edw519's Hacker Quality of Life
  
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If I am aware of the correct meaning, that is. (Not native.)

Exercise, exercise, exercise.

However I have finally started to move into management. Meetings, be nice to clients, billing and invoicing. Bit of a pain but I can still code and finally get to try and NOT be the sort of manager I used to complain about :)

When I think about high-karma HN users with douchy tendencies edw519 is not someone who comes to mind. I mean, in any account exceeding a couple of hundred posts it's probably easy to find some less than stellar content, but I don't remember edw519 ever making a post as low as you just did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4529609

And the post itself? Even if we're retroactively judging someone for voicing a less than flattering opinion about a person who is by now dead, it's not nearly as low as this ad hominem attack above. Is that the worst you could find after putting in the energy to research that guy's content a year back? I probably said worse things this month, and most likely so did you.

I already speculated how we all made some comments that we're probably not proud of, so I'm really not getting what your point is.

this statement and your whole post is just brain fart - i.e. outlandish conclusion made without knowing any facts or even basic understanding of context.

The HN community response to Aaron's cry for help was spearheaded by the above mentioned top-voted comment and was basically a prudish guilty verdict from a jury of his peers. It has prominent place in the history and is known outside of this echo-chamber, so no need for the "research".

I know, it's not fashionable to acknowledge the importance of civility, but I for one do believe it's a key factor in keeping a community productive and worthwhile. It's hard to believe that rjh29 would have engaged in that level of vitriol face to face, just as it is hard to imagine you dismissing my entire line of reasoning by selectively declaring one argument a brain fart if we had just met at the pub for a beer.

It's sometimes easy to forget there are real people on the other side of that screen and we didn't all come here just to have anonymous fights.

I don't think at all voicing your reasonable opinion on a public forum counts at all as a douche move. Not if it later turns out this opinion missed crucial information about the mental state and fragile support framework of Aaron. And especially not if that opinion was obviously shared by many members of said forum.

Claiming Edward spearheaded a negative community response to a desperate cry for help of a dying man is ludicrous. And I think you should apologize for insinuating that, as I am sure expressing these thoughts puts significant torment on Edward.

it is not about "later" and specific Aaron's mental state. It is about very specific pattern of "holier than thou" types making up and leading the approving crowd throwing rotten tomatoes and kicking a witch being drawn toward the prepared stake, an "enemy of the people" being shot or sent to Gulag, a school teacher being sent to reeducation camp, a blacklisted for "unamerican activities" actor being denied a job, and yes, a young prodigy whose life being crushed and flushed down the drain for a Prometheus like action.

>Claiming Edward spearheaded a negative community response to a desperate cry for help of a dying man is ludicrous. And I think you should apologize for insinuating that

ok, i've just checked my English through Webster

spearhead:

2: a leading element, force, or influence in an undertaking or development

you don't think his opinion was a leading element and influence in that community response ? Ok. That just my opinion against yours. Lets look what other people are saying:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-asking-for-hel...

Surprise! they cite the same comment.

>as I am sure expressing these thoughts puts significant torment on Edward.

have you read the top voted comment on this page we right now at? Sounds like that of a tormented man?

Have you even read what Edward said in that comment? No such things were insinuated. He just voices his opinion on the way Edward was raising money. It's not that radical to think Aaron's action were a bit reckless!

>Surprise! they cite the same comment. Yes.. that article was written after Aaron had already passed, and nowhere says anything about wether the comment leaded a community response. It is just an example of a community response. >Sounds like that of a tormented man? Everyone has his demons, I think if people stop blaming him for stuff he didn't do in threads that are completely unrelated, he would feel a bit better after making a nice contribution to our community like that top voted comment.

Oh and I still think you should apologize.

I'd love if we as a community could endeavor to give troll responses like that as little attention as possible.

Just in case any of you whippersnappers are wondering what it feels like to start hacking in your teens and continue (in one form or another) to be hacking into your late 40s: It is pretty much the same after the first cup of coffee in the morning. Where it differs is the lull in the afternoon makes me want to nap. (So I do.)

The drag is that until I look in the mirror? I'd tell you I'm 20-something, and I have to genuinely remind myself that I'm pushing 50.

"Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened."

Great quote btw. It made me google it-- seems Cory Harvey Armstrong. is the author, whoever that is.

> Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

None, but I might be a weird case. When I finished grad school, I was hired by TI, then Bell Labs. Both treated me like royalty. Because I am not satisfied with being treated like royalty, I went out and founded a company during 2000. I raised a ton of money from VCs (money was free back then). Bootstrapped another. So I've been running my own businesses ever since.

> Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

A bunch of years in there were hardware hacking. So lots of C and C++ through the 90s, some perl for maintainance. Never saw the need for trendy stuff until I saw Ruby on Rails. That made light work of projects I had in front of me.

> Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

Largest management position was CTO of an 85 person company. I'm happy to manage people, and believe that I can manage over the range of herding-cats to drill-Sargent. I definitely prefer the role of Field Marshall to General, ie rolling in the mud with the troops compared to suit-and-tie rub-elbows-with-those-who-need-their-elbows-rubbed.

Lately though: All hacking + customer management. We're growing, so I suspect managing more people is going to be back in my future.

Have you encountered any agism in your line of work?

Not really, and not in a negative sense. I did have an experience once where my boss sent me out to help one of our younger consultants on an engagement because, as he put it, the client "wants to see somebody with some grey in their beard". IOW, my presence was largely not needed in the technical sense, but I was there to contribute "gravitas" and comfort to the client.

Do you work with "trendy" languages and technologies or do you stick with tried-and-true, enterprisey type of stuff?

I reject your distinction between "trendy" and "entrprisey". Enterprise software and systems rock, and there's significant overlap at the systems level anyway. You may see Scala, Hadoop, Mahout, Mesos, Spark, S4, Clojure, etc. as "trendy, non enterprise" technologies, while I'm spending my time thinking of ways to use that stuff in the enterprise. :-)

Have you considered moving into management or have you always just preferred getting down on your hands and knees so to speak and hacking things together?

I have never had, and will never have, any real desire to be in "management" at someone else's company. Now, being a founder/CEO, that's a different story. I love the idea of building a company, and building the kind of company I always wanted to work for. And I've always been fascinated by marketing and some other aspects of the business world. So for me to now be a founder and in a position to run a company, is a real blast in many ways (in other ways, it's a long, hard, tough, painful, slow slog).

:( it's sad that this is sometimes required. Agism works both ways, I guess.

I like a lot of things about enterprise development, but I dislike a bunch of things, too. If this all works, I get to create a startup environment and total control (much more pleasant working conditions) and the potential for more substantial reward, but I can keep working on problems I like to work on.

  > among good technical people

Most of the people in the upper tiers got there in their early to mid 30s.

It's not to say that older people can't be petty, just that proactively engaging in politics seems to be seen as not particularly worth it. My frame of reference is that I've just turned 40 - I will probably feel differently again in 10 years :)

Infrastructure tends to have less ageism than development/software engineering. Large corporations relatively less than start-ups (agism in corps is usually tied to/masked by salary level; "it's about cutting costs"). Midwest/rural areas less than large metros and "hip locations" (due mainly to smaller pools of potential employees).

Unfortunately that has not been my experience at all. Aside from personal experience, I read constantly on HN about how you can walk in off the street and get a job in SV and NYC if you have any skills at all.

To say that's not the experience here would be an understatement. You pretty much have to know someone. One advantage of being in this game since '81 is I know a lot of people. A BSCS from a decent school will get you a job in midwest/rural, its just going to be entry level helpdesk resetting email passwords, or pulling cat5 cable. Probably about half of grads are underemployed, I see them at work all the time.

Not to say there's no advantages; if you can get one of the "good jobs" the standard of living is spectacular in midwest/rural compared to the coasts, and there's better recreation (well, depends on your personal likes/dislikes, etc). Culture is better, generally.

Every once in a while, I take a 90 minute, 100 MPH commuter train into downtown Chicago and remind myself why I don't want to live in a big city. Or go to a conference on the coasts, or visit Europe again. I don't live in a big city; that's why I can easily afford that kind of lifestyle.

Funny thing is, now that I'm in that 45-50 range, things have inverted. Now I rarely see someone above 40 or 45, unless it's management or infrastructure. It's all people in their late 20s, early 30s.

One evening I was having dinner with my wife and her nearly 70 year old parents. Her mom made a comment that has stuck with me:

"You know, we still think and feel the same way we did when we were your age."

