How much exercise, and have you always been physically active?[I&#x27;m more than halfway to your experience but definitely missing this aspect.]

I guess not smoking, no drugs and regular exercise.  I really enjoy what I do - the challenge of achieving an analytical objective with limited resources has always given me great satisfaction.

Congratulations! You&#x27;re an inspiration!Tell us, what is the secret to your longevity?

Wonderful to hear that, and congratulations to you for that accomplishment.  I worry those type of opportunities are no more, or at least much rarer.

I actually was only 16, but turned 17 right after I started.  I had finished all the math and science courses in my high school in Mississippi and I had a lot of extra time in my senior year.  As a junior, I scored the highest in the U.S. on an engineering aptitude test and got a write-up in the local paper.  Mitchell Engineering was trying to get into computers but didn&#x27;t know how to find people who could program.  When they heard about me, they approached me with the idea of becoming a programmer.  At the time, I had no idea what a programmer was, but they hired me and trained me on the job.

Keep on, however, and soon I&#x27;m sure you will be the longest serving.

No, probably not the longest-serving, though maybe longest-serving who is on HN.Also: 74 - 57 = 17 years of age when you started as a full time programmer. How did you pull that off in 1963?

And then over at Google it&#x27;s mostly VIM and browsers, deploying on machines hardly anyone ever sees. I&#x27;m pretty sure they exist, but I have no hard evidence of that.The PCs really aren&#x27;t much more than intelligent terminals. You were right, and you should have held your ground and been eventually correct.

The first time I programed in mainframe, I suffered a lot. I am young. We young people at least myself is people programming from top to down, but you guys, old programmer programed from down to top. I mean from low level to high level of computer. Early days, people would have to learn hardware a lot to program. This is my impression.

I know what you mean.  Many of my contemporaries never got past the mainframes.  I&#x27;ll have to admit that it took me a little while to accept the PC to be more than any intelligent terminal.  I was lucky in that I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation from 1976 to 1982 - they pioneered distributed computing.

I&#x27;m happy to see that you&#x27;ve kept up with new fields and changes in the industry.  I&#x27;ve worked with several older programmers and they&#x27;ve usually been very set in their ways and shown little interest in developing new skills.

Ooh - definitely should go through with that. Also, I&#x27;m doing a pilot show interviewing some Tech moguls local to Atlanta. There&#x27;s a diverse group I&#x27;m interviewing from wealthy entrepreneurs to notable employees of bell labs, to people who hold an insane amount of patents. I think you could definitely fit in there somewhere.

One reason I posted this is because I may attempt to gain recognition in the Guinness World Records.  I know my career is longer than the person they now have listed as the &quot;Longest career as a computer software developer&quot; - Kaneyuki Yamaguchi in Japan

This is pretty cool. Definitely worth documenting I think.

For most of the past 25 years I have been working from home - which is a problem because you never leave your work.  The main thing that has changed over recent years is that I now take a 1-hour nap around 2 or 3 PM every day, except when I have conference calls that prevent it.  After the nap, I feel rejuvenated and productive.  I&#x27;m sure this is partly related to old age, but I&#x27;m also dyslexic and I think my brain needs a rest from struggling with written communications.

What’s your daily routine now and how has it evolved over the years?

google had a fair number of older programmers (like over 50) when I was there. they had a group for them, &#x27;greygler&#x27;, also gaygler (not positive of the spelling). google has a bunch of employee groups that are portmanteau&#x27;s of something + google.

Yes. The term used is &quot;not a good cultural fit&quot;.

I definitely experienced age discrimination in one company that will go nameless.  The small company I&#x27;m working for now has been great - I love the culture.  However, they were just bought by Thomson Reuters and this Monday I will officially be a TR employee.  I understand their culture is similar, and I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;s true!

I think the age discrimination comes from the mostly younger staff, not so much the company. Works out the same, of course, when you’re told you aren’t a “good cultural fit.”

Where do you work now? And also, I&#x27;ve heard that at Google for example, there is prejudice against older programmers? Have you experienced anything like that?

Be a bit more optimistic! Cent&#x27;anni!

I hope to make 80 - not sure my health will hold up.  I did see the article on Grace Hopper on Wikipedia.  She began her computing career in 1944 and she died in 1992, so that&#x27;s a maximum of only 48 years.  On that measure, I have her beat by 9 years already.

She was a mathematician before that, though; probably about as close as you could get at the time :)But yeah, always vaguely thought she was younger starting.

How much of that time was she a working programmer?As an example, Larry Page may have been a programmer in the very early days of Google, but it&#x27;s been more than 15 years since Larry has seriously written code for a living.As opposed to Jeff Dean who is still hacking away at his keyboard.

According to Wikipedia, Grace Hopper started her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark 1, which would have put her at ~38 when she began. Assuming she worked until her death, that puts her career in computing at a (incredibly impressive) 47 years.

Here&#x27;s a short must-see video of Grace Hopper explaining a nanosecond:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9eyFDBPk4Yw</a>

Grace Hopper apparently retired from the navy when she was _80_. And then went into consulting. So you’ve a few years to go yet.

Adjusting for surviving birth, life expectancy varies wildly in both directions (although even considering that, &quot;longer&quot; is definitely less of a promise now than it has been for the last several decades).

I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s particularly optimistic - if you&#x27;re (accurately) saying current life expectancy numbers don&#x27;t take catastrophic risks into account, neither did calculations of life expectancy back then. Unless you think there is a higher risk of catastrophic events now than there was during the cold war.

