want to start their own country. Texas wants to simply leave.
Quite frankly, it's embarassing to share a land-mass with you guys. You do know that most of the world can't distinguish Canadians from United Statians, so they call us all Americans, you know, since we share that land mass known as the Americas. The British are going to mock us!
Good thing you still have the right to bare arms. Even if the British aren't coming, I guess the blacks sure are.
Good point. Someone out there trying to make people's lives easier by giving away for free, someone else's hard work is spretty dangerous. And I don't think you can say that laytops and printers are excessive profits these days.
He forgot that at least 10 persons worked hard long to write those manuals. It's not his job to make accessing them any easier. He also forgot that those people don't necessarily want that access to be any easier. And he should have known that because toshiba has no problems making a web-site.
Maybe this guy should add his own value to the world by actually creating something of his own, instead of simply by repackaging someone else's content. What was he expecting when he redistributed someone else's hard work?
Oh, I hear you. I went the management route a few years ago when I hired more programmers. Suddenly, I spent more time managing and directing my team, and less time innovating -- which as I'm sure you know, means no time innovating. Which is why I dropped down to 2 employees, which was much better. Early this year, I moved, losing my last colleague due to distance. It took a few months to get back into the full swing, but I'm super-happy on my own now -- plus the occasional contractor for things like artistry of course.
But really, assuming you've got no major things holding you back -- meaning that you can afford to take some time to work through a risk -- then you really ought to go it on your own. And don't let that scare you, you needn't be totally alone, and you needn't be doing something unfamiliar.
It can be as simple as taking a single project -- some SaaS or web-site project usually works best. Take all of your experience and build it -- either yourself, with a partner, with an inexpensive student, or with a contractor. You'll undoutedly wind up choosing something for which you've seen some kind of need. You may even simply choose to compete directly with whatever your last employer was doing. That's fine too.
You get to offer your clients something that they can rarely get -- a senior programmer actually doing the work. They get to meet with the programmer, brainstorm with the programmer, and get customer service from the programmer. For small businesses (~25 employees) with large quantities of product sales, you and I are amazingly well-suited to giving them the benefits of data management in their often-odd scenarios.
And keep in mind, when it comes to your own small business, small business owners help small business owners. No one competes for 1'000th place. So we help each other because better the two of us improve over the other 997, than 998 stays above 999.
Let me know if you need any emotional support, or lifestyle advice. Certainly everyone else that you know will discourage you from taking risks -- those who don't never think anyone should.
And always remember not to jump 100 hurdles in a single leap. One hurdle at a time. Plan ten steps, take two steps, and plan again. If you keep making adjustments, you can't ever actually fail. You'll just wind up building something a little or a lot different than you'd initially planned.
But that's exactly where your experience is valuable. You can see things working or not working well before even I can. That's huge.
That's what a drug is. That's practically the definition of the word. Every drug improves something -- almost always by inhibiting something else. Welcome to focus. If you allow that focus to flourish, you'll reap the benefits.
Whether or not that inhibition is detrimental, short-term or long-term, is the value proposition.
If you haven't noticed, programming has changed since the '90s. It's now pretty well a blue-collar job -- under three levels of management. Even in small companies, it's heavily controlled, especially where version control comes into play.
It's the perfect job for any 20-something.
By the time 30 roles around, you'd better be the one determining what gets programmed. Whether or not you also do the programming is irrelevant.
By 60, your value comes as proper experience. You shouldn't be looking for a programming job. You should be looking to manage a programming company, consult for a programming company, assess a programming company, or start your own programming company. Otherwise, you're a) not bringing any more skill than a 20-something and b) wasting a lot of the skill that you certainly have.
I'm 35, have my own software company that's varied in size between 1 and 5 programmers -- including myself. And that's just the way I love it.
Slashdot Mirror
So one guy tries to discredit his competitor, and that's all it takes? I'm not talking about the one guy. One guy didn't pressure the entire show to cancel.
And there is nothing wrong with inviting your friends to your conference. And there's nothing wrong with your friends all being the same colour. It's your conference, you can do with it whatever you like. People aren't forced to attend.
In this case, an overwhelming financial force encouraged a guy to cancel an otherwise on-track conference because of false-optics.
Instead of complaining that a conference is all white, run your own conference and make it as diverse as you want. My experience concludes that most of the time, those who complain don't do anything themselves. They work as peons somewhere, and have never made any decisions on their own.
Start your own business, it's never been difficult. And show that you're better than others. What a great competitive advantage you'll have.
Quit complaining when someone else does what they want. I don't imagine that in this case the organizer turned away non-white speakers. You wanted it to be random, and sometimes random is uniform. So sorry, that's how math works.
