Ageism in Software | Prime Reacts

[@mascot4950]

It's ironic that he makes a point of "not just about writing code". It's not that long ago I worked with a younger guy, not a baby like this one, but mid 20s. He was really really good. He had endorsements, awards, had attended special programs, all of the things. The issue was that all of his skills were "writing code". He had some pretty poor solution proposals, because he just didn't have the experience to know why they would cause major headaches five or ten years down the road. He didn't see how what he suggested would be a horror to maintain for anyone but him. He could no doubt write the code, but... It's not surprising to see a 17 year old not see how the number of years alive correlates to potential for experience and by extension capability. I still, vaguely, remember being that age. I wouldn't be surprised if he rediscovers this article in a decade and cringes at his younger self.

[@DexieTheSheep]

Yep. "Writing code" and understanding it is what ChatGPT and Copilot are pretty much capable of on their own. Being able to make decisions about code is what humans are for.

[@DeepestDiveDev]

He will probably cringe at this next year. In those years you change a lot every year

[@Salantor]

I'm not going to lie, I would be suspicious of any 17-year-old talking about how many languages, frameworks, and environments he knows or learned or even tried. He would be either a savant, or someone with very shallow knowledge about all of them.

[@complexity5545]

I used to be this 17 year. I had a really good teacher and we had 3 people in my high school programming class. You learn alot when there are only 3 people in the class; alot of extra stuff. I'm not extra smart. Some people just get lucky at a specific time in life (especially with knowledge). We wrote alot of efficient code because she used to run IBM and then went on to her own startup. She was just teaching school to pass her senior years. She'd make us write parsers and she taught us BNF regular expressions. I think the BNF regular expressions at 17 is what made me a early learner. One of my classmates dad's worked for microsoft at the time. We were learning all time of stuff in within 2 years which were my junior year and senior year. In 2 years I learned pascal, c++, c, visual c++, and TI (calculator LOL). We were basically looking at company source code that the teacher had saved over her life. I went to college and quickly realized it was a set-back. I would skip programming class because I already knew c, and c++. I taught myself perl, mathmatica, haskell, TCL SAS and all types of other languages because I would go down to the co-op office and see what they were looking for during my freshman year. The only classes I remember going to were Java and all the engineering classes because of attendance rules. College felt like just 4 years of me teaching myself. I would literally have teachers require me to come to office hours and explain my code. One professor straight up told me, "I never see you and you turn in abnormal code. I just had to test you on a face to face setting" or something like that; I was also a athlete which made it look like I was cheating or something. I realized when I went to college that I had a once in a lifetime type of high school education. A lucky 17 year old.

[@kuhluhOG]

or started to work on learning this kind of stuff at like 10 but this normally means that their soft skills are rather bad

[@alivepenmods]

​@@kuhluhOGonly savants can internalize complex CS concepts at 10 years old

[@kuhluhOG]

@@alivepenmods that's not what you start with when going into IT especially not at this age

[@alivepenmods]

@@kuhluhOG that's what's needed to "know a language". You don't know a language by knowing it's APIs. You know a language once you know how it's compiler behaves and how it interacts with the OS.

[@CR3271]

Okay, I'm 5 minutes into this video and so far I think his biggest problem may be arrogance, not age. Having "dabbled" in a few things doesn't make you an expert. When I came out of college and interviewed for my first job, I promoted what I thought I was good at, admitted what I had little or no experience at, and emphasized my willingness to learn -- understanding that I was talking to people that had a heck of a lot more experience than me. Now, 20 years later, I work at a company that hires lots of interns. It's very obvious who are the good candidates and who are the ones who think they already know everything.

[@SolarPlayer]

It's the other way around imo - job interviews are the 1 place where being overconfident/arrogant actually helps you

[@_garicas]

Same here. Just a few minutes into the video and I start hearing "I know how to program in Rust, Go, Typescript, whatever, and even dabbled in bla bla bla" then I knew it was a video hard to watch/listen to...

[@felixjohnson3874]

At 17 he likely hasn't even finished secondary education/high school. I started taking college CS classes at 14 and even I was only learning things like DFS or BFS at 16-17. Its pure arrogance.

[@thomasstock1985]

​@@SolarPlayer that is BS unless the job is sales.

[@SolarPlayer]

@@thomasstock1985 interesting, maybe I'm way off base but I've always had that impression

[@jl6723]

In software there is a lot to learn. And sometimes it does feel like you aren’t taken seriously despite having so much knowledge in your head, but there’re certain sets of “soft” skills that crystallize with experience that are highly important. I recently claimed that there was age-ism at my company and talked with management about it and they asked me a question of “how would you determine experience and skill?” I have my answers back only to learn that each and everyone of those things were actually considered or had been implemented. I thought I was clever and smart, but it terms out my skillset and title was well considered in lieu of the factors that the company had available to actually get a good measurement. I basically repeated back what they already did expecting that they didn’t. It turns out it wasn’t age-ism, it was just that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I have always been receptive to that lesson, because it always means that there was more to discover and that I could always be better. Don’t assume age-ism where it might juste be that you suck or you are not showing yourself in metrics that you would actually expect of others for promotion and advancement.

[@zoeythebee1779]

"17 through 26 are the dumbest years of your life" unironically brought a lot of pressure off my shoulders as a 21 year old who has no fucking clue what they are doing.

[@fernando-loula]

He is being generous, the only reasonable way in which a 35 year old is diferent from a teenager is the legal aspect. Life is hard, we basically only learn by making our own mistakes and tipically mistakes cost a lot. Unless you have a very rich family that can afford you millions of opportunities, the cost is your time. There is no real way out, knoledge comes from doing stuff, getting it all wrong and correcting course.