Let&#x27;s say larger variance in life expectancy--we expect a longer tail of a new generation living longer.

&quot;longer life expectancy&quot; is a very optimistic thing to say

It just occurred to me how interesting it will be for the new generation who start so much younger and longer life expectancy what they&#x27;ll see in their long careers. Given how much has changed in your story, from Fortran to AlphaZero and GPT-2. How much will change in theirs? Will the singularity appear to be in sight? Will programmers disappear like telephone operators?

you&#x27;re right, not all of us can be super star devs (i certainly am not) but we can apply their techniques, mainly stay healthy and never stop learning.

I&#x27;m 52 and am just starting to look around. Given that I primarily want world-wide remote (I live in Japan), it may be a tad difficult. However, I had no trouble at all attracting interest in my mid 40&#x27;s when I went to London for a couple of years. It took me less than a month to land a job and I had a couple of options.My biggest piece of advice to anyone who wants a long technical career is to keep learning new things. Don&#x27;t rely on your day job to train you in what you need. Follow up on stuff that interests you and invest some of your &quot;me&quot; time on staying current in areas that interest you. I&#x27;ve seen a lot of people drop out of the industry because they were over specialised. I know APL experts, Cobol and DB2 experts, C++ with MFC experts, etc, etc. None of them are working as programmers any more. It&#x27;s tempting to thing that Java enterprise and C# and Ruby on Rails and Python and whatever you think is the best paycheck will last forever. It won&#x27;t and over time you will slowly become obsolete. A 40 something (or 50 something) with no relevant technology experience will be seen as less valuable than a 30 something because people will be imagining you are simply going through the motions. The fact that you aren&#x27;t getting sucked into the new (and horrible) programming fads makes you even less attractive because the people hiring you have been pulled into those fads. So it&#x27;s important to be able to speak the speak and walk the walk.

while not as old as OP, I personally know several programmers in their 50s and 60s and all said they had no problem finding work.I think if you&#x27;re a top-tier developer (which OP seems to be!) age discrimination may not be as much of a factor? If you&#x27;re decent but not amazing (most of us honestly) you may find it easier to find work at 35 than at 55.

I think current gigs want younger people not for their performance but their „price”. They work overtime without payment, are relatively cheap and you need alot of them. For every architect you have in the company there are like 20-30 developers of lower grade. So the demand for „design making” people is just not there.

I think a large part of the problem is that the software industry still doesn&#x27;t know how to measure someone&#x27;s value systematically and reliably. Metrics like LOC&#x2F;day or bug minimization or speed of project delivery differ widely across problem domains and the technical level of contributor.Does wisdom count in software? Practically and generally, I&#x27;d say no. When setting hiring priorities, cost trumps wisdom in all but the most senior roles.(BTW, at 62, I&#x27;ve been coding professionally for 34 years. I wish I were valued more by my employers with each passing year. But if it&#x27;s so, they hide it well.)

The industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one?Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that&#x27;s left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by &quot;taste&quot;. Taste gets better with experience.A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve Jobs, they don&#x27;t have any taste. Their surplus physical energy could be a liability, as they&#x27;ll just write more code that&#x27;s hard to maintain. Of course there are exceptions. Don&#x27;t discriminate by age in either direction. Ask for experience, and make your final judgment after examining their portfolio (just as you would an architect or photographer), looking for signs of good taste.Further reading: &quot;Taste for Makers&quot;, by Paul Graham, <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;taste.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;taste.html</a>

given the numerous posts about age discrimination on hn, i&#x27;m delighted to hear your story and wish you many more years of happy programming. as a whipper-snapper 40-something developer, it gives me hope and motivation.

Do you consider what you do to be programming? How does it compare to, say, hand-writing C?

I&#x27;m 30 now and my background is more in mathematics, so I do focus a lot on Python and R. A lot of my work is in statistics and also in agriculture. Hopefully, but the time I am your age, I will have some secret skills to teach the young folk. I hope to do more mathematics in my everyday work as I get older.I just realised I need to walk my dog more often after the lockdowns are getting less strict!

So far I really haven&#x27;t sensed any mental decrease, but I know there must be some.  I do type some source code in Python and R, but primarily I use a rapid applications development tool that allows me to build custom machine learning algorithms and ad hoc analytics to work on big data.

Do you still type source code?How do you rate your mental agility versus your younger self?

Just briefly, then I have to hit the sack - I&#x27;m on the east coast.  I developed a set of programs to allow them to map out the design of a steel building, and my programs would calculate all the pieces they need to load on the truck to build it.  Mitchell was very progressive in this area - this type of computerization enabled them to have the building up in record time.  A Civil Engineer worked with me and used the computer to design the main support beams.  Between the two of us the entire process was automated.

Could you talk more about what you remember from your time at Mitchell Engineering Company? You worked on order processing and fulfillment...what was lacking in their process that they wanted to computerize? Was your project deemed a business success? Were you happy while you were working on it? Was it just you or a team?

I have the same 3 monitor, &#x27;computer glasses&#x27; setup... Did your optometrist give you grief about them?The first time I said I wanted a pair of single focus lenses for the computer (so I could use my whole field of view..), I got a lot of flak about &quot;you should get bifocals&quot;. I haven&#x27;t needed to drive anywhere in the last couple of years, so I basically never where my distance glasses anymore.lately though.. Seems like they&#x27;re getting more used to the idea. Maybe more people doing it ?

