I appreciated this. Lots of solid advice and positive and pragmatic thinking here about aging in the context of being a programmer, and more generally too.
I'll take this opportunity to make a related pitch regarding back pain in particular, which can become more of a problem if you are sedentary as so many programmers are: if you have chronic back issues you owe it to yourself to at least check out Stuart McGill's Back Mechanic (https://www.backfitpro.com/books/back-mechanic-the-mcgill-me...). It's very much in line with this post; in particular the idea that you just have to deal with back pain as a fact of life is--for most people--not the case. Please take a look if you are struggling with back pain. The process he lays out takes work but it's based on solid research and experience and it has helped me tremendously.
Endorsing Back Mechanic as a great book for fixing back issues, at least for my own experience. Referenced a copy after I first threw out my back. Took months of regular McGill exercises to get back to normal (could barely even walk for a week). It was extremely comforting to know that my back pain problems were fixable, and regressions could be solved with more careful adherence to the exercise regime. I am as active as I have ever been 7 years later, and now I understand the warning signs when I have been mistreating my back.
Edit: For the past few years I've also been sitting in a https://qor360.com/ chair when I'm working. I've found I've had fewer warning niggles of incipient back pain during the periods where I regularly sit in this kind of active chair. I could only tolerate it for brief periods at first but the adjustment period was worth working through.
Have you compared it to sitting on a yoga ball?
I've tried a yoga ball a few times before and found them to be too unstable / uncomfortable. I haven't compared since starting to use the Ariel 2.0 (for almost 3 years now), but I will say that I enjoy the postures that I can adopt while sitting on what is essentially a fancy stool. A yoga ball wouldn't have the same height or allow me to rest my feet with my legs at the same angle. It's probably important to note that the active sitting chair requires a desk with an adjustable height so you can bring the desk up to the correct level for the chair.
Programmers are much more likely than the general population to have hyper-mobility. I am so hypermobile that none of the traditional ergonomics techniques, including physical therapy, work well enough and I have resorted to using a reclining chair. The reclining chair has worked out great and I really wish I had tried it much sooner. I had not considered it earlier because all of the advice I had received was that it was damaging.
Programmers are much more likely than the general population to have hyper-mobility
Boy, that one comes with a whole lot of [citation needed].
I know it really doesn't count for much but I suffer from hyper-mobility and have ADHD as well. So hey we have an n of one so far.
Not really an expert in the topic, and so I can't comment much on the mechanisms why, but AFAIK there's a decent body of evidence that hypermobility is significantly more common in the ADHD + Autism populations than the general public....and I don't think there's much debate that those populations are more likely to be programmers than the general public.
Haven't reviewed in depth, but here's an example to support that claim that looks reasonably credible from a quick review - for some types of hypermobility at least, 5x more likely for Adult ADHD, we're not necessarily talking some kind of small/statistical noise level difference: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34560594/
Autism and hypermobility (e.g., Ehlers-Danlos) are highly correlated. I have both, with ADHD thrown in.
I strongly doubt. Why would this be the case?
Do you mean why would it be the case that a strong claim needs citation? Because it's a strong claim with no evidence (they provided some in another comment, sample size of 5...).
If you mean the claim itself, the person you responded to did not make it.
The sample is biased and intentionally so, the prior probabilities are pulled from general population statistics. Consider the likelihood of an event that should only occur 1/10K times happening 5 times in a row due to random chance, it is incredibly small.
Why is citation needed?
Elaboration may be warranted, but if you do not have the trust in the parent to provide that elaboration under his own creation, why engage with him at all? To only be willing to speak to him if he relays quotes from someone else is quite unusual, if not anti-social.
If you would rather speak to that someone else who you deem a suitable authority, why not speak to that other person instead? What do you hope to gain from using the parent as a pointless middleman? Especially when you consider that middleman untrustworthy, thus making any citations that may be provided unreliable anyway. A strange endeavour.
Did you just arrive from Mars to judge our discourse norms?
It's completely typical to expect someone who makes a surprising factual claim to back it up with evidence. You're talking to them because you think they might know something you don't, and be able to point to how they know it - or they might not, and them offering weak or non-existent evidence would show that.
> It's completely typical to expect someone who makes a surprising factual claim to back it up with evidence.
A citation does not necessarily provide evidence, it only guarantees the words of a third-party. A third-party can spout complete nonsense as well as anyone else. The request ultimately serves to appeal to a flawed assumption that a third-party's words are more valuable than the words of who you are speaking to.
Which also incorrectly assumes there is someone else's words to even draw from. HN is well known for attracting experts in their field. It could have very well been that the parent commenter is the only person who knows anything about the subject. There may not be anyone else. Even if there was, to dismiss his knowledge as the hypothetical leading expert to hear from some other random nobody doesn't make sense.
But, to give the benefit of the doubt, if we assume there is a greater subject matter expert who can give you better words than the parent to describe the knowledge you seek: What purpose does the middleman serve? Why not talk directly with the expert? You are going to get a lot more out of it. The middleman, if not a valuable party to the subject, isn't going to relay what is most useful if for no other reason than because he doesn't know what is useful. A citation remains pointless.
> You're talking to them because you think they might know something you don't
Of course. Which, again, questions why you would want to defer to a third-party? If you have good reason to believe someone knows something you don't, why wouldn't you want to hear it from them directly in their own words? As I said before, in this case elaboration is what would be valuable. A citation is not. A citation is completely useless here. While citations do have a place, asking for a citation in the middle of a conversation is a fallacious device.
> Which also incorrectly assumes there is someone else's words to even draw from.
The claim in question is that there is a prevalence of hyper-mobility among programmers.
That can only be backed by data. Data gathered from a large number of people. Even if we suppose that the claim is the result of a solo research effort --- one person did all the data gathering and analysis --- and that that solo researcher is the very person making the comment on hacker news, there are still other words that can be referenced. They are not another person's words, but that same researcher's words hosted elsewhere, giving interesting details about the research!!!