[@JonathanTheZombie]

Senior devs have seen thousands of arrogant junior devs who are -10x engineers. Ageism is a byproduct of hating working with those people.

[@manoel.vilela.neoway]

I never heard about -10x engineers. Now everything makes sense. That's the concept name of the last two co-worker engineers that was fired for only doing shit and hoping senior engineers fix their code.

[@mathijsfrank9268]

You could apply that same logic to racism. If you've encountered a few bad people that are black, you could argue that you can expect someone to be racist. However any reasonable person sees that this is inhumane and completely wrong. So why would that argument apply for age?

[@homelessrobot]

@@mathijsfrank9268 because age is nothing like race. You stop being a certain age. You grow as a person. Black people generally remain black people no matter what they do to address whatever problems they are having. Also, if you are young, nearly everyone who is going to treat you like you are incompetant or irresponsible because of this, is speaking from experience. Experience no only dealing with young people, but having been young themselves. That doesn't necessarily excuse agism. But it definitely sets it apart from racism.

[@Otomega1]

​@@mathijsfrank9268because it do apply to race 💀

[@Spookyhoobster]

@@mathijsfrank9268 When it comes to general respect, I can kind of get behind where you're coming from. We put this weird layer of bubble wrap around younger people that I don't necessarily agree with, and I think American culture (and to some extent, western culture in general) could do a better job younger people with more "general dignity". But that doesn't apply to professional opinions. If you seriously think skin color affects a person's professional capabilities, that just shows you haven't worked with enough people in your own professional experience. If you think age affects a person's professional capabilities, that means you have some level of understanding of how professional growth works and how it largely just takes time to play out. I toyed with the idea of having a "residency program" similar to how medical professionals get into the field. I don't really know enough about how med students become doctors, but I bet there's some interesting insights on things the Software Development industry could better from other industries like that. I do think this industry needs a more mature approach towards helping on-board young people beyond "if they're good, they'll figure it out".

[@JonathanTheZombie]

I only discriminate against Java devs

[@sck3570]

Hell yeah brother

[@KoboldAdvocate]

Not all of us chose this life 😢

[@bread8176]

Same. Unfortunately, I also am one 😓

[@underscore.]

same

[@vaisakh_km]

I am a java and cobol dev... cuz it pays my bills (and a lot)... then use rust,python and cool new js frameworks for personal projects.....

[@Ryan_Wiseman]

As someone who's started seriously coding at 25 with a massive background in so many other technological areas, those other skills can be just as important to learning code. and makes you more appealing to a company. You also have a lot more opportunities in the tech industry as well, since focuses like UI can be heavily reliant upon graphical design/video experience. Going back to school for computer science, while I feel like I am far from expert level compared to those younger than me, the amount of time spent in other tech areas makes learning code a lot easier compared to my attempts of learning at 14-15. It may seem like it matters less, these other skills, but I would be far more behind without them.

[@mplovecraft]

When I was 20-25 I was quite full of myself. I thought I was the smartest guy around, I would not listen if someone told me something I didn't agree with and I did snap judgements of people all the time. Obviously, not everyone is like that, but at least for me it isn't necessarily the years I'm the proudest to look back at.

[@dupersuper1000]

Honestly, I can kind of understand where that comes from. Most software engineers are probably in the top 20% of IQ scores. When you’re not constantly surrounded by other software engineers (in high school & college), you are often pretty much the smartest person in the room in a lot of settings, so it’s really easy to become arrogant. But when you’re suddenly thrown into a room with lots of highly experienced software engineers, it’s actually very unlikely that you’re the smartest person in the room, and it’s wise to just always assume that others are smarter than you. In most cases it really doesn’t matter who is “smarter” per se, because the biggest difference between any two engineers is the amount of small trivial pieces of knowledge that they learned from experience. You don’t ask questions because you’re dumber than the other person. You ask questions because they learned a thing that you haven’t yet learned. So humility is critical if you want to succeed.

[@JC-Alan]

​@@dupersuper1000very good advice

[@DomonX1]

Started programming at the age of 7, first job at the age of 19, i've learnt more in first 2 years of professional coding than in 12 years of just coding in free time as a hobby. When I was 19 I thought I was a master of many programming languages i've been using. Now I have 6 years of commercial experience as front-end dev, and consider myself just good in JavaScript etc. Sometimes we are trapped by Dunning-Kruger effect.

[@bryanp8042]

Boy do I have experience with this. I started programming at 11, got hired at the company I currently work for at 14 (as an intern), and have stuck around. I'm in my early 20s now as a very well respected senior engineer at my company. I'll say this - I've been arrogant and dumb while also experiencing ageism at the same time. Ageism isn't when someone pushes back against the arrogance, it's the immediate disregard for anything you say or any opinion you express. My mentors would respect my opinions about things (even the dumb ones), and push me in the right direction when my perspective was flawed. The ageists wouldn't listen at all - they would ignore anything that I said, and wouldn't point out where I was wrong either. If you work with young devs and interns at your company and you don't want them to silently hate you, please avoid being patronizing. Few things hurt more as a young dev then having someone you look up to treat you like a nuisance.

[@robgrainger5314]

That's true, and that's how you learn, but in this case I felt that he was claiming a level experience he simply cannot yet have. He described applying for "middle dev" positions, while he must surely expect to start as either an intern or junior dev. Definitely not software engineer.

[@bryanp8042]

@@robgrainger5314 Oh for sure, the guy in the article was definitely overselling himself

[@FR-099]

@@bryanp8042 biggest flag on the article was listing languages not projects. If he said he's built a web socket server in rust, I'd listen and engage. If he was showing me his Open Source PRs, I'd listen and engage. In this article he's showing that he knows how to name drop.

