My father, who is about to turn 80, is still knee deep in code every day -- having retired (many years ago) after 45 years in the industry. The guy remembers paper tape, and is still going strong.

And often, he's way into whatever the latest language is. He builds games, software for organizing pills and bills, and has designed and rebuilt his own editor several times.

Honestly, the guy's my hero.

Does your dad have a website or github with his work? Would be cool to check it out.

No, honestly. He contributes little bugfix patches to projects here and there to various projects, but he doesn't want to maintain software for anyone else (fair, I think -- he did spend an entire career doing that).

He makes (pretty cool) side-scrollers for this grandchildren, tools for himself. He sometimes complains that he's not sure what to build, but he figures it out. He also has a Mac and a Linux box (running Gentoo, I think). That keeps him busy!

This is encouraging for me to hear. I hope to still be hacking away on my projects when I reach that age. (and beyond ideally).

That’s awesome. I’m curious, what are his languages of choice?

You probably can't name one he hasn't played around with (and I'll admit -- I'm an enabler with this). He certainly has his black belt in C++, JavaScript, and Ruby, but he's crazy about Lisp and has recently gone on a tear with Nim.

He's written his own editor ("I want it the way I want it!") maybe four times in different languages, just because. He's always teasing me for being a vi user ("You're stuck in the 70s!")

> has recently gone on a tear with Nim.

That's awesome! I'd love to hear his thoughts :)

He really loved it (and I think plans to write some more stuff with it).

I'm coming up on 50, so all of my friends' parents are roughly the same age. The big crackup for me is that they're all worried about their parents falling for a phishing attack or having to update operating systems that haven't seen an update in ten years.

When I call my dad, he wants to get deep into compiler theory. Or talk about Rust. Or moon about how the world would have been so much better if Brendan Eich had just implemented Scheme. Or he'll talk about how much he loves TeX.

You know, he complains that he's not as sharp as he used to be. He's always warning me to take care of my body, because "mens sana in corpore sano!" But really, I just don't worry about him at all.

He's also one of the happiest people I know, and absolutely one of the most well read (I'm an English professor; I'm surrounded by well-read people. It's kind of amazing how many books he's read in his life).

damn, that's amazing. I don't think my hands or eyes will keep up with me at that age. Hell, they carp is already getting my wrists. At least I'll still have metalworking!

Maybe you won't (alas)! He is also a master-level woodworker, but had to stop due to spinal stenosis.

Being a geek, he has his Apple watch set up to remind him to go walk around every hour, and that tends to keep it at bay. But he really can't work in the shop any more.

And honestly (just to brag on my dad a bit more) the way he said goodbye to all that struck me as really impressive. He loved woodworking, but he didn't weep and mourn or go into a depression when he couldn't do it anymore. He just shrugged and said, "Well, I guess it's on to my other hobbies!"

That's how I want to be.

> regardless of how wealthy he becomes

It may be the reverse that happens here: he is wealthy enough to have time to play with Lisp.

There are a LOT of things like that. Travel is a good example.

For people making a living wage, some think “I don’t have the money to travel.” Then when they have the money, they think “I don’t have the time to travel.” They don’t really travel until they retire, and then they have trouble going anywhere that isn’t friendly to their knees and faltering eyesight, so they buy an RV.

Others travel in college from hostel to hostel. When they get work, they negotiate longer vacations to travel, or they deliberately become giggers so they can travel.

I met a couple in Thailand who climbed, they worked five months a year around the clock as nurses, and climbed seven months a year literally everywhere. They lived on the cheap so they would have more climbing days.

I have similar stories about people who ride bicycles and dive. If you are passionate, don’t wait for some magical day when you can fly the Concorde to go climbing in Europe with your friends (true story about some Yosemite dirtbags who came into illicit cash).

If you’re passionate about a thing, go do that thing. Now.

> they negotiate longer vacations to travel

Does that work? I've tried to negotiate more vacation days with every job offer I've received, and it's never worked.

Coming up on my 4-year anniversary at a company, having just returned from 2 years in a foreign office, I told my Director I'd like a 3rd week of vacation and no more money. Just treat me like I'd been working here an extra year.

He got me a $5,000 raise, no extra vacation time. Said that he did his best and he was the type of person I'd absolutely believe.

Ever since then, in my mind, a vacation day has to be worth more than $1,000. Simple economics, right? Somehow giving me $5,000 maximizes shareholder value more than giving me 5 extra days off.

My next job was more generous with vacation. They used the accrual method with a maximum and there was an extended period where it had become difficult to take time off and they'd stopped putting our PTO balance on our paystubs... so at some point I track down where to find the info and realize I'd lost 10 days of vacation accrual.

