Coding is good for the brain, it keeps you thinking and on your toes. I hope I live long enough to get to 85 and am still coding. This was inspiring, if an 85 year old can learn Javascript maybe I can learn other languages I've been putting off learning because I felt as though they were too hard.
Anecdotally I'd say this isn't true. I'm 42, and in the last 5 years I've learned coding, welding and a few other things. When I look around at my friends, many of them have also been learning new things. One of my best friends, who has been doing rockshows and awards his whole life, has started writing a childrens book, and has just come out as transgendered so he's learning a lot about writing, how to do nails, walk in high heels, etc.
I might be biased because I'm lucky enough to have unusual, crazy and progressive friends, but I think learning new stuff has less to do with age, and more to do with social factors such as having kids (and thus not a lot of time), or having large monthly expenses due to cars, houses, etc.
These things are correlAted of course, but I don't think age per se is a factor.
I agree with this as a general statement. The usual trend is that we learn so many new things while growing up. We attend school everyday. We get our degrees, get our jobs, and then we specialize. We are not so much learning any more as honing our already acquired skill set to mastery. There is a difference. Lifelong learning outside of your skill set is much better for your brain and decreases the likelihood of developing Alzheimer's and other age-related cognitive illnesses. So having the mindset to learn something new at 85 is amazing and I hope to always retain that thirst for knowledge. It's good for you!
> "Too often, people seem to give up on learning new stuff at an older age. Usually around 30."
Since when has 30 been "an older age"? It's still well within the 1st half of a persons life (assuming average life expectancy), never mind the latter part of the 2nd half.
As a 30-something myself, I'm constantly learning new technologies (only this week I started teaching myself Go).
I know the computer industry is a very youth-orientated sector. But calling 30 year olds "old timers" is a touch unfair.
At age 30, I dimly remembered some Fortran IV from a freshman class. At 32, I taught myself assembler (a now obsolete one), at 33 went back to school...
I think when I run a company, instead of targeting only young people (on the assumption that they can learn new stuff faster) I'm going to give a bump to people who are 35+ and are still learning new stuff.
It's the same theory as is behind choosing an attractive older person. You know that the good-looking 35-year-old has started to age and is still taking care of him- or herself; the good-looking 20-year-old could fall apart in a few years once the metabolism slows down.
Everyone's curious at 22. I want the people who had enough of an insubordinate/rebellious streak to protect their creativity and curiosity through their 20s, despite their corporate masters' attempts to destroy it.
It shouldn't be, but 13 years of corporate subordination and forced creative atrophy puts a lot of people into an out-of-shape state that's hard to recover from. There's nothing natural about this sort of premature mediocrity. If we tear the corporate system down, Bastille-style, we'll see a lot more badass older people, which will be a great thing for the world.
Well I'm here to say that you can break the shackles. At 37 I might still toil in the Java mines during the day, but at night I am learning Ruby, Rails, NoSQL, zsh and other Open Source/less than enterprisey stuff.
I might not be able to debug a rails app as fast as I can a JEE app but I can still grok/reason/solve issues on the platform.
You absolutely can break the shackles, and should. I'm just saying it's (admirably) insubordinate.
From a typical boss-man perspective, your performance is reduced by this extracurricular work. You're probably working late into the evening, and thinking about Ruby during the day. You're probably planning a move to something better.
You can't be fired for that alone, but it puts you at risk of being in the socially excluded, not-getting-the-benefit-of-the-doubt category.
One of the issues with side projects is that admitting to having them breaks the Fundamental Subordinate Dishonesty (http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/fundamental-s...). You're "supposed" to be putting all available energy into your job, or at least respect authority enough to put effort into that illusion. Vacation is okay: that's just taking a break. Off-hours work isn't (in typical workplaces).
I remember talking to a previous boss saying, "I've been thinking of starting skunk works project 'X'. Where 'X' was introducing an ORM, JQuery, or cleaning up some old code/modules. And the answer was always "I'd rather you work on the backlog [of features]."
IMHO, he line of thinking where employers want you only grinding on today's problems rather than additionally incrementally honing the skills to innovate is a broken methodology and does not work for software. The barrier to learning these skills is too low to expect people not to want to do these things and it keeps getting lower.
:-) Thanks for posting the sentiment publicly. Much appreciated.
>> enough of an insubordinate/rebellious streak to protect their creativity and curiosity through their 20s, despite their corporate masters' attempts to destroy it
This is a very nice thing to say (and I consider myself in that category), but people like this are usually the one who come out of life being absolutely clobbered and all.. People like this are very nice to watch from a distance (and admire), but it is a very unpleasant hike to be in our shoes.
Because "fitting in" means exactly that - you fit in space that is just big enough to allow you to work and not much else. Creativity and curiosity require wandering around.
Creative people are willing to follow another's lead if they believe it to be beneficial, as in a mentor/protege relationship where the mentor is clearly superior at the craft. People who will put themselves into the total subordination that the corporate world expects (in which you de-prioritize your own progress, education, and career in favor of managerial-organizational statism) lose their creative capability and rarely are able to get it back.
The comments on the article itself (not here) make me sad. It almost immediately devolves into a language war. Why is it that some people always have to find something to complain about?
I bet a conversation with the author of this article would be very interesting. With the attitude he demonstrated here, he probably has a lot to teach.
People have a need to feel superior to other people. I mean, I get it, you're super smart because you're able to critique programming languages. But at the end of the day, this guy was trying to learn a little about coding and did. And that's pretty cool.
People have lost their sense of wonder, and it's been replaced with cynicism and egomania. C'est la vie.
I believe anyone can learn anything, regardless the age.
And I agree with the author, know how to program is a useful knowledge in a world where computers are everywhere. And it also helps to improve the logical thinking. But I'm not among those who think that everybody must to learn programming.
I'm free to do whatever I want. I chose to learn informatics for the fat paycheck mostly. So what? I happened to like programming, nowadays I spend a lot of my free time building stuff for no reason, and have fun doing that. But in the end, if I were rich, I'm not sure I would be doing any of this. I would probably be playing ping pong all day long, or travelling around the world, or investing in space exploration, or learning astrophysics.