What do you use three different computers for? Running different OS’s I assume?A true inspiration, thanks for sharing.

I&#x27;m amazed your eyes held up from probably at least 20 years of CRTs bombarding you! That&#x27;s great!

I sit in an office chair (tilted back slightly) with 3 large HD monitors about 3 feet from my eyes - I have special glasses for that range.  The monitors can be switched among 3 computers, and the wireless keyboard&#x2F;mouse has a switch to move from one computer to another.  Most importantly, I have a dog that needs walking several times a day, and that forces me to get up and walk a couple miles every day.

I should also mention that I recently bought a Flexispot stand up desk converter.  So now I can stand up and work when I want to.  It only accommodates two of my monitors, but that&#x27;s all I really need anyway.

Serious question: How do you sit and type? What chair and what angle has worked best for your back and neck all these years?

Same. I recently got into scheme&#x2F;lisp and got a newfound inspiration. Seems like older folks were on a better path which got as time passed by more and more corrupted.

The really amazing part, is last time I looked - most software developers _leave tech_ after 10 years. This guy has managed to keep the passion over 5x that long!Hope I&#x27;ll be able to say the same someday :-)

Right? I&#x27;m at 22 years professionally and I feel like a dinosaur out here.

Dam - I thought my 40 years was pushing ...
Thanks for the inspiration!

For me I’ve learned programming is one of the purest feelings of joy I experience. Even regardless of the language or environment. It’s so thrilling to get to take something apart and put it back together to solve a problem. I feel so lucky to have such work. Congrats. I hope I can make it to 74 writing code!

Maurice Wilkes programmed from 1949 (if we&#x27;re counting from when the program ran on a stored-program computer) until his death in 2010, so OP has at least 4 years to go to make the record.

Probably close. The first software program ran 21 June 1948 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stored-program_computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stored-program_computer</a>) and not many people who start working at 16 keep programming until 74.

I think you probably are, if you go by date you started working to the date you stopped! Even Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie seem to have started their first programming jobs a few years after you.Welcome to HN! I hope you stick around, it can be a great place.

This is quite inspiring to read. What languages do you work with these days? What do you miss about the &quot;old way&quot; of programming? You have such a unique perspective.

I second this request. Would love to hear any insight you have with all your life experiences in the field.

No. Coding JS on keyboard is already bad enough.

Please don&#x27;t say implementing JavaScript on punchcards.

Reading a speculative prediction, given been watching progress from up close for 57 years, is interesting.Any meaningful milestones along the way, that you think are worth noting. Tasks or roles that indicate progress?

&gt; Don&#x27;t forget all the information is in our DNAI&#x27;m not so sure about that (but I&#x27;m pretty green on bioinformatics). I mean, for one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1605&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;1605&#x2F;</a>. For two, if that was the case we wouldn&#x27;t need projects like folding@home and such to tell us what the structures described by DNA actually look like. And for three, there is a massive amount of influence on brain development from elsewhere (both from within the fetal body and from the womb). It&#x27;s a bit like having a compiler&#x27;s source code but nothing to bootstrap it with...

I think someday we will be able to duplicate the basic brain of an infant in a computer.  Don&#x27;t forget all the information is in our DNA and there&#x27;s not that much innate knowledge - most of the infant&#x27;s brain relates to the amazing capacity to learn.  Someone will then take one home and train it like a human baby.  It will become so close to a human that it will spark debates about whether it has self-awareness and whether it should have human rights.  I regret I won&#x27;t be around to see it, but who knows - maybe I&#x27;ll be back :-)

What do you think about all of the advances that happened in your time, especially with what machine learning is capable of these days (fully artificial human faces, for one)?Any advice (technical or life) for us younger people?

Thank you for making me feel young in this crowd! Started in 1974, still at it.

Because you need money to eat and pay rent and most importantly provide for your family or offspring if you have any.

Who cares about the money when one has an ounce of passion for it

Because money matters. There are good arguments for financial transparency.

I’m genuinely curious, why you curious? :)

The salary curve along the career is as well interesting - is it always increasing, or having some drops?

I wouldn&#x27;t mind sharing, but I don&#x27;t want to take the chance that someone in my company could be reading this.  I started in 1963 at $1.55 an hour, which was actually pretty good back then.  It&#x27;s mostly been increasing, except for several years when I was self-employed.  Now it&#x27;s more based on my domain knowledge in healthcare fraud detection than on my seniority and skills as a programmer.

Curious what is your salary? Can you share?

Congratulations!!. What made you stick to Programming and not go the path of leadership? Are you on linkedin ?

Congratulations! I hope it&#x27;s okay this has turned into an AMA :D. Feel free to not answer!What do you think the biggest shift for day to day programming was for you in your 57 years?

That&#x27;s the way he likes to paint himself. From a lecture he gave at my university I remember that he said something along the lines of, that he usually came up with the idea and others wrote the code. From the experience out of the same lecture, however, I can tell you first hand that he knows his way around code and that he can code. The lecture was indeed more of a hands on workshop with Knuth spending most of the time in Emacs coding MMIXAL assembly - pretty low level stuff actually.

To be honest, it&#x27;s a bit weird to judge a man on the basis of a joke he made over 40 years ago.

