
Box's 65-Year-Old Android Engineer Gives Your Startup Some Unsentimental Advice - goronbjorn
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3007250/open-company/boxs-65-year-old-android-engineer-gives-your-startup-some-unsentimental-advice#
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asveikau
I congratulate this guy.

But I feel like the youngish folks reading hacker news (self included),
especially those that get wrapped up in youth-worship and pseudo-
libertarianism (not me) should ask themselves, what will we do at 65? It's a
fairly uncomfortable question in our field. Whatever the reason we should not
tolerate the factors that push older people out, or make excuses for doing so.

~~~
patja
Does anybody who has spent their adult working career in this industry have an
excuse for not achieving financial independence by age 65?

~~~
svachalek
Children, medical problems, divorce, expensive hobbies, stock crashes. Stuff
happens. If you expect to live to 85, which is pretty reasonable, and keep
paying to live in the Bay Area, do a little traveling, you'd want to pull down
$100k or so per year and thus need about $2M in the bank.

~~~
alexkus
True if your $2M sits in an account earning zero interest. In reality you need
quite a bit less than $2M if you want to guarantee 20 years at $100k.

~~~
chadcf
At a 7% return you'd still need about $1.5 mil. And that's assuming that your
hopefully more conservative investments in retirement earn 7% a year and over
that 20 year span there is not a crash... This includes about 3.5% per year
for inflation.

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DanielBMarkham
I continue to believe that over the next couple of decades the tech community
is going to see something it never has before: lots of kick-ass retirement-age
programmers.

I'm hoping that we see some great startups come out of it, but whatever
happens, it's going to change a lot of things. Programming won't be seen as a
college-kid thing, older folks will be able to create interactive tech
experiences around their worldviews, and discussions around the impact of
technology on society will have many more voices. This guy is just the
vanguard of a big crowd to come.

Neat.

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charleshaanel
I enjoyed this comment: "Maynard says the current generation of startups
should be more patient than he was. “Englebert's law of technology prediction
says that all technology predictions overpredict what technology will do for
you in the short term and underpredict what technology will do for you in the
long term," he explains. "I have seen this curve over and over, and lots of
startups fail in that gap because they don't keep at it long enough. They
think the technology will be there before it's really ready.”

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ErikAugust
"That is unbelievable--but I think we have lost the idea of the software
artist. When the machines were much smaller, I did my game essentially as a
one-man team. I did all the art. I did all the programming. I had one other
engineer help me with some of the music. I have a friend working with EA today
and he is probably working in a team of 120 engineers.”

“Electronic Arts treated the programmer as an artist," he says. "They were the
first people to do that.”

First time I've read someone explain this concept...

~~~
sehugg
Speaking of which, here's David Maynard himself posing (lower-right) in EA's
first software-artist-themed "Can a Computer Make You Cry?" advertisement:

<http://chrishecker.com/Can_a_Computer_Make_You_Cry%3F>

~~~
joezydeco
+1 to you for remembering the original Electronic Arts. It's been such a long
long time, hasn't it?

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softbuilder
This reminds me of the Eddie Izzard bit about Europe vs. America and how
Americans will make a big deal about something restored to the way it was
"over 50 years ago". __GASP __"Surely, no one was alive back then!"

"OMG this guy is 65 and still codes?". C'mon. There are a lot of older
programmers out there. At least the ones who weren't bullied out by management
or peer pressure or killed off by the health effects of sitting at your desk
for 40 years.

~~~
DannoHung
I find it hard to believe that there are too many guys above 65 and coding
that aren't Fellows or academics.

Not that I believe that they are in anyway incapable, I'm just thinking once
you get to 65 or thereabouts, you're probably looking to retire.

~~~
jebblue
>> I find it hard to believe that there are too many guys above 65 and coding
that aren't Fellows or academics.

Being a Fellow or academic sounds to me more like a sentence than a career
goal.

~~~
pjmlp
Given the benefits you get out of it in certain places, I would surely
appreciate it.

It all depends where you work.

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Zigurd
I'm not as old, and MIT's LCS and AI lab were well-established by the time I
was an undergrad. But I do feel privileged to be there close enough to the
beginning to have written code for some of DEC's oldest products and seen,
firsthand, how venture capital and software intertwined and grew together.
Maynard does a great job of articulating the perspective that growing up with
computing imparts.

I think it is no accident he is making Android code. It's a system you can
learn about inside and out. It's elegant in many of the same ways Macintosh
was in 1984. It's enjoyable, which is important when you could just decide you
are too old to code.

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dmbaggett
Here's David in EA's iconic "We See Farther" poster, from the company's golden
age (the Trip Hawkins era):

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/grouchodis/7918145932/in/photos...](http://www.flickr.com/photos/grouchodis/7918145932/in/photostream)

I had this poster on my wall in high school; these guys were the original
"rockstar" coders.

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andrewguenther
EA really did used to be a great company. It is a shame how far they've
fallen.

