Comment by temphn
13 years ago
If your first priority is your kids, your first priority is not your work. That's fine, it's a choice, but there is a frequent claim that the massive incremental time demand of kids makes one so much more time efficient at work that it more-than-compensates. Insofar as one is the same human being, with the same energy reservoirs and time management skills as before your child was born, this is unlikely.
I understand the reason this fiction is maintained: people with kids need the job even more than people without, and have an interest in denouncing people who claim kids make you less productive. There's also the second order effect in which "with kids" is correlated with "older".
The net of it though is that devs with kids tend to assign work a lower priority, to take fewer risks, to need more money, and to be older and hence less familiar with new technologies (and too busy to learn in their free time).
Society doesn't have a good answer for this situation yet. In times past, technology didn't move so fast that experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time. A 40 year old farmer with kids in 1713 would probably have much to teach a young whippersnapper. The same isn't true for a 40 year old programmer with kids in 2013.
LOL at technology moving fast and experience becoming obsolete in "a decade's time." I'm not even that old--I started programming in the late 1990's--but I've been programming more than a decade, and as far as I can tell all that has happened to mainstream programming technology in that time span is bike-shedding. There has been basically nothing new in mainstream programming since about the 1980's ("Oh, NewtonScript looks like C now instead of Pascal, and we're calling it Javascript? That's nice.") In many ways it's gone backwards (the sorry state of Javascript IDE's relative to Visual Studio 6.x not to mention Smalltalk IDE's a decade older than even that). "Oh, you can use threads in web apps now? Like you could in Win32 apps since 1995?"
To a first approximation, all this new "web technology" is just a way of doing what you could've done on an internet-connected NeXT machine 20 years ago, only more brain-damaged and frustrating to work with.
The only place technology has advanced in that time period is in domain-specific areas (which of course requires experts, not young whippersnappers), and infrastructure (the world looks a lot different for computers with pervasive 4G--the software is just an adaptation of proven concepts to uses enabled by innovative hardware).
Programming is applied mathematics, and that hasn't changed substantially since people were developing software on punch cards.
The main thing that's changed for what you call infrastructure is that a massive proportion of people are connected from a plethora of different devices on different kinds of networks.
That wouldn't have been possible without the web. The web technologies you decry are more irritating in many ways than any one specific proprietary system from 20 years ago, but that ignores some of the huge benefits of openness and standards and platform independence.
I can write a program and have it run without modification on my phone, on an embedded computer running sensors, on a tablet, on my laptop, my desktop computer, my hifi, my network hard drive, a huge server being rented to me on the other side of the world. I can even make it easily distributable so it can run safely on other peoples computers who don't fully trust me. It's unimaginable that any proprietary system from 20 years ago would have been able to produce that state of affairs.
I do agree that open standards are necessary to make the modern web work, but those aren't advances in technology per se, they're advances in organization. There's no technology in HTML/JS/WebGL that didn't exist in SGML/Obj-C/OpenGL. There are no breakthrough new concepts that "old programmers" have to wrap their minds around. Rather, it's just the organizational process of agreeing on the color of the bike shed (in this case puke green). Don't get me wrong, organization is important, but standardization isn't technological change.
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"I can write a program and have it run without modification on my phone, on an embedded computer running sensors, on a tablet, on my laptop, my desktop computer, my hifi, my network hard drive, a huge server being rented to me on the other side of the world. I can even make it easily distributable so it can run safely on other peoples computers who don't fully trust me. It's unimaginable that any proprietary system from 20 years ago would have been able to produce that state of affairs."
That's what Java was about. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language) it appeared 1995 - 18 years ago.
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Same thing is basically true of physics - the Standard Model is still the best one we have.