[@rammrras9683]

Knowing a lunguage or a technology can be interpreted as "I know the instructions and the main constructs, I've read online and made some toy projects or examples". To really know one must use it in production and to really master it one needs to have successfully delivered and maintained at least a couple of theese projects. At 17 I see it hard to believe that one can be really good in all those languages.

[@ferreiravinicius]

It's so nice hear you being grateful for the way your mom raised you.

[@PhilfreezeCH]

As a young (26) electronics engineer: You need the graybeards, can‘t get shit done without them. They have so much experience that often their intuition makes for better engineering than some rough calculations or even advanced simulations. They way my boss put it is this way: - You need graybeards for their experience but they are bound to reach the end of their career - So you need people with family because they habe some experience, have the process down and will likely stay for quite some time (they have a family to feed). However, they want to go home at 5 and don‘t work on weekends or holidays. - So you need youngsters, they are motivated, can pull all-nighters with ease and don‘t have a family, hence they aren‘t that much bound to a schedule. I really like this, it shows well that you need experience, reliability and also some crazy work-drive for those crunches and each age group can provide one thing easier than the others, so you really want all of them.

[@yasserdecimo]

I like this ❤

[@stanislavsh6582]

26 is not young...

[@yasserdecimo]

@@stanislavsh6582 bruh you think you became an engineer at 17

[@jkf16m96]

Haha that boss can suck my bawls. Because I still go to my home at 6:30pm always.

[@stanislavsh6582]

​@@yasserdecimo I became at 22. Just after university.

[@JonathanTheZombie]

As a senior engineer, young engineers need to make sure they are open to learning something other than they learned in a book, or at school. They also need to take learning seriously if they want to make a real impact.

[@realtristan288]

I'm a 17 year old soft eng and I know that my code, 90% of the time, sucks. But, I don't blame it on ageism. Instead, I use that criticism to improve. Also, learning a lot of languages doesn't automatically make you a good developer. It takes years to become GREAT at a language. To be proficient in all of the languages he listed, it would have taken YEARS.

[@ea_naseer]

I'm 19 and i used to think my html and css was the best because it always got the job done and people praised me for it but then i started seeing other people's less complex code, more readable code and i'm shocked. My bubble just burst.

[@realtristan288]

@@ea_naseer exactly. so many young people have big egos but in reality there’s so much that you just don’t know. It’s obvious that that’s the case for the kid who wrote this piece.

[@neonraytracer8846]

I spent two years learning concepts, and now a language is just a matter of syntax. I'm still learning concepts 8 years later. My best advice to anyone in the beginning of their journey is to explore concepts of not just computer science, but digital graphics, electronics, etc. as it all ultimately is a concept one can learn about and utilise in day-to-day programming. Programming is never something that stops, paradigms and concepts evolve and one needs to adapt. My top skills for being a good programmer has nothing to do with any language: - Data types and various abstractions - Problem solving and critical thinking - Debugging and diving deep into source code - Understanding language as that's where programming/CS concepts come from. A proxy, a map, recursion, and many more can be explained with analogies from real life. - Understanding various kinds of processes and underlying layers to utilise them fully - And many more essential skills that all have nothing to do with any programming language Once one gets a good grasp of the fundamentals of programming, syntax for a language is just a way to write the logic one already knows how should perform, and which edge-cases it could introduce. That being said, experience with one language does make it easier and faster to write the thing one wants... But that's basically the same as learning the slang or dialect of a language you already understand - logic. BTW, if you keep going, I hope you enjoy banging your head against a wall because that's like 90% of the learning curve for most things programming.

[@realtristan288]

@@neonraytracer8846 I always avoid working with people who advertise how many languages they know because most times all they can do is write in the language, but not actually produce good, safe, well-written code. There’s also so much more to a programming language than just learning syntax (ie libraries, paradigms, etc.) So it’s great that you know how to code in ___ but do you really know everything that language offers?

[@autismspirit]

I started coding at 15 and I'm 23 now, and with (technically) 8 years of experience in my field I'm still learning a ton, and especially as a junior dev, getting the help of more senior devs "guiding" my code in the right direction with their wisdom I've realized that great software is more about the long-term decisions you make and cutting down on complexity rather than writing some extremely elaborate and impressive systems. I'm also from the same part of the world as the author of the article, and I'm not exactly sure what kind of stereotypes he's supposed to be breaking, Ukrainians are known to be fluent in C++ from birth and are able to make an entire AAA game engine from scratch by the time they're 16. Maybe he's breaking the stereotype of them being humble people? (lol)

[@karaloop9544]

2:46 concerning Hype cycles absolutely spot on. After a few of these you can become really jaded to the whole of them.

[@AntonioDoesMetal]

This was the biggest moment of the video for me too. When I started 8 years ago one of the first things my mentor told me was to beware of hype cycles. At the time there was a lot of sales folks hyping up Hadoop and how it cures cancer and since I was very green to it all, I was wide eyed and wanted to be involved. My mentor laughed when I started talking about the capabilities of Hadoop and the implications of HDFS and gave me a very straight talk about how hype cycles come and go and to not be swept away by them. Now 8 years later I roll my eyes every time I hear the latest buzzword and I wait a bit to see how it plays out in the industry.

[@Dipj01]

Yeah, the latest hype is AI, after web3 and crypto hype died.

[@atiedebee1020]

Calling yourself a software engineer at 17 is the first mistake

[@vaisakh_km]

For real... I called my self that too when i was 17... Now i have a job and imposer syndrome kicks in when i see my title as a software engineer...