Anil Nerode is almost surely the oldest working computer scientist today - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.cornell.edu&#x2F;anil-nerode" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;math.cornell.edu&#x2F;anil-nerode</a> - He technically is in the math department at Cornell but he has been there since well before Cornell had a computer science department.

Partly cribbed from my comment downthread: I think I&#x27;d classify Knuth as the slightly different &quot;longest working computer scientist&quot;. He&#x27;s known for his quote &quot;Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.&quot;Or perhaps I&#x27;d classify him as the somewhat more sycophantic &quot;longest working genius&quot; or &quot;longest working cool guy&quot;. Heck, Knuth was uniquely awarded a master&#x27;s degree for his bachelor&#x27;s because his work was considered so outstanding, he&#x27;s an organist and composer, and he&#x27;s hilarious. I love this quote about him: &quot;If you had an optimization function that was in some way a combination of warmth and depth, Don would be it.&quot;A quote from him in an interview I found: &quot;Indeed, as mentioned above, my life&#x27;s work was to be a teacher.&quot;

Knuth was being paid by Burroughs to implement an Algol-58 compiler in 1960. He’s still programming, and seems to have advice for others on the subject. But I don’t expect to see him here.Congratulations on being in that company, and may it long continue.

Congrats! I love reading inspiring posts on HN!There are probably many of us who will probably follow in your footsteps. Provided that Stack Overflow continues to exist, I have no plans to ever stop programming either.

My father-in-law retired from a software engineering position at age 75. I&#x27;d be 57 years in the industry if I retired then. It seems doable; I know a couple of software types approaching or over 70 now.This would be convenient because the 32-bit signed time_t apocalypse is in early 2037. :-)

As a rather young person in the field, I&#x27;d love to hear your thoughts on any question you feel the motivation to answer. Your learned wisdom is appreciated by all of us young bucks!

Is there a feature request subsite for HN? I’ve seen this implemented really well on other sites[1] in ways that don’t detract from the main site focus or functionality.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nolt.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nolt.io</a>No affiliation, I just use a site which uses this to provide functionality suggestions. I don’t see why this kind of functionality can’t be bootstrapped from existing HN code.

how about a checkbox in the profile for people willing to test new features? i bet you&#x27;ll find a number of volunteers.i am definetly interested in this one. i often search for timestamps to find newer comments. color markers would make that a lot easier.

Have you considered implementing accessibility for this feature before it goes live for all? Screen reader users cannot see colored bars, and need a different indication of the fact a comment is new. I can give suggestions if needed.

I haven&#x27;t been able to find the colored bar, maybe because of refreshes, but let me suggest you use something that is searchable.  That way you could use CTRL-F and then jump from one to the next.  Right now, I&#x27;m  searching for &quot; min&quot; (note the space) to find the most recent posts, and &quot;1 hour&quot;, &quot;2 hour&quot; etc. to find older ones.

(I&#x27;m a moderator here. Welcome to HN!) Because you&#x27;re likely to get a flood of comments and questions overnight, I&#x27;ve switched an alpha feature on for your account that will highlight new comments that have appeared since you last viewed the page. They&#x27;ll show up with a colored bar to the left of the comment. The feature doesn&#x27;t work perfectly yet, but hopefully it&#x27;ll help you keep track of what&#x27;s been posted since you last looked. Note that the colored bars will disappear each time you refresh the page.Good luck and thanks for a great post!(Anyone else who&#x27;d like this alpha feature turned on for their account is welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and we&#x27;ll be happy to.)

Wow! I appreciate all the interest and feedback - quite unexpected.  I&#x27;m glad I found HN.  I&#x27;ll try to add more responses tomorrow.

That’s one of the best software engineering advices I’ve ever heard. You should write a book. Seriously.

The one thing that comes to mind is to avoid the &quot;hammer looking for a nail&quot; syndrome.  I see this all the time, especially in academia.  Rather than worry about learning all the latest stuff, concentrate on solving the problem at hand in the simplest and most effective manner.  If that requires you to learn new things, then that&#x27;s a great time to expand your repertoire - working on a specific problem.  Of course you have to strike a balance, but mainly concentrate on solving problems rather than being up-to-date on all the latest stuff and trying to find the proverbial nail for your new hammer.

Periodically there are questions here about dealing with burnout and learning to cope with technological change&#x2F;churn. Someone who&#x27;s been doing it enthusiastically for over half a century sounds like exactly the kind of person who could offer advice on that. Do you have any?

She&#x27;s the CEO of Hamilton Technologies: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.htius.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.htius.com&#x2F;</a>

The Wikipedia page I linked to lists a 2018 IEEE paper; her company&#x27;s website still has her name on it.

Margaret Hamilton is an inspiration, but is she actually still working at age 83? I can&#x27;t find anything that would indicate she is. For something like the &quot;longest-working programmer&quot; I&#x27;d expect them to have been actually &quot;work&quot;-working during that time.And I think I&#x27;d classify Knuth as the slightly different &quot;longest working computer scientist&quot;. He&#x27;s known for his quote &quot;Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.&quot;Or perhaps I&#x27;d classify him as the somewhat more sycophantic &quot;longest working genius&quot; or &quot;longest working cool guy&quot;. Heck, Knuth was uniquely awarded a master&#x27;s degree for his bachelor&#x27;s because his work was considered so outstanding, he&#x27;s an organist and composer, and he&#x27;s hilarious. I love this quote about him: &quot;If you had an optimization function that was in some way a combination of warmth and depth, Don would be it.&quot;

