
I would have hired Doug, but... - nicolethenerd
http://liveblog.co/users/davewiner/2015/05/06/iWouldHaveHiredDougBut.html
======
michaelangerman
I am 55 and have been programming computers since 1975 when I was 15 years
old. Do the math, I have been programming now for 40 years. Recently, I had a
conversation with someone else about this topic and I told them that I have
never been so excited about my career, the field of computer science, and most
importantly the opportunities that exist today in the field of technology. The
excitement surrounding too many topics to list is amazing. I only hope and
wish that I am able to stay healthy and continue programming to the day I die.

~~~
thinkmac
well, it is good that you like the things you do. at your age, we youngsters
tend to expect you to be in the management level, not at individual
contributor level.

from time to time, i would see our team hiring engineer with gray hair and
requiring special mechanical keyboard, and we all thought "mm.. interesting."

~~~
learc83
>requiring special mechanical keyboard

Well youngster, you seem to be falling behind the latest trends. Maybe you're
not as young as you think. Don't you know all the fashionable
programmers/gamers are using mechanical keyboards?

~~~
Dewie3
All that clickety-clack must be so satisfying. And annoying to everyone else.

~~~
DennisP
Not all mechanical keyboards are loud or clicky. I use one with Cherry Browns
and mostly type without bottoming out the keys, and it's no louder than cheap
keyboards.

~~~
odonnellryan
I love the browns! But Blues are a lot more fun (and loud!) to program on ;)

~~~
qmr
Because loudness equates to competence?

~~~
ericd
Just a feeling of productivity, from producing so much noise. But it really is
satisfying, if you haven't tried it.

And I've found that you start wanting to type faster, to create even more
noise. So it might actually make you more productive, in a weird way.

~~~
alabut
Ugh, it's so much noise for your neighbor though. I worked next to someone
with an old IBM keyboard for a year and was grumpy the entire time. Couldn't
find headphones strong enough to cancel out what sounded like someone shooting
an automatic weapon in the office.

~~~
ericd
I think there's a happy medium with the quieter cherry switches. But yeah, I
don't use a mechanical keyboard in settings where I'm right next to other
people.

------
intrasight
When I was a young man, a slightly older associate told me that "programming
is a trap". What he meant is that if you are relatively smart, you can get a
CS degree, get good at it, and go earn a fantastic income right out of school.
I heard the words. I understood the words. I agreed with the words. Even now,
30 years later, I keep asking "is this a trap that I choose to remain in?" I
still love programming, but it is a trap in that I've not, for a long time,
seriously tried doing anything else. So for me it has been 30 years of regular
retooling, and likely another 20 years of the same. Unless I decide to open
the trap and leave.

~~~
ErikAugust
You should quit now, and try working a multitude of other jobs. Come back to
us and see if your definition of 'trap' has changed, or expanded.

Software engineering is such an entitled world, it is ridiculous. As someone
who has seen the world of menial work, I will never, ever leave it. I feel
blessed. You should too. You just don't know it.

~~~
onaclov2000
I guess what I read into that is similar to how you can consider television a
"trap". It's easy to get sucked into and not think about anything else. I know
that I spend a lot of time thinking about different software related stuff, I
love it, but I would suspect (and i could be wrong) that the cashier working
at burger king doesn't think about how they can ring things up faster, move
between the pickup window and the fries more efficiently while they're playing
with their kids, _I suspect_ they go home and thing about their family, not
their job, and i think it's _easy_ to fall into the trap of thinking about
work much easier when your job is a "thought" job per se.... again I could be
crazy though.... good luck if I am.

~~~
Klinky
They may not actually be going home. They may be going to a second job or
school, seeing their kids for an hour in the evening, and then going to bed
worried about paying bills.

Low-wage jobs are their own cyclical trap, which can lead to not enough
resources to improve your situation and apathy towards your day-to-day life.
You can easily get stuck in a rut.

~~~
siscia
The low-wage thing was an example...

I don't think that neither the lawer nor the physician when they get home keep
thinking about what their job...

For us coders is different, there was a question like: "What you think while
you are coding ?" the majority of the answer was "nothing", the most part of
my job is done when I am away from the keyboard, when I walk, dream, read,
talk with other people...

I love it, but I am also scared that I am missing a whole word just because I
am too focus on computer for a not even too long while...