The comment, whether we believe it or not, simply contains insufficient detail to someone interested.
Don't you understand?
Indeed, it's as if you came from space to dictate alien discourse protocols to humans.
> That can only be backed by data.
Okay. But the request was for citation, not data around mobility. A request for the latter would at least carry something, albeit unless you are an expert yourself you likely won't be able to take much from it, but that is not what was requested. Still, I posit that elaboration is the better approach. If the person is, in fact, an expert in the subject they may have better ways of broaching the subject with you than dumping raws value upon you. And if dumping raw data is truly the best they can offer, that is still apt to be where they end up in their elaboration anyway, so in the worst case you haven't lost anything. Demanding that you know the best way to continue the conversation when it is you without the requisite knowledge seems foolhardy.
> there are still other words that can be referenced
Why reference when he can reiterate his own words, if there is merit in retelling what he has already told before? HN is not a Wiki trying to index historical knowledge, it is decidedly a link aggregator combined with discussion forum, with the latter being the feature that is relevant to the context. Further, this seems to imply that you don't trust the words on HN, but if that is the case why bother with HN at all? There is no utility if nothing can be taken from the words posted here.
> Indeed, it's as if you came from space to dictate alien discourse protocols to humans.
I have never seen this behaviour outside of Reddit (and where Reddit memes have leaked into HN). Humans having a discussion usually talk to each other in the present, not go back and forth pointing to quotes written in the past and likely written by a third-party. Even from my alien vantage point I recognize that as something humans would find strange. What makes you think it is human protocol?
Just an hour ago read somebody say that the California fires were caused by a combination of 5G and coronal mass ejections.
At the time I dismissed his words is not being supported by scientists or other authorities but in future I will remember your wisdom that it is "a flawed assumption that a third-party's words are more valuable than the words of who you are speaking to."
> "I dismissed his words" ... "you are speaking to"
Which is it? Did you dismiss him or did you speak to him? If you dismissed him as you claim, the quote, even ignoring how it is taken out of context, doesn't work. It explicitly refers to where there is an exchange happening.
> To only be willing to speak to him if he relays quotes from someone else is quite unusual
True, but extraordinary claims do call for some reference.
Asking for references is doesn't ipso facto show an unwillingness to speak.
The one making the claim can be reasonably expected to have more ready access to the sources of information than the one newly surprised by the claim, having already done some of the homework. (Perhaps extensively!)
> Programmers are much more likely than the general population to have hyper-mobility.
This does not seem intuitive to me. Why would this be the case?
I noticed it in general observationally and later found a generic explanation for it.
I used to do behavioral analytics and noticed that programmers tend to have a distinct clustering of behaviors.
I’m pretty sure it’s the TNXB gene, it’s been overlooked because it’s traditionally hard to sequence but modern sequencing 30x or long reads can find SNPs here. A colleague who has the same rare set of behaviors and interest as me and is also hyper-mobile had found that he has a TNXB SNP combination that should by random chance only occur in 1/10K people, I subsequently did a DNA test and found that I too had the same SNPs. I have since collected more samples from friends and colleagues who are world class in their fields and so far 5 of 5 have had the same TNXB SNPs. It also appears that in reality this combination is much more common than random chance due to sexual selection which should underscore how behaviorally impactful it is.
Hyper mobility is considered a spectrum and a theory that I’m yet to prove is that the spectrum is almost entirely down to the number and type of TNXB SNPs. And it appears that people on this spectrum are more likely to be programmers.
Consider the over representation of transgenderism in programming. That same over representation exists in hyper-mobility and I would suggest this is due to a common cause.
These conditions (hypermobilty, transgenderism, programming) are all part of the autism cluster.
That is true, I tend to use transgenderism instead of autism because the data is cleaner and that more than makes up for the smaller sample sizes. At least for the things I am interested in.
But for internet discussions I should have used the autism cluster instead.
Programmers might be one of the most autistic cliques I've seen, so this checks out. That's both a good and bad thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermobility_(joints)
I think everyone doubting, saying counter-intuitive etc. is making a spot interpretation of what the term means ('very active sporty person' or something).
just say double jointed - I had to look it up too.
Just got that book yesterday because I've been struggling with managing my back pain. Hopefully it'll help mitigate it.
See also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539720/
McKenzie's ideas helped me greatly with back pain but did not help with my neck pain I got later. After some years I discovered I had trouble in my jaw which caused referred pain to my neck and shoulders. My dentist recommended a bite guard for my tooth grinding, at which point the pain quickly localized in my jaw and slowly got better -- maybe it hurts a bit one or two days a month now.
The simplified version of McKenzie is that you have back pain because you don't have enough flexibility to be comfortable in a neutral position and your muscles are pushing against each other, it's like the pain you'd have if you used one hand to squish the fingers on your other hand. Exercises that stretch backwards like
https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/how-to-do-cobra-pose
really help, although my favorite is Lowen's "Bioenergetic arch" which is terribly obscure (can't find it online except for a comment about it that I wrote on Reddit years ago!) like most of Lowen's work
https://www.amazon.com/Bioenergetics-Revolutionary-Therapy-L...
and not "destined to become widely influential" which is too bad. You stand with your feet together and put your arms straight up and then stretch backward guided by the visualization that your whole body is bending along a circle. You can do it in a standing position whenever the pain reminds you you have a problem and not have to get down on the floor.
----
Another "life hack" was that once I had tendinitis in my hands that was severe enough I thought I had to quit programming. I started doing plain ordinary push ups and the problem cleared up in two weeks and has stayed away ever since. Might not work for you but you can't lose trying it.
My wife was resentful the other day about having to lift a heavy treadmill up the stairs for a person who probably won't make a habit of it. My trainer at the gym told me that the treadmill was the most popular equipment at the gym but also the worst. My trainer introduced me to TRX and kettlebells and I felt pretty stupid because I thought kettlebells were something girls used to look like a dancer in a Kardi B video -- they are that, but they were also one of the Soviet Union's secret weapons when they were crushing everybody in the Olympics.
