clifanatic

> You are only as old as you believe you are.

Well, I'm 42 and I believe I'm 20... until I spend any time hanging around 20 year olds.

> It was actually Steve Russel

I seem to recall reading that McCarthy was actually surprised to discover that Lisp _could_ be run by a real computer; he intended it to be a completely theoretical tool.

> most of the jobs are for senior roles.

They mean 3-5 years.

I really don’t think that’s what he’s saying, and if at least some of this doesn’t resonate with you, you’ve never looked for (programming) work after 40. The problem is that programming is, by it’s nature, “strange” work. In every other job, you perform some function for a long time, learn all the ins and outs of it, and then move on to manage other people who are performing that function: break their work down into tasks, assign different people to different tasks based on skill sets, suggest timeframes, etc.. That’s true from sandwich making up to neurosurgery. Programming work seems to defy that natural progression. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now, and I’m no better at breaking software development projects down into discrete tasks for _other people_ to carry out than I was when I started - and I’ve never met nor worked with anybody else who could, or even pretended they could. So we have this odd career where you start out as a programmer, and you stay a programmer until you retire. Couple that with the outsiders expectation that programming is getting easier when the reality is that the opposite is true, you have a _lot_ of people with a very low opinion of programmers as professionals - i.e. if you were actually any good, you wouldn’t have to be doing this any more.

Yeah, I've never really understood being _offended_ by being asked to do something relatively simple (and honestly, those are actually pretty good problems). I might consider it a little amusing if somebody asked me to write FizzBuzz or something really basic, but I would shrug my shoulders and do it.

> were started/ramped up under W. Bush

Assault on privacy and massive surveillance started as soon as the internet became a household word - which actually happened under Bill Clinton.

I think a lot of this religious behavior stems from an underlying belief, mostly by people who've never tried it themselves, that programming _must be_ easy and anything that makes it appear hard (and especially slow) means that somebody is making a mistake somewhere. So they go looking for a silver bullet, and the latest fad seems to fit the bill.

Jesus Christ, Scrooge, it was a joke. And not even remotely contrary to any of those guidelines.

> There is no union nor labour law in China (well technically they both exist but..).

Same thing in America.

> So labour abusing is normal.

Same thing in America.

> Many tech workers are 'voluntarily' working 996 on a 955 pay slip.

Same thing in America.

There's a great, fun, programmer-centric website called thedailywtf.com (sorry, I just scheduled the rest of your afternoon for you). Developers can submit WTF's that they've found in other's code - as the site admin says, "curious perversions in information technology".

One thing that strikes me about the majority of the submissions, as funny as they are, is that they mostly boil down to "so-and-so didn't know that such-and-such feature existed, so wrote reams of code to implement that feature in a complex way". It also strikes me that just this article's sort of analysis of "prolific" (aka "good") engineers/programmers drives this same sort of behavior. If every developer is supposed to be committing code all day, every day, there's no time left over to read the product documentation, try out a new feature, review a reference implementation, read a blog post: to be "good", you must be spending as much time as possible _typing_, because that's what you're paid to do. This (ubiquitous) management mentality is how we end up with roll-your-own crypto, or five competing Javascript frameworks, parsing using regular expressions... it's not so much that what they did was wrong - and trust me, if it works, it won't be removed - it's that it's pointless.

> how many people here seriously believe the result would not be exams in Agile Software Craftsmanship Manifesto Driven Development

Well, since the sort of people who set up regulatory exams are likely to be the same sort of people who design college curricula, I don't think that would be the case at all. I suspect that a software licensing exam would cover things like algorithmic complexity, NP-completeness, pushdown automata, Turing completeness, LR parsing, etc. etc.

My kids were born 11 and 13 years ago... can I get a job there and take those 40 weeks retroactively?

At my last job, my title was "Vice President" (against my preference). There were five of us. I was Vice President over nobody, and spent all my time doing the same things I do (programming computers) at my current job with the title "software architect". If titles didn't used to be meaningless, startup culture has rendered them so.

> Younger people are not smarter. They might learn faster new things.

I was a young person once (no, seriously!). I _thought_ I was learning things fast back then. When I got older, I realized I was trading speed for depth.

> That recipe to stay current looks tiresome. ... Your reward: you are still employable.

It does make pursuing a career in programming seem dubious, doesn't it? There's an old saying about "clawing your way to the top", but sometimes it feels like I'm clawing my way back to where I started. I feel like I'm expected to have instant answers to any question and immediately comprehend any technology (regardless of its level of documentation or comprehensibility). I actually do enjoy learning about new things (and old things!), but most of the time, we're not paid to learn, we're paid to instantly know, and if you don't instantly know, there are 20 guys lined up around the block who are ready to take your place as soon as you admit that you don't know how to set up pass-through SSL using the undocumented firewall product that was installed last week that you don't have credentials for and we don't have time for you to waste reading documentation because there's a customer deadline and there's no slack in the schedule. The only other career I can think of that you have to put this much ongoing personal effort into is entertainment; it's like we have all the downsides of entertainment careers without any of the upsides.

On the other hand, I can't imagine doing anything else - every other job (except maybe astronaut) looks murderously boring to me.

Heck, even software with the equivalent level of unpopularity (PHP) doesn't disappear.

Next month - 30 days of web coding using only vanilla C! Day 1: write a web browser!

(I kid, this is awesome)

> technical interview process

Even before that is the technical screening process. If the company has standardized on Angular 2, your experience with Dojo, Ext-JS, jQuery and even Angular 1 is considered irrelevant by the screeners - you may as well have experience in medieval basket weaving; they won't even call you. If the company has standardized on Groovy, your experience with Java is equally irrelevant. If the company has standardized on MySQL, your experience with Oracle is irrelevant. If the company has standardized on Linux, your experience with Solaris is irrelevant. And on and on it goes...

There's a perception (which I've already seen repeated 10 times in this thread, and I'm only halfway through it) that the "new thing" always completely replaces and invalidates the old thing. But that's almost never the case. Angular uses jQuery. jQuery uses Javascript. Javascript uses the DOM. Groovy uses Java. Hibernate uses JDBC. AJAX uses HTTP. HTTP uses TCP/IP. They all use the OS. And when X uses Y, Y can go wrong in ways you didn't expect if you just assumed that Y became meaningless when X came along.

So we have this environment where the hiring managers are shooting themselves in the foot by looking for style over substance and anybody who tries to bring it up is dismissed as a dinosaur with a case of sour grapes.

> Have lots of sex - your wife will love you again

Unless she finds out.

> shows you several links, including the ones from Stack Overflow.

And all of the stack overflow answers that were linked from the top of the google search are "Have you ever heard of Google, N00B?"

Looking at the link I'm inclined to agree with Don.

> Why do you think that is the wrong approach?

"Because you should write code that works in the first place!" -- your boss

"Surely I'm misreading that title..."

"Nope, that's really what it is..."

> Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable.

Seems to be working for the American Bar Association.

> Because he got handcuffed.

He actually asked them to handcuff him and then take his picture because he said it would look cool. Look at the picture, the police officers are smiling in the background. He played them.

So, you drive around trying to catch Amazons on your phone?