~~~
Klinky
Your view of the tech field sounds a little pompous. Medical and law are well
known life-consuming professions.

I think any dedicated professional will have issues at some point unplugging
themselves from their profession to pursue other facets of life.

------
bliti
As someone who started programming during the mid 80's:

\- Everything I've learned may be applied to most languages. Meaning that
writing testable code generally translates from BASIC to Javascript.

\- Programming should always make you feel stupid. Feeling comfortable with
something means that you stopped learning new things.

\- Experience != Knowledge. My biggest issue with some older programmers is
that they tend to confuse experience with a language, codebase, or framework
with knowledge. The more you learn the less experience you will have. Think
about it. You start learning Javascript after years of working with C#. What
does that experience work for now? You will surely have an understanding of
all the basics. But you have not yet been bitten by the == and === operators.
You have to get that new experience. As time passes you will realize that it
becomes a game of knowing enough versus being experienced enough.

\- New technologies are exciting. A lot of people are scared by them. They
feel they will be replaced. Their comfy jobs taken away. I'm not scared of
this. Change is exciting because it means that I will have the chance to learn
something.

\- New languages might be rehashed versions of older ones. But they contain
something different: Somebody else did it. That's reason enough to give it a
try. Javascript might not be the most universally praised language, and it
doesn't really bring much new to the scene. Its still someones interpretation
of how a given problem should be solved. You might not agree with it, but that
wont stop people from writing lots of JS code.

\- Nostalgia is fine. Don't let it get you. Sure, I miss typing BASIC into my
old C64, but its no longer relevant. I could pick up demo'ing as a hobby and
learn lots of stuff about old chips and memory management tricks. It wont
really help me to stay employed much.

\- All these new devices are scary! I grew up programming for one kind of
device. Now I have to take into account tablets, phones, tvs, and whatnot.
Embrace it. Mobile is here to stay. It will keep morphing and completely
remove desktop computing as we know it. The same way desktop computers removed
mainframes and terminals. It is scary. Try and get excited. There is nothing
more mind blowing than watching a several months old child tap on a tablet to
play a game.

/old guy rant

~~~
no1publicenemy
With all due respect, how would mobile devices replace/match the computing
experience I have now with my 27" computer?

How would be that possible?

Good spirit and even better understanding of the Zeitgeist :)

~~~
demachina
Mobile devices will presumably jack in to large monitors or head mounted
displays of some kind, plus a good keyboard of some kind, and pointing
device(track pad). Thanks to Moores law you should be able to have the
equivalent of a desktop experience driven by a mobile device soon.

The one problem is being slave to Apple and Google having absolute control of
the OS, software and apps you can run. The only plus is their hegemony does
help with security but neither one of them is even remotely trustable with the
keys to every personal computer on the planet. There is irony that the creator
of the big brother commercial in 1984 is increasingly, you know, big brother.

P.S.

Not sure how Daves self promotion blogging rose so far on hacker news. It
actually has almost nothing to do with Doug Engelbart. He was just name
dropping, something he often does, before doing what he usually does, self
promotion. Yes there is that age discrimination angle which plays well with
some old programmers, but not me.

People who spend their time complaining about discrimination should spend more
time doing something that people will value regardless of your age, sex or
gender. At that point your age, sex and gender become irrelevent especially on
the Internet which tends to be blind to these things until you wear them on
your sleeve. Dave likes to use his age to promote a martyr complex angle.

Ive looked at most of Daves recent projects and none of them are particularly
interesting.

------
jgrahamc
"Unlike Engelbart, I have re-tooled. I now work in JavaScript in the browser
and on the server. I had to walk away from the codebase that I loved. I
understood that the price of relevance is to give up fighting at some point
and settle for a partial victory. I think I was right in the development
environment I created. But right doesn't mean the world uses what you
created."

