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- title: Old Geek
- url: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/09/14/Old-Geek
- hash_url: e3f5dfb37e7a8852e79d5484cc319df0
-
- <p itemprop='description'>I’m one. We’re not ex­act­ly com­mon on the ground; my pro­fes­sion, ap­par­ent­ly
- not con­tent with hav­ing ex­clud­ed a whole gen­der, is most­ly do­ing with­out the
- ser­vices of a cou­ple of gen­er­a­tions.</p>
-
- <p>This was pro­voked by a post from <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Gosling'>James Gosling</a>, which
- I’ll re­pro­duce be­cause it was on Face­book and I don’t care to learn how to
- link in­to there:</p>
-
- <blockquote><p>Al­most ev­ery old friend of mine is screwed. In the time be­tween
- Sun and LRI I’d get lines like “We nor­mal­ly don’t hire peo­ple your age, but in
- your case we might make an exception”. In my brief stint at Google I had
- sev­er­al guys in their 30s talk about cos­met­ic surgery. It's all trag­i­cal­ly
- crazy.</p>
- </blockquote>
- <p>He’d linked to <a href='http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/silicon-valley-s-job-hungry-say-we-re-not-to-old-for-this'>It’s Tough Be­ing Over 40 in Sil­i­con Val­ley</a>,
- by Carol Hy­mowitz and Robert Bur­son on Bloomberg. It’s sad­den­ing, es­pe­cial­ly
- the part about try­ing to look younger.</p>
-
- <p>I’ve seen it at home, too; my wife <a href='http://laurenwood.org/'>Lau­ren</a> is among the most awe­some project
- man­agers I’ve known, is pro­fi­cient with sev­er­al soft­ware tech­nolo­gies, and is
- pol­ished and pro­fes­sion­al. While she
- has an OK con­sult­ing biz, she oc­ca­sion­al­ly sees a full-time job that looks
- in­ter­est­ing. But these days usu­al­ly doesn’t both­er reach­ing out; 40-plus wom­en
- are ba­si­cal­ly not em­ploy­able in the tech­nol­o­gy sec­tor.</p>
-
- <p id='p-2' class='p1'><span class='h2'>On the oth­er hand</span> ·
- To be fair, not ev­ery­one wants to go on pro­gram­ming in­to their life’s
- sec­ond half. To start with, man­agers and mar­keters make more mon­ey. Al­so,
- lots of places make de­vel­op­ers sit in rows in poorly-lit poorly-ventilated
- spaces, with not an atom of peace or pri­va­cy. And then, who, male or fe­male,
- wants to work where there are hard­ly any wom­en?</p>
-
- <p>And even if you do want to stay tech­ni­cal, and even if you’re a su­perb
- coder, chances are that af­ter two or three decades of se­nior­i­ty you’re go­ing
- to make a big­ger con­tri­bu­tion help­ing oth­er peo­ple out, re­view­ing de­sign­s,
- run­ning task forces, ad­vis­ing ex­ec­u­tives, and so on.</p>
-
- <p>Fi­nal­ly, there’s a bad thing that can hap­pen: If you help build some­thing
- im­por­tant and im­pact­ful, call it X, it’s easy to slip in­to year af­ter year of
- be­ing the world’s great­est ex­pert on X, and when X isn’t im­por­tant and
- im­pact­ful any more, you’re in a bad place.</p>
-
- <p>But hav­ing said all that, Bay Area tech cul­ture to­tal­ly has a
- blind spot, just an­oth­er part of their great di­ver­si­ty suck­age. It’s hurt­ing
- them as much as all the de­mo­graph­ics they ex­clude, but ap­par­ent­ly not enough
- to mo­ti­vate se­ri­ous ac­tion.</p>
-
- <p id='p-1' class='p1'><span class='h2'>Can old folks code?</span> ·
- I don’t know about the rest of the world, but they can at Ama­zon
- and Google. There are all these lit­tle com­mu­ni­ties at Google: Gay­gler­s,
- Jew­gler­s, and my fa­vorite, the Grey­gler­s; that’s the on­ly T-shirt I took with
- me and still wear. The Grey­glers are led by Vint Cer­f, who holds
- wine-and-cheese events (<em>good</em> wine, <em>good</em> cheese) when he
- vis­its Moun­tain View from his reg­u­lar DC digs.
- I’m not claim­ing it’s a big pop­u­la­tion, but in­cludes peo­ple who are do­ing
- se­ri­ous shit with core tech­nol­o­gy that you use ev­ery day.</p>
-
- <p>There’s no equiv­a­lent at Ama­zon, but there is the com­mu­ni­ty of Prin­ci­pal
- Engi­neers (I’m one), a tiny tribe in Amazon’s huge en­gi­neer­ing army. There
- are a few fresh-faced youth­ful PEs, but on av­er­age we tend to griz­zle and sag
- more than just a bit. And if you’re a group try­ing to do some­thing se­ri­ous,
- it’s ex­pect­ed you’ll have a PE ad­vis­ing or men­tor­ing or even bet­ter,
- cod­ing.</p>
-
- <p>Like I do. Right now there’s code I wrote match­ing and rout­ing mil­lions
- and mil­lions of <a href='http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/events/WhatIsCloudWatchEvents.html'>Events</a>
- ev­ery day, which makes me hap­py.</p>
-
- <p>Not that <em>that</em> much of my time goes in­to it<span class="dashes">  —</span>  in
- fac­t, I helped Events more with plan­ning and pol­i­tick­ing than cod­ing.
- But a few weeks ago I
- got an idea for an­oth­er project I’d been help­ing out with, a rel­a­tive­ly
- cheap, fast way to do some­thing that isn’t in the “Minimum Vi­able Product”
- that al­ways ship­s, but would be super-useful. I de­cid­ed it would be eas­i­er to
- build it
- than con­vince some­one else, so… well, it turned out that I had to in­vent an
- in­ter­me­di­ate lan­guage, and a pars­er for it, and I haven’t been blog­ging and,
- er­m, seem a lit­tle short on sleep.</p>
-
- <p id='p-3' class='p1'><span class='h2'>Ad­vice</span> ·
- Are you get­ting middle-aged-or-later and find you still like code? I think
- what’s
- most helped me hang on is my at­ten­tion span, com­pa­ra­ble to a gnat’s. I get
- bored re­al­ly, re­al­ly fast and so I’m al­ways wan­der­ing away from what I was
- just do­ing and pok­ing cu­ri­ous­ly at the new shiny.</p>
-
- <p>On top of which I’ve been ex­tra luck­y. The ev­i­dence says my
- taste is super-mainstream, what­ev­er it is I find shiny is like­ly to ap­peal to
- mil­lions of oth­ers too.</p>
-
- <p>Any­how, I don’t usu­al­ly wear a T-shirt, but when I do, it’s <a href='http://www.tyrrellmuseumshop.com/shop/adult/t-rex-skeleton-tshirt/'>this
- one</a>.</p>
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