People vastly underestimate the gap between their theories and reality. Experience forces them to change some of their theories to ideas that seem less plausible but that turn out to correspond better to reality. When they try to pass these improved ideas on to younger people without the same experience, they are often rejected. They sound less plausible than what they and their young peers take for granted.

If the younger people go on to have the same experiences as their parents, they might eventually recognize the wisdom of their elders' ideas, but if not, they might never realize how wrong they are and will easily pass the plausible-sounding bad ideas on to their own children. At some point, most of society can have a good chuckle at the old people's "out of date" ideas.

Since each generation faces different experiences, we have a mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience keeps being lost and replaced by plausible-sounding bad ideas.

You also have the mechanism whereby people point at one area that has clearly improved as evidence that today's ideas are better than those of the past. After all, today's telephone hardware is vastly better than the Lisp Machine of 50 years ago, so the design of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform must represent a substantial improvement on the best ideas from Common Lisp with the bad ideas removed.

No? Well then there's another mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience in the past can be replaced by worse ideas that just happen to end up carried to popularity by historical circumstance.

Just as I study how old-time engineers solved technical problems without using today's technologies, I try to study the writings of "old people" from ancient times to modern, and I try to learn from the "out of date" ideas that came from experiences I've never had. I find it contains more real wisdom than the taken-for-granted trendy theories popular among today's young elites. That of course makes me "feel different" and my thoughts "out of date", too.

I'd guess, instead, that these modern bad ideas are possibly good ideas that just don't jibe with your experience.

With that history in mind, the common notion that today's popular ideas are all wiser than any of the past can be seen as absurdly unlikely. Does that imply that all old ideas are better than new replacements? Of course not. It implies that some of them are.

It implies that if you are more interested in wisdom than in popularity, you should look beyond what is taken for granted as the orthodoxy of your own generation.

We're not designed to preemptively multitask; I just crash my stack when I try. We can cooperatively multitask, but the context-switching has to planned ahead. Even then, interrupts are costly. Used to be there was nothing between me and putting in a sleepless weekend on a project except me and my fatigue, which enthusiasm overcame easily. Now I've got kids and elderly parents and they're not only interrupting, they're nonmaskable. Stack-crash, context-dump and a profound weariness from loss of momentum, next stop.

I love it when I can shove in the earplugs, unplug the phone and dive in on a new learning adventure -- I hunger for that, it's part of who I am. Those times when I can trust the world to handshake timeslices and mask interrupts are very rare these days, however. From the outside it might look like slower learning; from in here, it's that the learning seldom gets any runtime.

Hard to tell, but a speedup if anything. Once you know 5 or 6 languages, another one is pretty easy to pick up by looking at it.

I've posted elsewhere: Most recent endeavor is RoR, and that was fast. It's hard for me to differentiate whether that's because I'm Mr Smart&Experienced or because Michael Hartl rocks. I suspect the latter.

Pretty sure I cannot put in as many hours though. Wish I had learned to put in fewer earlier.

You really DO learn a lot when you have more smart people around you to learn from.

1) assume that the HN readership satisfactorily correlates to the startup demographic at large

2) the majority of the respondants answered 26-30, as was also the case in the poll that tptacek referenced elsewhere in this thread

3) the longtail is heavily skewed towards the older folks, rather than towards the younger side

Just clarifying the facts. Not disputing your conclusion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5536734

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5537023

  The most significant result of this poll is that HN now seems to be past the point where we can rely on an honor system to prevent users from giving junk answers to polls. A few years ago we could. That's an unfortunate change.

A couple of years ago I faced a cross road in my career to either go into mgmt (director of UX) or commit to development. I chose to remain on the technical path and haven't regretted it one bit. I haven't experienced any overt ageism but I do feel I need to keep my skills at the cutting edge to stay on top like a cagey vet.

Looking forward (and in the mirror) I realize the clock is ticking wrt promotions and salary so I'm working on a couple of side project/apps/start-up ideas with the idea that eventually I will be able to leave the mon-fri corporate world behind once and for all.

All joking aside, it isn't so bad. EDW's chart above is pretty accurate in some ways. Certainly life doesn't end at 40(ish)...

