Re:Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?
by fjfaase on Friday March 25, 2022 @11:02AM
(#30803007)
I am almost the age of your dad and I have been a professional software engineer since 1986. In the first years I worked with Pascal (VAX-Pascal and Turbo-Pascal.) From 1990, I mostly used C and C++. The last two years I have been working with C#. Now that I am getting a bit older, I noticed that it takes me more time to get know a developing environment and all the libraries/packages that go with it. It is a big leap from knowing how to develop an excel sheet to, for example, develop a website with a database backend. I am always happy to have younger colleagues who are good at setting-up a development environment. Also being an efficient software developer is much more than knowing how to program.
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Re:Ask HN: Starting a Career in Programming at 61?
by iguanayou on Friday March 25, 2022 @11:29AM
(#30803341)
Taking longer to get up to speed and setting up a development environment: I'm not sure that's a function of age. It's more likely because development environments truly have gotten larger and more complicated over time.
I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.