~~~
Macsenour
Just for the outside. At that same time they were commissioning work from
multiple developers for the same project at low fees saying: "We'll make it up
in royalties", but canceling those versions they didn't like. None of the
developers knew this was the case until they got the cancelation call.

Ethics? Not really.

~~~
waterlesscloud
So they were an incubator.

Heh.

~~~
Macsenour
Ha! In a way... it's like losing/winning a race you didn't know you were in.

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t0
What advice is he actually giving? Don't introduce new technology too fast?
Keep working at a failed startup because it might work longterm?

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michaelwww
The title is misleading. I couldn't find "Englebert's law of technology" but
basically Douglas Englebart must have taught him "technology predictions
overpredict what technology will do for you in the short term and underpredict
what technology will do for you in the long term." He goes on to say "I have
seen this curve over and over, and lots of startups fail in that gap because
they don't keep at it long enough. They think the technology will be there
before it's really ready." So yes, keep at it, and timing is everything.

~~~
T-A
Sounds like Amara's Law: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Amara>

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michaelwww
_[Amara] worked closely with Doug Engelbart on the proposals that led to
Engelbart's history-making Augmentation Research Center._
<http://boingboing.net/2008/01/03/roy-amara-forecaster.html>

Maynard is mis-remebering, which is understandable since Amara and Engelbart
worked together.

~~~
dmaynard
Yes you are probably correct. However it was Doug that explained to me the
reason why this law holds. It is because of Moore's law that the technology
level grows exponentially but the human mind seems incapable of grokking the
exponential curve and thus predicts on a linear basis. The linear line stays
above the exponential curve until they inevitably cross. Thus ""We tend to
overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the
effect in the long run"

~~~
michaelwww
We're in the same age bracket and like you, all I've ever wanted to do was
write code. I'm thinking about your explanation here and wondering if Moore's
law is the most relevant factor or if it's network power laws. I'm not reading
a lot of posts saying "I have this great app that will be revolutionary but I
need much more speed and memory in mobile devices." But I do read a lot posts
about growing a network of users. On the other hand, it's inevitable that
there will be much more power in mobile devices, so the it's best to see what
code can be written with that target in mind, which is why I don't get
involved in the native vs html5 debate. It's clear HTML5 will continue to get
better and be sufficient for most applications.

I'm a few years behind you, so I idolized guys like you and Englebart when I
was starting out. I kind of miss that ga-ga eyed hero-worship phase of my
life. Now I'm older than the President of the United States and that's kind of
hard to grasp.

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abhishekg
He's also #1 on the company's internal fitbit competititon

~~~
patja
That is awesome. Is that a common thing for organizations to have internal
fitbit rankings?

~~~
prexer
Y, I've have several other friends with similar competitions at their
companies, prizes handed out every few months. Fitbit isn't the only brand of
fitness monitors.

Good HR departments are handing them out as part of Open Enrollment and Health
programs.

~~~
jboggan
An informal competition has sprung up among the engineers at my company but we
are mostly trying to hack it. Does anyone know what happens when you put a
FitBit in a paint shaker?

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bornonmars
"But if I had to do it over again today, I might choose bio-informatics or
nanotechnology.”

In 20 years from now, IT skills will better be more than common. The internet
will be in a post-maturity stage. The new "lack of" won't be of CS folks. It
may as well be of what he mentioned.

~~~
hkmurakami
I have doubts, given that machines are getting locked down both in terms of
hardware and software, preventing users from exploring the guts of their
gadgets as their curiosity is piqued by using these devices.

The advances in technology, while making "creation" more accessible than ever,
also seems to be enabling fewer people to serve more people than ever before.

~~~
protomyth
I expect more and more to be locked down. Not so much because of desire by
companies to lock their product (although that is a motivator), but media
sensationalism and politicians need to look like leaders while expending no
effort. I look at the case of the startup uploading all the addresses found in
the contacts of an iPhone and the reaction to that. I did not see one article
asking if someone's Outlook for Windows contacts had ever been uploaded. It
was a stupid move for the startup, but given the history of PCs, it seems like
something post-PC product managers would overlook. People seem to want to
share everything, but have control over privacy. Adding to that, I am sure a
push to make absolutely sure security measures (remote wipe, find my phone)
cannot be disabled by a thief. All this gets us secure, locked devices,
because it is easier than having your C-level executive be lectured to by some
member of Congress's committee.

So, I would expect to see less and less of people in the industry who got into
like me with and Atari 400. There are certainly no modern day version of the
C64, Sinclair Z80, or TI-99/4a (no, Raspberry Pi isn't even close).

iOS provides great software to start every career but the one that makes it
sing.

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herdrick
Wow, this guy worked with Doug Engelbart _and_ Kelly Johnson!

~~~
dmaynard
To set the record straight I worked for Lockheed, and got to meet Kelly
Johnson, who is one of my heroes, but I actually did not work with him. I did
work for Doug Engelbart. Both true visionaries and engineering Samurais.