I told my wife that our friend would be better off with something like that and she said "she has back pain" and in my mind the answer to that is that she needs to get stronger, needs the kettlebells more than I do, just she has to start with lighter weights.
PSA: Be careful about doing McKenzie technique exercises! It made it worse for me because the physical therapist didn't do a good enough analysis! I encourage a thorough assessment that includes an MRI review of your spine first.
The link posted above mentions it as well
> Although most patients favor spinal extension, there are, however, patients who favor spinal flexion instead. For these types of patients, the repetitive extension based exercises can possibly lead to peripheralization which is the worsening of distal referred pain from repetitive motion. In contrast to centralization, peripheralization does not carry a good prognosis and is to be avoided. It is thus vital for clinicians to form an accurate assessment of the directional preference rather than assuming a patient will favor extension and thereby proceeding with therapy based on that assumption.
EDIT: Just to clarify further, the potential side effects are not just "pain". In my case, doing a cobra pose causes me to piss myself and lose feeling in my legs. This can be catastrophic to some people. Please folks, do not just go off some rando on social media telling you "X will treat your neck/back pain!". You can end up seriously much worse than you started. You need to SEE what the problem is first and only an MRI and a trained physician can tell you what is appropriate for you.
Unfortunately the results you get from doing that are pretty variable.
Not like you shouldn't go see a doc and get imaging and do all that (you should!) but every time I've gotten imaging done I've heard "you've got degeneration which is typical for somebody your age" -- my son just got an MRI for a work injury (paid for by Workman's Comp) and got told the same thing. Often your doc gives you an order to a PT and what sort of therapy you get from a PT is complete random and not evidence based.
Imaging might turn up a specific cause (maybe a tumour) but it is usually inconclusive. Studies tend to show low correlation between degeneration seen and back pain and my doc was clear it was the same when I was having serious pain in my knee.
You're right that centralization vs peripheralization is an important sign.
Your chances of getting better are still greater than if you just willynilly self-treat without the support of those diagnostic tools. Yes for the majority of people, simple spine degeneration may not be a big deal and probably easily treatable at home with stretching and strength training exercises. There's degeneration, and then there's borderline myelopathy; you sure is hell don't want to make that worse (trust me) before you get a chance to see a medical professional. Myelopathy is insidious too, it can turn into a catastrophe without you realizing. One day it might be pain, the next it could be near paralysis.
I agree, the quality of care received is very lacking (especially in the US, I don't think anyone would argue otherwise), but if you find a physical therapist that is actually willing to look at your MRIs to determine what the mechanics of your particular situation are and work with you on what feels good vs what makes things worse, you'll be far better off. They do exist, it might take time to find them. If you go into a PT clinic and they don't even look at your imaging, I'd go somewhere else.
I just wanted to point out that your preconceived notions about kettle bells are way off. nothing “girly” about them. They have origins in russia and europe actually.
I got into Kettlebells after I watched this Russian strong man called 'Victor Blud's videos on YouTube.
Hell yeah. I just wish I knew that 10 years ago!
Most people should be doing at least some baseline level of both strength training AND cardio. Working around whatever injuries or anatomical issues they have. There's nothing wrong with treadmills.
Personally I have a history of patello-femoral problems, running is not the best exercise for me so if I am doing cardio I prefer the elliptical, AMT, ergometer, anything else. If I do want to walk I am going to do it in the woods around me.
I agree there's a fad today that trainers are more into weights than cardio. (Personally I love things like circuit training that are hybrids.)
I had a time period when I was under extreme stress and doing two hours a cardio, sometimes walking 12 miles a day, etc. It helped me make endless cold calls and deal with a huge amount of uncertainty.
I fainted when I was in an exercise class, working extra hard because I had a crush on the instructor, on an extremely hot day in a high humidity building after eating too much. I saw a number of doctors as a result including a cardiologist and spent a month wearing a portable EKG. I was told I had "Athlete's Heart" with visible changes on my sonogram and an abnormally low resting heart rate (so did my grandfather who died of mesothelioma around age 75 and so did President G. W. Bush who is still kicking at 78)
The Holter monitor caught about 10 bad heartbeats in the last 30 minutes of the study so I got a diagnosis of Atrial Fibrillation which I'm now being treated for. (Oddly a hare-brained scheme of mine had fallen apart right at that time which was a major stress source) My doc told me it was fine for me to do 1 hour of cardio a day but not more.
> Personally I have a history of patello-femoral problems
Look up "knees over toes guy". Seriously.
Oh, thanks. The video is an hour long. Slide deck is two minutes.
Standard advice on aging. Not programmer specific.
There is some good advice, but the way she assumes old people have a lot of money, costs go down because of accumulation of assetes and salaries rise faster than inflation, might not be transferable to everyone in all geographies and generations (only read the slides)
Indeed. That partly seems to be based on the advice to build (save/invest) money while you are younger, which seems a bit contradictory.
I suppose everything is easier when you are rich, including ageing.
The current crop of old people had money when interest rates started high and ended low, which is far better than the opposite of starting low and ending high. There is a lower bound for interest rates and there is a risk component to the rate, especially for regular borrowers. Now consider that during the period of lowering interest rates the risk temporarily dips lower because in general all asset holders are making money. This doesn’t happen if the interest rates merely stay still, in time the risk component will increase and the rate at which people can borrow will increase along with it.
I’m not sure what the takeaway should be from this, dysfunctions can last longer than people’s lifetimes so it’s not always a sure bet to bet against it. My prediction which I’ve held for a long time is that the economic dysfunction will create civil unrest. The increase of security cost will undermine profitability impares the ability for asserts to maintain their high values and this will trigger a downturn. It does appear to me that we are in the early stages of civil unrest.
It's good advice anyway. You have to try pretty hard to end up worse off for saving money. Much of what we're going through was experienced in the 70s, and those people lived through it. Even if things really fell apart, order would probably be restored within a decade. Lots of undesirable changes could happen as a result of a crisis, but it could also lead to positive outcomes like a renewed focus on the country's self-sufficiency.
"Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure does make the bad times easier" - some 40s/50s Hollywood starlet.
It's not contradictory at all. As Einstein said, "compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe."
[dead]
I think expecting anyone's advice on anything to "be transferable to everyone in all geographies and generations" is pretty ridiculous on its face.
There's some solid disclaimers at the start; I don't think it's fair to say she assumes that this is universal advice since she explicitly states that it isn't.
I don't see the words "standing desk" together in the comments yet. I am using one at the moment and later today I will be sitting. It is important to alternate lest you create new issues IMO.
And if you really want to up your game a treadmill desk has been an amazing upgrade.
If I just live my typical WFH life I am usually hitting a dismal 2k steps a day. Doing two 45 min to an hour work sessions walking at the treadmill desk had me hitting 10k steps without having to devote any special extra time in my day to exercise.
Do you find it's difficult/impossible to type with a treadmill desk setup? That's my largest concern. Even when I'm not coding I spend a decent amount of time doing PRs, Slack, etc.
I haven’t had an issue with it but I’ve heard other people do depending on the speed they’re walking.
I actually find walking to help intensify my focus for coding if I’m deep in the flow of a problem. I find reading PRs while walking to actually be the more difficult thing vs coding.
Yes, 100%. Being immobile is bad, whether you're standing, sitting, or lying down. (Too much strain from movement is bad too, hence RSI for many of us.)
I really enjoy having the flexibility/option of standing or sitting, and IMO a standing desk is one of those purchases that has a 10x payback.
I'm a software engineer maybe half the age of the speaker, probably less. But I am already gradually going blind. (No one knows whether I'll reach legal blindness in 5 years or 25, but its presence in my future is a certainty.)
It's striking, if not surprising, how relatable this talk is to me. My biggest difficulties are with contrast and brightness, and it's clear that dropping night driving will be the first major life change required by my degrading vision. Many-- maybe even most-- of the compensatory measures the speaker suggests for dealing with vision loss are already part of my life.
For me, these similarities and others feel very natural and very right, even a little comforting. My eye disease is genetic, with no treatments and no cure, and so part of what it has taught and reminded me is that bodies fail, and the terms of when and how they fail isn't up to us. One of the things I really like about this talk is how unsentimental it is (without being cold, either). Disability isn't a question of if but of when and how-- and that's not a tragic thing any more than the abstract fact of death, either-- it's just a part of nature, of life.
I like this talk because it reminds us that aging, injury, disability, and adapting to those things (individually and collectively) are common threads in human lives. They're something we should know to expect. We may not be fully in control, but we can prepare-- prepare ourselves, our families, our workplaces, our governments, our cities and towns and neighborhoods-- to accommodate the inevitability of various shades and varieties of disability in ourselves and the people around us. Embracing an awareness of the universality of disability can ground us even in the face of bodily changes that frighten and grieve us. We can know they're not the end of the world because they've always been part of the world around us.
This talk may be worth a watch even if you think it's not really about you. :)
Good luck. Hope your sight will hold until they discover a cure.
Looks to be 100% about aging, but I don't see anything specific to programming
We're lucking that aging has not impact on programming, then.
I'm 61 and I'm definitely aware that by many metrics I am a worse programmer than I was 10 years ago.
By some other metrics, I'm better, and I could still run circles around most younger programmers in terms of architecture/system design.
But it absolutely has an impact.
I'm not yet 50, I'm "only" in my mid-40s, but for sure advancing in age has had an effect on the way I program code. For sure I won't be able to spend long hours in the night trying to decipher/solve a specific programming problem, I used to do that when I was younger.
I also used to type a lot more code, as in, my fingers used to type a lot more, I can't physically afford to do that now because after a certain threshold I can feel it in my fingers, and that feeling is not good.
I'd say that even my capability to stay focused on a specific issue has kind of changed, but maybe that's just a me thing, related to my specific life choices/environment, I couldn't tell, maybe some other programmers who have the same age as I do are better at keeping focused, or at least as good as they were 15-20 years ago.
I think I write much less code now to solve a given problem, largely due to a few decades of YAGNI experience. Gee, I could build this infinitely flexible inner system to solve this whole class of problems, or I could just write some code to concretely solve today’s problem, and keep it loosely coupled enough that we can replace it wholesale later if we need to.
That, plus a healthy dose of “good enough”, along with a whole lot of “I’ve written this 5 times already” lets me get easily maintainable stuff out the door more quickly than when I started.
If I were hiring, I’d vastly prefer current me to younger me.
It really varies by person and circumstances, and there's also things you can do (analogous to when someone with aches starts lifting weights, and gets in the best shape of their life).
Late nights are often a bad idea anyway. Though I literally just finished a successful all-nighter about an hour ago, I try not to make a habit of it. And there's a ton of things we know how to do, so that most all-nighters never need to happen.
Regarding typing, it might not be a "this is my life now" thing you just have to accept and work with, but there might be some practice/nuance or environmental factor that you can change for big wins. You can look into typing/workstation ergonomics, and experiment with the many variables, to see what works for you. I had to do that in my late teens, when most of our development team on a stressful project developed hand pain and worse, and learned what worked for me. Now I can type all day and night without problem. Having that known-good baseline means that I soon know when I start doing something that doesn't work for me. (Last time was a few years ago, when I started using a laptop with a numeric keypad at a startup, and hand started hurting. I think probably because hands had to twist badly for the way I was balancing the laptop with the off-center main keyboard. So I switched that work to a laptop without an off-center keyboard, and problem disappeared.)
Being only in my 30s but also affected by a lot of usually-age-related disability has been a big struggle for me as a programmer. I don't know how typical it actually is, but I guess I skipped the "work way too hard because your body can handle it" phase that appears to build reputation and wealth early in a career. Probably it would have been different if I'd grown up more physically active; I basically hate most sports and other ways of staying healthy and didn't learn their value until it started getting in the way of the things I do love.
