Are there developer with 34+ years of experience?
1 03 Nov 2016 22:41 by u/roznak
I have seen a pattern to emerge, I see lots of very experienced developers here that count their experience in the decades but 34 appears to be some magical number that no one surpass. One would expect a lot of young people here, but I am from time to time surprised that we have 50+ even 60+ here that still acts like teenagers.
Could this because the cheap PC started to pop up somewhere in 1982?
The other funny thing is why are they still developers? Why did they not become some manager and ended up not developing anymore?
3 comments
4 u/Gargilius 03 Nov 2016 23:48
Self respect? Some of us enjoy coding?
I am one of these ol' farts; still a foot soldier, partly by choice, partly by lack of the social / political skills required to get into management. Funny thing is that I have mostly reached my FI (financial independence) target a wee while back, so the day I am no longer enjoying the game, I'll just kick back and retire (i.e., work on my own projects instead :-) )
ps and I'll keep behaving like a teenager as long as I am still enjoying it too, you darn kid.
2 u/Morbo 04 Nov 2016 01:26
Well I fall 4 years short of the 34 year mark. I count decades because it's less intimidating for younger developers to hear 3 decades rather than 30 years when you're introducing yourself and giving background info on your experience. I still act like a teenager/20-something because I may have grown old but I never really grew up. It's more fun being young at heart. I did try the management path for a while including becoming a product manager but I missed the action and hated the useless (to me) social pandering needed to get interface with upper management. I'm in the trenches again where I'm happy so I will probably stay here until I can't do it any more. Why be boring and old when I can be old and still have shitloads of fun doing cool things?
When I started programming it was in the before time when PCs were still fighting to gain the top spot. My first paying programming gig (1986) involved writing Z-80 assembly code for embedded microcontrollers used in data acquisition on fuel pumps. I wrote code on a Morrow Designs MD-11 and a Kaypro II and burned the resulting compiled code to EPROMs for the microcontrollers. I didn't touch a PC (IBM compatible) till 1989 when I did some projects on commission in QuickBASIC. From there I bounced around the 90s programming in DBase, Borland C, Visual Basic, Delphi and VC++ (MFC/ATL). In the more recent times I've settled into C# mostly because it's easy to get work in my area with that. I miss the old days of Win32 programming where it was you and the bare metal but it's nice to make things happen quickly and with less hassle. I still have a special place in my heart for ActionScript and Adobe Flex because that was a fun language/framework that let my creative side play with my technical side and make awesome stuff. I despise modern web programming but that's a much bigger discussion that doesn't fit here. I've forgotten more programming things than most of my colleagues have learned so I feel weird and out of place at times until my dinosaur knowledge saves the day and I'm a rockstar again for a while. It's fun and I wouldn't really want to do much else professionally if given the opportunity.
1 u/CujoQuarrel 04 Nov 2016 02:24
I'm at about 35. For my last job interview (many many years ago) I told them two things
1) This will be the last time you see me wearing a suit unless there is a funeral 2) I never want to be in charge of anyone
The job worked well till I had to retire due to illness