[@vaisakh_km]

@@lexus4tw i don't agree everyone who attended engineering university is default a engineer.... and vise versa, there are very talented people who learned them self and even pioneered fields of engineering... it's a shame if we can't call them engineer...

[@vaisakh_km]

​@@lexus4tw Idk man... people call Leonardo Da Vinci engineer.. just google it... (in fact, first example of engineer in Wikipedia, i know Wikipedia may not be credible source.. but still ) some even describe him as greatest engineer of all time... and at that time, engg. universities weren't invented.... def of Engineers(acc: Wikipedia ): Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who invent, design, analyze, build and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while considering the limitations imposed by practicality, regulation, safety and cost.[1][2] and not person who got a degree from a random university.. if that was the definition itself(which is what you are saying ) then i can accept it.... But i agree that it will be a miracle to if there is a person who is actually a engineer without being in a collage

[@ryannathanwilson]

@@lexus4twrules on that vary by country

[@lukivan8]

But why other people who also learned by themselves are eligeable to call themselves software engineers?

[@sacredgeometry]

Respect is earned. If you are 17 you shouldnt be looking to get respect for your non existent working experience you should be figuring out how to start earning it by watching people who garner it and then emulating those behaviours.

[@VinnyXL420]

And that is how the sheep mentality was born...

[@ea_naseer]

@@zuma206 i think that's just normal behaviour but i get it.

[@briumphbimbles]

@@zuma206 You need to prove/ demonstrate that those hours amount to anything useful because most people could easily spend that time and walk away with next to nothing.

[@briumphbimbles]

@@VinnyXL420 Quite the opposite.

[@yahyae420]

sometimes you should tone down the arrogance and realize that you don't know shit. Knowing a thing or two is not equal to knowing the whole thing or having enough wisdom. you reek of arrogance@@zuma206

[@jimcain349]

I wrote my first program when I was 13. I'm still doing it 43 years later, and I'm still passionate and curious about learning new languages and new paradigms.

[@quelchx]

I could tell a junior wrote this article.

[@robertsimplerino]

> 17yo > list of 20 langs > *middle dev* > personal blog with broken html > gh full of hello world repos wow, ageism indeed

[@SurvivalGamingyt]

Yeah I saw that website of his 😂

[@pelle4971]

The Dunning-Kruger effect in all its glory

[@NotAFanMan88]

At least from how the article is written... he seems like the kind of kid that writes a lot of stuff but doesn't have the experience in using it as a solution for an extended period of time that then also requires maintenance, upgrades, and adjustments. For the young developers they're a lot more obsessed with zooming about and writing new things rather than take a bit of time and looking 5 years down the road and seeing if what you're planning is a good idea. That takes time and responsibility to really understand. I'd still hire him on as a junior, probably, if he has all this language experience and I look at some work he's done that checks out.

[@felixjohnson3874]

100%. I got tired of windows breaking shit so I wrote a custom python image viewer around 14-15ish and within months I was bolting on new features with a sledgehammer and spent half of the slideshow processor time updating the frame so it didn't "stop responding".

[@matteol4]

his 2 months old github doesn't check with the things he say

[@TehKarmalizer]

@@matteol4 you didn't learn 7 languages and 18 frameworks in the last two months? What are you even doing with your time? smh

[@NavyTriedCode28]

The way you described working with the intern makes me proud as a Junior Fullstack Developer (Intern). What you mentioned accurately mirrors the situation I'm currently experiencing with my senior. Despite primarily using JS for both frontend and backend development, your content has sparked a strong desire within me to learn more. In fact, I've even begun studying Golang and am committed to pushing my learning even further. Thank you, Prime.😂

[@kuhluhOG]

22 old here: There are multiple things which you need to be a good developer. Some can be learned actively, some only passively. The stuff you can actively learn e.g. via crunching is pretty much age independent. These are for example programming languages, libraries, software architecture etc. The stuff you can only passively learn are things you can only learn with experience, and you can only gain experience over a long ass time (but also only if you are open to actually learn this kind of stuff). These things are soft skill (e.g. how to talk with people which is incredibly important when working in teams), intuition but quite frankly also design decisions around a current problem/goal.

[@ThePrimeTimeagen]

agreed there is some amount of intuition that can only be earned after just years of doing a "thing"

[@FR-099]

@@ThePrimeTimeagen yeah but intuition is just an experience you don't understand yet. I find if I look at the pros and cons of a decision and where intuition is leading me, I can usually capture the lesson in terms I can tell a junior dev. Then as long as they can remember the "rule of thumb" they can have my intuition too for better or worse. I certainly learned faster by trying to dissect, and pushing my seniors to dissect, the reasoning behind decisions. I mostly manage teams in data and integration now, but I always look out for people who at least have a theory about where their gut feelings are coming from.

[@nexovec]

What I like about older guys is that they don't feel the need to jump on bandwagons, because they've just seen so much that they know things come and go, and I've internalized that too, and it does wonders for me. (Don't tell my gf)

[@gamevidzist]

I hate this victim mentality everywhere. Getting rejected = something wrong with them not me. It's also funny how such people are the first ones to figure out where they are being pushed down. All the people I have seen excel have never given such shit reasons like ageism. They go out and get it done.

[@koxafis]

I feel like the 'many' languages he is talking about is probably like a few 3 hour courses for each language and that's it. His github profile either has empty/no code projects, a few Go projects with 200-400 LOC that might as well be chatgpt generated, and then a couple that are from youtube videos. This indeed shows little to no experience and arrogance.

[@gnomeinacoma]

dabbler. go deep.

