We need young programmers; We need old programmers
Well, I&#x27;m a bit tired of this &quot;debate&quot; (there actually isn&#x27;t one -it&#x27;s all about personal emotional baggage, when it gets stripped down to the bare skeleton, and we can&#x27;t actually reason with our reptile brains; which is where this stuff lives).<p>I admit that I did my share of whining. It was quite jarring for me to encounter the naked, unapologetic ageism in tech, but I have now come to accept that it&#x27;s just &quot;part of the landscape.&quot; I can&#x27;t change anyone else&#x27;s mind, so I don&#x27;t even try, anymore.<p>You don&#x27;t want what I have? Don&#x27;t worry; You won&#x27;t get it. I won&#x27;t waste any of our time, trying to convince you otherwise.<p>My age (and commensurate experience) helps me to <i>get stuff done</i>. I don&#x27;t pretend to have the creative flair that can dream up reusable boosters and smartphones, but I definitely have a long, long record of <i>ship</i>. I&#x27;ve been working on <i>shipping</i> product, for my entire adult life. I&#x27;m pretty good at working in a layered, modular fashion that can result in robust, highly-usable, scalable, localizable and accessible software that can project and reinforce branding, as well as actually provide a revenue stream, and establish a legacy. I&#x27;ve written software that lasts <i>decades</i>.<p>But that doesn&#x27;t seem to be what the industry wants. Quick lash-ups are more valuable. I understand why. They can act as &quot;MVPs,&quot; and iterate quickly. That&#x27;s actually a really important feature, and one that us ol&#x27; fogeys don&#x27;t always appreciate. When I look back on my career, I shipped a lot of dross, as well as a (far fewer) number of really good products. The quality of my work improved dramatically as I got older; mostly because I screwed up so much, earlier. I&#x27;m grateful that none of my screwups turned into the Jurassic-scale disasters we read about all the time.<p><i>&quot;Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.&quot;</i><p>At the moment, I&#x27;m working on a social media-style system. It&#x27;s fairly ambitious. I can&#x27;t even imagine my younger self working on this kind of thing, but I am grateful for the long trail of work by others that give me pitfalls and patterns to use. Younger me would have ignored all that, slapped together stuff without proper design or testing, and turned out some real crap. A lot of people would have been hurt by my cruddy workmanship.