I about lost my mind and HR couldn't understand why I felt like they'd cheated me out of more than $10,000.

Felt trapped in the job forever 'cause eventually I'm earning I think 27 vacation days per year, and 10 to start is pretty typical, maybe 15 if you're lucky... And as much as we might like to think everything is negotiable, reality on the ground is that very little besides salary can be successfully negotiated.

I've negotiated with dozens of people who favor vacation over salary increase and I'm glad to give the extra time off to them. It's definitely negotiable.

Are you hiring?

A friend of mine told his boss “I’m going traveling for three months starting in January. Am I quitting or just taking a leave of absence?”. It worked.

To negotiate more vacation days at hiring, you need multiple offers. Then you can tell them “I will accept your offer if it includes six weeks of vacation. Otherwise I’m going to Facebook”. It probably means negotiating a little less hard on pay since you need to focus to get it. But that’s probably fair.

> Then you can tell them “I will accept your offer if it includes six weeks of vacation. Otherwise I’m going to Facebook”

I've used that exact line, and they didn't budge, so I went to Facebook. I guess everywhere I've applied is large tech companies. It might work better at smaller firms.

Negotiation is never a sure thing. Don’t say it unless you mean it, it can always go either way.

How much vacation time did you get at Facebook?

All US employees get 21 days. Not amazing, but it's better than the starting level for many companies.

Facebook budged, and Facebook is a big tech company.

Really? I thought they were 21 days for literally everybody. What did you get?

They won’t ever “budge” all the way up to your actual worth though, you just went from 10% of your worth to 12%.

Nothing is certain, but remember that there's a difference between negotiating "unpaid time off" and "vacation days."

A vacation day is a paid thing. Unpaid time off is not. It's all money and productivity in the end, but in many companies it's easier to negotiate unpaid time off, than to negotiate extra vacation days. Even if the money works out the same in the end.

I’m not sure these are the universal definitions you think they are. I refer to paid vacation as ‘time off’.

And then there’s PTO, which is sometimes “paid time off,” and sometimes “personal time off,” which is also paid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paid_time_off

Perhaps it’s best, as another comment suggests, to always include the adjectives “paid” or “unpaid.”

The modifier matters

Paid time off

Unpaid time off

Leave of absence

Quit and reapply when you get back.

First rule of negotiation is you have to be willing to walk away if you don't get what you ask for. Could be you weren't willing to say "no thanks" if they didn't budge on vacation time.

> First rule of negotiation is you have to be willing to walk away if you don't get what you ask for. Could be you weren't willing to say "no thanks" if they didn't budge on vacation time.

Second would be maybe start asking about that when the offer letter comes in. At which point they are invested in you.

Fwiw, Google allows for unpaid time off of less than 30 days. Your salary stops during that time, but benefits and so on stay on, which is nice rather than going into "Ugh, need to figure out COBRA".

Google also has up to 5 weeks paid vacation in the US, starting at 3 weeks when you join. After 3 years, you move to 4 weeks, and after 5 years you max out at 5. Other countries basically have their government mandated time off rules, but 5 weeks plus unpaid plus holidays is pretty good.

Each week of unpaid time is thus about 2% of salary. That said, I'm definitely in the minority in using unpaid time off (though, even more strange for me is how many colleagues let their vacation accrual reach the maximum and even forfeit days...).

You do have to leave occasionally to have believable leverage. I’ve found that if you announce you’re leaving and will quit if you have to they’re much more amenable.

Link for the lazy: https://www.thecannachronicles.com/the-dirtbags-of-dope-lake...

This is discussed in the Valley Uprising documentary as well (the whole doc is amazing and definitely worth your time).

I haven't checked your link, but John Long told the story in one of his many autobiographical books. He also was credited with the story idea that became the Sylvester Stallone climbing action movie "Cliffhanger," and that is loosely based on the incident.

Oh yeah, I'm definitely not providing the definitive or original account, just throwing out a decent overview for anyone interested in more details.

Your link provides a number of details I do not recall from John Long’s account. Thank you.

On the other hand, John Long is a raconteur par excellence, and I recommend all of his books as entertaining reading about an important time in climbing history.

——

One thing Long wrote/claimed that is not mentioned in the linked post is that two of the dirtbags involved leveraged their haul into an ongoing drug-dealing business. Until they were found, shot dead, in their home.

We want our employees to live first, work second. So we have set it up so people can work from anywhere, and they do. A lot of employees go and work from interesting travel places for a few weeks or months.