[@adambickford8720]

It's not just learning a syntax or grammar; every language has an ecosystem and expected idioms. IME java devs will likely take a `List` whereas in C# it tends to be `IEnumerable`. Java solutions tend to be more 'abstract' than C# solutions. C# tends to have better async support, which has a non-trivial impact on the code.

[@KX36]

age is not just a number. in javascript it's an object.

[@imgs7773]

True…

[@danielvaughn4551]

I’m approaching 40 this year and I can guarantee, age is not just a number. Young people need to understand that they can be brilliant, and at the same time be like the fish that asks “what the hell is water”. It takes time, a LOT of time, to see the bigger patterns in life, and then it takes even longer to weave them into your own understanding so that you can use that wisdom. You’re not gonna be there at 20, it doesn’t matter how smart you are.

[@calebpena3729]

The nice thing about ageism is that you grow out of it.

[@ratpoopert]

Senior dev Kenji would not hire 17 year old Kenji.

[@vaisakh_km]

😆 for reall...

[@canyonblue7735]

Would love to see a senior SE serve the kid some humble pie in a challenging code off. I'd also like to see the follow up article in 20 years when Kenji ACTUALLY becomes an amazing! SE.... His passion says he will be, his arrogance says 'not yet'

[@bitmasked]

You need to be old enough to legally enter into a contract before I'll even consider hiring you.

[@chpsilva]

I have no reason to doubt about how smart and talented this guy probably is. Also, I have no doubt he would be someone very difficult to work with in a team, because probably he believes is smarter than all the grumpy oldfarts around and very likely will get frustrated when either a) is prevented to do things in his own, "better" way or b) does it anyway, messes up because he is inexperienced and gets roasted for this. I've seen alot of this in my 25 year career as developer.

[@TheHTMLCode]

This was a real trip down memory lane, I remember having that same hunger and frustration at 17, feeling like I knew way more than those senior to me, heck even up until the point I landed my first real programming job at 21 I felt the same. I’ve been fortunate enough to hold a 7 year tenure at my current employer and it’s amazing to git blame and flame past me for being a gigantic over-engineering dumbass You accumulate so much wisdom over the years and learn that you don’t have to prove your worth as an engineer by implementing the most elaborate solution to every problem I’d love to see how the OP reflects on this post 5-10 years down the line

[@dejfcold]

That guy is either a genius, or suffers from Dunning-Kruger. I also knew a tons of things at 17, but I didn't knew-knew them and I was aware of it at least.

[@vaisakh_km]

Dunning-Kruger for sure.. i checked his website and i don't think it that much of a professional web site.. and and nextjs is probably a overkill for that static site... and in his github, he has a weather app, which he made only few months ago.....

[@Satook]

I encounter this every time a talk to a 2 years out of uni candidate showing me their 9 out of 10 rating across a dozen languages/skills. I had the same passion as a younger dev but I’ve definitely gotten better at building what is actually needed. Experience matters. I try to pose it in a positive way. “Yes, you are awesome now! Will you get better over the next 5-10 years?” That’s what I mean by senior dev. An excellent dev taking in a tonne of lessons and feedback from their systems and colleagues.

[@composerkris2935]

100% spot on about the kid thing. I grew so much since I have had kids. I didn’t fully know what it meant to manage my time effectively until that stage in my life.

[@aidantilgner]

I got my first dev job at 18, after doing a coding bootcamp. I worked on developing my skills further through many side projects and additional learning. Then I decided to join some developer communities (OCaml), and apply to some jobs. That was a wake-up call for me. I had thought I was the hot s***, but I quickly learned that I have a lot to learn before I'll be exceptional. I think with young devs like me, and obviously others, arrogance my be the biggest issue. Thinking we're special because we got in earlier than our peers, etc.

[@kassios]

I’ve interviewed people with such CVs and most didn’t understand passing by reference and passing by value. Programming languages are not trophies or badges you collect. You need to spend the time on each language or framework alone. Also at 17 means you haven’t put in the work for a long goal (such as a degree or the very least an actual project). Your perseverance, your dedication, your character skills have not been tested. If at 17 you are a genius you don’t write articles about ageism. You just go out there and perform.

[@KX36]

17 year-olds can be highly skilled amateur programmers, but lack industry experience. They don't know how the work game works, they haven't built work relationships with colleagues and they don't have a big portfolio of professional work behind them. I work in a different industry and guess what, it's hard to get your foot in the door in any industry. When you're a fresh graduate, you can't get a job because you don't have professional experience and you can't get professional experience because you don't have a job. Catch 22. A 17 year old isn't even a graduate, so that might also hold them back. When you can finally get your first job you have to stick to it and keep your head down for a couple of years, then you can start to build on that. You certainly can't be complaining that you're not considered for what sounds like promotions / higher level positions when you're 17, you don't have a degree and you've just started your first job, it just shows you don't know anything about how the work world works. Just wait until you're 21 and you have 4 years professional experience and you're competing with graduates who have none and then see how the industry treats you.

[@dupersuper1000]

The common problem I see with younger engineers is that they tend to be bad at managing priorities and high-level decision-making. Many of them are top-tier *programmers*, but programming is more of an implementation detail of the job. What companies really want is an engineer who can deliver a technological solution to a real-world problem. Programming alone will not deliver that solution. Most of the time you want to minimize the amount of programming you do, because programming is pretty much just churning out tech debt. If you can adequately solve a problem without doing any programming, then you should do that. The ability to holistically solve problems with technology is a totally different skillset, and most people will never develop those skills without lots of industry experience. Writing great code just isn’t as important as many young programmers seem to think.

[@mitchelvalentino1569]

The Perl hype cycle of the mid-‘90s still haunts.

