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Time: 2017-03-13 04:38:31 UTC

Original URL: http://chaosinmotion.com/blog/?p=1184 [chaosinmotion.com] using UTF-8 encoding.

Title: A comment left on Slashdot

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A comment left on Slashdot

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story [chaosinmotion.com]:

An on-going conversation about stuff I find interesting.

The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth. I don’t know the number of people I’ve encountered who tell me that by being older, my experience is worthless since all the stuff I’ve learned has become obsolete.

This, despite the fact that the dominant operating systems used in most systems is based on an operating system that is nearly 50 years old, [wikipedia.org] the “new” features being added to many “modern” languages are really concepts from languages that are between 50 [wikipedia.org] and 60 years old or older, [wikipedia.org] and most of the concepts we bandy about as cutting edge were developed from 20 [wikipedia.org] to 50 years ago. [wikipedia.org]

It also doesn’t help that the youth whose accomplishments we worship usually get concepts wrong. I don’t know the number of times I’ve seen someone claim code was refactored along some new-fangled “improvement” [www.objc.io] over an “outdated” design pattern who wrote objects that bare no resemblance to the pattern they claim to be following. (In the case above, the classes they used included “modules” and “models”, neither which are part of the VIPER backronym.) And when I indicate that the “massive view controller” problem often represents a misunderstanding as to what constitutes a model and what constitutes a view, I’m told that I have no idea what I’m talking about–despite having more experience than the critic has been alive, and despite graduating from Caltech–meaning I’m probably not a complete idiot.)

Our industry is rife with arrogance, and often the arrogance of the young and inexperienced. Our industry seems to value “cowboys” despite doing everything it can (with the management technique “flavor of the month” [techrepublic.com]) to stop “cowboys.” Our industry is agist, [businessinsider.com] sexist, [cbsnews.com] one where the blind leads the blind, and seminal works attempting to understand the problem of development [wikipedia.org] go ignored.

How many of you have seen code which seems developed using “design pattern” roulette? Don’t know what you’re doing? Spin the wheel!

Ours is also one of the fewest industries based on scientific research which blatantly ignores the research, unless it is popularized in shallow books which rarely explore anything in depth. We have a constant churn [cleancoder.com] of technologies which are often pointless, introducing new languages using extreme hype [apple.com] which is often unwarranted as those languages seldom expand beyond a basic domain representing a subset of LISP. [paulgraham.com] I can’t think of a single developer I’ve met professionally who belong to the ACM [acm.org] or to IEEE, [ieee.org] and when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, [techcrunch.com] even when it is a basic algorithm problem. (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list.)

So what do we do?

Sometimes there are a rare few out there who do want to learn; for those it is worth spending your time. It’s been my experience that most software developers who don’t bother to develop their skills and who are not interested in learning from those with experience often burn out after a few years. In today’s current mobile development expansion, there is still more demand than supply of programmers, but like that will change, as it did with the dot-com bubble, [wikipedia.org] and a lot of those who have no interest in honing their skills (either out of arrogance or ignorance) will find themselves in serious trouble.

Ultimately, as an individual I don’t know if there is anything those of us who have been around for a while can do very much of anything, except offer our wisdom and experience to whomever may want to learn. As someone who has been around for a while it is also incumbent on us to continue to learn and hone our skills; just this past few years I picked up another couple of programming languages and have been playing around with a new operating system.

And personally I have little hope. Sure, there is a lot of cutting edge stuff taking place, but as an industry we’re also producing a lot of crap. We’ve created working environments that are hostile (and I see sexism as the canary in the coal-mine of a much deeper cultural problem), and we are creating software which is increasingly hostile to its users, despite decades of research showing us alternatives. We are increasingly ignoring team structures that worked well in the 1980’s and 1990’s: back then we saw support staff (such as QA and QAE and tech writers) who worked alongside software developers; today in the teams I’ve worked for I’m hard pressed to find more than one or two QA alongside teams of a dozen or more developers. I haven’t seen a technical writer embedded in a development team (helping to document API interfaces and internal workings) for at least 20 years. And we are increasingly being seen as line workers in a factory rather than technically creative workers.

I’m not bitter; I just believe we’ve fallen into a bunch of bad habits in our industry which need a good recession and some creative destruction to weed out what is limping along. And I hope that others will eventually realize what we’ve lost and where we’re failing.

But for me; I’ll just keep plugging along; a 50+ year old developer in an industry where 30 is considered “old”, writing software and quietly fixing flaws created by those who can’t be bothered to understand that “modules” are not part of VIPER or that MVC can include database access methods in the “model” and who believe all code is “self-documenting.”

And complaining about the problems when asked.