Yep. That's the key to staying relevant: change with the times.

~~~
ams6110
For me, the thing that gets a bit discouraging at times is the feeling of
riding a slow-motion merry-go-round. Every 10 years or so you see the same
ideas start to come around again, only with some new paint and landscaping.

I have found myself more than once thinking that learning about some new
trendy buzzword is just ultimately a waste of time, since I will barely have
mastered it before it's been replaced by the next new/old thing.

On the other hand, it gets easier since none of the concepts are new anymore,
and I tell myself, "hey, if you want to pay me to build a client-server app in
the browser like it was 1995 (substitute Powerbuilder for Firefox/Chrome),
great, happy to take your money."

~~~
tomjen3
As a young person my biggest concern with hiring old people is that exact
attitude: this is just like $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH.

Yeah on the surface. $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH didn't catch on or it wouldn't be
irrelevant but _why_ didn't it catch on? Powerbuilder failed, but was it
because you couldn't write a good enough program that way on 1995s hardware?
Or because it was ultimately a stupid idea?

Somebody like me who has never heard of Powerbuilder would have to look into
the technology, which would take longer but it would prevent me from just
dismissing it because "this has been done before".

Remember it isn't what you don't know that gets you, it is what you know for
damn sure that just isn't so.

I am not saying this is the case for all old developers, but it would be my
concern.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_...this is just like $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH.

Yeah on the surface. $IRRELEVANT_OLD_TECH didn't catch on or it wouldn't be
irrelevant but _why_ didn't it catch on?..._

I'm a young person, too. Lipstick on a pig doesn't make a cow, you know.

Arguments like "It's only similar on the surface" I've found tend to give too
much credence to incidental properties - this runs on X, it's widespread
unlike previous solutions, it's better at specific Y use case, etc. Yet
regardless of underlying platform, the concepts do not tend to evolve quickly,
and it is all too often the case that their limitations have been discovered
either in academia or engineering practice. These limitations will eventually
be uncovered again, and no one learns from their failures or successes. Where
languages and platforms shift, architecture will always bite you.

As for the reasons why, that's another fallacy. It assumes the status quo
always maintains an equilibrium of what is inherently technical superior, and
that popularity implies great technical qualities. The reasons can be
plentiful, often it's unfortunate historical circumstances.

It's comforting to think we're on to something truly new, but this is rarely
the case:
[http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html](http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html)

~~~
walshemj
Amen when I was looking at hadoop it suddenly dawned on me that I had been
doing map reduce back in the early 80's for British Telecom.

------
bonif
"We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!", [0]

best slogan ever

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Videotext](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Videotext)

------
ilaksh
Is this the old people thread?

I'm 37. I think ageism is a very real problem and I hope people will consider
doing more suing even if they don't have to. Some people need to be sued. We
need some class actions.

Right from the top down of Silicon Valley ageism is rampant and in your face.
For example, Sam Altman has publicly made explicitly agist remarks.

You kids may not think its a big deal now but give it ten years or so. You
will see.

Of course in 10-15 years everyone will be in the same boat, being completely
ignored by the ASIs.

~~~
equalarrow
"Of course in 10-15 years everyone will be in the same boat, being completely
ignored by the ASIs"

Exactly, so why give them any credence now?? You only give these people power
if you do. That's great that's what Sam Altman thinks; he's "young", but ya
know, when he's 50, then what? He'll probably say "oh, that's obviously not
how I see things now". Or Zuck. He's ancient to a 19yr old and the only reason
he doesn't care about this is because he's rich and runs Facebook.

I'm older than you and have been through enough startups and honestly I've
dealt with ageism enough to the point that it doesn't even phase me anymore -
I've moved past it. But this is because I've _made_ it that way. If people
don't want to work with me, np, there are plenty of other opportunities out
there.

Sure, you might not get hired at the hot startup you just interviewed at. But
honestly, if that's the case, who cares? Make your own way, your own rules and
then you can decide to hire young or older people or not.

------
Liquix
Anyone interested in Doug Engelbart and his pioneering work at Stanford
Research Institute (or computers in general) should check out What the
Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer
Industry [0]. It goes back much further than Xerox or Apple to tell the tale
of Engelbart's visionary Augment project and how his ideas led to the birth of
the PC and the internet.