[@robertholtz]

He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

[@htomar_dev]

This article reminded me of Nexxel, and how people are surprised when they realise he is 18. Its important to make a case for yourself, instead of expecting people to gamble on you by hiring you.

[@brianviktor8212]

The child is clearly irrational. He tries to make "ageism" a general thing whereas it seems to apply only to a tiny fraction of all programmers. Even if he is extraordinarily competent, it doesn't mean that such a low age like 17 should be considered competent universally - in 99%+ cases it's clearly not. He is merely an exception to the rule - yet he tries to conjure up a movement over this. At this point I'd question his competence and truthfulness in general. He clearly lacks self-reflection, overestimating his value a LOT. He sounds like a ticking time bomb - or a big waste of resources all busy with social justice warrior crap - TELLING how great he is without actually BEING great. I mean why does that blog or whatever exist in the first place? Where are the relevant details? All I am reading is "I'm 17 blablabla ageism blablabla..."

[@KX36]

The whole article sounds naive. He'll look back at this in 5 years and think "Oh, man, I can't believe I wrote that. So cringe."

[@glauco_rocha]

It's hilarious that the aging filter used to make the thumbnail even aged the headphones.

[@MuTheDev]

7:30 it literally has, by all means YES, because time equals experience, you don’t get to be expert in something by doing it one time or doing it for an hour, you get experience by doing it more and more and more, and all that doing takes TIME, at 17 with more than 5 languages I bet you didn’t even scratch the surface of experience at each one ( unless you been programming since 7 ). How many projects did he work on for each language?. How many big ( enterprise scale ) projects did he work on for each language?

[@rz2374]

kid learns about printing and variables in 10 languages and claims he is an expert in all of them

[@yungifez]

Yeah I'm 19 I'm very conversant with PHP and Javascript ( to an extent ) I do basic Python and some others but I never list it as a language that I know

[@sacredgeometry]

@@yungifez Are you actually very conversant in PHP and JS though?

[@yungifez]

@@sacredgeometry yeah I am

[@briumphbimbles]

@@yungifez How do you know?

[@2hotflavored666]

​@@briumphbimblesBecause he's very conversant with PHP and Javascript.

[@robrick9361]

Even if he's a genius programmer, a manager is risking their job by hiring a 17 year old. One screw up and you're a laughing stock for hiring a high schooler.

[@thomasstock1985]

How are you "risking your job" as a manager? If you see a high potential junior, and you can hire for cheap, that is work the risk to the company. Do you think managers get fired for a bad hire? Maybe if they hire a bad 40 year old CTO that has the ability to do tons of damage to the company.

[@JohnDoe-jk3vv]

Hell yeah. Managers should play safe and only look for the most experienced, the more likely to be best. "Young people gotta start somewhere", you say, and yeah, you're right, but they better start elsewhere and come back when they are experienced and highly profitable.

[@siniarskimar]

So a 40 year old with some programming experience is better than a 17 year old with a Computer Science degree and possibly couple of portfolio worthy projects. Huh interesting Age != maturity

[@thomasstock1985]

@@JohnDoe-jk3vv There are many different kinds of companies. In my experience, a small company is best off ONLY hiring experienced devs with a proven track record. But a bigger company can diversify and get some juniors/mediors since they have more flexibility in who they give the easy/hard tasks + they can let the seniors review the work. It's more cost-efficient. I feel 70% senior 20% mid 10% junior is a pretty good balance for a random-boring-enterprise company.

[@JohnDoe-jk3vv]

@@thomasstock1985 I'm bad at math, but doesn't this proportion (70, 20, 10) mean that in the future there will be a very small amount of seniors? Because if only 10% are developers in the beginning of their careers, there won't be that big of an incentive for people to get in the field simply because there won't be that many entry-level jobs out there. On top of that, I believe that seniority is pretty similar to age demographics, there will be people who will change careers before reaching senior level, there will be people who will never become a decent senior and there will be people who will pass away before that. So how can large businesses keep the same working force size and composition if senior programmers will become more and more rare despite the high demand and how can small businesses compete with big businesses for an ever smaller pool of senior developers? Are we doomed?

[@AScribblingTurtle]

It is one thing to be overconfident. But its another to completely deny the amount of mental development, that age brings. Back when I was his age, I thought that Java would be THE programming language of the future. After all, it was running on phones, in browsers and everything. Ohhhhh boy, what a future that would have been. Long story short, the Dunning-Kruger-Effect is strong with that one. But what do I know. I'm probably just a big old Ageist.

[@niamhleeson3522]

I still believe the Year of Java will come!

[@vaisakh_km]

@@niamhleeson3522 it's already gone when google dropped it in favor of kotlin... now only Enterprise web apps are going to be written in it be cause they can't migrate billion doller investments in dependencies...

[@vercolit]

There's almost no chance that a 17 year old is genuinely good enough to be a great senior software engineer. It takes many many years of solving an insane amount of problems consistently to even be pretty good at a language. The idea that a 17 year old is actually good in go, rust, javascript elixir AND python is laughable. He'll learn and cringe at that article in 10 years

[@arcanernz]

At 17 I thought I knew everything too. It’s hard to know what kind of knowledge/experiences you’re lacking when you have no frame of reference nor have worked with engineers of higher skill levels. It took time for me to realized that I was very lacking in communication skills and had to spend a lot of time/energy learning about myself and others. You may not get wiser with age but wisdom does require time to achieve.

[@Dipj01]

How did you learn communication skills?

[@arcanernz]

@@Dipj01 I just made it a priority and socialized more and just try to understand how to be an effective communicator and listener.

