Some quotes I found interesting regarding the usage of tech by elderly people:
> I explained my app. "Since senior citizens are not good at swiping," I said, "I made it possible for them to play by tapping."
> I think AI speakers are helpful to the elderly. Once the initial setup is complete, we can use them even if we become bedridden.
> What we need are features that support people from the AI side. One example would be a function that informs users that evacuation instructions have been issued due to heavy rain. Or when you feel a pain in your chest, a function that dials 119 (Japan's emergency number) would be helpful.
> I explained my app. "Since senior citizens are not good at swiping," I said, "I made it possible for them to play by tapping."
I have a similar experience. A few years ago I implemented a traditional Chinese dominoes game on Android for my grandma. (To date she still plays the game every night for two hours.) When I let her tested the game, the first thing I observed was that she was poor at dragging the dominoes to the table. So, I quickly changed dragging to tapping. (Tap a dominoe once to choose it and tap the table once to play it. To cancel a wrong choice, tap the chosen dominoe again.)
I have been programming for 45 years and started at age 15, the key to make it fun, forever, is just work on coding projects you love doing. Of course, you have to be in a situation that enables you to do that, but if you are lucky enough to be there, then I can see someone coding for another 20 years or most of your life.
How do you solve the problem where you love coding but not the problems you have to solve at work?
Where I live, every place is the same, Jira sweatshop mentality, just put out a fire or solve as many stories as quickly as possible to maintain velocity, with whatever tools someone higher than you imposed because it was convenient at the time.
When I come home I'm done with coding for the day and I have no time to code stuff I like as I'm investing it in taking care of myself physically and socially to counteract the negative effects of being on a chair at work in front of a monitor with headphones on 8 hours a day.
look into smaller businesses who only need 1-5 coders. you will get paid well, do interesting stuff and have a lot of say in your stack and tools. usually these companies do not produce software as their deliverable but need good internal software.
e.g. i work for < 50M/yr e-commerce company that manufactures in the DIY/home remodeling industry. i report directly to the CEO, code our full stack and admin our VPS linode server. we have internal voip systems that get integrated, physical production hardware (scales, scanners, etc), inventory tracking, fulfillment, amazon integration and a whole lot more. i get to touch it all.
Where I live(Germany), the business who only need 2 developers already have them. All the job ads are only from big/medium companies and it's not worth working for the medium sized ones as you have all the downside of the big corps with none of the perks.
I agree, actually. It's so hard to find a good job that doesn't pay like crap in Germany (I used to live in Cologne and Berlin). Try contracting with UK companies if you can find a remote gig, my QoL went significantly up after I stopped working with German companies.
define "pay like crap". My experience in Berlin is different, depending on your experience 60-90K EUR is possible. Combined with the relatively low cost of living in Berlin, you can live comfortably. I don't see London paying significantly more, while being a lot more expensive.
That's exactly what I meant by that. I've been in a few companies and I don't think the compensation structure for SWEs is fair for most of the German market. I do agree that Berlin is still fairly cheap.
agreed. I was visiting Bucharest last November and was surprised that there were multiple tech meetups on meetup.com. Perhaps I shouldn't have been, but ... I was just... pleasantly surprised. I wasn't there for work, but found a couple evenings where I ended up having the night to myself and stumbled on the idea of checking my meetup app and... bam - multiple places to go meet up with tech folks. More than I had time for actually...
Bucharest is capital, not 'just' an EU city, but it's by no means the largest nor would I think it has the most tech folks compared to other areas. (maybe that's wrong assumption though?)
Healthy ecosystem exists even in rather small cities. Up here in Vilnius, Lithuania, small-sized backwater EU city, we've quite a few meetups with a decent amount of networking opportunities. Sure it's not as SV scale. But even < 1million metro area can sustain that.
without getting too specific, 100k-250k. a bit less than i'd expect to make at FAANG but i live in a chicago suburb where the buying power more than offsets the difference. my drive to work is a traffic-free 10min, as is my wife's.
there's another dev that can handle any emergencies or critical bug fixes while i'm out. still i have to be available by phone in case there are questions, but even then it rarely requires more than a lazy login/check at the end of the day.
I live in Europe, there not much FANG here apart from maybe Lindon or Berlin but anyway, at this point of my life, the relationships I have with the people around me are more valuable than chasing some FAANG job or hip startup in some other country, hoping that would give me more satisfaction.