When will we get it that in real life, people don't have "first priorities" just as they don't have "arch enemies"? :) Really, any sane not-overworked not-burned-out team will benefit from older more experienced devs in it. If you're overworking the shit out of everybody, of course that the older-with-kids guys will underperform. But if you are overworking people like hell, it probably just means that you are doing things very inefficiently and compensating by "sheer work power" and shooting yourself in the foot by making the experience holders work at 40% of their top performance because of the environment (ok, I agree, this might be a good trade-off for some businesses). Chill out a bit, do things the right way and at the "natural" pace and you don't need to care about this "problem" or use the nine-to-five-with-kids stereotype. As one wise man told me once: you can't "move fast and break things" kiddo, because all that time spent fixing the things you break actually means that you're not moving as fast as you can or fast enough.
> experience was mostly obsolete (and hence useless) in a decade's time
I'm 28, which means I'm young enough that even people like you believe I can learn new tricks. As far as I can tell, my brain is still fully functional. That said, most of what I use every day, I learned over ten years ago. Computer science never gets old. The notion of indirection is never obsolete. The mental machinery required to navigate up and down in an abstraction hierarchy is universal. Sure, I learn new APIs every day, read about new programming paradigms (hey, functional reactive programming is cool), and so on, but I learned all the basics way back when.
Would you say that all my older experience is worthless? If your hypothesis were correct, I should be able to say that what I'm learning now is more important than what I learned in 1998, and that's just not true.
Even technology-wise, a lot of the knowledge you got 10 years ago could still be applicable. For example, as a result of having learned webdev in the '90s, I actually know how to manipulate the DOM and work around cross-browser issues even when jQuery isn't available, which it is my impression a lot of professionals have no clue about these days. Similarly, I learned Objective-C and Cocoa about a decade ago, and I know others with grayer beards than mine who learned it almost a decade before that — I would say that experience is actually more valuable in the modern development landscape than it was back then.
Most of the cool new programming paradigms are pretty old. I learned Haskell about 15 years ago and its taken the cool kids years to discover it...
I bet the "inventor" of the "cloud" thought it was some new discovery too. Those of us useless 40+ people with evil kids and no skills left know different, and smile...
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If anything, one of the main complaints I read between the line of the original post was a lack of senior devs keeping the juniors in check.
What are you basing all of these assumptions on? All you've contributed to the conversation is more stereotyping. If you have something to cite I'm happy to look at it.
Most of the assumptions you've made don't apply to me, a 40 year old father of two. It may very well apply to some people similar to me. This is the problem with stereotypes and the problem with people perpetuating them. Oversimplifications are a shoddy mental crutch to deal with the complexities of reality.
What the OP wrote is the same kind of thing I'd have said at 22, before I knew any better. Now 32 (and, at least for another four months, childless) I turn a little red reading it.
The older you get, the more experienced you become, the better decisions you make, the more valuable you become.
At 22, I was a great tactician. I could code faster than anyone else.
At 32, I'm a moderate strategist. I code slow than when I was at 22; but my productivity is far higher.
At 52, I hope to be a great strategist. The potential is frightening.
I concur. I'm 34, been programming "properly" (think C, C#, JavaScript, Python, Objective C etc) for over 20 years now, and I've noticed that in the last couple of years most of my productive coding time is just thinking.
3 hours of sitting thinking about a problem, then 30 minutes of coding. I would never have done that at 20, I'd have opened an editor and started typing because I was still learning the intricacies of the platform.
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Ah yes, 20-somethings without kids are famous for having work be their first priority.
Having kids can put a lot more structure into a life that was missing it before. 20-somethings without kids are usually the ones late in in the morning, missing standups, or the ones working while hung over.
I'm sure that it is possible to get someone who is so dedicated to their work that they have no life at any age. Whether or not this is a good idea for your company is a different question.
There's so much wrong with you condescending and arrogant post that it's hard to know where to begin.
Where do you think bad, old developers come from? Well, they started off as untalented young developers. Right now now there are young developers who are awesome and others who suck and will one day become crappy, old developers.
I could go on about stories where youth and inexperience led to disasters. They would be just as one-sided as talking about old developers who are out of touch. Who do you think it is that's creating all if the tools that you use?
It's about the work.