[@leon_De_Grelle]

I shopped around, at age 17, a blueprint for a somewhat advanced HIDS-IDS combination - nowadays done in a number of ways but at the time unique as this was circa 2001 - and was laughed at because of my age. I had intended on developing it with any company who had the funds. That same year I was selling various e-mail marketing-adjacent software I wrote. Guess I wasn't that bad. But I get it.

[@chillyvanilly6352]

Aaaw man, I am so sorry what happened to you and your family :( Lovely vid! Thank you

[@throwawaynyaa2616]

I’m 21, I work professionally for 3 years and I started writing my own small projects ~10 years ago. Stuff that I wrote before commercial experience of course did work, but “working project” doesn’t mean that you know how to write a good code. Code review, projects outside your comfort zone, tasks without proper specification, dynamically changing scope of the work, clients that don’t know what they want, fuckups on production with lots of users and angry users making negative comments about stuff that you wrote - all of those things make you a better developer and you won’t have them working only on your own projects that nobody uses. It’s obvious that people won’t treat you seriously when you are young (and attitude shown in this article doesn’t help). People also don’t treat me seriously when I tell them my age and that I study Japanese Studies (I wouldn’t treat myself seriously as well lol), but maybe instead of playing a victim try presenting yourself professionally as a good business partner and not as a child crying on the internet 🙂 I’m not saying that I know everything now, I’m aware that there is still lots of stuff to learn, but I try to be aware of my shortcomings

[@lukivan8]

I am 17yo frontend dev and I didn't encounter ageism until I saw this video. You just need to crush technical interview so you are taken seriously. But problems with getting those interviews, oh boy it is nightmare. And also from legal standpoint was kinda hard for me to get officially employed. But some loopholes and no ageism beside jokes.

[@osbornghampson3105]

I'm also 17 but I totally understand why i am not equal to senior devs, we might (even though rarely) match in skills but we will never match in experience

[@svenzverg7321]

I am trying to start in 39 as a junior frontend developer. Heard about ageism several times during my courses, and always thought ageism is about people like me. You know, those who allegedly don't have the knowledge yet, and at the same time have no time to acquire it, because their brain allegedly is too slow and stuff. I am glad, that this person can leave ageism in the digital dust. I, on the other hand, feel kinda trapped, really. The more rejections I receive, the older I become. I hope the OP will never encounter this side of ageism.

[@spyroninja]

He's not old enough to understand that age is not just a number.

[@tb15900]

I think it’s about having time to make mistakes. Making big decisions and seeing them pay off or burn in flames. I also love working with older devs because there’s a lot of wisdom there. You also have older devs that fall into the frozen caveman trap, or hate change, or think that their age makes them the smartest person in the room but overall that hasn’t been my experience. I think I wrote decent code aged 17, But I wasn’t great at designing bigger, more complex projects. I wasn’t great at communicating with managers that something was a bad idea, I hadn’t learned to under promise and over deliver and setting realistic goals. I hadn’t learned how to not write awful tests. Or about composition vs inheritance. I don’t necessarily think age is the variable that matters most, but years of experience certainly matters, and they _generally_ correlate with age. Attitude is the other major factor!

[@Tobsson]

"Younger. Everyone wants to be younger, the older I get the more I feel the hunger" - Ren

[@krftsman]

I've had the opposite experience. I have been told a lot that I can't possibly understand technology because I'm too old. It's been really hard to get hired as a software developer over 30. I started coding as a kid in 1978 and have been a professional developer for 25 years. It's far easier to find a job as a development manager once you are over 30.

[@powercore2000]

At 17, theres not a lot of time to have built enough knowledge and projects to be respected as a peer engineer. You can show promise through starting to build experience, but you need some ammount of time to prove your skill and consistency

[@nomoredarts8918]

Juniors in the team are much appreciated, they usually bring fresh knowledge

[@mistersmithson4321]

I started programming at 14, writing code that you want to write can't prepare you for writing code that you have to write.

[@a__random__person]

I started coding at 14... but even at 17 when I was doing it professionally and making money, I felt I was a good dev, but knew there was an enormous amount that I didn't know.. and that our brains don't finish fully developing until around 25. Now being 38 and looking back, through allll the tech changes over the years. I've learned that you can pretty much master anything within 5 years if you dedicated yourself enough... but life experience and wisdom plays much more of a role in your career than just being a good dev.

[@spicynoodle7419]

I'm 23 and I thought I knew a lot about software development because I was half way through uni and was making pet projects, parsers and so on. Turns out, experience was just as important as knowing all algorithms and data structures. What uni has ever taught how to implement microservices, for example? What I don't respect is some of my professors still using C++11 or some stupid ass Java coding style when we have much newer and better technologies that they can't be arsed to re-learn

[@saultube44]

Dang, I'm 50 and learning programming, I'm so screwed then 😮😢

[@yapdog]

When that 17-year old turns 21, he'll regret posting that article.

[@TakeThisLove]

Maybe the reason the guy is getting rejected is not because of his age? I haven't seen his resume, but unless he is a savant, he doesn't have a CS degree and doesn't have experience (at least as an intern). I would only consider such a candidate if there are no better candidates.

[@rnovak2256]

Aren't there hour restrictions due to age?

[@jamlie977]

well i'm challenged by age as well, i applied to 6 companies and all of them replied with "you seem good, but you're 19, you could come back next year or so and try to apply again"

[@gerdokurt]

He delivers the explanation why age is a thing with his own post and the fact that he doesnt notice is the direct validation! The only thing worse than working together with kids is working together with kids who think they`ve seen it all because they crinded through some nights.

