[jpdoctor]

God these types of polls make me feel like a geezer.

Just in case any of you whippersnappers are wondering what it feels like to start hacking in your teens and continue (in one form or another) to be hacking into your late 40s: It is pretty much the same after the first cup of coffee in the morning. Where it differs is the lull in the afternoon makes me want to nap. (So I do.)

The drag is that until I look in the mirror? I'd tell you I'm 20-something, and I have to genuinely remind myself that I'm pushing 50.

[drumdance]

I can relate. I once saw a quote, maybe from Garrison Keillor?

"Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened."

[drumdance]

On the flip side, one thing getting older does is give you perspective about what's really important in life. I definitely am much more attentive to health and relationships, for example.

[pvnick]

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work? Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff? Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

[jpdoctor]

Great questions, answers inline.

> Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

None, but I might be a weird case. When I finished grad school, I was hired by TI, then Bell Labs. Both treated me like royalty. Because I am not satisfied with being treated like royalty, I went out and founded a company during 2000. I raised a ton of money from VCs (money was free back then). Bootstrapped another. So I've been running my own businesses ever since.

> Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

A bunch of years in there were hardware hacking. So lots of C and C++ through the 90s, some perl for maintainance. Never saw the need for trendy stuff until I saw Ruby on Rails. That made light work of projects I had in front of me.

> Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

Largest management position was CTO of an 85 person company. I'm happy to manage people, and believe that I can manage over the range of herding-cats to drill-Sargent. I definitely prefer the role of Field Marshall to General, ie rolling in the mud with the troops compared to suit-and-tie rub-elbows-with-those-who-need-their-elbows-rubbed.

Lately though: All hacking + customer management. We're growing, so I suspect managing more people is going to be back in my future.

[mindcrime]

Another "old person" chiming in...

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

Not really, and not in a negative sense. I did have an experience once where my boss sent me out to help one of our younger consultants on an engagement because, as he put it, the client "wants to see somebody with some grey in their beard". IOW, my presence was largely not needed in the technical sense, but I was there to contribute "gravitas" and comfort to the client.

Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

I reject your distinction between "trendy" and "entrprisey". Enterprise software and systems rock, and there's significant overlap at the systems level anyway. You may see Scala, Hadoop, Mahout, Mesos, Spark, S4, Clojure, etc. as "trendy, non enterprise" technologies, while I'm spending my time thinking of ways to use that stuff in the enterprise. :-)

Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

I have never had, and will never have, any real desire to be in "management" at someone else's company. Now, being a founder/CEO, that's a different story. I love the idea of building a company, and building the kind of company I always wanted to work for. And I've always been fascinated by marketing and some other aspects of the business world. So for me to now be a founder and in a position to run a company, is a real blast in many ways (in other ways, it's a long, hard, tough, painful, slow slog).

[beat]

I'm 48, and I haven't encountered ageism yet. I haven't seen it, among good technical people. The hard part is that by the time you're in your late 40s, you've probably peaked out on advancement. Even if you go into management (which isn't really "advancement"), you're just going to ceiling out there instead.

[kfcm]

Another consideration is it all depends upon where you're located--geographically, company-wise, and technology area. At least in my observation.

Infrastructure tends to have less ageism than development/software engineering. Large corporations relatively less than start-ups (agism in corps is usually tied to/masked by salary level; "it's about cutting costs"). Midwest/rural areas less than large metros and "hip locations" (due mainly to smaller pools of potential employees).

[kfcm]

When first starting out many years (decades?!?) ago, I experienced what could best be called "reverse agism". Guys in their 40s-50s were concerned about hiring a 23-25 year old "wet-behind-the-ears" high-energy "kid" who might make them look bad. And there weren't many twenty-somethings around

Funny thing is, now that I'm in that 45-50 range, things have inverted. Now I rarely see someone above 40 or 45, unless it's management or infrastructure. It's all people in their late 20s, early 30s.

[tritchey]

I'm sliding down the other side of that distribution myself.

One evening I was having dinner with my wife and her nearly 70 year old parents. Her mom made a comment that has stuck with me:

"You know, we still think and feel the same way we did when we were your age."

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah; but those thoughts are now 50 years out of date. That's why old people feel different; they are from another time.

[zwieback]

For me it's actually better in my late 40s. I've seen enough fads come and go that I don't feel like I have to chase after them anymore.

[incompatible]

Fads come but they never seem to go. Even COBOL is still out there in daily use. EVERTHING is still out there in daily use.

[lesterbuck]

It takes about ten years to get used to how old you are.

[marshray]

I was napping hard in the afternoons and staying up late as a teenager. I was hoping that would get better with age like it does for some people. But it hasn't for me.

[elboru]

Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)?

[crb3]

No, what I (currently 64) have noticed is a swift reduction in unbroken-focus time. Unlike in my 20's and 30's, I have personal responsibilities, now, y'see.

We're not designed to preemptively multitask; I just crash my stack when I try. We can cooperatively multitask, but the context-switching has to planned ahead. Even then, interrupts are costly. Used to be there was nothing between me and putting in a sleepless weekend on a project except me and my fatigue, which enthusiasm overcame easily. Now I've got kids and elderly parents and they're not only interrupting, they're nonmaskable. Stack-crash, context-dump and a profound weariness from loss of momentum, next stop.

I love it when I can shove in the earplugs, unplug the phone and dive in on a new learning adventure -- I hunger for that, it's part of who I am. Those times when I can trust the world to handshake timeslices and mask interrupts are very rare these days, however. From the outside it might look like slower learning; from in here, it's that the learning seldom gets any runtime.

[guelo]

I feel like I learn new tech faster now, though it's probably just because I've seen similar things before. I feel like I'm doing my best work now.

[jpdoctor]

> Have you noticed any speed decrement in your learning curves (learning new languages or frameworks)?

Hard to tell, but a speedup if anything. Once you know 5 or 6 languages, another one is pretty easy to pick up by looking at it.

I've posted elsewhere: Most recent endeavor is RoR, and that was fast. It's hard for me to differentiate whether that's because I'm Mr Smart&Experienced or because Michael Hartl rocks. I suspect the latter.

[djbender]

Age is only a number.

[gilrain]

And an approximate measure of the gradual deterioration of your body.

[codebolt]

Not just any number. It's the number of whole orbits you've made around the sun since leaving your mothers womb.

[girvo]

Damnit. I've started doing that nap thing, and I'm 22.