Don&#x27;t forget Ivan Sutherland and Niklaus Wirth. Fred Brooks joined IBM in 1956 and he&#x27;s still active in research as well; Cynthia Solomon, there&#x27;s quite a few

Trygve Reenskaug is still working on programming.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trygve_Reenskaug" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trygve_Reenskaug</a>

Margaret Hamilton started her first job in 1959 and is still working: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_(software_engineer)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...</a>Depending how and whether you count academia, Donald Knuth may have a slightly longer career: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Donald_Knuth" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Donald_Knuth</a>Feels like a decent chance you&#x27;re third, then. Certainly you&#x27;re one of the longest-working programmers. Best of luck. :)

Respect for how you achieved continuous learning along the way1&#x2F; Did you ever feel isolated in a group because of age?
2&#x2F; How did you manage to stay focused when your colleagues may just be growing up the ladder?

That’s very nice to hear
My question is how do you keep your technical knowledge upto date

I&#x27;m 28 and I wanna be like you. You don&#x27;t know how inspiring you are, buddy :)

&gt; I am now a data scientist developing cloud-based big data fraud detection algorithms using machine learning and other advanced analytical technologies.Put that in a pitch deck and raise whatever you want!J&#x2F;K! Congratulations on the career, success and evolution!

Interesting. For the cheaters, how does the business side of it work?

I used to be on the side of cheaters, but mostly for fun. Was never funded but could have made profit from it. I know several people who went in that direction and made good money. As teenagers with no qualifications, getting a blue collar job wasn&#x27;t really an option.Attempts at protecting a game client from reverse engineering are mostly a waste of time. These protections can be beaten faster than they can be developed. Once a hacker has reverse engineered your wire protocol and cryptography your game client is just one of potentially several.Has probably changed a lot over the past decade or so, but the developers at the time were wasting their efforts on tightening their software clients rather than using AI, honeypots and other techniques on the server to detect and ban bots. I recall offering to work for a couple of the companies whose games I had developed cheats for, but they rejected me right away without even an interview.One of the issues is: MMOs are often very repetitive. The actions of your real users are somwhat bot-like to begin with. This means bot developing isn&#x27;t that difficult. Adding randomness to the behaviour of the bot can make it look like a regular player. I suspect there are some differences which some well trained neural networks might be able to classify, but you need to be really careful of false positives because anything which gets in the way of regular players enjoying the game will lose you customers.

!!please get in to anti-cheat engineering for multi-player networked games. the battle between game developers and funded cheat orgs is cold war-esque

I think it&#x27;s awesome that you have had a long career and still going.  I know of one gentleman in a similar situation.  I think he may be in his late 70&#x27;s or even early 80&#x27;s.  He&#x27;s currently working on porting some Fortran or Cobol code he wrote in his 20&#x27;s from his first job ever!

I thought I was an old timer, with my Fortran 77 experience. But Fortran II! If it followed the naming convention, that was from 1902, right?Welcome to Hacker News. They don&#x27;t always treat us graybeards well so you&#x27;ll need to be tough.

Mate first of all my huge huge respect to you for keeping at it.  This is true passion and I really really wish that see more of it.   I hope you are doing what you enjoy for another 50 years at least!!!

That is wonderful! Hey I&#x27;m from Florida too! (I assume you&#x27;ve at least been there since you mentioned FAU) :) You are doing what I hope to: code even if I &#x27;retire&#x27; I intend to code till the day I can&#x27;t anymore.Welcome to HN! It&#x27;s a great place, has a few things I don&#x27;t like here or there, but overall a great place to learn all sorts of things and learn about all sorts of people from varying backgrounds.

Yeah, your titles become more amazing until around 40 years of age, then they start degrading again.Of course, if you stay where you are your salary doesn’t, so :&#x2F;

Sadly that is a very common situation.  Thus even more fitting to celebrate those who are still working, learning and enjoying their programming careers.

Real senior developers with lots of experience are usually shown the finger in our industry. There’s no such title to reflect 57 years of experience; i’ve heard it unofficially refered as baggage

Jurassic Developer (with all the respect).

In French (I work in France), sénior (senior) sounds similar to seigneur (lord), so I use this to my advantage.

I&#x27;m a young pup compared to the OP - started programming in 1973 (unless you count the DigiComp I..)  My children had a license plate frame made for me that has has my current title (at least around the family):  Granddaddo, Gerihacktrics Specialist!  (At work I&#x27;m currently a Principal Software Engineer.  Last gig, I was Senior Principal.  Would be fun to make Fellow one of these days.)

In our industry traditional titles are exhausted so early so here&#x27;s localized quantification [0] (on a lighter note, no disrespect to OP or anyone). I&#x27;m in KSD title range.0: 
Kilo senior developor (min 10 years)
mega senior developer (min 20 years)
giga senior developer (min 30 years)
tera senior developer (min 40 years)
peta senior developer (min 50 years)
exa senior developer (min 60 years)
zeta senior developer (min 70 years)

My current title is Director of Analytics Innovation.  But I am an individual contributor - I don&#x27;t have anyone reporting to me.

In my company, we can get &quot;Senior Developer&quot; title after 3 to 4 year experience.What your current title?

My mother is still coding Fortran at 76.  I think she may have started a couple of years after you though.  Fortran forever!

