from Hacker News

Why age in software is bullshit

by moonlighter on 7/16/16, 11:50 PM with 18 comments

  • by ckdarby on 7/17/16, 2:12 AM

    I think the author misses what is being said by the individuals making the 'age' comment.

    I'm in my 20s and I've said this comment before plenty but it isn't in the context of someone being too old to ship code but instead the fact that as we age we usually take on additional commitments, responsibilities, etc.

    All these extra factors often limit the amount of time that most people have to dedicate to coding.

  • by yanilkr on 7/17/16, 1:01 AM

    Its usually not the age. But its common for people effected to think that they are being discriminated because of their age.

    There is a tendency for a lot of people to hang on to tools and ideas that worked for them in the past. e.g someone who comes from a relational world, finds it very hard to get used to nosql unless their boss gives them no choice.

  • by jotaefea on 7/17/16, 3:51 AM

    I'd say the problem (which may be correlated with age) starts when we repeat "I know" too much and "I'm learning" too little.

  • by notacoward on 7/17/16, 12:32 PM

    I don't think it's surprising that older people have the ability to be so prolific. What's surprising is that they still have the patience to put up with all of the BS that goes along with writing software. When you hit the ten thousandth broken library API or build-system idiosyncracy of your career, it's tempting to scream "Enough!" and retire to farm fish or something. Ditto for dealing with well-meaning users demanding features to support an impossible use case, or not-so-well-meaning haters trashing you on Twitter/HN/Reddit. If you can only code, on what you want the way you want, without caring even one little bit if anybody uses or likes it, that might still be fun. Otherwise, all that other stuff gets pretty old, and that's more of a problem than you getting old. As you see your friends starting to pull back or retire altogether, and you realize that you could do the same, the idea gets pretty tempting even if you love to code.

    BTW, since somebody's likely to ask, I'm 51.