He was playing with Lisp before he was wealthy and also while becoming wealthy. HN's software, which runs on Arc, used to run YC too. It was all one codebase. Only after pg retired did YC move the business parts of the software out of Lisp, and it got a lot bigger and more complicated in the process—as any Lisper would expect.

At first it was not just all one codebase, but all one thread. If HN was busy, all our internal software would run a little slower.

have you thought about publishing the full source from then? The HN source was dense but very educational, and it would be really interesting to see internal tools written in arc.

You wouldn't learn much more from reading it, because (to an almost comical extent in retrospect) the internal code was just like HN. In fact, not just like; it was mostly the same code.

Interesting, am I reading this the right way that the larger YC organization's codebase is an outgrowth of the message board tech? You guys post updates on investments/ideas for what startups should be doing just like news links are shared on HN, but actually on HN/not visible to other normal-HN users?

That was once true, but it's all been rewritten.

Bigger and more complicated and handled many more users.

I was in the room when the decision was made, and it wasn't about more users.

That's the kind of thing people say because they assume it must be so. If you do that about unconventional things, which this software was/is, you'll simply reproduce the conventional view.

A rule devised on college summers from a state school. Students had money or time, depending on if they had a summer job. Seems to hold true to most peoples existence.

until you have enough money to make more money without adding much time..

Completely agree. While I have no idea what I'd actually do if I was this wealthy (maybe just enjoy life and give into time consuming addictions), but I have numerous projects that are "on hold" from lack of time.

> I wonder if Bill Gates ever codes anything anymore, I emailed to him ask once but never got a reply.

I don't have any inside information, but looking at this old post of Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... I guess that Bill Gates is still coding.

I love this. I'm definitely appropriating the phrase "MBA-type." Seems to have fallen out of fashion as MBA-types become increasingly common in tech.

My dad isn't a software engineer, but more of a combination mechanical/aerospace engineer (MA in mechanical, PhD in aerospace), but his official job is a tech-lead right now, which he likes, but he misses "real" engineering".

Pretty much every evening and weekend, he's mucking around with something in FreeCAD and knee-deep in equations that I don't fully understand, because he genuinely loves this stuff, and doesn't want to ever become rusty.

He's 58 now, but I get the impression that he'll be doing this until his deathbed.

That's when you know you've found a passion. A lot of guys work on cars on weekends and it's not a job. My dad was into it, I always found it a pain in the ass when something went wrong with a vehicle. He didnt, it always got him going full bore with equipment, wrenches, lifts, etc. He was an accountant by trade, but cars brought him to life.

Stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld mentioned in an interview that he still goes to comedy clubs to perform every week. Obviously he isn't doing it for the money. It's the process of testing out meterials before big shows that makes him good at his acts.

My takeaway from such stories is that Passion for work and keeping in touch with the path that lead them to success helps them stay relevant and successful.

BTW, comedians literally call this "working out"—it's understood that if you don't use it, even for a week, you start to lose it. So along with a need to do it, part of it is that it's more difficult to get back into comedic shape than it is to stay in shape.

It's very similar to programming, right? I guess we can generalize it to any specialized skills/expertise. Use it or you start losing it.

It's fortunate that taking only a week off programming doesn't dull your edge. That sounds nerve wracking!

I bet it does. It's just that most programmers are used to working at 25% or less of their actual capacity due to constant interruptions, so it's less apparent.

He talks about this in the Comedians in cars getting coffee Obama episode (worth a watch!). He basically says he fell in love with the work and that’s what keeps him grounded.

Seinfeld also blames his audience when they don’t like his jokes. He’s a really, really bad example of that (common) practice.

Oh?

Yup.

I always argue the software is a new form of literacy - and if you think of it like that, it is not at all unusual that someone will keep reading and writing well into retirement.

Have fun with your unproductive beautiful coding :-)

Man it’s much easier to code if you don’t do it at work.

>I wonder if Bill Gates ever codes anything anymore, I emailed to him ask once but never got a reply.

He does (at least as of 2013): https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/18bhme/im_bill_gates_...

I'm spending the weekend making a set of custom sleeved PSU cables - I'm in the middle of a crunch at work and writing code is the last thing I want to do ... so instead I'm doing something that's monotonous, but relaxing because of it. Don't need to engage higher brain functions, just cut, crimp, cut, melt, crimp, into the connector, next.

Whilst I do extoll the virtues of working on "passion projects" with programming, sometimes you need to do something else so that you can go back recharged, and that's OK too.

If you follow John in Twitter you'll occasionally see him mention c++ quirks he ran into.

I'll bet Bill Gates can still code some mean, lean C.

Amen