Regardless, it's a massive toll on my mental health. Although frequently assured otherwise, I constantly feel like a burden on my team, like I'm unreliable, for being unable to put in the same hours my older coworkers do. As difficult as it is to start now, focusing on developing my physical health is the only way forward.
I'm the same age as you. I think it would be difficult to disentangle reduced focus from changed internet usage.
Personally I'm trying to watch less youtube. When I want a break from work, I try to go read a book for a while instead of taking the "mental junk food" option. I can't provide an objective report on whether measures like this help, but they do feel better.
So you have nothing to worry about....
Lucky employer then.
One thing I've struggled with, that is very personality dependent, is being assertive around younger, sharper programmers. It can be an odd dynamic, where I may work with people smarter and faster but less experienced than myself. It can become difficult depending on the dynamics to push for the best choices in architecture, libraries, etc, when it is something they don't want to do, if you are not explicitly their senior. More naturally confident and assertive programmers will not have this issue. This is particularly problematic when pushing for restraint.
For example, choosing a more well supported and stable UI library for an internal tool, vs using one with e.g. more components or more customization. Its hard to sell that there's no money in fancy internal tools, and a limited set of UI that works well and requires little or no support and even less cognitive load, and just working with those constraints, can result in a net benefit long term. Especially when someone that is sharp and fast can bang out working solutions very quickly. Then three years on the tool is only growing, and the complexity is high, re-usability is low, each page is its own snowflake, and someone has to maintain it. The cost suddenly becomes that of an FTE, for a tool that's only occasionally used, which is astronomically cost ineffective. I told you so is worse than worthless because it solves nothing and only burns bridges. You just deal with the outcome and know you should have pushed harder, perhaps even put your job on the line. Tough to do for trivial matters. I think people that excel as aging programmers figure out how to deal with this well, whether through being more assertive, more convincing, more officially senior, or perhaps even more selective about the situations they get themselves into.
I guess what's not surprising is that you can work in this career so long, continually on "the same stuff", and yet the patterns and opportunities can provide interesting new problems to solve, not always the ones you thought needed solving.
> know you should have pushed harder, perhaps even put your job on the line
If you are not the ultimate decision-maker, it is not your fault what decision was made. If you are going out of your way to point out the flaws and issues you anticipate, you are doing everything you need and, indeed, everything you reasonably can.
Very general advice, but as a 50 year old developer I needed to read this.
Additional instance of this presentation put on by the same speaker at another conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LArOT95LTJU
interesting. i am 55-ish.
"change is the only constant in universe" - whoever said that.
For a change, i went long-distance bikepacking 5y ago. 500-1000-1500kms.
Then, Learned to e-foil 2y ago.. took me weeks if not months to get the balance right. (While some kid i taught on the beach, needed 25 mins :/) 7000km so far. Traumas not counted - but hey i am (even more) alive. Today seawater was 8'C.. so what.
The other day decided to (finally) learn Go.. did the tour mostly, then, what, just read the spec top to bottom (it's short, has interesting recent changes in scope of for-vars). A nice little language as they frame it. (Maybe 25th or 35th programming language i learn. stopped counting long ago)
But.. Cannot be bothered to LLMize meself. And Maybe connected, it seems hard to find a (proper) job recently. esp. if excluding some things on ethical grounds.. Which brings cynicism - as described in the article.
But yeah. Better Live now. Yesterday is history, Tomorrow is a mystery..
have fun
I haven't tried e-foil, but did I thoroughly enjoy learning to balance on a racing stand up paddle board last summer (only 23" wide). It took me many hilariously humbling weeks of constantly falling off before I could stay up for any distance. I loved feeling inept and awkward but with only benign consequences: failure means a mere dunk in warm water.
Lots of interesting personal stories and anecdotes in the comments. I was wondering what the average case would be, though, as I don't think many people, myself included, will be far from the average. Indeed, the video cautioned us in the Disclaimer section at the minute 1:24 and quoted the famous WWII story on survival bias.
I was enjoying this, but then reached a point where the speaker said
> BMI is just nonsense, and not only that, it’s almost certainly racist nonsense […] it has been shown to be healthier in the group they call overweight than the group they call normal
Which makes me doubt the veracity of other claims made, to say the least
Yes, it is not necessarily a racist view to assume that people who look different have more in common than not. If American doctors conduct research on a group of people within their own demographics, and that does not apply to all of humanity for some unknown reason, that doesn't mean they are racists. It's a vague guideline anyway with many exceptions such as bodybuilders and people with unusual proportions.
> Under the newly adopted policy, the AMA recognizes issues with using BMI as a measurement due to its historical harm, its use for racist exclusion, and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations. Due to significant limitations associated with the widespread use of BMI in clinical settings, the AMA suggests that it be used in conjunction with other valid measures of risk such as, but not limited to, measurements of visceral fat, body adiposity index, body composition, relative fat mass, waist circumference and genetic/metabolic factors.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-ado...
I'm a better and faster programmer than I've ever been, though I'm probably un-hirable anywhere that filters by age (almost everywhere).
My problem in my role atm is not skill, it's the competition for bandwidth both inside the role, and outside it (i.e. that I have a life consistent with my age, which has a lot of moving parts itself).
22-year-old-me worked past midnight, but 22-year-old-me sometimes had to because they couldn't draw boundaries, manage scope, manage time, etc. I was smart then too but had fewer hacks burned into memory.
I rarely do late nights now, not because I don't want to—tearing myself away remains excrutiating—but because I can't.
Not because of ability, though I'm sure that's diminished objectivley; but because I have responsibilities which don't mesh with no-sleep or being cranky from lack of it.
The host is clearly in poor physical condition and many of their concerns are due to lack of proper nutrition , exercise and prescription meds abuse. They appear 15 years older than they should be. Their advice is primarily reactive, and the trivial proactive advice (exercise more) is delivered almost ironically.