Again, be responsible for something of your own, and you'll find that you won't care what others do on their own.
Want to use your name instead of ordering others anonymously? Management doesn't work anonymously. And clearly you're trying to manage me.
But once again, I think there are as many management positions as there are 42 year-old programmers.
And there can be as many as you want, because you can always start your own company -- instead of just assuming that someone else will give you a job, as though jobs are somehow your right in the first place. Quit complaining that there aren't enough jobs, and make one yourself.
And, once again, since I'm stating a fact -- it's the way I choose whom to hire -- I can't be wrong here. I'm also coroberating the original post.
Clearly, you're talent for speaking puts you in the disabled category anyway, so you shouldn't worry about your age; you're an effective 12 year-old anyway.
Fair enough. I hated that corporate ladder too, which is why I chose to create my own venture.
I'll just leave you with the following perspective. That high-risk tolerance you mentioned, it doesn't really exist for the technical entrepreneur. Assuming you're willing to do in business what you do in programming -- seeing what doesn't work, and shifting in favour of what does -- there really is no risk in the way that people think. Being an intelligent technical person, if what you try and sell doesn't sell, something adjacent to it will. You just keep shifting one turn at a time, and you eventually fall into something that works quite well.
Sure, if you go for the multi-billion dollar idea, it's high risk. But if you go for the normal-paying world, there's always some way to adjust to whatever happens.
And in the end, my risk now is virtually nill. I'm not likely to lose all of my clients at once, which means that I can't "lose my job". Sure I have no idea what work I'll be doing next year, nor how much money I'll make next month, but over any long-enough period of time, the fluctuations all even out and I get paid quite well. And, of course, I get to write-off so many things that my effective earnings are far higher than my actual earnings.
And that's what I mean about the whole executive decision-making. You can do exactly what you're doing now, but in an executive capacity, you wind up being able to double your effective earnings. And at 42, with all of the experience that you have, you'd be silly to not trust in your own efforts. It needn't be in your own company where you need to do your own accounting. It can be where you currently are.
So how's this for the question. What's stopping you from going to your current employer and asking to become something of a partner. You'll wait for the client to pay before you take any money on a project. You'll take a percentage of what the client pays. If the client runs away you'll get nothing. You'll sit with the client to determine their needs. And you'll do the work like you always do, but you won't be on any sort of clock. And as a result, your employer will have less "risk", you'll have more accountability. If you screw up some work, obviously you'll be redoing it without any additional money -- and less if you wind up discounting it for the client.
I'd be quite, well, dissappointed, if you said that you don't trust your own work well enough to effectively guarantee it. Especially because that's exactly what your employer is doing with your work anyway. So the fluctuations are simply smoothed out for you, and your employer makes more money off of you when you do well, and slightly less money when you do poorly, and fires you when you do very poorly.
For a 20 year old who hasn't any idea of what they themselves are capable, I can see that. They need management, they need to be told what to do, and they need a process thrust upon them. But you don't need that any more. So why would you want someone else to profit so much off of your success while you get nothing for performing above expected?
I remember as a child, when my father would come home and brag to his wife (my mother) that he just negotiated some cool huge corporate deal that would make the company millions in profits, she'd respond "so how many of those millions do you get" and he'd say something to the effect of "I've secured my annual bonus of $5'000".
Incidentally, and I don't want to mix this up with the actual discussion: I find it odd that an anonymous poster, such as yourself, would order me, by name, to stop posting on a well-populated discussion venue. Aside from the fact that you needn't read every post, you certainly needn't read mine.
Additionally, being 42, I'd have hoped that you'd want to know what business owners think on the issue. Since it affects both of us.
My opinion can't be dribble when I'm actually using it in the industry when considering hiring people of such a demographic. It's reality. It's reality because I make it a reality. You can say that it isn't representative of the rest of the industry, and it may not be, although this discussion started with a post that suggests it is.
So you're objecting to my co-roberating the original post? That doesn't make much sense to me. So I assume that you simply don't like my language, and are objecting to my syntax, and not the content of my post.
Obviously my post was rather direct. I'm a technical person, and I lack many social concerns, so none of that is surprising. But I assume that you've dealt with people of my kind before, especially if you're in this industry. In which case you know that my "tone" is purely in your head, that I'm not upset with you at all.
I do hope that unlike the original post suggests, you're gainfully employed, and enjoy your job/career. Especially since I'm not that far from 42 myself, and I may choose to dial-back the whole making-decisions thing in an effort to ease my daily workload. It would comfort me to know that option exists.
