Age and Programming
I used to work for a large bank, in the treasury department. That is where the bank trades with house money. That means they are trading with their own money. There are many reasons for that, hedging, for instance. Banks deal with interest-bearing instruments a lot. So, they tend to trade those products.
Anyhow. For whatever reason, I did not have much to do in the department. I sat around for a while and finally found a way onto the trading floor because one day someone asked if I was a Perl guy. Yeah, you see, I was so bored of not doing much, I gave a talk on Perl to the department.
So, they needed a Perl guy to fix a script they used on the trading floor to do some quick and dirty calculation. And the author of the script did not anticipate 10-digit amounts, so they set a limit of 9 digits. Well, imagine not having the most significant digit of a 10-digit amount.
So, over the next few weeks, I went down to the trading floor, talking to a small group of people working there, supporting the traders. And I started reading about trading as well. I don’t remember where I read it, but somewhere in a book whose title I don’t remember, it mentioned that traders are almost never older than 35, most are under 30 Because it is an extremely stressful job. So, people over 30 are either washed out already, or they don’t trade any more and become managers or something.
I was thinking, well, that is how programming has been described: a young person’s job.
I was over 30 at that point, working as a programmer in my second full-time job after university.
I turned 60 a month ago, and today, this very day, I worked on a optimizing system, fixed some iOS things, one day after I made an Android app ready for the next version. Another developer and me built this 3000-class system six years ago, working over 16 hours a day, seven days a week to finish it. I was 54, 55 years old at that time. The other developer was turning 50 at that time too.
Two instances don’t mean anything, of course. But, no, age has nothing to do with programming competence. Lack of will to learn and physical decline do.
I don’t intend to stop programming until I can’t see the monitor. Or I can’t tell the monitor from the computer and call the monitor the computer and the computer the harddisk. Wait, that is what people call them. At least at a place where I used to do IT.
Keep writing programs; have fun learning new stuff.