In my case, the main issues are more joint pain, more random stiffness (after long car rides or something, for example) and other minor physical issues. Well, that and adult-onset (type 2) diabetes. But that's managed with oral medication, diet and exercise, and isn't exactly the end of the world (although I was pretty unhappy the day I was diagnosed).

I've noticed that too, and it terrifies me.

"novel experiences seem to slow time perception down. Repetition of events seems to make them go faster." from "Why Time Flies As You Age" - http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/...

In his younger years he reversed engineered the apple2 and excels in music, painting and and of course hacking like there is no tomorrow. He can literally build anything he wants to.

He is an expert in assembler and and a couple of higher level languages, but it is his assembler skills that have always amazed me because he would always produce some crazy hardware for his many passions. And he had many. This was besides running a successful bank security company.

He is a watch geek and is building this in half size from scratch litterally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Olsen's_World_Clock

One of the wrenches is 400 years to resolve around it's own axis.

Here is some of that work.

http://000fff.org/watches/523223_10150679399796150_150139365...

And here are some more of his work:

http://000fff.org/watches/134363_468677071149_7733152_o.jpg

http://000fff.org/watches/135126_468676956149_1839796_o.jpg

http://000fff.org/watches/169423_468677241149_6736953_o.jpg

He also designed this small boat harbour for the local area he lives in https://www.google.com/maps/preview#!q=bryggen%2C+copenhagen... because he bought a boat.

I somehow wonder how many Da Vinci's are out there with these kind skills. I can't even begin to think who they manage.

Would be cool to do a series of some of these holder hackers.

Most age discrimination seems to be more birth year discrimination. I don't think 34 year olds now are treated as the incompetents that we treated 34 year olds in 1999, because back then, there really were not as many 34 year olds with Internet/tech/etc experience. (Obviously some, who are now largely the not accomplished people, but it was a small percentage of the population.)

   0-10 |o
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  16-20 |OOO
  21-25 |OOOOOOOOOOO
  26-30 |OOOOOOOOOOOOO
  31-35 |OOOOOOOO
  36-40 |OOOO
  41-45 |OO
  46-50 |O
  51-55 |O
  56-60 |o
    61+ |o

I've having been developing professionally since 18. I took a weird route, spending one year at uni (17), then working full time, and getting my degrees at night before it was fashionable to do so. In ~15 years, I've had the gamut - developer to multi-geo team manager, with ownership of 9 datacenters. I vastly prefer software.

I'll echo edw519 there - quality of life increases dramatically once you get out of your 20's. The longer you're in it and learning, the more value you have. You've seen more, been around, and pick up new things faster - because they look like combinations of things you've seen before. Curve balls no longer freak you out, they're exciting.

tl;dr Getting older is actually awesome.

I came for the technical discussion, not for the startup scene.

Google "startups" and you tend to end up on a YC page pretty fast, and on HN soon after.

I came across HN while searching for code examples for forums (strangely enough). This was when Digg was still relevant, but someone suggested looking to alternatives for link sharing and HN came up in the conversation.

I lurked around for a long time and then finally joined.

I like HN and check it regularly. It has a much higher standard than reddit and thus supports more interesting discussion. Yes, I do often read the bloody comments before reading the story. Sometimes only the comments because they can be more interesting than the story could possibly.

Dang, odds are that nobody I meet in the old folk's home is going to know anything at all about functional programming or Lean Startups.

But not mentally. I've suffered from alcohol addiction since the past 4 years. I've been diagnosed with soft bipolar disorder and acute social anxiety. Occupational hazards I guess. :)

So, people who are below 30, watch your health! That's all you have left as you get older.

It's very depressing, only a couple of boxes left until the pine one...

Right now (3 days shy of 40).

if you have noticed any fluctuation? I hear you mental power peaks at about 22 and begins to decline after 26, but that's pretty depressing, and I don't want to believe it, so if you have experience to counter or confirm this, please share.

I don't really buy it. Subjectively I don't feel anything that makes me feel less smart or less capable than when I was 22. And given the huge advantage in accumulated knowledge and experience I have now, I feel FAR more capable than my 22 year old self, or my 30 year old self, or even my 35 year old self.

Does your wisdom and experience outweigh any mental decline in real-life situations?

I would say "yes". If my cognitive abilities have declined at all, I think the increase in knowledge and experience far more than compensates for that.

How does age affect creativity?

I think I'm more creative right now than at any other stage of my life.

