Disclaimer: I didn't read the full article. I can't stomach these types of "career strategy" articles anymore. This approach to life in general is very misguided (maybe less so if you just want a career to fulfill other goals), but for those who want to pursue a more idealistic life, just pursue your passions. Plan B is being an improv comedian. Plan B is writing the great American novel. Plan B is traveling the world as a war correspondent.

I left corporate world precisely because I felt "planning my career", as I was encouraged to do, was an absolute false way to live (for me). I couldn't reconcile the absurdity of it with the severity of the consequences if I didn't do it. But the consequences are all socially constructed, and they go away as soon as you change your mentality.

When I think of my heroes, I don't think of people who've hedged their bets here or there - they just did what they felt they had to.

I'm that "geezer". Coded in C and C++ for over a decade, and now I'm working in the magical world of Rails, where I get to watch 20-somethings rediscover the value of old ideas the hard way. (Given the average comment thread on Hacker News, and you'd be excused for wondering why anyone ever used compiled languages or static typing. Silly dinosaurs!)

That said, while I appreciate your sentiment, I know in my heart that the author is right. All of my friends from college have moved out of programming. Many have left the industry completely -- and we're not even that old! The bottom line is that there's little or no cost advantage to hiring an older coder, when I have t-shirts that are older than the most popular development environments.

Every once in a while, some young geek chimes into these conversations with the observation that one needs only "keep up with technology" to stay relevant in the industry. But even ignoring the fact that "keeping up" is usually easier said than done, the economics just don't work out. My friends who went to medical school are finishing their residencies and starting in private practice; my friends who went to law school are making partner. In most industries, you're just beginning your career when you're in your early 30s. In software, you're already old enough to be a conversation topic.

I don't think there should be undue stigma or speculation when founders move on. The type of person who can cast a vision that brings a company to this point isn't always (or rarely is) the same person who will thrive on the task of maintaining a company once it reaches, or nearly reaches the founder's original vision for it. There is nothing wrong with finding the most opportune moment to bow out, provided you aren't screwing over anyone else.

This is far and away the best description of the attraction to starting up for me.

I don't want to retire young; I want to keep making things. I just want to do them on my terms.

This reasoning doesn't take into account the fact that a lot of people are very bad at programming and get tired of doing something they're very bad at. We have a fair number of bad programmers in their twenties, few in their thirties, and probably none over 35. It isn't because they get better. The only middle-aged programmers we have are absolutely solid.

Leaving a comment on T/C is like spinning a roulette wheel. It can be really frustrating to have comments censored when they are not incendiary or trollish in any way. What's shocking is that many racist / homophobic / trollish comments are posted regularly. If you agree with Arrington on one of his douchy posts about how the NY Times doesn't understand journalism, you can say whatever you want.

Initially I stopped visiting techcrunch because of the ignnorance and hatred in the comments for a post Arrington made about a T-shirt company that sold intentionally offensive and incendiary products. I revisited a few months later (after I read they reshuffled and hired more reporters). Things were a little better for a while but Arrington seems to have returned to his aggressive and argumentative self. I didn't see discussion of it here but yesterday he went off on the Times and attacked their journalistic integrity for reporting techcrunch's dubious recent history (see last.fm).

Laporte is right, though, Arrington is a troll. He picks fights with anyone he can. "What are you gonna do about it" seems to be his attitude about everything, and when people disagree, he censors their comments from his Bully pulpit. This is no different from what people like O'Reilly and other right wing radio hosts do when they cut the microphone of people they do not agree with.

Not to downplay the severity of people's health problems when it comes to certain sleep conditions, but I've observed a basic principle in life: When you try to work in ways that go against the basic design of your body you have to resort to a lot of complicated things to coddle and cajole your body into going along with it. 300 dollar sleep devices, mattresses, alarm clocks et al.

At the end of the day, I wonder how many sleep issues would go away if we ate correctly, stayed active, turned the lights out at dusk and kept the blinds open for when dawn peeks through the curtains. When we operate outside our design parameters we can function, but we function as visitors. Encumbered with our mass of tools, plans, pills and procedures designed to enable us to survive outside the envelope. Necessarily? Sometimes yes. Elegant? Almost never.

The only thing this article made me want to do is visit that hot spring in Japan.