I am so reluctant to accept Microsoft in ECMA, and I have no idea why but I&#x27;m even more reluctant to after hearing this.I mean - sure. I love Gates and all. But things like the Win32 API make me so weary to ever trust his opinion as a SWE. His technical &quot;blessing&quot; on anything doesn&#x27;t mean much IMO.

In an interview Bill Gates said he likes TypeScript. It was about a year ago. Sure he’s not a full time programmer but something tells me the itch will always be there for us the curious! :)

Congrats, you made it top 1 on HN! When we live in a world where experience is treated as baggage it is remarkable to find people in places like here to still appreciate it. I hope you will be able to enjoy your career until you decide yourself to retire! I think a lot of younger folks here, who are old by modern standards - I just turned 40 this year - are thirsty for some wisdom and lots of questions will be asked. And please don’t be offended if someone attacks you for some oppinion, this is the world we live in nowadays, someone’d find a fault in almost anything or anyone.

Yes. Read up on data structures and their big-O costs.Most of the &quot;interviews&quot; are conducted by very-recent college graduates who know the algorithms and their big-O.The fact that I taught Data Structures didn&#x27;t seem to matter as none of them actually read my resume (despite having a copy they brought with them).It is more of a &quot;hazing ritual&quot; than a job interview.

Congrats! Just curious, as someone with so much experience, do you still have to do coding challenges when interviewing for positions?

Someone should get this gentleman on a podcast

How many programming languages and frameworks have you learned in total?

Not the OP but I got my first programming job as a junior in high school in 1980 so I&#x27;ve been at it for 40 years. If that&#x27;s good enough, here are my answers:&gt; What ideas proved useful throughout your careerLearning Lisp. I got an enormous amount of leverage out of that, and still do (I&#x27;m more or less retired, but I have a nice little Lisp consulting gig at the moment).&gt; what ideas did you change your mind about?Before Lisp I thought BASIC was pretty cool (old-school BASIC, with line numbers). I was pretty down on Python when I first encountered it but now I&#x27;m a fan.&gt; What are your hobbies?I like to hike, bike, ski, travel, fly airplanes, free dive and ride flowriders. I also write a blog.&gt; Do you still program in your spare time - if so, what?Yes, but not very much. The last big project I did was writing the firmware for this product:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sc4.us&#x2F;hsm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sc4.us&#x2F;hsm</a>and the e-commerce system I use to sell it. That was quite a while ago.&gt; Did you get the PhD?Yes, because I thought I wanted to be a college professor. Turns out that&#x27;s not what I wanted, but I&#x27;m still glad I did it. But it&#x27;s not for everyone. It really depends on what you want out of life. Do it because you love research. Don&#x27;t do it as a means to some other end. It takes way too many of the best years of your life to do it for anything other than its own sake.&gt; What were the Big Ideas in software over your career that didn&#x27;t work out? Any that were better than expected?I&#x27;ve seen a zillion software fads come and go. UML. XML. ISO whatever the fuck it was back in 2000 or so. The vast majority of popular things in the software world are bullshit. The world keeps re-inventing s-expressions with different syntax. Very little has turned out better than expected, though Rust and webassembly look pretty cool. If I were going to do another deep dive into something today it would probably be one of those two things.&gt; General successes&#x2F;regrets&#x2F;advice for these readers!The world today is awash with computational wealth beyond the wildest dreams of my youth. Take advantage of it. Get a Raspberry pi and noodle around with it. Bring up a web server, an email server, a DNS server. If you&#x27;re really feeling ambitious, write your own, or write a game. Build a Linux kernel from source. Design your own programming language and write a compiler for it, even if it&#x27;s just a minor riff on something that already exists. None of these things are particularly hard [1], and the things you will learn and the empowerment you will feel by doing them are priceless.[1] The hard part of programming is not getting things to work, the hard part is getting things to work well enough for someone else to want to use use.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;developer-aging&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoq.com&#x2F;presentations&#x2F;developer-aging&#x2F;</a>

Looked up “HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System)” but didn’t find any good direct hits. Can you point me to some good starting points?

Why do you regret not finishing your PhD? I’ve gotten mixed reviews on if the effort was worth it for those I know who did it.

Is HOPS something that could be discussed publicly on HN? are there sources and examples that people could look at? If so, we could arrange some sort of thread about it.

This?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businesswire.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;home&#x2F;20081114005550&#x2F;en&#x2F;TRAP-Systems-HOPS-Introduces-New-Software-as-a-Service-Platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businesswire.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;home&#x2F;20081114005550&#x2F;en&#x2F;TRA...</a>

This looks like hops.com moved to hops-international.com which is now gone.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130613015951&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hops.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20130613015951&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hops.com&#x2F;</a>

That&#x27;s a lot of questions, but let me take a couple.  I got my Master&#x27;s degrees in the early 1970&#x27;s, when we used something called a &quot;slide rule&quot;.  In 1990 I went back to school to update my skills and expand my knowledge into artificial intelligence, which I had become enamored with.  Unfortunately, I didn&#x27;t finish my PhD (big mistake!) because in 1995 I jumped on an opportunity to join a company that had this amazing software that enabled very advanced analytics on big data (except it wasn&#x27;t called &quot;big data&quot; back then).  The software was called HOPS (for Heuristic Optimized Processing System) and I still use it today to develop custom machine learning applications among other things.  I went back to school again in 2016 to fill in some gaps so would qualify as a real &quot;data scientist&quot; - the latest craze.  I will say that HOPS was and is the biggest idea in software that hasn&#x27;t worked out - at least not commercially.  It&#x27;s a system that is great for data scientists working on big data and enables them to do their own programming with minimal effort.  I&#x27;m still hoping HOPS will take it&#x27;s deserved place in the world of software development.  It will be a great loss if it doesn&#x27;t!  It&#x27;s one reason I&#x27;m holding on - to prove the exceptional things that it enables and prevent it from being tossed into the trash bin of history.