Employees who are parents are less productive. Logically, it follows that there would be measurable degredation in society over time, as long as workers keep procreating. Society's decline is irrefutable.
I hope the explanation for your post is that you're 17. This blatant generalization is idiotic and useless. Reading that reply is a denial of service attack on productive thought.
> Logically, it follows that there would be measurable degredation in society over time, as long as workers keep procreating.
What? New workers enter the workforce.
Sorry- I was being sarcastic.
> Reading that reply is a denial of service attack > on productive thought.
This is brilliant!!
If your experience of programming becomes worthless after 10 years, then you probably did not focus on the good skills. I don't see how learning how low level hardware works, some time tried languages (C for example), data structures, networking details, debugging protocols of all kinds, structuring programs, working in teams and so on and so forth... could become worthless.
For the idea that parents and older programmers have different priorities, that may be true, but you downplay experience way too much. That said, trying to find 150% dedicated younglings, that don't spend a lot of time on side projects and just enjoying life is not that easy either
This doesn't add up. I started programming in late 80-ies, I've learnt Forth, C, WinAPI (I started seriously developing Windows programs with 2.0! Gosh, how old I am...), then moved to the brighter side, learnt C++, LISP, I used ksh and vi (never was smart enough to master Emacs), used sccs and then rcs, wrote my own implementation of TCP, did some embedded work in C and asm, etc, etc etc.
Given that list, what would you consider obsolete now? It's been 2 decades, not 1, mind you. Asm? Well, the last time I touched this sword for a reason was 2005 and it was SSE assembler, something that compilers were not able to generate efficiently then (and to the large extent still not able).
Yeah, like very quick lowercasing of blocks of ASCII text, 8 characters at a time:
Out of curiosity what kind of program were you writing that it was bottlenecked by a UTF8 lowercase conversion?
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Wow. One of the most offensive, patronising, arrogant, ignorant posts I've seen here.
Were you parents rubbish slackers because they made the mistake of having you? Or did they work so hard they forgot to bring you up well?
Since you felt free to generalize us parents, I will feel free to tell you that people without kids are generally way behind us parents in terms of maturity. That might not matter in entry-level jobs, but is quite essential when you climb up a bit.
...fighting an overgeneralization with another overgeneralization - if one were to write a "starting flame wars guide for dummies" it should be the top of the bullet list :) (thankfully this is not a topic people start flamewars in)
"Maturity" is an ambiguous and contextual concept that doesn't usually mean anything - people should be rated by objective attributes like experience, productivity and so on. One could also say that a younger person with more and harsher life experience can be more "mature" than someone older and with kids (think someone who raised his/her little brothers by mistake after the parents got killed or something like that), but with less impacting experience but it would be just as meaningless because of the ambiguity of "maturity" (how much is life experience relevant to a programmer?). Raising children teaches one useful "life things", but so does starting a business, travelling around the world or working for the red cross in Africa. Adding insult to injury, managers tend to use "maturity" when referring to employees as "ability to take orders and act predictably even if not particularly creative" which basically makes it an "antiquality" for a small fast startup.
"Experience" and "productivity" seem pretty darn ambiguous and contextual too...
"too busy to learn in their free time"
Somehow, despite having kids, I manage to learn new technologies, even insofar as I was able to write a book about it (Dart in Action). The only reason I had time to do that is because I try to keep my day job between 9-5.
I'm not yet 40, just 35 with 2 kids. I don't agree with any bit of what you wrote. 1. As many people noted - experience is NOT obsolete. The same few concepts re-occur in every software language. You need to learn new APIs and new syntax, but that's total non-sense for good experienced people.
2. People with children have a better understanding of what responsibility is.
3. People with children usually spend less time on dating and going to bars :)
4. We tend to be more time efficient
Is it reasonable that we try to build a IT-industry where people can have a family and kids and still be considered productive? Do you plan on having a family and kids yourself one day? Will you change job and start selling bananas that day?
