<story><title>Old Geek</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/09/14/Old-Geek</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>There seem to be more articles about age popping up on HN lately. I find this both weird and disconcerting. As I wrote in a comment in another thread:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is idiotic. People over 40 trade one set of skills for another (source: I&amp;#x27;m over 40). You lose short-term memory, can&amp;#x27;t juggle too many things simultaneously, and aren&amp;#x27;t always up to date on every latest fad. But what you gain is fantastically valuable: intuition, abstract thinking, systems thinking, ability to detect patterns in large systems, ability to notice that certain problems have been solved in a different field, and lots more. As I grow older, I notice these changes, and while I do regret not being able to remember IP addresses after switching to a different window (get a larger monitor, or just copy&amp;amp;paste), I am very happy with the overall shift.&lt;p&gt;To put this in other words, as I age, I found that yes, I do have less ability to do brilliant-late-night-ninja-coding stunts, but overall what I gained translates into Getting Things Done. Which is why I find this ageism trend mindboggling: is there a CEO out there that doesn&amp;#x27;t want his company to Get Things Done?&lt;p&gt;To give a tangible practical example: I just wrote and launched PartsBox.io (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;partsbox.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;partsbox.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) as a side project. I could only do it in the time constraints involved because I knew which shortcuts I could take and which code I should not write. My 25-year old self would likely have written brilliant ninja code (that no one would ever see), but would never have gotten the project shipped.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wwweston</author><text>&amp;gt; There seem to be more articles about age popping up on HN lately. I find this both weird and disconcerting.&lt;p&gt;Not so weird.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;re now 30+ years from the dawn of the desktop PC marketplace. 20+ years from the dawn of the web and associated  original internet startup mania. 10+ years from the post-collapse web 2.0 resurgence with Ajax and frameworks. Pushing a decade since the introduction of the smartphone.&lt;p&gt;Every bright-eyed twentysomething that could bask in the glory of their wunderkind youth at the start of each of those eras -- everybody who knew PG was talking to&amp;#x2F;about them in his essays -- has now wound the course that time dictates everybody&amp;#x27;s gotta take: they arrived at being older.&lt;p&gt;So of course there&amp;#x27;s a lot of interest in what that means in the software industry. And maybe some rueful reflection from some participants on what they thought that meant when they were younger.</text></comment>
<story><title>Old Geek</title><url>https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/09/14/Old-Geek</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jwr</author><text>There seem to be more articles about age popping up on HN lately. I find this both weird and disconcerting. As I wrote in a comment in another thread:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; This is idiotic. People over 40 trade one set of skills for another (source: I&amp;#x27;m over 40). You lose short-term memory, can&amp;#x27;t juggle too many things simultaneously, and aren&amp;#x27;t always up to date on every latest fad. But what you gain is fantastically valuable: intuition, abstract thinking, systems thinking, ability to detect patterns in large systems, ability to notice that certain problems have been solved in a different field, and lots more. As I grow older, I notice these changes, and while I do regret not being able to remember IP addresses after switching to a different window (get a larger monitor, or just copy&amp;amp;paste), I am very happy with the overall shift.&lt;p&gt;To put this in other words, as I age, I found that yes, I do have less ability to do brilliant-late-night-ninja-coding stunts, but overall what I gained translates into Getting Things Done. Which is why I find this ageism trend mindboggling: is there a CEO out there that doesn&amp;#x27;t want his company to Get Things Done?&lt;p&gt;To give a tangible practical example: I just wrote and launched PartsBox.io (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;partsbox.io&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;partsbox.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) as a side project. I could only do it in the time constraints involved because I knew which shortcuts I could take and which code I should not write. My 25-year old self would likely have written brilliant ninja code (that no one would ever see), but would never have gotten the project shipped.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dunkelheit</author><text>I am under 30 but ageism scares the shit out of me.&lt;p&gt;I love to build things and I am not keen on sliding into a management position. But this becomes the easiest career path once your soft skills start to increase to the detriment of raw coding skills.&lt;p&gt;On the other hand I&amp;#x27;ve seen enough engineers with decades of experience who said no to going into management and who are now basically irrelevant.&lt;p&gt;Both these outcomes are scary but they seem to be the defaults for someone who goes with the flow.</text></comment>