Senior vs Proficient
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I am one of the people you are disparaging, as I turn 60 in less than two weeks. While I am currently the oldest member of my team, I am also the leading advocate for new technologies and new techniques. I will admit I don't do web programming. My fields of expertise include complex machine UI's, real-time distributed process control, and embedded applications. By your standards and based upon these factors I'm an out-of-date oldster who should be euthanized because I'm in your way. I will be laughing my ass off from hell when you do, as you try to run a commercial ink-jet printing system(*) from a web server. You're trying to keep track of printing four colors on both sides of the paper, at 600x900 dpi, putting down over 1 billion drops of ink per second, on paper that's moving over 10 feet per second, and that's for one system. (*) Using my current job as an example
Software Zen:
delete this;Aren't you projecting your own frustrations a bit? People come in all shapes and sizes so I try not to generalize too much. I never said old people are unskilled or stop learning two decades before they retire, I only said I've met people like that and they were called senior because they were old. In fact, I said "old or with the company for many years." (and those two usually correlate, but not necessarily.) I knew this guy, only 38, had been with the company since he was 18, so 20 years. He was one of the two senior developers and by far the best of the two, but also the worst programmer in the team. New projects stressed him out and he only worked on projects he already knew, which really weren't anything special in terms of quality or complexity. He knew the systems inside out though, and when you said "we need to update service X" he'd say "then you also need to update services A, Y and Z." The other senior was slightly older, early 40's, and he did nothing, if he did anything it caused bugs and he literally slept on the job (they put a close eye on him, probably building a dossier). These were the only two developers who could access the production environments because they were seniors. All others had to go through the least helpful bunch of sysadmins I've ever met. And in other, similar, instances the senior was just old ;) Just because you're old, doesn't mean you are skilled or knowledgeable. I've also met lots of juniors and mediors who were really bad at programming, but that wasn't the question. Likewise, I've met awesome young developers, but they rarely got a senior title as they were only around their 30's and people don't buy that. Whenever I think of old(er) people who are definitely senior and good at what they do I think of some CP members, most notably Marc Clifton. I also just read Clean Architecture and The Pragmatic Programmer, both books written by old folk! And sometimes people just work with older technologies and that's okay (like mainframe maintenance or something, I don't know), just not in the (web development) environments where I work.
Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
I am one of the people you are disparaging, as I turn 60 in less than two weeks. [...] By your standards and based upon these factors I'm an out-of-date oldster who should be euthanized because I'm in your way.
My whole point is actually that age doesn't mean an :elephant:ing thing! Happy early birthday by the way!
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I've found differently when I worked at consulting firms like sogeti and emc. The would hire at the senior level and pay accordingly, but they expected particular skills, bordering on project management, and definitely including team lead abilities.
Real programmers use butterflies
I've found new hires are set to much higher standards than own employees :rolleyes: Although I worked at a consulting firm, and with, and the average did seem to be a bit higher.
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