I'm not sure if you're being polite, or simply dismissive -- the latter would demonstrate my point. If you're 42, and you're in my industry (web development, business software programming) then your greatest value is in your application of literally decades of experience.
That experience may be actual programming, or it may be knowing what's already been done, or it may be in having seen what happens when certain things are combined, or how they get used. It's a big deal to anyone who lacks that.
We've all seen very skilled programmers make the mistake of thinking that a great idea is good for their employer, but miss a very important perspective. For example, one of my employees had a brilliant idea for how to improve the scalability and performance of my platform, and couldn't understand why I shot him down without even considering it.
His idea, and it was quite innovative, necessitated migrating existing clients in order to reap the benefits. We'd have had to migrate all of the clients at once. Easily done, each client would take about an hour, and we'd be done in three days, lickety-split.
What he failed to realize was that it put me in the position of risk losing each and every single one of my clients all in the same week. It doesn't matter how much better things can get, I'm not going to risk every dollar of my future revenue. Had we screwed up mid-migration, I can't say to 100 clients that I screwed up doing something optional.
By 42, you not only have that kind of experience, but you may also have a solution -- or you'll come at the problem of tweaking the platform from a totally different angle, never wasting a thought on something too risky for your employer.
But hey, if you don't want to contribute in such decisions, and you don't want to take your own risks, and you don't want to be 100% accountable for your mistakes, then that's fine. I don't mind your working for someone, and I don't mind your working for me either. I'll happily hire a 42 year-old programmer.
But there are real advantages to hiring a 20 year-old programmer. And since you've thrown away almost 80% of the advantages to hiring a 42 year-old programmer, then you can't exactly blame an employer for preferring the 20 year-old.
Common advantages to the 20 side are: they can be pushed longer, they can work more hours, they likely don't have a family to support, they likely don't have the funds to go on vacations as often, they'll work weekends, they'll volunteer for after-hours on-call, they'll do more research into new things, they start off more recently-educated, they've got something to prove, they may want to move up, they have fewer expectations, you can groom them to your own ideals, they're in better health, they have fewer expenses, they'll work cheaper, they have fewer outside responsibilities that can distract them from work.
Common advantages to the 42 side are: they depend on the money, they don't struggle with complex things, they don't struggle with complicated things, some things they've done before, they have fewer questions.
Without the decision-making stuff, the typical 42 side is thinner. Plain and simple.
Actually, mine wasn't a metaphor. Straight up, if you're 35+, and you're doing work that a 20 year-old can do, (assuming it's not at a speed or proficiency an order of magnitude greater than the 20 year-old) then you simply aren't contributing to society any more than a 20 year-old can. And since you've got far more experience, and therefore potential ability, one of three things is true:
a) you're lazy; which is fine, by the way
b) you simply don't want to act your age; which is even more fine, by the way
c) you ignored the opportunity to learn, or are incapable of learning; which is ok too
But no matter which of those three covers your scenario, you can't blame an employer for not wanting to hire you over the 20 year-old. The 20 year-old is none of those three things.
So if, as the post reads, you aren't being treated as "relevant", it's quite possible that you aren't relevant. Makes sense to me. I do own a business, I do have a little experience hiring people in the programming industry, and even when I look at myself I worked much harder when I was 20 than I do now in my 30's. The difference, however, is that now I make most of my money in terms of offering value in experience and decisions and combination solutions. Not in the actual effort of programming. Which also makes sense, since I've programmed for 28 years, and I type fast.
Plain and simple: if you're 35, and you're still being told what to do, then you've forgotten how to grow. You're no longer contributing to society, and you've become a burden. You're no different than a 20 year-old who just can't tie his shoes (injuries and disabilities appreciated, obviously).
By the time you're 35, having years of experience, you'd better be capable of delegating, teaching, instructing, managing, or directing others. It's time for you to be making executive decisions -- since, you know, that the important part of any business. You ought to be accountable at that point. That means taking the risks, having something to lose, using your own dollars and your own decision-making to actually make things happen.
At that point, if you're also the one doing the work, that's cool.
But if you're 35, and aren't making your own decisions, well, maybe you should go back to velcro shoes. They really do make more sense, after all.
Oh, I couldn't agree more. Alas, my clients have specifically asked me to not bill things correctly. They don't want thinks itemized, and they don't want things explained.
Ultimately, they've got good reason. My side is technical, their side is very much not. They need to justify their expenses, which are my actions, up their chain. And because that chain isn't technical, they want me to bundle, summarize, and obscure to the point where every line item references only the initial business-reason for the project.