Take care of yourself now. Drop the weight, get generous activity, get off the meds and you will feel loads better.
If you skim the transcript you'll see stuff like this:
> [...] a big part of what I want to talk about is things you can do in your 20s in your 30s in your 40s in your 50s that lead towards you being able to do what you want which could be nothing or could be programming in your 60s in your 70s uh in your 80s [...]
Further in she says:
> it's really astonishing the minute you have proof, visual proof to strangers that your body doesn't quite work people assume your mind doesn't quite work.
To her point, she's 63. We have no idea what she's seen in her life, what sacrifices she's had to make to get where she is today, or anything. What I see is that she is doing more about it now than most of us in this thread, and it might pay to look past her "poor physical condition" to see what she is conveying.
physical appearance is one of the most informative indicators of health.
this is easily falsifiable, since many diseases are internal: heart disease, low/high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer. also, most mental health issues do not present external indicators.
bruce lee was at peak physical performance when he dropped dead. you could smoke cigarettes and take adderall nonstop and still look "healthy".
Physical appearance is also an informative indicator of age. Care to expand on what you think a 63 year old woman is supposed to look like? Any examples from Hollywood or Greek mythology that match what you're looking for here?
We all know what a healthy person looks like from toddler's age. It takes mental gymnastics to argue otherwise. The fact that we can only think of a couple examples of obviously fit folks who had health problems, like the other chap tried to do, is an exception that proves the rule.
Do yourself a favor and try to break away from the overly legislative mindset. Meaning is not bounded by words and definitions. The things that matter -- like true love, peace, happiness, health, contentment, and more-- are not bounded by rules and definitions. We all know those things when we see them.
If someone presents themselves as an authority on health issues and how to cope with them, they should obviously be healthy.
Your post has great insight. I would just take ever so slight exception to your final paragraph based on two physicians I know that are 8n bad shape medically through no fault of their own. ;-)
Really? Nah. What does a 63 year old healthy single woman look like? What about a 63 year old woman who had four kids? What about a 63 year old woman who beat stage IV metastatic melanoma?[1] A "healthy" 63 year old person is going to look mighty different depending on the curves life threw them.
So is it not overly legislative to bind a person's health choices to their looks when you don't have the whole story?
I can look at her (and listen to her) and see healthy mind behind a body that has done decades of hard work. I hope that you can too someday.
[1] http://www.gregcons.com/KateBlog/SurvivingIncurableCancer.as...
>So is it not overly legislative to bind a person's health choices to their looks when you don't have the whole story?
No, it is overly pedantic to argue with someone making a basic and reasonable statement that someone looks overweight and would probably do better if they lost weight. Being overweight contributes to all kinds of joint pain and diabetes (which causes a lot of other physical and even mental problems). Maybe this woman is a natural oddity that can be in peak health and also significantly overweight at an old age, but odds are against it.
Fifteen years older?! You think that woman looks 78? To me I'd put her in her mid-60s. She's 63. She looks like a 63 year old.
I think part of the problem of this talk is that it introduces the fact that older people/people with disabilities are judged on their appearances instead of their capabilities (which, with respect, you have just demonstrated). Then the talk sortof goes off into a "how to age gracefully" direction and abandons that original line of thinking (disclaimer, I only watched the first 30 minutes so far).
I definitely would be interested in addressing the first issue because, as they say, everyone becomes a old and/or disabled (unless like Tom Petty, you're dead).
yes i have friends and family in their 80s who look younger
100%. Not only does this help physically but mentally as well. My mental health improved by strides when I started exercising regularly.
Meanwhile The Economist says [1]:
"In a way, those over the age of 55 but under the age of 75—roughly speaking, the baby-boomers and some of what is referred to as “Generation X”—are the new problem generation. <...> Whereas young people in rich countries these days are addicted to their phones, more anxious than previous generations and far less likely than them to use mind-altering substances or to party recklessly, their grandparents belong to a generation that experimented with sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. As they reach older age, they are not giving up their old habits."
[1] https://www.economist.com/international/2025/01/02/why-peopl... , https://archive.is/dkxot
slightly more recent, slightly expanded version of the same talk, with link to slides:
Lots of good advice, especially for younger people for whom it can pay increasing dividends because they're starting earlier.
I have a small quibble about the idea of knowing when you're thirsty. Many people either don't realize when they need to drink more, or actively avoid drinking because they don't want to have to go to the bathroom more frequently. As a result, they are underhydrated and their overall health suffers. (This is largely based on my observations, not any studies, but it was confirmed to me by a PT who encourages people to hydrate more.) So while it may not be necessary to set a timer and drink a liter of water every couple of hours, simply thinking "I'm in touch with my body and I don't feel thirsty" may be a product of deluded wishful thinking.
Also she mentioned around the 50 minute mark that "brain games" don't actually help you get better at anything except those brain games, but doing activities you like such as reading are helpful overall. What makes one mental activity more helpful than another? Most programmers tend to like brain games, so you'd figure any mental exercises are better than none, especially if you do different ones.
I haven’t seen the submission (video) but I need to shift from my focus from "this is just what it is now" to dealing with problems head-on and mitigating. Also absorbing experiences and knowledge from people who have been where I am at.
"This is just how it is now" (you know the refrain) becomes a self-fulfilling phrophecy. Could most problems simply be avoided and mitigated until a long time in the future? I don’t know yet.
I don’t have the glass half full attitude yet. Right now it’s mostly "I guess this is just how it is now for me rest of my life." That’s more like my current mindset.
What I learned so far, at 45, is that you can't rely on your body retaining capabilities just from you not being completely sedentary, as it was the case for me before.
You get to keep only the abilities, movements that you actively use in daily (or perhaps weekly) life. For example if you don't squat you'll gradually lose ability to squat even if you run a mile every day. If you don't jump, or jump down regularly you'll lose that ability too.