If you're not interested in purchasing the book, he gave an incredible hour
and a half long demonstration of his system at the Fall Joint Computer
Conference. Dubbed The Mother of All Demos [1], he displayed (for the first
time in the world) remote video conferencing, hypertext, text editing, and a
graphical windowing system. In 1968. Definitely worth a watch.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
Pers...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-
Personal/dp/0143036769)

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

------
SonicSoul
Interesting, I just hired someone in mid 50's for a programming role. We've
seen at least a dozen candidates and he did by far the best on the phone and
code test. Now I'm happy to have him on the team. In a industry with a
shortage of people that are good I'm surprised anyone can afford to
discriminate good candidates based on their age. I think the key is being good
and getting along with people. I've interviewed some older guys that were not
only bad but were coming with an attitude that they were going to teach
everyone here.

------
biturd
I was looking at some of the code for one of his projects that is a little
node http server. I don't really know JS or node at all, but can someone
explain this to me:

    
    
         function secondsSince (when) { 
    	var now = new Date ();
    	when = new Date (when);
    	return ((now - when) / 1000);
    	}
    

I'm assuming now returns seconds since some fixed point in time ( epoch ) when
when someone passes in the 'when' argument, it must already be formatted a
certain way, or node/js somehow managed to figure out the input? How would it
deal with 5/8/2015 vs 8/5/2015

Or this is just a very case specific function and the input is already
sanitized in a way that is prepared for this function?

github is here:
[https://github.com/scripting/pagepark/blob/master/lib/utils....](https://github.com/scripting/pagepark/blob/master/lib/utils.js)

~~~
onaclov2000
I'm not 100% sure what he's doing here, however I know when I have used new
Date().getTime() it returns something like milliseconds, and thus I had to
divide by 1000 to result in seconds, so it _appears_ that he's subtracting
milliseconds and getting seconds after the division by 1000.

Typically I believe new Date() is current time/date
([http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_date_ne...](http://www.w3schools.com/js/tryit.asp?filename=tryjs_date_new))
in my experience.

As far as your question how to deal with 5/8/2015, and 8/5/2015, to be honest
I don't know that answer.

~~~
onaclov2000
Also assuming I can read, it doesn't look like that function is used, (I
searched second in the same file, and in the higher level folder, and couldn't
find that function called anywhere)

------
lrobb
The more interesting post was the link to Phil G's blog post about the MIT
reunion: "The medical doctor was at the peak of his career and in no danger of
being fired. The university professor had the security of tenure and was
looking forward to a defined benefit pension starting six years from now. The
corporate attorney was finishing up a prosperous career. The engineers who’d
chosen to work in industry, however, were a varied lot. A woman who’d taken a
job at a defense contractor was still there, 30 years later. The super-wizard
Lisp Machine programmer was now in a senior technical, but non-supervisory
role, at a multi-billion dollar dotcom (not necessarily getting paid more than
a competent 30-year-old, however). About half of the engineers, however,
talked about being pushed into a financially uncomfortable early retirement
and/or not being able to find work."

------
Decade
So far, it looks like nobody is commenting on Dave Winer’s own work.

Everybody has been influenced by Engelbart, but nobody uses NLS. Merely the
ideas went into all the computers that we use today. Engelbart was so
frustrated because he had more great ideas, but they were difficult to develop
and he couldn’t get funding.

Winer specifically mentions Userland Frontier. It was a useful tool, which I’m
sure helped with the development of RSS, just as NeXT Project Builder helped
with the development of WWW. The problem with the Engelbart comparison is that
there are countless other development environments, many of them free and/or
not in a dialect of C and/or available via git, while the Mother of All Demos
was unique.

I think the open-sourcing of Frontier was too little, too late. Frontier is an
impressive achievement, but I don’t see why it should be interesting to me.

------
scarecrowbob
I play a lot of music with folks older than me... I'm 37, and the drummer in a
blues band I play with is 73 (he's a neat guy- he was in the 13th Floor
Elevators).

I've played with folks in their late 80s, and most of the folks I play with
weekly in a large jazz band are between 50 and 70. I also play bi-weekly with
an orchestra with members ranging from 12-82.