It's difficult to take "customer service management" and "fielding customer callls" and "recording customer call actions" and then distinguish between storage, delivery, backup, and reliability. My clients simply don't care about the distinctions -- probably because by the time it makes it to their perspectives, there is no distinction.
So yeah, sometimes, it's up to me to present the option of the cheaper storage and no backup of unimportant data. But it's also up to me to point out that my network services are more reliable when I treat every byte as important, and one day it may become so anyway. So I'd often prefer to have the backup option available on a whim, than to say that engaging backup requires additional resources.
Maybe my clients rely on my to orchestrate the most robust solution meaningful to their scenario, and maybe that's exactly what they're paying for. In which case, it shouldn't matter to you whether they're paying for better storage, or they're paying for possible options and future flexibility. That distinction is of the very same sort that my clients ask me to obscure.
even without how the data is being used, it needs to be there, and it needs to be acquired, capacity-planned, and it's a part of a large network. In my case, there's a limit to how much storage I can put into one web server. And since I divide my multiple clients across multiple web servers, if 25% of them suddenly jump 25% in their usage, I hit the ceiling really quickly. And since I have huge administrative and risk costs to migrating projects from one server to another, or procuring a new server, there are real costs as a result.
I'm not charging for data storage. I'm charging for an entire working solution. Data storage has a impact on that solution in a manner far greater than it's simple cost. Hey, motherboards are more expensive than hard drives. But motherboards can be replaced in an hour without loss of client data, or just about any software configuration. Motherboards can be swapped. But when a hard drive needs replacing (it doesn't need to be broken, it can just be too small), it's a big ordeal to manage that data throughout the process.
2G, 3G, and landlines won't exist in five years.
This article talks about police radios going to lte.
No one has walkie talkies anymore.
Multiple carriers roam on eachothers' networks, and share cell sites.
One sector of one tower of one carrier is enough to cover an entire office building.
Overlapping towers can quickly become over-saturated in the absense of a single one.
You're correct that it's all FUD. But not because it can't work exactly that way. Only because terrorists are monumentally stupid and can't figure out the most basic ways of getting around security provisions.
For example, getting a device onto a plane requires going through about six layers of security. Standing on the rooftop of the airport parking lot however, watching the same plane take-off about 100 yards away, requires a $4 parking fee. Standing under the path of landing aircraft near the airport, where the plans come by 200 yards over-head, every 2 minutes for hours, requires nothing more than the cost of the helium balloon, pulling a can of red paint.
The point is always the same. If you're going to have emergency personnel using lte for communication, lte simply isn't good enough because it isn't resistant to anything..
You're looking at it all wrong. Terrorists needn't go through the effort of attacking a military might at all. Just take down all communications in a city, and watch the mayhem.
Aside from huge inconvenience, and a whopping expense to resolve the problems, there's so much more. Businesses stop working. Security alarms stop working -- which doesn't matter because the traffic alone will stop any timely response. Here comes the looting, followed closely by the rioting.
It's not the end of the world, and it'll all get resolved in a day or two; but that's a day or two of mayhem, followed by a couple weeks of clean-up. And it all cost $500 to the terrorist -- which can just as easily be a local. Or worse, a local with an imported cellphone, who doesn't know that he's the one causing the mayhem.
And it can be a monthly occurance.
And it can be in ten cities at the same time.
Why oh why would you exchange hard-wired security for wireless broadcast? Dude, convenience is the antithesis of security.
And this is why, you should simply own your own IMAP server. Since it costs next to nothing. If you own it, the storage is yours, and you haven't abandoned anything.
Or, you know, you could let someone else hold onto your stuff forever, which for this law, and logic, means you've abandoned it.
Makes sense. Why weren't you paying the few pennies to own your stuff?
It's one thing to be racist. It's another thing to have good reason to do so. This sort of thing gives large populations an actualy reason to be racist. Between "you didn't work as hard to get here", and "me and every one of my peers", you might as well segrogate the schools, since you've totally segrogates the students.
And what of group projects? Or don't you have those in your country? Why would a white member treat a latino member with any respect in such a group? Moreover, why would the asian guy expect the disabled student to even try? At basically a third of the value, it becomes meaningless: a chasm between them.
There was never anything wrong with a disabled person being a few grades behind. That made sense. It makes sense because those that happen to succeed, get to be proud of doing so. That's true at all levels.
It should never have been "no student left behind". It should have been "no students dragged forward".
(: I was hoping someone would notice that!
Can't even agree on capital punishment. There's no uniform education, no uniform science, no uniform anything. About the only things that are nation-wide (aside from insurance companies of course) are the military, the fbi, and the cia.