I think it's a good idea to enrich your environment so that you are forced to do the things you'd like to retain. For example sleep on the mattress on the floor to get up from floor level every day. Another idea is barefoot shoes so you don't lose stability and active amortization your feet should provide. If you live in a house with multiple floors and bathrooms always use bathroom on another floor. What's infeasible to implement you'll need to supplant with regular intentional exercise like hip abductions.
I listened through Move Your DNA last year (biomechanics) so this makes a lot of sense.
On the whole it doesn’t seem that bad, at least this aspect. We just need to do better than sitting for 12+ hours. And I like movement. Not being lethargic.
Some things (out of the deluge of information from everywhere) discourage me, like learning that you have been drinking water wrong your whole life or whatever microhabit is ruining your life this week. But I was and am mostly optimistic about the biomechanics stuff. Because there is a ton of potential to do better considering that even athletes can be habitual oversitters.
Thanks.
How is BMI racist?
One example of many - https://www.henryford.com/blog/2023/11/how-bmi-is-flawed-and...
It's in the title, but that article lists no reasons why it's racist.
They try to relate it to socioeconomic status, but BMI is applied to poor white people as well.
I don't buy that reasoning on face value though, it's perfectly affordable to eat healthy. These days fast food and processed foods are much more expensive than buying fresh groceries.
Just a trash article trying to normalize obesity and race-bait.
yeh, the poor neighborhoods are full of grocery stores with fresh food and not food deserts
AMA any better as a source? https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/how-use-bmi-fet...
> "food deserts", low-income census tracts that are more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
One mile. That's absurdly narrow. They are tailoring the definitions to meet the resultant behavior. You can grocery shop once every two weeks or less and be healthier than the average American by eating some of the cheapest possible foods, such as rice, beans, and cabbage, carrots, pasta... as an upper income individual I feed my kids this stuff all the time, its dirt cheap and they (we) are happy to eat it. There's serious problems to be dealt with in the US with respect to lower income support, but IMHO food related ones are mostly cultural / educational, not "lives 2 miles from super market, impossible to eat healthy now".
yes even the poor have grocery stores.
and no, that's a terrible article as well.
feel free to pick out the strongest point you think the article has and present it.
dumping links is not a conversation.
here's a wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
this is a long-studied area with real and verifiable research. the "grocery stores" you're thinking of are liquor/corner stores, which are not adequate substitutes.
In which parts do you disagree with the history it narrates?
I disagree with the entire premise of the article.
None of the facts they sprinkled in are relevant to their conclusions.
What exactly do you find compelling from it?
no they dont so I'm outta here
The scientific literature on this is vast.
1. Have talking point.
2. Pay people to write paper about it.
3. Have shills link it everywhere for free.
There is correlation with race and groups within the same race. Which makes it more complicated than just one number fit all.
I personally use my own self 10 years back as a 'normal' state. No I'm about 10% heavier then I should be. Working on it ;)
Reading the articles below it appears that BMI should be sub-categorized by race and gender categories - healthy weights for [X-race + Y-gender] person to increase its efficacy as a health tool.
And what about mixed races?
Most reasons denote it's racist because of socioeconomic status.
Should we account for income in BMI as well?
Is being overweight healthy for any race? If not, it's probably not a great idea to suggest that it is for the members of the protected race. In fact that seems a bit racist itself.
I don't see a problem with my programming skills, but with my ability to play the corporate game.
Probably because i have a lot of experience, i kind of know when a manager wants to push a team too much because he wants to play some game of thrones with another manager. I know when they decide to ignore all warnings to get to a deadline, and then when everything explodes they blame someone else. I know when someone has no idea on what he is doing but has too much power. I know when they are demanding world class results on half the time and a tenth of the resources any serious company would dedicate to the effort.
Today you have this "go fast, break things" mentality, which sounds cool and "based", but justifies breaking any rule of software engineering (who has time to write test, amirite?).
And now with IA, is even worse, any manager thinks they can rewrite their stack because they got "hello world" running on localhost.
Maybe i'm getting old...
If you want to be a programmer past the age of forty, you have to accept watching your manager learn things about software development (and management) that you learned years ago.
And that's okay. If it drives you crazy, either let it go, or bite the bullet and apply for the job yourself.
Or become an entrepreneur.
But don't think that because you are great at writing software that you automatically will be great at running a business.
> Today you have this "go fast, break things" mentality
Not in most of the big tech companies, even in the bay area. It's amazing that the bay area companies have managed to grow themselves into giant bureaucratic organizations and they console themselves with bullshit like slow is fast.
That's because "go fast and break things" was a stupid plan for children and criminals. It worked sometimes in the same way that some people who move to LA to become A-list actors succeed, but that doesn't make it a good plan. Slow IS faster. But slow can also be slow; you can go slow because you're doing it right, or you can go slow because you're dragging cinderblocks behind you for no reason. The trick is telling those two things apart.
"Go fast and break things" is a good thing if you're working on stuff nobody needs, or stuff that doesn't make a lot of money.
Breaking a social network that 2,000 people use and makes no revenue is fine as long as you learned something from it that makes it easier to get that 2,001st user or first dollar. Breaking a hospital's IT network could kill someone and should have consequences. Breaking amazon.com costs tens or hundreds of millions of dollars and should have consequences.
GFBT's usefulness, like most things, changes based on the scale at which you apply it. Calling it stupid is reductive at best.
Yup, or EM pitches the big five year vision rearchitecture because that's what builds their empire, even though a cron job that takes a couple days to write would solve the business need.
And you know that you'll come back in five years and nothing will have changed, except five new services that do half of what the vision required, most systems still depend on what was originally there, the team has tripled in size and most of them are just there to maintain the workarounds of the half-implemented systems, latency, cost, storage, and bug count are all way up, and no new functionality has been built that the original cron job couldn't have handled.
IA or AI?
Just think about it for a second.
In general, in such situations the senior devs pull the ejection cable, and form a new company without the managerial labor cost overhead.
If they still want product support, than get a quote from SAP first. Ghost ships don't need managers by the way...