Maybe I lack the same perspective I lacked when I was younger (and thought
that 45 was pretty old), but I absolutely don't see how 60 is old. 80 is old,
maybe, but 60 just isn't that old, and I don't mean that in the attitude
sense, as with:

"The ones that love me say I'm really young, and I appreciate that. I think
they mean my thinking is flexible, and I'm excited about the future, like a
young person might be."

~~~
AndrewWright
Am I the only one who noticed "he was in 13th Floor Elevators"? Whoa! That's
rad! And props on making music the priority, not worrying about age.

~~~
whyaduck
No you're not. I'm listening to "You're Gonna Miss Me" right now.

So is he in touch with Roky?

~~~
scarecrowbob
They are actually playing next weekend:

[http://www.austinpsychfest.com/portfolio-item/the-13th-
floor...](http://www.austinpsychfest.com/portfolio-item/the-13th-floor-
elevators/)

It's kind of funny... I just thought he was some random (occasionally iffy,
somewhat nutty) drummer.

------
taurath
You wonder why people aren't curious?? I'm 28 and I would pay money to spend a
day talking about coding with you - I'm "senior level" at my company but that
just means I don't have very many people around to mentor me. If you're near
the Seattle area I'd love to buy you coffee.

------
porker
This is a great thread. What I have appreciated most is seeing the long-term
vision that older programmers have - thinking in terms of change over decades,
not years.

Working in the web industry, the second-hardest thing I find (after pace of
change/fascination with "New! Shiny!") is the vision of people can be measured
in months to 3-4 years. Applications are not built with the thought they will
be running in a decade; it's assumed they'll be rewritten in New Language X
with New Architecture Y long before that.

To older programmers: if you work in the web field, how do you handle/deal
with this?

------
neurocis
Not that I condone treachery, but growing up my father used to have a famous
line "Old age and treachery will beat out youth and enthusiasm any day". And
although he wasn't a programmer, but rather an investigative thinker, his
subtle manner of obtaining voluntary compliance seemed to win the day. Whilst
not treachery in the blatant sense, there was allot to learn from this wisdom
which is only gained from life experience. Would I have hired Doug, probably,
but I think maybe I would have been better self-served being HIRED by Doug. My
age - 43 and irrelevant IMO.

------
codeonfire
Part of the problem, at least in America is one that people don't want to talk
about. The industry has globalized greatly over the last couple decades, and
many companies hire in areas that have no labor standards. Companies are
operating under US labor standards but are hiring people in greater numbers in
China and India, some to work in the US. In those places discrimination by age
is commonplace. Additionally, there are a large number of foreign managers
working in the US who don't understand why they can't just openly discriminate
by whatever standard they want. and it makes sense they are confused if you're
allowed to discriminate in some cases but not others at the same company. No
one regulates US based corporations hiring people in overseas markets for US
jobs. The problem is so bad that many resumes that US managers in US companies
have sitting on their desk contain things like age, birthplace, country of
origin, family members, and even blood type. It blatantly violates US law.

------
nickpp
"The processes I use, investing in good tools and underpinnings, and paying
attention to good features of other people's software, makes it easy and quick
to try out new ideas. Some of them are really worth it."

What processes is he using? What tools and underpinnings that allow him to
quickly try out new ideas?

------
btilly
Those who do not know who Douglas Engelbart is should see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos).
If you have time, watch the demo to see the state of the art in 1968.

------
jakejake
I read an article recently that said something to the effect that most people
stop listening to new music at age 33. I kinda feel the same about
programming. There are a lot of people still doing it, but not as many that
are truly excited about learning new things.

When we bring on young people they have a ton of energy and are excited to try
every new thing which, don't get me wrong, is awesome. But they do
occasionally criticize me for moving too cautiously, even though I am plenty
excited about trying new things. I always think to myself, call me back in
about 15 years and we'll see whether you evolve into the rockstar that you
envision yourself to be, or else if you stagnate, burn out, move onto
something else, etc. I always hope they do become the rockstar.

~~~
danieltillett
I am 45 and I almost only listen to new music. I have almost a 1000 CDs from
the 90s and early 00s (all ripped to FLAC), but I find myself listening to new
music because there is so much fantastic new music out there and it is so easy
to access. For a music fan it really is the golden age (not so much for the
musicians).

