← Back to context

Comment by godelski

16 hours ago

Hard to say but to back his claim that he was programming since the 90's his CV shows he was working on stuff that's clearly more than your basic undergraduate skill level since the early 2000's. I'd be willing to bet he has more years under his belt than most HN users. I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's, and this guy has been programming most my life. Though that doesn't explicitly imply experience, or more specifically experience in what.

That said, I think people really under appreciate how diverse programmers actually are. I started in physics and came over when I went to grad school. While I wouldn't expect a physicist to do super well on leetcode problems I've seen those same people write incredible code that's optimized for HPC systems and they're really good at tracing bottlenecks (it's a skill that translates from physics really really well). Hell, the best programmer I've ever met got that way because he was doing his PhD in mechanical engineering. He's practically the leading expert in data streaming for HPC systems and gained this skill because he needed more performance for his other work.

There's a lot of different types of programmers out there but I think it's too easy to think the field is narrow.

29 comments

godelski

Reply
mikewarot  14 hours ago

>I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's

I'm 62, and I'm not old yet, you're just a kid. ;-)

Seriously, there are some folks here who started on punch cards and/or paper tape in the 1960s.

  • wombatpm  9 hours ago

    I played with punch cards and polystyrene test samples from the Standard Oil Refinery where my father worked in the early 70’s and my first language after basic was Fortran 77. Not old either.

  • godelski  13 hours ago

    Thanks. I meant is more of in a joking way, poking fun at the community. I know I'm far too young to earn a gray beard, but I hope to in the next 20-30 years ;-) I still got a lot to learn till that happens

techiferous  19 minutes ago

> I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's,

The 30s is the first decade of life that people experience where there are adults younger than them. This inevitably leads people in their 30s to start saying that they are "old" even though they generally have decades of vigor ahead of them.

pjmlp  2 hours ago

My first home computer was bought in 1986, before that the only electronics at home were Game & Watch handhelds, like Manhole.

I guess I am reaching Gandalf status then. :)

AceJohnny2  14 hours ago

> I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's

sigh

  • bojo  14 hours ago

    I feel like a grandpa after reading that comment now.

    • psychoslave  1 hour ago

      This year my in-your-face-old-fart-moment was realising I was contributing to Wikimedia projects for longer than some fellow wikimedians existed. XD

  • godelski  14 hours ago

    But am I wrong? I am joking, but good jokes have an element of truth...

    • omnicognate  13 hours ago

      Depends what you mean by "old". If you mean elderly then obviously you're not. If you mean "past it" then it might reassure you to know the average expecting mother is in her 30s now (in the UK). Even if you just mean "grown up", recent research [1] on brain development identifies adolescence as typically extending into the early thirties, with (brain) adulthood running from there to the mid sixties before even then only entering the "early aging" stage.

      For my part, I'm a lot older than you and don't consider myself old. Indeed, I think prematurely thinking of yourself as old can be a pretty bad mistake, health-wise.

      [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65974-8

      2 replies →

    • AceJohnny2  13 hours ago

      It'd be interesting the know the median age of HN commenters.

      I guess the median age of YCombinator cohorts is <30 ?

anthk  3 hours ago

38 there. If you didn't suffer Win9x's 'stability', then editing X11 config files by hand, getting mad with ALSA/Dmix, writing new ad-hoc drivers for weird BTTV tuners reusing old known ones for $WEIRDBRAND, you didn't live.