I absolutely love that there are seasoned experts like you on HN.

Would you mind sharing with us what you're working on these days?

Compared to you I'm relatively young (I've been programming around 26 years) and in my circles I don't get to mix with too many older programmers.

Would love to hear your thoughts on career trajectories.

For me personally, I'm gradually spending less time on pursuing commercial interests, and more time on pro bono projects - and I love the idea of working on open source software indefinitely once I retire.

Cheers from South Africa.

I have many authors to thank.

I've been extremely lucky to mostly have worked with mostly ordinary programmers with some extremely good[1] thrown in and luckily even with the brilliant ones all except two of them were also down to earth and nice as well.

[1]: "master of all trades", all-knowing teacher types with "saintly" patience, learns-anything-in-two-hours-and-proceeds-to-fix-hard-bugs-after-lunch

Programming became a lot easier when Visual BASIC and Delphi came out. Just drag and drop controls.

Due to ageism I am sure I don't fit the culture of a startup or relate to 20 somethings. They hire them young anyway not old. So I do tech support for family and friends to get by.

Whatever you believe, your brain, like a sentry, will find confirmation for. Be careful with that.

(And this can work on in a good way too -- if you say to yourself maybe: I like these people, I like most people, what matters is not age, but if the others are curious and want to learn new things)

Now, of course I do believe that ageism is a thing, still, I'd think there're somewhat many good workplaces that aren't much affected by it

I can learn any language on the market if I wanted to. I am a quick learner as I have the theories of computer science in my head as I learn.

Have a nice weekend tomorrow

Work on projects, not at jobs...that’s my advice.

I wasn't part of the couple waves of programmers, but I think it is fair to say I was in pretty early. Retying out programs from magazines isn't even something most programmers have considered these days, let alone programming without the internet.

But the essence of your comment is right. Of course there would be people out there that have programmed for twice as long as I have. That's a little frightening to think of.

Oof, this takes me back to the day I learned about RAM the hard way. I was typing out a program from a magazine. It seemed like it took forever, even then. About halfway through the computer rudely informed me that 4K of RAM is not, in fact, enough for everyone.

I learned originally on a VIC-20 by typing in games out of books from the public library. At some point we upgraded to an XT and a friend sold me a copy of Power C for $20. It came with a beautiful hard copy library reference and the rest, as they say, is history!

Check this out for a trip down memory lane: http://www.mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm

Yeah, the graphics library was great! When I moved on to Linux and gcc, I was disappointed for a while that I didn't have all those super simple primitives to work with.

I'm still retyping stuff from stack overflow instead of copying. I find it really effective to really think through the code you're borrowing from somewhere — because once it's committed under your name, you're the one responsible for it.

As Morpheus said, “Time is always against us”.. so I just made sure it followed our coding standards, checked the test cases, and moved on.

But, I am old enough to remember code listings in magazines. I like to think the typesetters introduced deliberate mistakes because they hated the work so much - not to disrespect the fine profession of typesetters, but when you set your 100th `Poke` command in a row, you might think this isn’t what you signed up for..

Numerical Recipes in C. Had the hard copy but not the disk.

Often the code was just to obscure to work out as you typed, but there was some real value to typing it in. You got some real feel for it. Additionally it offered hard lessons in writing test cases.

When I compare the skill involved with something like violin versus the skill that's needed to validate HTML forms with JavaScript or creating an application in Visual Basic, I really do not believe that people that happened to study software at a young age happen to be geniuses just because they did. Yes I'm smart, but I really believe that this path could be open to anyone that age if they have the interest and I think the internet has unlocked many people that have learned the same skills without the credentials.

I no longer believe that "anyone with an interest" can be at the same level as someone that can just see the answers, with little effort. Some people have fewer/shorter tendrils.

This has definitely changed the way I interact with people. I used to get frustrated when people, who I thought should be able to understand, couldn't. Now I realize that they just can't as easily. They need that picture drawn out for them, and even then, they'll never see the nuances or perceive the textures of the problem, unless you point it out to them.

I think I'm lucky for being born with the mind that I have. It has made my life easy, pulling me out of poverty, with a mostly addictive enjoyment in what I do. I think you're probably luckier than you realize.

Your ability to 'just see the answers', in this framing, stems from having a lot of data points readily available and the ability to combine them together quickly.

There are definitely people who are better at remembering things, and piecing multiple ideas together quickly, but these are also skills that can be trained. I think it's likely that a lot of 'intelligent' people are simply people who actively (though usually not consciously) train these skills because they enjoy them.

In the same way that many fit people don't have to think about exercising - they do it because they enjoy it or without any particular goal - there are people who see an interesting problem and immediately start thinking about how they might solve it or how it's similar to other problems they've seen.

In the same way that anyone can implement a training regime to improve their fitness I think anyone can implement a training regime to improve the number of data points available to them (read lots!) and their ability to combine that information together (solve puzzles, especially theoretical/not personally applicable ones like "how would I get that boat free?").

I think it's odd how many people make up their own private theories about these things :-)

When there's research available about how intelligence "happens".