Thank you, this is a wonderful post! Please share more of your story. (Write a book, please).I would love to hear answers to the following:1. What ideas proved useful throughout your career, and what ideas did you change your mind about?2. What are your hobbies? Do you still program in your spare time - if so, what? Or do you find other outlets?3. What went into the decision to go back to school? Did you get the PhD? If not, did you get burned out, or what lured you away?4. What were the Big Ideas in software over your career that didn&#x27;t work out? Any that were better than expected?5. General successes&#x2F;regrets&#x2F;advice for these readers!

&gt; I wonder if you have any advice on how to keep the interest from flagging in a project past that initial days&#x2F;weeks of deep absorption.I, too, have been programming for 32 years. I have thought about your question many times. My current solution is to &#x27;play more&#x27;. Allow yourself to play, even when you are in the 100x additional part. Playing makes your passion flare up again. By play I mean to start interesting side projects, ideas, try something new.

Maybe aim to see things in a different perspective. You making that code usable by others means others will benefit from your work.So
1) you benefit from the work by having fun
2) others benefit from your work by using it to solve their problems or building things they find funUsability is also a problem worth solving. It&#x27;s just a different problem.

Respect! That&#x27;s truly inspirational. At barely half the experience with 30 years I keep wondering about what next. I still do plenty of programming in C (which, along with Z80 and 8086 assembly, is what I started with), Python and JS with some dabbling in Go. I find the problem solving part as invigorating and exhilarating as ever. What I do struggle with is the 100x additional lines of code which will be needed to make that initial code usable by others. That is needed and all that, but is stuff I would have done dozens of times in the past in different contexts and sometimes approaches drudgery. I wonder if you have any advice on how to keep the interest from flagging in a project past that initial days&#x2F;weeks of deep absorption. Thanks again for sharing this.

I think you may be. I got to try programming a Basic timesharing system in 1963 when I was a kid, in 1972 I had a summer job doing FORTRAN, and then started a full time programming job after getting a BS in Physics from UCSB in 1973.So you have ten more years working than I do.

you remember my Father. Worked for IBM in the end of 60s, worked as COBOL developer, then went the whole process until become Territory manager from IBM and after retirement, got a second master in Quality assurance testing, and now in the age of 75 got, this week, his Scrum master certification and spend his day busy with python :)

Fist bump.Congrats on an awesome career. You are an inspiration. Slice up fulfillment data in Fortran II before rules and drama -- legit. What are the younger programmers doing wrong? (I don&#x27;t think we are much quicker - at anything). Also #1 on hacker news.

That&#x27;s a lot of typing, over 57 years. How did you avoid RSI, carpal tunnel, and other injuries &#x2F; health problems related to programming for this long?

Even if not the longest-serving, you&#x27;re definitely quite high on the list. Thanks for sharing your story!

I don’t know many details, but he’s been using Java for 10 years or so, and he’s not particularly interested in the new hotness. 10ish years ago I asked him how to learn to code and I know he in turn asked his brother, who’s a tad younger and I think is a CS professor somewhere in the Midwest. He ended up giving me Learn to Program Ruby by Chris Pine.Edit: One more thing is that he’s the most intellectually well-rounded person I’ve ever met, a characteristic which I wouldn’t be surprised if it was common in programmers with more than a couple dozen years of experience.

details.what technologies is your grandpa using?what&#x27;s his opinion on javascript?any epic kids these days stories?

I too am 62 and have been a working programmer for almost 39 years. I did run two small startups early in my career, but was always a full time programmer alongside the others. Today I am a lead iOS programmer working with a team of 4 (until recently 7) team members, I still write code everyday and my team has a great rep for doing things faster than anyone expects, and still with the highest quality results. I&#x27;ve switched gears a lot over my career, from Fortran to Assembly to Pascal to C to C++ to Objective-C to Java back to C&#x2F;C++ back to Objective-C and now the latest Swift. Done almost every kind of programming including embedded systems, desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps, dev tools and even worked at Apple helping other programmers back in the sad days. Funny how things I learned early on still guide me today, even though the tech has changed radically so many times.

Oh yeah, I started at 12, now I&#x27;m 62, still working happily, I think the trick is to reinvent yourself every decade or so, find something completely different to do, it&#x27;s a big field

&gt; Either that or I just doxxed myself ;)I wager, everything will be retroactively doxxed in about 20 years or so...

My grandpa is ~75, started programming professionally in his early 20s, and currently works as an engineer for the University of Utah, so my hunch is that there’s more people with 50+ years of software engineering experience than you might at first suspect.Either that or I just doxxed myself ;)

Thanks for posting, it&#x27;s good to see long-time developers that did not move to management :)How many jobs have you held, and what was your criteria when switching jobs (apart from any possible family reasons)?Looking back, is there any favorite technology of yours (language, concept, anything)Do you feel the industry is buzzword-driven to a significant extent? (e.g. things get rebranded, reinvented, reimplemented on latest tech instead of fixing and improving existing things, business value does not get better but software often gets more resource-hungry)

For a moment there I thought you meant you were 38 years old, meaning you would have been tapping on that membrane keyboard in your nappies :-) But yeah, happy days. My school had a couple of ZX81s and an Apple ][ which got me started until the BBC Micro came out and we got a ZX Spectrum at home.

