As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?
Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...
Not advertising it is key. I'm also coming up on 50, and people constantly are surprised when they inevitably find out how old I am. Ageism can unconsciously creep in when you have more than 15 years of experience visible on your resume, even for higher management-level positions.
Also - if you're a mid-level IC in your 40's you should start asking yourself what's stopping you from being higher up on the IC or management tracks. "Career senior engineer" is not a great place to be, long-term.
I am in my mid fifties and am closing in on 60. I am half way between IC and management.
I stopped emphasizing my full experience around 45, by fifty I was actively avoiding the subject, now I really avoid it.
I am fortunate I have a so called “baby face” thanks to my Hungarian dad.
I have found more and more that people value me a lot more as a strategic advisor than a coder, and that sweet spot works very well. In that role I can draw on my full 35+ years of experience. Stuff I did in the early 90s still has some relevance all these decades later, at a high level at least if not in the details.
Being a coding IC at this age is much harder as they can generally hire someone younger / cheaper with lower expectations and get somewhat similar results.
A lot of places will not consider you for management unless you have prior management experience, so it's a catch22. Happened to me several times despite my career aspirations being clear to my manager. I suppose it's safer to hire someone externally who's already a manager than to promote someone internally who you also need to keep doing the grunt work.
And "experience" is what allows one software architect to select the right stack, and the other to select something that turned out to be abandonware half a year later. It is what allows one developer to introduce abstractions in exactly the right place, and another to either overabstract or turn stuff into a tangled mess. It's what allows one team lead to estimate the right time and resources for a project, while the other keeps missing deadlines or burning out team-members.
I'm going towards my fifties now. And I have made, or been part of, so many mistakes, failures, errors and stupid decisions. Much more than the average 20-something colleague. I've seen software projects survive 10+ years of continuous change just fine, and others to grind to a screetching halt after even 8 months already.
I'm selling this experience now. As freelancer. I still like to write code. But the experience allows me to often not write it in the first place. Or to write very little of it. Or to map out a path that allows us to write it fast today and continue to do so in the next 15 years.
Absolutely.. that's what I mean with wisdom :-) I've been doing the same thing. When I was younger I was a little worried that I'd "age out", only until I thought about the older people I was working with. They were either the worst on the team or the best on the team. The latter group were the path I was going down so there risk was small :)
I have one of these in the garage. I think they're 6502-based with the OS on EPROM, or at least that's what I vaguely recall from last time I had mine opened-up about 20 years ago. I can dump the ROM if it'd help.
I understand he got permission and everything was checked out by actual RF eggheads, but damn. I won't even change a HV run capacitor unless i'm wearing crocs, standing on cement, and wearing the rubber oven mitts. And even then, I keep one hand behind my back. Because there have been accidents, and they hurt (the pool pump run cap fails approximately annually in this climate and if I paid someone to change it every time, I'd be a lot poorer).
That said, the food demodulating the signal into audible noise is badass.
Cement is surpisingly conductive. I have a thick rubber mat I stand on when doing high voltage (CRT, etc) repair work, and even then I have a full set of rated protective gear, and precautions (one hand in pocket, etc)
Oh man, that reminds me of a mistake I made a few years back.
I had opened up a motor controller to fix it, and I knew to discharge the cap before messing around inside. I applied a screwdriver across the terminals to short it out, and was rewarded with a beautiful long and skinny arc as the screwdriver came into contact. I said out loud, "That was cool", and my coworker sitting behind me said, "What was cool"? I told him that I had just shorted out the cap and the arc looked really cool. So he said, "Can you show me?" I said sure, and plugged the controller in for a few seconds to recharge it, then unplugged it and proceeded to repeat what I had just done.
What I had forgotten was that previously the motor controller had been unplugged overnight. When I touched the screwdriver to the freshly charged capacitor, there was a boom, a three inch fireball, and the end of the screwdriver was completely gone. As I sat there thunderstruck, my coworker said, "You're right. That was pretty cool".
Well, your comment was my deep laugh for the day. excellent story. When I was younger, I saw my father working on a ceiling fan...while it was on. I asked him why he did not flip the breaker first and he said "well, as long as you don't touch both wires at the same time, you'll be fine "
Fast forward a few days later I am at school, and I see in one of the outlets one of the prongs for a power cable had broken off in it. I remembered his advice about not touching both sides and proceeded to try and pull it out using my fingers...you can probably imagine what happened. It grabbed hold of me for a few seconds and a lesson was learned.
Ideally you’d short a run cap with a suitable resistor, but you’re right, short the cap right after de-energizing the motor circuit before touching it with your hands.
Yeah, I try to bleed it with a long-handle screwdriver for 30 seconds. In fact, the couple times I've managed to zap myself was with residual current even after that, so I can't imagine what the full potential is. It's just a no-fun job.
Indeed it is. Anybody who's spent time jamming in old basements with bad ground or two-prong plugs has learned this the hard way via a microphone or guitar (myself included). Shoes are essential - not even flip-flops are good enough because even something as simple as walking across a wet lawn will leave enough residual moisture to zap you.