I know of very few other jobs were you are supposed to spend so much of your spare time reading up on new stuff as the IT-business. A few of my friends are physicians and they to spend their spare time reading up on new stuff. Others, not so much.
I don't think this is a sustainable way of doing business in the long run.
The claim about technology moving faster now is absolute garbage. We've had exactly two major pieces of innovation in computer science in the last two decades.
The first was in search and distributed systems, at Google, and the blueprint for their systems was created by two mid-career engineers out of DEC.
The second was the evolution of the smartphone, at Apple, an old company that is known for keeping its engineers for a long ass time.
The most innovative computer language we have was designed in the 50s, and every time I meet an old-time hacker, there's something I can learn from them.
The real lie is that a kid out of college who starts a company is automatically considered an innovator. Rehashing an idea one more time in a slightly more marketable way or creating an app that goes viral has nothing to do with innovation.
In the pop culture age, we constantly confuse the Britney Spears' of the world with real talent, and the Summly's of the world with real innovation.
"If your first priority is your kids, your first priority is not your work. That's fine, it's a choice, but there is a frequent claim that the massive incremental time demand of kids makes one so much more time efficient at work that it more-than-compensates."
I am not young. I've been attending funerals recently, and meeting family members I have not seen for 30+ years. None of us were comparing notes about our productivity.
Insofar as one is the same human being, with the same energy reservoirs and time management skills as before your child was born, this is unlikely.
Your whole post drips with resentment-fueled bigotry and ignorance, making me wonder if you're fighting for attention at your workplace or whatever, feeling unloved. Here's an internet hug. Hugz.
Many years back I -- a new graduate employee -- was chatting with my boss, who was a part owner of the company/president. He had five kids, or maybe even six. He asked me when I was thinking of having children (it was still too early for me, but just as a conversational thing), and my honest answer was that I didn't know how he could afford it.
He then told me about an Arabic parable or the like that each child comes with a bag of money.
That seemed counter intuitive to me, but my life has proven it out. I now have four children, and I would wager good money that I know more current technologies, in much more depth, than you do.
If you have the capacity, having children has a profound ability to make you focus: While I am the same intellectual being, like the vast majority of developers I was absolutely pissing time away before children, and I doubt I passed even 5% productivity. Slashdot was the Reddit of the time, and doing asinine, meaningless implementations for days on ends was just a normal day. And I know this is the case for most developers.
Now I don't have time for the bullshit. I focus specifically on the things that yield success, in the most efficient manner possible. I'm still only maybe 15% productive (still piss away a lot of time), but the result is my own company, a lot of success, etc.
This.
Its hard to remember life before kids, but one thing I know for sure: I wasted a huge amount of time.
I work far more effectively at 39 than I did in my 20's. And my ability to focus took a massive boost after becoming a father.
But how much of that is due to nearly two decades of experience and how much is due to having kids?
Your words exactly mirror my experience after having my first child, too.
I still waste time, but I've never been more productive. I work full-time, have my own company in my spare time, and my child at every moment he's awake.
I've never heard about this effect, it sounds amazing. Do you have some more information about it?
> He then told me about an Arabic parable or the like that each child comes with a bag of money.
I can see how an empathetic person having children would increase their focus to succeed, but what is the limit on the number of kids? How would one know when to stop having kids? Why did you stop at four kids? Are you going to have more?
While indeed the story as told sounds like I am promoting copious reproduction, really one child fulfills the meaning of the parable: Many if not most of us operate at a very low level of effort, and succeed to some degree regardless. Having a child (which really is a surrogate for "having a reason to pursue success", which to others might simply be intrinsic drive) seems to make many focus the effort and improve efficiency.
We didn't expect our third child, or the fourth for that matter. That's life though, and I'm a very roll with it sort of person and am extremely pleased with how things have turned out.
Of course I am speaking from a very privileged position of happening to have the right sort of mind at the right moment in history in the right situation where I can talk about pissing most of my time away and still achieving what many would consider a lot of success. This obviously doesn't apply to all careers or all people.
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