As for learning new programming skills I still enjoy it, but I think this is
because for me languages/frameworks/algorithms are just tools. The real fun is
in using the right tool to solve a complex problem.

~~~
jakejake
Same here. I basically get bored with most music fairly quickly so I'm always
looking for something new. Most of my high-school friends are still listening
to the same music from the 80's and 90's though!

------
valine
I'm 18 years old and I just got my first significant programming job building
android applications for a medical device company. I must say its inspiring to
read something like this. I've heard stories from mentors and professors about
what it takes to stay relevent in the field computer science. It's odd to
think that the technologies I've devoted my time and energy could be all but
useless by the time I turn 30. Maybe it's wrong, but I dream of a post Moore's
Law era where development tools can finally mature and the best programmers
are the ones with 40 years of experience.

------
datashovel
I can imagine a time in my distant future where I will feel unappreciated
and/or unable to keep up with technology the way I can today (though
admittedly even today it's not an easy task given the trajectory. I'm pretty
certain we're on an exponential curve).

What is the gift that will keep on giving? Write about what you know. Write
about your experiences and insights. Even thousands of years from now people
may come across your work and given the advances they will be living amongst
will almost certainly be interested in what you had to say.

------
lurkinggrue
Well remember: 74 is the new 24,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5c-Qndqio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u5c-Qndqio)

(The artist that did that music video is 74)

~~~
mortehu
Note that he did the music, not the video itself, which is taken from the demo
"Spin"[1] by Andromeda Software Development.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFqMnVDIuvc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFqMnVDIuvc)

------
forrestthewoods
I'm 30 and a senior programmer. What should I be doing to ensure I have career
options at 50? Is management inevitable with individual contribution primarily
reserved for scrappy youngsters?

~~~
equalarrow
I think this goes without saying: never stop learning.

The people that are resourceful will always find a way. Sometimes this may
mean on your own, sometimes with a group. But as long as you can keep learning
and just 'do things', you will be light years ahead of those that don't know
what to do and look to other people to tell them.

From Steve Jobs:

"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no
smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build
your own things that other people can use."

It's hard sometimes (a lot of the time??) to get over that bit where 'no one
is smarter than you'. (I'm not as smart as a Google PhD, am I??..) Once you
can and you chart your own course because you are resourceful and confident
and someone who can _do things_ , then you won't need to ask the question you
asked. :)

Good Luck! (I'm still on this journey)

------
guard-of-terra
I'm 30 now (from time to time I feel that I've already lived enough and am
mostly done), the idea of expecting at least 30 productive years ahead of me
is intriguing.

~~~
lamuerteflaca
What have you done that makes you feel satisfied with your life? Just curious.
I'm 37 and feel like I'm just getting started. Keep in mind that I have wasted
very little time. Always working on some project here or there. Right now I'm
planning my next fourty years. So it really makes me wonder how you can feel
you are done.

~~~
guard-of-terra
Maybe it is exactly because I've "wasted" a lot of time on leisure activities
so I have quite some fond memories.

Did some nice things professionally, too.

~~~
Revex
I am right there with you. I am a little over half way through my 30th year of
life. I have "wasted" a lot by having a ton of fun and enjoying myself, while
also getting plenty done professionally. I am excited about the future, and
also intrigued with this concept of another 30-50 years of productivity, but
like you, sometimes I can accept a fate of being 'finished'. It's weird, but
not in a morbid way, more like a, "I'm so blessed to have been able to do all
this amazing stuff" kind of way.

------
lukego
Recently I saw a conference presentation from an 80 year old who had just
created a new CPU on an FPGA and ported a graphical operating system onto it
:-)
[https://twitter.com/lukego/status/436558489910255616](https://twitter.com/lukego/status/436558489910255616)

------
chrisbennet
I'm only 35 (in hex, ha, ha!) and I've been programming professionally since
1985 when the earth's crust was still cooling. It's still a blast.

------
shanemhansen
One of my mentors is in his 60s (I think). He's an extremely successful
architect/consultant who still does plenty of coding. His enthusiasm is what
energizes me (just turned 30).

I'm not saying that people don't get tired/slower as they get older (I
struggle with it), but I don't think it's inevitable.