In the early 1990s, the IIgs community went through this sort of "faux workstation" phase where we had 16MHz hotrodded accelerator cards, high(er) resolution graphics cards like SecondSight, and a pre-emptive multitasking operating system (GNO/ME) along with the beginnings of TCP/IP support (gstcp). If you squinted one eye, we could almost hold our own against something like SPARCStation 1 as long as you didn't want to run Mosaic. You could fire up a desktop with a few shell windows and compile C programs and telnet out while playing SoundSmith (not-quite-.MOD) songs. That is to say, we were pushing the whole mess beyond anything a sane person would even fever-dream of attempting.
The community today is putting out more releases more steadily than any other era I can recall since then, but we seem to have mostly backed off of the whole "workstation" application that was in a few dorm rooms at the time.
Edit: FWIW I just noticed the date today. Happy 8/16!
I remember being at a TUG conference (I think Texas A&M/1990) and speculating about whether it might be possible to get a working TeX implementation working on the //e. It would require hand-rewriting the whole thing in 6502 assembly and some insane use of bank-switching, but I think it could have been possible. But I had neither the time nor the hardware to do it which is, in the end, probably a good thing.
This seems to have been a pattern with all the 80s home platforms, especially in Europe.
I came from the Commodore Amiga, and used mine still in the early 00's all hacked up with cottage industry expansions and software hacks as a Mini-workstation writing LaTeX and C/C++ for Uni and a somewhat functional browser.
The Atari ST had a similar trajectory post Atari with FreeMiNT, and even smaller the Archimedes and Sinclair QL did!
There is modern new QL-compatible hardware on sale today, which still amazes me, 4 decades later.
But saying that... If one were so inclined, which I am, one could argue that the entirety of the Arm platform, including the modern Mac I'm typing this on, is an extension and development of the Acorn Archimedes.
It doesn't run the Acorn OS, but neither do modern x86 PCs. And anyway, the original OS is alive and well and runs on modern hardware:
It doesn't use the original GPU, but nor do PCs. It doesn't use the same RAM layout or anything, but nor do PCs.
But it's a compatible, extended, modernised version of the self-same CPU architecture, just like PCs are. It can emulate the old environment so you can run the old OS, just like PCs can.
Any current Arm64 device, phone or tablet or laptop or server, is every bit as much an Acorn Archimedes as a modern multicore x86-64 computer is an IBM PC.
As a longhaired teenager, I rarely got the chance to physically touch these things (although it did happen a couple times). Mostly I remember telnetting into a machine, noticing that it was Irix, and being able to login as "4Dgifts" without a password for a root shell. The joy was short-lived though, because as soon as you tried to build software (regardless of how "portable" the package was), you ran into interesting problems, if the compilers were even installed. I eventually got to spend several days with a Webforce Indy and its fancy (what we would now call a) webcam, where I took my first-ever selfie in 1995 and made my peace with the dev environment. These lil things were definitely ahead of their time, even if their price tags weren't.
Not sure if this was intended, but in Belizean creole, "Fi Wi" (pronounced "fee wee", not like WiFi) means "ours" or "for us." Good name for an MIT-licensed kernel project.
If you want to make money, there's no place like eBay to move vintage hardware. If you're more concerned about it going to a good home, show up to any sort of vintage hardware meetup (KansasFest, VCF, etc) and someone will take it off your hands. Generally speaking, most vintage hardware is something that someone else wants, with the notable exception of generic Intel/AMD clone hardware, and even that stuff is gaining traction in the community.
I have never, and I mean never, been a Windows user, even though I've been using computers since 1982. During the rise of Wintel in the early 1990s, I followed the rise of Linux and 386BSD. When Win95 and NT ruled the business desktop in the late 1990s, I sought refuge in SPARCStations, Linux, and discontinued NeXT hardware. After the turn of the century, I adopted the newly-POSIX-compliant Mac OS. All this to say, avoidance of Microsoft products has been a cornerstone of my computing policy for nearly half a century (with the notable exception of Applesoft BASIC).
It's a way of using Windows that is very tolerable to POSIX commandline diehards. The similarities are numerous and include enhanced scriptability and even small details like up-arrow command history. You could get all of that with Cygwin, but Powershell adds tight OS integration, access to COM objects (or whatever we're calling them this year) as well as the remoting of objects. It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.
> It's a useful and powerful shell that reminds me of VMS DCL and csh.
I remember watching a video on one of the various Microsoft learning sites in which Snover and another guy were interviewed about the creation of PowerShell. One of the two guys said that after they realized that UNIX-style wasn’t going to work they turned to VMS and drew a lot of inspiration from it.
2. Automatic introspection/command completion for command parameters, even user-created commands.
You can argue about a lot of other things Powershell does, but these 2 things are things which if Bash were designed today by 100 top notch software developers, would probably be part of 95 of their designs.
I get one of these every week or two. If someone says they're "impressed with the work you're doing" at my family S-corporation that magically W2-ifies my contract gigs, it's kind of a giveaway.
Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...