Almost every sick division I saw had a 15% budget kickback clause in their contract for unspent resources. =3
My peak programming skills are close to what they were 30 years ago, but I cannot sustain that level of concentration for long periods as I once could.
I feel like a pinch hitter: I can do a couple innings at a high level of performance, but I can't keep that level up as long as I used to.
OTOH I think I have better judgement when it comes to deep, complex questions of long-term architecture choices. My "meta-programming" skills are sharper than ever.
“A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of his superior skill.” Frank Borman
I thought I knew how to program 30 years ago (in my early 30s), but now realize that I didn't have much of a clue. So I think I'm hopefully a much better programmer than I was back then - though more aware of my weak areas and the fact that there seem to be a lot of them (the older I get, the less I know). I'm not sure concentration is the issue for me (though it is an issue and I know that social media etc. has killed my attention span) as much as not being able to sit for hours at a time anymore. I've gotta get up and walk around, go outside and move my achy joints. So more of a combination of physical and mental.
The challenge here is a lot of managers don't know how to grade you based on things you successfully avoided.
> but I cannot sustain that level of concentration for long periods as I once could.
This scares me. I'm younger and thus, I feel like social media and short form content has had so much impact on my ability to focus that it already feels bad where it is right now. Never thought this might be the peak of my concentration power though.
I'm 40 and as far as I can tell, I can concentrate just as well now as I did when I was 20. I'm also pretty deliberate with what I do in life, I don't engage in "mass social media" like FB/Twitter/etc. , I don't use YouTube, Tiktok, etc.. .. I mean, I will view something if someone sends a link, but I don't "browse" stuff (partly because browsing literally anything feels like I'm being manipulated and I'm pretty sensitive to that). Sometimes I see someone using a modern social media app like FB, IG or whatever, and I cannot imagine that months and years of this kind of "scrolling endlessly, pausing on things that grab your attention, then resuming" is healthy for one's consciousness or focus. I think the summary is, I live my life the same way I did in 1999 or whatever, as I've found that works for me, and I have to basically actively reject what modern society tries to manipulate me into living like. (btw this is hard to do, EVERYONE and EVERYTHING wants me to be paying attention to millions of disparate trivial things, it's a literal nonstop battle...)
This site is a social network. Not as bad as Facebook or Twitter/X, but pretty much the same idea.
I imagine you can recognize the difference between an extractive, engagement-metric-driven profit-centre like FB or "X" and a forum-like discussion site like Hacker News. There's a reason I used the phrase "mass social media". And actually, no, HN is not a social network in the same category as the ones I mentioned. No one has a "wall"/feed, you can't add/message friends, there's no algorithm telling me what to see, etc.
I think the differences between a _forum_ like this - which isn't far off from Usenet - as compared to modern social media are entirely the point.
It's precisely those differences that matter: the highly polished, short form content designed to give a dopamine hit. The highly polarized topics, the hot takes, ML echo chambers, dark patterns, all of it.
HN isn't without its issues, and much of those other platforms' issues bleed over, but we're talking apples and aircraft carriers here, and I reject the idea that this is "pretty much the same thing".
A social network requires at least being able to "friend" another user does it not? I don't think Hacker News has such features.
It's a forum... And a bloody good one.
I’ve seen this argument made so much lately I’m starting to feel like it’s being astroturfed.
Forums are like proto-social networks, but were around a long time before the MySpace/FB-type of bona fide social networks
I'm 40; you're fine. I put down Instagram last year, and I never even think of it anymore. Your mind evolved over millions of years, "short form content" is not going to rewrite that. Once you delete that stuff off of your phone, your brain will immediately free up that headspace, like Instagram never even existed.
I don't know about my concentration. I've got more non-negotiable responsibilities now, so I have less time to work on things, but I work on them harder, and I take advantage of the off time to let solutions bubble up.
I'm also a middle aged programmer and I don't think parent's observation is really about age per se.
Rather: we of a certain age grew up in a world before the optimized dopamine reward cycle of social media, and when the news / politics / outrage loops were far less potent. We could focus more because... well... we weren't being distracted to death.
Maintaining deep focus in the face of this onslaught is a skill I feel like people of all ages need to curate.
I've felt the same. I started reading books again though, and I felt a small improvement in my ability to concentrate. Digital detoxing helps too.
Focus is a muscle. Gotta build it up. Block everything, read books. (And I really should practice what I preach, here).
> but I cannot sustain that level of concentration for long periods
You can fix this by paying attention to it. When your mind starts wondering acknowledge this, take 5 min 'break' lazily thinking about the task. Then get back to the task. This is sort of mind hack.
Another way to control your thoughts is through meditation. A lot can be done this way. To summarize it: you can consciously control what you are thinking about. It's non physically hard.
Can I read more about this? The "lazy break" in particular - is this something you personally came up with?
it's just a generic idea. if you want to do something try to not to force yourself. will power is a limited resource. find an easy way. 'lazy break' is sort of application of this idea. the task may be complex, just mentally step back, take a look at the whole picture, imagine next steps to do. all in relaxed way, may be walking, having a cup of coffee.
my problem is the opposite, sometimes i'm too focused and forget about the other thing to do. this lunatic state can last for days.
Clever architecture always beats clever code.
Companies that don’t get it confuse furious activity for fixing more and more effective ways
Natural focus can change to learning new things.
Focusing on learning and implementing brain health above all is the key I’ve found.
Starting to introduce individual magnesium threonate and zinc made a surprising difference.
Normal things like understanding how sleep, hydration, exercise, diet. The science around gut health has also been interesting for its contribution to focus and energy.
Be happy to learn from you on anything you find works.
"Clever architecture always beats clever code."
Since the difference between clever code and broken code is often obfuscated and ephemeral, it's difficult to argue with the assertion.
I've so rarely seen clever architecture that I find it difficult to agree with it, though.
I amused myself for a few minutes reflecting on your choice of the verb "beats". Quite clever, to introduce such rich ambiguity!
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