[@Jessyco]

YES for hype cycles; You can't see it until you live it. I mean maybe we could write about it but it's so hard to give the proper context in "now" without sounding "OLD"... hence experience.

[@Definesleepalt]

the guy in chat saying "where's his github tho??" killed me lmao

[@Snollygoster-]

I mean his github repo has 23 repositories, most of which are telegram bots or very basic shit. One more unique project that is like a blockchain implementation, which on the surface looks pretty well done. Zero pull requests, so he's done nothing to help other projects even though he's apparently itching to do things. 90% of it is Go, the rest is JS and his nvconfig(which looks like NVChad). Nothing up there is Rust, which is quite sad, since that's the second language he listed. It seems like he's just a kid with passion that's hiked up a mountain and thinks he's ready for everest. Not to shit on him, because all of those things are good, but there's smaller mountains he needs to trek first.

[@istasi5201]

the good old wisdom vs intelligence, you just cant experience things fast enough for wisdom to build up...

[@noahg2]

Prime unintentionally recreated Bioshock infinite's poster for his thumbnail. 😆😆

[@aryanchatterjee8659]

Just yesterday, we had to debug a problem in our code . One of the senior guys (he has 25 years of experience) just glanced at the issue at hand and said it’s a key mismatch issue . We rejected that hypothesis . After an entire day’s worth of debugging, we found, yea indeed it was a key mismatch . Experience is worth a lot

[@gubfhidnom4714]

Age correlates with professional experience and professional experience correlates with competence. When you're hacking on a side project by yourself you're in an echo chamber and you could just be writing garbage without anyone reviewing it. I've seen a junior store fragments of user-supplied C# in a database and then compile and run them on the fly and they couldn't see a problem with that.

[@FlanPoirot]

lol that's hilarious

[@gubfhidnom4714]

@@FlanPoirot Yeah. I can't remember the whole thing but basically needed some kind of DSL/Macro language and he thought "hey, C# can do everything we need for free". At least it wasn't JavaScript? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@Huntertje13]

Explain the problem with that :)

[@FlanPoirot]

@@Huntertje13 security, the user can run anything they want to in the server by supplying a C# script

[@Huntertje13]

@@FlanPoirot Hmm when reading it I thought they just stored code in the database, not run it.

[@andythedishwasher1117]

Where does a 30-year-old with 2 and a half years of building applications 8 hours a day independently fall on this spectrum?

[@briankamras2913]

Having kids is like dropping acid - you’re never the same, and you always look at things differently.

[@jwbonnett]

Soap is still used, specifically in SAML..

[@jackmiddleton2080]

The problem with a 17 year old programmer is you never know when they are going to abandon the team to go to Coachella.

[@saymehname]

I want to revote on your poll. I look forward to your 2 videos a day. “Mid” is good

[@olafbaeyens8955]

No, 41 years of programming experience, passion does not go down.

[@sunnohh]

I rarely ever meet competent devs under 30, 50 is the golden spot

[@johnyewtube2286]

Is the 10k hour rule applicable to programming in general or is it 10k hours using one language?

[@TeslasMoustache419]

If you know one language well, it will take much less time to learn another language, because many fundamental programming skills are transferable. That 10k hour rule is kind of arbitrary, you can learn something much faster by studying efficiently! Hard work is not necessarily good if you're not spending the time wisely.

[@digitalspecter]

A lot of fundamental skills are transferable between languages that use the same paradigm. It lessens when you cross paradigm lines and you might actually need to "unlearn" some things to grok certain concepts. So, if you want to be well rounded, learn some imperative languages, (purely) functional languages and throw in a logic programming language like Prolog or Mercury.

[@godeketime]

I recently had a very young dev on my team who was as skilled as this article implies and he was a treat to work with. Except he would get distracted by shiny problems over the day-to-day work that needed to be done, so his output was just average overall. And there was the whole "my world is single user mode", which meant that standard business security procedures were an impediment (and lets be honest, intentionally they are) which should be "worked around" (which, to be honest, the usually shouldn't). So while the work was really well done if you wanted BLAZINGLY FAST, it left out considerations for data integrity, reliability, and security. Those things fell into the "boring" box. Given a few years and some real world incidents where these things gained meaning, he will be unstoppable. I would say the same thing about any inexperienced dev that made those same choices, regardless of age.

[@trapexit]

@6:45 perhaps ironically age / inexperience is leading to misjudging the topic of age / experience. Unless you are an actual wunderkind (and often even then) age is strongly correlated with experience. And experience is strongly correlated with wisdom and often knowledge.

[@supercompooper]

I'm cursed to be one of those effing gurus where people come to me after months of toiling and I fix the whole thing inside a day, make it 1000 times simpler and better. It's a horrible curse watching juniors just run top speed into the wall over and over.

[@dandogamer]

I'm in my late 20s and for a while I thought I was the 10x dev now I doubt whether I'm even a senior. I've made horrible mistakes, mistakes that often didnt reveal themselves until years later. I used to be scared of making mistakes now I know they are inevitable and part of the journey. Age might not equal talent or knowledge but it should in some way tell you about experience and a good way to see that is to understand the mistakes they made along the way and how it influences their behaviours and their decision making now

[@FR-099]

Its clearly NOT ageism. Poor kid thinks writing hello world in 50 languages makes him a virtuoso. I would listen if he talked about the things he built in a few languages, but "OOOh i mastered everything" just shows he doesn't understand the assignment.

[@gozh2002]

The way to crack is a github account and the projects you built. The document is all about what knows. but better shows what he did that makes difference

[@roaringfork]

I love working with dudes that start sentences with "When I worked at Bell Labs...". Don't stop talking, thanks.