At the end of the day it's just a salary I need to support my other hobbies. After 7 years in the trenches I lost hope in the do what you love coding for fun mantra as I never found it and i feel that chasing it any longer will waste precious years of our limited time on this Earth I could use enjoying other things life has to offer or new experiences.
plus a ton of corporate bullshit & politics. i can count on 0 hands thr number of times someone at a large corp felt they were special and uniquely valuable to the company as a whole. invariably they're just replaceable cogs that have a very narrow set of responsibilities. of course they don't always see it that way ;) stockholm syndrome, perhaps.
It seems he really did lose hope. Perhaps stuck in a lousy job for too long. Over the course of my life, I've changed jobs whenever I felt I needed a change. I've done databases, Java, embedded, mobile, etc. It kept me happy.
You don’t need hope if you are pragmatic. Know your own weaknesses, and have a system for failing. It seems like that guy is maybe going through something in a shitty career, but it becomes a vicious cycle. You end up traumatized and gravitate toward similar abusive workplaces. Have seen that happen to many friends in this industry. Everyone has an upper limit of the political bs they can take at their workplace. That’s why I personally refuse to work at a place with too many h1b. IME management tend to be literal slavedrivers and suck all the fun out of SWE in those places.
Everyone is replaceable. Feeling valued is a separate cultural issue, but no company should have a major dependence on a single individual for survival.
Mitigating risk and ensuring continuity is a core tenant of good business.
it's true that very few people are truly irreplaceable and it's a good hedge for knowledge to be well distributed. at the same time, small companies rarely have the luxury of employing (and keeping busy) multiple senior architects. unless you're at a very large company, there's always going to be a bus factor somewhere - it's just the reality for 90% of small businesses. either that or you have lock-in to outside consulting companies and services and no one with deep technical insight - just someone who's a consultant coordinator.
i'm not saying it's good to be that bus factor (you're on-call basically 24/7), but it also has undeniable perks for the employee (not the employer).
in reality my bus factor is not that high. the nice thing about well-designed systems is that they seldomly need attention, and there's another dev here who's more than capable of bug fixing and maintaining what's already in place.
There are two types of bus factors though. It’s true that at a small company, you can’t share all your responsibilities with someone else, but you can make sure that if they need to you can be replaced by someone else (ie. if you get hit by a bus) by doing things like documenting your work. Alternatively, if you want to make sure your job is secure, don’t do that, but make sure you’re doing it knowingly.
I think this is probably what most of us have to deal with. IMHO I think trying to see everything as a challenge is one of the keys. For no particular reason here is my story: I was sick of programming at some point in my career, the way I found it exciting/fun again was to learn a new paradigm, most of my career I had only worked with OOP (java/php) I decided to move on to another company and I was lucky? I guess, to learn to program in a functional language which was totally new for me, this experience sort of `opened my eyes` and gave that satisfaction/excitement for programming again and I believe that part of that was due to the fact that I pretty much had to learn to program again coming from OOP to FP. I guess sometimes change is the key.
Ask yourself - do you need to take care of yourself physically and socially every day of the week? How about allocating 2 evenings in the week to tech stuff that you like? I started https://news.kindandgreenworld.com/ as a result of spending an evening or two on it every week. It's still not where I want it to be but the fact that it exists is a good reminder to me that its nice to accomplish things, and urges me to do more.
Maybe it's just me but yes, I do. I'm a very social person and coding is a solitary activity and I can't stand having spent my whole day without any meaningful human interaction. I feel and sleep better after having a meaningfull human interaction or having had a portion of exercise. If I do more coding after the coding at work I can't sleep well, my brain can't unwind before bed as it keeps crunching away at the problems.
First you say you "love coding", and I'm with you, but then you say this, and I'm not with you at all, and I think the difference might be your ticket out of your predicament. There are some foods I "love" but would quickly grow sick of if I had to eat them every day. I love them as treats but would hate them as staples. There are other foods that I merely like but have no problem eating every day. I wouldn't want to keep eating anything after I'm full, but I'm not sick of the food, just full. Tomorrow when I'm not full, I'll feel like eating it again. A staple for me.
You may have to reconsider the difference between treat and staple, coding and "meaningful human interaction". Coding remains a staple for me even though I'm often "overfed" with poorly prepared fare. I'll still want more tomorrow. So when you say you "love coding", I think, well, me too, although maybe not as much as you do--but it turns out that we're not actually the same at all. You're more "normal".