You have accurately described the tip of a very big iceberg. Fortunately there is a name for it. Think of Steve Jobs and the worship of his arrogance. The name is Aspergers syndrome. Most of the current crop of celebrity techies have it. They don’t know that they have it. It just seems normal to them. Assuming that anyone who disagrees with you is stupid is normal in the technology industry. The same issue of Slashdot that your comment appears in also contains an article about Microsoft abusing its customers. Apple users could say the same, when you point out a bug to Apple they will tell you it’s a feature. The Mac file system does not work, but they are making billions, so you must be wrong. Try telling Linux users that trying to force users of a GUI to use the command line to access basic functions has failed consistently to attract a viable market share after two decades. You won’t get a reasonable rebuttal because you must be wrong. The nerds have dropped the mic.

“The problem is that our industry, unlike every other single industry except acting and modeling (and note neither are known for “intelligence”) worship at the altar of youth.”

I don’t believe that. It may be a problem in the technology industry, but it’s certainly not unique to technology. If you look at the US government’s list of median ages by industry, technology doesn’t even crack the bottom 10.

I was surprised you don’t mention athletics. They “worship at the altar of youth” far more than technology does. Quick: name a gymnast, from any point in history, who competed when they were older than 25. At Rio last year, Aly Raisman was the oldest on the gold medal team, at 22. It’s common for gymnasts to retire in their teens.

Or look at professional musicians. Of the top 10 on the Billboard “Hot 100” today, how many artists are over 30? I see just one: Bruno Mars is a geriatric 31. There’s lots of early-20’s musicians, and at least one teenager.

The average age of Formula 1 drivers is under 30. The average age of winning F1 drivers is under 30, as well, so that figure isn’t spoiled by lots of rookies.

The average age of the US military is 30 or younger, across every branch. The Coast Guard is the oldest, at 30. In fact, the various branches actually block enrollment at age 28, 34, or 35.

I’m sure there are others — these are just the ones I could think of and verify easily.

BTW, acting is a weird one. It’s really only youth-obsessed with women. By any reasonable measure of success (money, awards, etc), men’s acting careers tend to peak in their mid-40’s. I’d describe the acting world as having a problem of sexism, rather than a problem of ageism.

I also take issue with your suggestion that fields which “worship at the altar of youth” are at odds with “intelligence”. Mathematics has long had a reputation for being a “young man’s game”, and I can name more than a few top mathematicians who did their top work when they were quite young.

Technology today has an issue with being centered on pop-culture rather than knowledge, and it might have an issue with glorifying youth (I haven’t seen this myself but I’ve heard too many secondhand reports to dismiss), but these two problems are not necessarily related, and neither one is unique to technology.

I take issue with your conflating the reality of athletes short careers based on physical damage or limitations of their speciality. Older is slower for many, many sports. Not all. It definitely is not true for SW, although management likes them well enough. Financial types like that they are cheaper.

I have retired from the SW industry and youth is its future. That is regardless of facts, knowledge, history and a wealth of knowledge that exists in senior developers. Routinely I have commented to others that ‘their unique’ problem was solved, or at least addressed, in the 70’s. Often before they were born. A specialist is good at their specialization. A software engineer understands the principles of CS & SW engineering. For a project with a new language, give them the manual, the language and they will be functional in a month or less. And very proficient in three. Less time than it takes for ‘new, young, bright’ pretenders to learn their special language.

One of the biggest problems in CS is teaching the history of our profession. We got here on the shoulders of giants, yet the newest have little if any understanding of it. I downloaded linux v.93. Then a slackware distribution, it took 24h. Finally, source code to the OS on a PC. Yet, many young developers understand nothing about linux or its very interesting history. Teaching high level coding only leaves them without a proper foundation. Teaching it is not an easy problem to solve.

Note that young mathematicians are often (if not always) standing on the shoulders of giants. As to the strength of their young, also note the length of their work once they have matured. You belittle those you praise.

How we got here: Tech bobble gold rush, big tech (google/s) takes best talent, investors only want good enough (build to a price), young bro-grammers fill need, flood of millennials (like the Chinese army) take over IT. Now we are moving as fast as we can, in the cheapest vehicle we can build, caring other people’s property.

Some of this is good. (SpaceX?) Some is pandering gossip (Facebook?) Some are rubber dog turds. (Ha.. sh– sells)

The pendulum swings: Mainframes connected to dumb terminals sending CICS to real time computing (PCs) to AWS connect to browsers sending HTML/CSS. So the bro-grammers think they are inventing something new.

Wisdom is learning from other’s mistakes. Developers today think of anything older then 5 years as obsolete. They are excited by what they think is NEW but really they are just naive.

Time is the flame in which or lives burn. If only more would take a moment and seek wisdom their products and lives would be enriched.

I’ve been IT for 40+ years. Still working. Still seeing the same mistakes made over and over again. I have a few young people I mentor and I’ve seen them move way above their co-workers.

So here is some words of wisdom if your new in IT. Find a co-worker over 50 and ask for advise.

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