<story><title>Babbage&apos;s heart-warming message for the middle-aged</title><url>http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/babbages-heart-warming-message-for.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jakevoytko</author><text>I believed that age mattered until I met a super-coder for the first time. He is over 60 years old, and completes entire projects by himself. A team of five decent programmers would likely complete these projects late and over budget. He has high standards, a razor-like focus on implementing The Right Thing, has a great eye for reusing old code, and isn&apos;t afraid to split the world apart to make life easier for the client. I&apos;m glad I met him as early in my career as I did; I unlearned a lot of falsehoods about software engineering.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BrandonM</author><text>I think this is where the current attitude towards programmers and how we hire them is wrong, or at least a little off-base. A lot of people here seem to look down on someone who just works his ass off and gets the job done unless that person has a web presence and a github repository. Why would a guy like this even have a blog? Why would he care about our opinions of him? The contrast is striking between the blogging, coding-a-personal-project nature of our generation of programmers and the get-things-done-efficiently-and-go-have-fun nature of an entirely different generation. Many miss that &quot;completes entire projects by himself&quot; and &quot;razor-like focus&quot; often preclude many of the activities we now expect to see in a good programmer. Many think that if a programmer is not giving something away for free -- likely something that few will use or read -- then he is just a hamster-wheel cubicle drone.&lt;p&gt;Your comment reminded me that the reality of the programming world is that there are countless unsung amazing programmers who have stuck to the same platform for years, if not decades. They know their IDEs, libraries, and code bases inside and out. They get an assignment, go into crazy-productive genius-coder mode, and get a high quality product out the door. And then they go home and enjoy themselves, and none of us are the wiser. But we sure do appreciate the reliability of our cell phone networks, our vehicle computer systems, and countless other amazing pieces of software that we take for granted. Thanks for reminding us that you can be a great programmer without having a huge following, programming open source, or even working for a startup. Building something people want and getting things done are all that matters.</text></comment>
<story><title>Babbage&apos;s heart-warming message for the middle-aged</title><url>http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/babbages-heart-warming-message-for.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jakevoytko</author><text>I believed that age mattered until I met a super-coder for the first time. He is over 60 years old, and completes entire projects by himself. A team of five decent programmers would likely complete these projects late and over budget. He has high standards, a razor-like focus on implementing The Right Thing, has a great eye for reusing old code, and isn&apos;t afraid to split the world apart to make life easier for the client. I&apos;m glad I met him as early in my career as I did; I unlearned a lot of falsehoods about software engineering.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>darwinGod</author><text>That is a strong departure from the stereotype!
I&apos;m really interested to know more.. Does this person have a blog?What type of projects has he worked on? Would be great be if you could elaborate on what had unlearned!</text></comment>