You may have to switch to a job where human interaction (the meaningful part--well, maybe sometimes) provides your staple and the coding is a special treat you indulge in on days when you feel like it.
Get a job in technical sales or PM or some other part of tech! Tons of tech jobs that desperately need social people. As a solo founder I had to spend a lot of time talking to customers etc until we grew a fair bit.
Learn to love solving problems instead. Accomplishing goals and seeing a finished delivered product is more fulfilling than a single fun coding component.
They all present challenges, but they could be acceptable for you.
Jira and stories are not the norm, especially if you have been doing it for a long time, most of the time your role is improving the process through experience.
8 hours a day is not given, if you already know how to do it in 5.
My problem is I like coding but can’t come up with projects I’m interested in. Everything that comes up exists or can be solved in a much simpler way (often a spreadsheet or an Apple note) that requires no software.
The analogy I like to apply when answering the question “everything already exists” is restaurants. Every conceivable type of food already exists and there have never been more restaurants and yet new ones are opening all the time. Why? Because there is always scope for minor variation/improvement. In software as in food, start by making something for yourself. Show it to your friends (HN) and get their feedback. Iterate from there. Yes, often ideas can be solved with a spreadsheet or note-taking app, but the UX of inputting and visualising the data is what matters.
But there is scope for major improvements in tech. Make software for fields which don’t receive a lot of attention. Alternatively, make accessibility enabled software so that everyone can use and enjoy the same resources
Totally agree. There's always scope for improvement especially in the field of accessibility. I was just highlighting that people should never think that "everything has already been done" because it really hasn't.
You may want to develop deep subject matter expertise!
As you become an expert on radio telescope arrays or the sport of curling you'll see the problems that are outside the scope of a spreadsheet. Meanwhile be part of the community surrounding it so they trust you and your understanding.
Otherwise you need a pathbreaking stroke of genius, a mountain of cash to burn, or the willpower and charm to get the world to choose your product app over the other 50 products that are very similar.
"the key to make it fun, forever, is just work on coding projects you love doing"
Working with computers every day, for 8 to 10 hours a day or more, for years on end has sucked the joy out of just about anything I used to enjoy that was computer-related.
Sometimes I'll get interested in something computer related on my own, like, say, emacs configuration, but nobody's going to pay me to work on that.
Basically, people pay you to work on something useful to them, and if what you're interested in is not useful to them, they don't care, and you can starve on the street for all they care.
I really wish I'll be like that at old age. I'm now in my forties, and since the age of 12, have had great fun programming. It's now my job, but I hope it doesn't get ruined. Regularly I see people here that have become jaded, and no longer derive pleasure from coding. This lady really inspires me and makes me wish my future contains loads of interesting programming problems to solve.
This is awesome, and it will become more prevalent as the generations that grew up with computers start to get older. Your body may get weaker but you can at least stave off the same happening to your mind by doing brain stuff. And there's a childlike satisfaction to coding that I reckon everyone enjoys, a new challenge whenever you do it.
I certainly hope to still be able to do it in my old age.
> Wakamiya also teaches "Excel art," which uses the spreadsheet software to create designs.
I've worked at a couple of Japanese companies in Tokyo and am truly amazed at what they can do with Excel. Most recently, I had a co-worker create UI mockups in excel. It wasn't Sketch / Figma level of design -- but it was pretty effective at communicating what he needed.
On the other hand, some things are just down right atrocious like internal company pages with everyone's name and picture.
We really need to address the rampant ageism problem in the software industry. I don't know what it will take but I see it as big of a problem as diversity & inclusion issues that impact women and minorities.
I think the problem will "address" itself as a large population of qualified programmers ages, and the total numbers of programmers stabilize. This field has experienced explosive growth over the past couple of decades, and that growth was mostly fueled by the young people, so it's no wonder the industry is geared towards them.
Disclosure: I'm in my mid-40s, self employed, but no shortage of clients.
We can't even solve it on Hacker News! Many threads complain about old people taking up resources that younger people want. I've even been "Ok, Boomered" several times here. I'm 57.
> I explained my app. "Since senior citizens are not good at swiping," I said, "I made it possible for them to play by tapping."
> I think AI speakers are helpful to the elderly. Once the initial setup is complete, we can use them even if we become bedridden.
> What we need are features that support people from the AI side. One example would be a function that informs users that evacuation instructions have been issued due to heavy rain. Or when you feel a pain in your chest, a function that dials 119 (Japan's emergency number) would be helpful.