There is definitely a middle ground, I believe emotional agility is at the heart of 'true' agility and the emotions have been highly overlooked by people who either master the art of bottling it up (looking at you former managers) or brooding (that's on me and many of us I believe)
The middle ground is becoming aware of the spectrum of unpleasant emotions and learning to feel in more depth while using intellect to guide your own actions.
For example, one can sense disgust at a certain codebase. That's perfectly acceptable, and it doesn't have to be anyone's fault. The disgust will drive us to want to improve it. Unfortunately, our managers tell us `bottle up your disgust and do some more disgusting things so we can ship` in which case young guys jump to the challenge and old guys tend to feel completely undervalued.
Edit: this statement is intentionally opinionated. It's alright to have an emotional reaction to it. I'd be interested to know what emotions it evokes in the reader.
That's kind of full on ageism don't you think? I am an older developer and I am easier going than some younger members of my team who are very aggressive and overly emotional when discussing technical problems.
Whether you think you can, or think you cannot: you're probably right.
How come I came to the opposite conclusion as you with similiar family obligations...where else can you earn 120k USD and work remote to spend time raising your children and banging your wife in between coding sessions throughout the day
> If you aren't a specialist, you are constantly competing against 20-somethings who will always be more current in their skills and breadth than yourself, because they have more free time than you have (e.g. I have a wife, kid)
I'm assuming that your wife is stay at home? In which case you would have more free time, not less.
On the other hand, if she works... then I understand.
- If you aren't a specialist, you are constantly competing against 20-somethings who will always be more current in their skills and breadth than yourself, because they have more free time than you have (e.g. I have a wife, kid)
- I've written GUI widgets from scratch, servers from scratch, same thing with linked lists, sorting, etc. Guess what? That doesn't likely justify an ever-increasing salary. No one cares.
- Older programmers tend to be very opinionated and have lots of war stories. This gets on peoples nerves. The stereotype, based entirely on truth, is that they are cranky and hard to work with.
I don't believe the same is true in specialized disciplines like engineering or modelling/simulation, numerical programming, etc. A 40, 50, 60 year-old engineer/mathematician/analytics developer doesn't have the same stigma. Those decades of experience are invaluable. The fundamentals of engineering or statistics aren't being reinvented every 3-5 years. Web development skills that are 5 years old are literally worthless today. Aside from general problem solving techniques, unless you've really specialized, the stuff you developed 10-20 years ago is of minimal value today and that experience (writing software that is now obsolete and could now be written in a fraction of the time, likely!) doesn't make you competitive against younger programmers.
My takeaway was to go deep as possible into analytics and math. AI, ML, anything that requires heavy math background, those are what I'm focusing on now.