Software is mathematical but it also requires a lot of judgement and experience. Consider that Guido van Rossum didn't even START working on Python (most popular language on HN) until age 35.

From what I can see 30's and 40's is a sweet spot for a lot of programmers. It seems like a lot of startup founders are young, but I think a lot of the guys actually making systems work have been around the block a few more times.

This is oft-repeated, but I’ve never seen any actual evidence to support it. I know plenty of mathematicians who didn’t start doing their best work until they were in their 40s, and musicians who have only gotten better well into their 60s.

Galenson claims there is a human dimorphism between people (or at least artists) who peak young and old (summarized here: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.07/genius.html)

Math, music, and chess do have the most child prodigies. It doesn't mean the converse is true, that older people are worse at them :)

However, over the years I have gained a large array of mental tools, techniques and knowledge that have vastly expanded my abilities. I am a more competent programmer now, as well as a more rounded person. We will see if that holds up for another 10 years.

I have had the privilege to work with tech folks on the other side of 40 and their experience was very handy as I was short in just that one field. Just the sheer experience helps them make better decisions. Also the fact that they have had more time to learn certain things compared to us younger ones must count to some extent maybe, right?

The first one is intelligence metrics are only permitted WRT aging which makes them impossible to intelligently compare. Culturally verboten to discuss the same metrics WRT class, race, pretty much anything else. So there's numbers... and we have no idea what they mean, if anything, in the bigger picture. OK then.

I suspect there are no large collection of serious peer reviewed numbers to back it up. A vague cultural belief of "everyone knows" but no one's really measured or documented it with enough detail and repetition to prove much of anything. Or its a statistical anomaly.. men who make it to age 20 have always lived to 60s-80s. The reason average lifespan exploded in the last century or two is 4/5ths of the kids stopped dying. Therefore the avg specs over the centuries means little to anyone already an adult. Might very well be the same effect. So no data and no critical analysis.

Another cultural problem is pigeonholing. Teen screws up, well its just hormones. Slightly older, must be on recreational drugs. A little older, well, he's the new guy. Bit older, the baby is keeping them up all night can't blame him. Now he's worried about his teenagers. Same old screwup who still screws up at the same rate as when he was 5, finally reaches a well seasoned age with no excuses left, well, his screw ups must "NOW" be because he's old, LOL. Even if a graph of "screwup-full-ness" is a perfect flat line for his whole life.

Another interesting distortion is changing jobs. Generally our culture doesn't give kids big picture jobs and old people entry level jobs. Odd how their demanded performance seems to match the stereotypical expectations.

Final cultural barrier you have to power thru is the classic, teens energy and ignorance rebel against parents wisdom and experience. I donno if you're going to be able to power past that, its a heck of a roadblock to correct for. Much like a recreational sport, the "conflict" might solely exist for fun/cultural reasons. There may be no actual difference at all, but humans love to "other" each other and get all dramatic, and this sounds like a fun topic to fight about, so...

That seems... odd, and doesn't reflect my experience. I'm doing the best and most creative work of my life right now, I wouldn't have even been capable of any of it at 22.

Linus started Linux at 21, Martin Odersky started designing Scala at around 46, likewise James Gosling fathered Java at around 39, Joel Spolsky founded Fog Creek around 35, Jack Dorsey founded Twitter around 30.

The measurement of time is a man-made system, it does not matter if you're 20 or 65. Comparing yourself with amazing people and their achievements and age will gain you nothing but discontent.

I'm 26, I'm excited with what I'm living with right now and what I'll be taking on in the years to come.

Are you trying to figure out if you are too young for something, if yes, then the answer is No you're not too young.

Are you trying to figure out if you are too old for something, then the answer is No, you're not too old.

If you're trying to figure out if you should fund someone, hire someone, have any sort of relationship with someone (regardless of the type of relationship, personal or business) based on some data, than I feel sad for you.

Did I miss anything?

0-10 - 11-15 - 16-20 --------- 21-25 -------------------------------- 26-30 -------------------------------------- 31-35 ------------------------ 36-40 ----------- 41-45 ------ 46-50 --- 51-55 - 56-60 - 61+ -

http://quickhist.onloop.net/0-10=59,11-15=39,16-20=512,21-25...

There's no way that was 2 years ago, was it?! :O

Thanks HN