Oh, certainly that's all true. Myself included. But I can't imagine that going it on your own would make things any better. That's just not a valid solution. Making the entire thing just straight crazy.
But I'll tell you what would work. You can get your Texan friends to all agree.
You should join Canada.
Not ashamed, just clear. The people don't actually agree on anything overall. It's a tentative union at best -- apparently.
Look, I hate the way democracy is handled, and I'm as white as most Texans (though no where near as tall), but this kind of thing doesn't just make your entire country look foolish. Quebec's done that to my country for a while. This makes your country look like 14th century racists. It's not even modern racism.
Haven't you guys had civil wars over this shit already? Aren't there movies and books and statues and abstract rail-roads about all of this?
Way to remind everyone that the USoA isn't a country, it's just a collection of independent states. Quebec doesn't want to "leave" Canada, they want to start their own country. Texas wants to simply leave.
Quite frankly, it's embarassing to share a land-mass with you guys. You do know that most of the world can't distinguish Canadians from United Statians, so they call us all Americans, you know, since we share that land mass known as the Americas. The British are going to mock us!
Good thing you still have the right to bare arms. Even if the British aren't coming, I guess the blacks sure are.
Wow. Little brother to big brother, grow up.
Good point. Someone out there trying to make people's lives easier by giving away for free, someone else's hard work is spretty dangerous. And I don't think you can say that laytops and printers are excessive profits these days.
He forgot that at least 10 persons worked hard long to write those manuals. It's not his job to make accessing them any easier. He also forgot that those people don't necessarily want that access to be any easier. And he should have known that because toshiba has no problems making a web-site.
Maybe this guy should add his own value to the world by actually creating something of his own, instead of simply by repackaging someone else's content. What was he expecting when he redistributed someone else's hard work?
Oh, I hear you. I went the management route a few years ago when I hired more programmers. Suddenly, I spent more time managing and directing my team, and less time innovating -- which as I'm sure you know, means no time innovating. Which is why I dropped down to 2 employees, which was much better. Early this year, I moved, losing my last colleague due to distance. It took a few months to get back into the full swing, but I'm super-happy on my own now -- plus the occasional contractor for things like artistry of course.
But really, assuming you've got no major things holding you back -- meaning that you can afford to take some time to work through a risk -- then you really ought to go it on your own. And don't let that scare you, you needn't be totally alone, and you needn't be doing something unfamiliar.
It can be as simple as taking a single project -- some SaaS or web-site project usually works best. Take all of your experience and build it -- either yourself, with a partner, with an inexpensive student, or with a contractor. You'll undoutedly wind up choosing something for which you've seen some kind of need. You may even simply choose to compete directly with whatever your last employer was doing. That's fine too.
You get to offer your clients something that they can rarely get -- a senior programmer actually doing the work. They get to meet with the programmer, brainstorm with the programmer, and get customer service from the programmer. For small businesses (~25 employees) with large quantities of product sales, you and I are amazingly well-suited to giving them the benefits of data management in their often-odd scenarios.
And keep in mind, when it comes to your own small business, small business owners help small business owners. No one competes for 1'000th place. So we help each other because better the two of us improve over the other 997, than 998 stays above 999.
Let me know if you need any emotional support, or lifestyle advice. Certainly everyone else that you know will discourage you from taking risks -- those who don't never think anyone should.
And always remember not to jump 100 hurdles in a single leap. One hurdle at a time. Plan ten steps, take two steps, and plan again. If you keep making adjustments, you can't ever actually fail. You'll just wind up building something a little or a lot different than you'd initially planned.
But that's exactly where your experience is valuable. You can see things working or not working well before even I can. That's huge.
That's what a drug is. That's practically the definition of the word. Every drug improves something -- almost always by inhibiting something else. Welcome to focus. If you allow that focus to flourish, you'll reap the benefits.
Whether or not that inhibition is detrimental, short-term or long-term, is the value proposition.
If you haven't noticed, programming has changed since the '90s. It's now pretty well a blue-collar job -- under three levels of management. Even in small companies, it's heavily controlled, especially where version control comes into play.
It's the perfect job for any 20-something.
By the time 30 roles around, you'd better be the one determining what gets programmed. Whether or not you also do the programming is irrelevant.
By 60, your value comes as proper experience. You shouldn't be looking for a programming job. You should be looking to manage a programming company, consult for a programming company, assess a programming company, or start your own programming company. Otherwise, you're a) not bringing any more skill than a 20-something and b) wasting a lot of the skill that you certainly have.
I'm 35, have my own software company that's varied in size between 1 and 5 programmers -- including myself. And that's just the way I love it.