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A comment on Ask HN: How many are 30+ years and still active programmers?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: How many are 30+ years and still active programmers? by purplethinking on Monday May 08, 2017 @06:07AM (#14290405)
My view (as a still quite young engineer around 30) is that good engineers don't become worse with age, quite the opposite. If you as a young programmer think you're better/faster than those old farts, check back in 10 years or so and you'll probably realize how naive you were. Now, bad engineers might stagnate completely, and those people are probably what makes up the bulk of the "old people stuck in old technologies; can't code" meme. Along with the people who end up doing less technical stuff and then forced to interview for other/technical positions after a layoff.

I think if you try to be excellent at what you do and improve over time, there is no reason you should have to worry about this until your brain is actually withering away.

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Re:Ask HN: How many are 30+ years and still active programmers? by lj3 on Monday May 08, 2017 @11:32AM (#14292427)
> Now, bad engineers might stagnate completely, and those people are probably what makes up the bulk of the "old people stuck in old technologies; can't code" meme.

> I think if you try to be excellent at what you do and improve over time, there is no reason you should have to worry about this until your brain is actually withering away.

It sounds like a pretty serious problem to me. Everybody knows the meme, so when they're hiring older people they're really going to try to rake them over the coals in the interview to make sure they don't hire one of those 'old people stuck in old technologies; can't code' devs. This makes it much harder for those who can still code to pass technical interviews.

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