If you’ve got links/references/keywords for research that invalidates (or validates!) these ideas please share them, I’d love to look them up. From what I’ve read the idea “intelligence can be (at least in part) described as having knowledge and being able to apply that knowledge to new problems” is a well trodden one.

I haven’t seen much on the idea that some people may be predisposed to engaging with stimulating situations, so anything you have on that topic would be highly appreciated. I have seen writings on how a stimulating environment is important, and on how encouraging engagement can be effective (for example asking questions of children and allowing them to answer, vs answering for them).

[edit] In my original post I should probably have written “is to frame a lot of what people call intelligence as” - I definitely don’t think this is all intelligence but I do think it has a significant role in what the gp was talking about, this ability to see answers quickly.

Ok then i understand better what you mean.

Actually there's a word for that type of intelligence:

Crystallized intelligence.

And I had another type of intelligence in mind:

Fluid intelligence.

I think we spoke past each other (or I spoke past you) thinking about different things.

Anyway, one of those, one can improve eg by reading, getting life experience. But the other one, is fixed (from what I've read) once one is grown up.

If you want to, you could websearch for those words. And also, wikipedia has a section about intelligence and inheritance (hint: life is unfair).

> I have seen writings on how a stimulating environment is important, and on how encouraging engagement can be effective (for example asking questions of children and allowing them to answer, vs answering for them).

That sounds great :-)

From what I've read, those things do work (!), when one is a kid / young. And from what I've read, it also prevents the brain from deteriorating, when one is old (using one's brain reduces the risk for dementia).

(Thanks for the reply)

> everyone seemed to think I was smarter than I believed I was. I feared I might fail miserably and finally prove how wrong they were about me

I can totally relate to that. Once everybody told you you're a genius, the pressure not to fail is incredible.

I started programming at 8. I got next to no help from my parents or my teachers, until the time I entered college, and by that point I felt I knew as much as the professors, sometimes more. I always avoided talking about programming, since that would get a me more genius calls on top of what my grades got me. And it doesn't help with making friends. Over the years I had maybe one or two friends who knew about it. Few would've believe me if I had told them what I could do.

I feel like there's nothing special about the path I took. I feel like anyone would be able to achieve the same knowledge I did given enough work and support. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in my teens. What nobody seem to realize is that the genius label is wrong, what they really should have told me was that I was "passionate". Anyone who is passionate enough can become a master.

That's what I think about when I hear people complaining about gatekeeping in our field. The books are open, the courses are there, interesting and useful applications abound. Given the same level of effort I think much of the difference between social groups would vanish.

If it was more practically-orientated, then I agree with you :).

I'm not really sure what to work on next. I was focussed on arms control for cyberweapons for a while, and I made some real progress, but I want to work on something new now. Maybe finding a way to scale up good things like trust or good will? I want to find something where I'm making the world a better place but also working on something that makes me smile. Trying to fight weapon dispersion is exhausting and discouraging and, ultimately, as I learned, futile.

Have you made any progress finding something new to work on?

Maybe I'm projecting here, but I'd imagine this is the dream of most of HN, no? But I don't know which is harder: finding such a unicorn idea, or executing on it once you've found it.

Have you considered working in the cryptocurrency space next? I think that would satisfy your desire to find ways to scale up trust. One of the key value propositions of crypto is building trust at scale on the pillars decentralization, cryptography, game theory, and economics.

Wow. Flashback. I started programming late age wise (college freshman in the 90s), because until that first student loan we didn’t have enough money to buy a computer. I would go to the local bookstore and copy code out of the programming magazines and books. I remember writing some c++ code, bumping into a problem I couldn’t solve and driving to the bookstore to look at the books for a solution.

I'd never say of myself that I've been programming "for a long time", let along "a long, long time".

I have a good friend that worked during the 60s era programming with punch cards doing applied physics work in FORTRAN (pre 77) which was already pretty big by then. You could probably go back a bit further but I don't think much was being actively taught as a sort of course one might expect today then. So I'd say you could have at most 65ish years of programming since formal use in college.

No, it was not software engineering at the time per se but I'd absolutely call it programming.

Per Wikipedia, 1953. Coincidentally the same year that RMS—not exactly the youngest programmer around—was born.

But that waa a graduate degree. Undergraduate probably sometime between then and 1962 when Purdue opened the first full CS department, I would assume.

You could easily have a CS degree and be past normal retirement age.

Was quite common to do 2-3 years then drop out and start a job. So much so that people with degrees were often looked down on. Exceptions for things like MIT.

After year 3, there was nothing left for me to take. So I took a job.

I would like to have a degree, but it was the right call at the time.

Few years ago I went back and started an Art degree. Was a blast.

Story goes that she had a campus job cleaning, and made good friends with the guys in charge of running the mainframe by bringing them food and drinks when she stopped by. Which of course meant she could often get them to sneak her stack of cards into the queue overnight.

Details are fuzzy since I last heard the tales over a decade ago, and haven't dug the assignments out in forever.

NC State was celebrating 40 years of CS in 2006 or so and they weren't the first. CS degrees have been around since the 1960s, so 50+ years at this point of CS as a separate degree program in the US. Apparently Cambridge offered their first CS degree in 1953.

https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/about/history-and-heritage/