At 38 years and a graduate of the ZX81 school of programming I am but a mere whippersnapper.But I look forward to the day when I have accumulated sufficient experience to truly understand Lisp.May the code by with you. Always.

Thanks for posting. Just laying the feels wide open here. It&#x27;s an inspiration to know you&#x27;re still at it and I sure hope to be at it too. Lots of worthwhile problems to still solve.

Kinda related: I’m a second generation programmer and my son a third

I&#x27;m not sure if he is still programming now (he was a few years ago at least) but Jeff Whittle started programming in 1962 on a Ferranti Sirius[0]. He was awarded an AO (Order of Australia) for his services to the Mining Industry a few years ago due to his mining optimisation software.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whittleconsulting.com.au&#x2F;livebook&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;3.5-Story.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whittleconsulting.com.au&#x2F;livebook&#x2F;downloads&#x2F;3.5-Stor...</a>

I&#x27;ve seen him quite active, providing his thoughts on e.g. language designs and relating them to his choices for D.

I was thrilled to see Walter Bright (@WalterBright) on here a few days ago! I don&#x27;t think he&#x27;s been working for 57 years but he certainly has a few stories to tell.57 years is an amazing innings in such a relentless field - congratulations, and long may you continue.

You&#x27;ve given this 51 year old coder (31 years in the coding seat) new hope!    I did 21 years of those in start-ups, so it&#x27;s been kind of harrowing.   Hoping this year to go full time remote.   Started with RPG-III&#x2F;System38s, now doing nodeJS&#x2F;nextJS&#x2F;react.  Adapt or die :)

Thank you for this. As a 40yo with 15 years into this profession, I have been having recurring feeling like “being at the crossroads”. This is exactly what I needed to get inspired. Respect.

Can you do a reddit AMA?? I think many people would be interested

Inventor of Forth, Chuck Moore still codes. He is 81. He funded his last startup at tender age of 70 (Green Arrays).

What kind of programming do you do these days?

It’s interesting you can be a little bit more than twice my age, but have 6 times as much professional experience.

I am a little older and maybe a little more than 40 years experience. I still love it and program at home and work. I still get excited about new stuff or learning a new platform (I am setting up Hashicorp Vault at the moment, awesomely interesting). My first love was electronics, which I still do at home, so maybe my experience is a little different. The last few years I have been learning abstract algebra and some nuclear physics. At this stage I can&#x27;t imagine ever stopping.

hello dear Gene,Wow, I wasn&#x27;t even born in 1963 (1965 issue here), and I really got into programming around 15 or so, so 40 years and counting on this end. Super impressive that you still enjoy coding and do not plan to retire.These days I only code for myself, I&#x27;ve stopped doing commercial work but will occasionally help out in places where my particular combination of talents is useful. I also don&#x27;t plan on giving it up at all but you never know what the future will bring and I&#x27;m very sure that my mental faculties are not at the same level where they were 20 years ago, nor do I get as fired up about a cool algorithm as I did back then.Being born around that time and seeing all this development has been a ride that I would not trade for anything else except for - retrospectively - a career in music (which still is my first love) or - corny, but timely - being an astronaut. But not to fly circles around the earth. So all things considered I feel both lucky and privileged and I wonder if those are things that you share or would care to talk about.best regards &amp; a very warm welcome to HN.

Started in 1978. No longer program professionally (much) but still do it for fun.

I have a question, did your wage stop going up at some point?

Best of luck to you when you do the interviews! Everything just takes time and practice :)

Funny. I too with 14 years also with a lot of love for programming want to have a career like him. Like you I too am leetcoding so that I can get into a proper engineering company where I will not be discriminated based on age.Hope we both will do the same as what the OP did.

This made my day, absolutely wonderful achievement! Especially the area that you’re now in...it’s really not an easy task to retrain yourself for ML.I’m 12 years in professionally and still loving every second of it! Currently been slugging out Leetcode problems all hours of the day to try and get myself to an org with a proper engineering track. So maybe further down the line I still might be able to solve computer problems (in some way or form) during my day.I really hope to someday to be able to come onto HN and do the same thing as you :)

That sounds so great! You were working in an area where computers had black-green terminals, you saw when people were afraid what will happen if the date changes to 2000 :scream:, you saw the Sony Ericsson handy area, smartphones, tables, wearables and now ML! Exciting man and I want to be able to write here in ~40 years.Congrats to all what you have achieved! :clap:

Whether you are or not, I congratulate you on your achievement. And the fact that you’re posting it on HN definitely counts for extra!Well done!

I started programming as a child in around 1979 and have been programming professionally since 1987. So you have me beat by quite a margin. Congratulations! I can&#x27;t imagine stopping programming as long as I am still capable of doing it.

Can we have a blog with your programming &#x2F; life adventures?Also, it would be wise to name it &quot;genedangelo in byteland&quot; haha! ^_^

&gt; It could be argued that many modern digital natives are really the locked-in inhabitants of digital cities and walled gardens.So true. I am lucky that almost all my programming is for personal enjoyment&#x2F;growth and have gotten a huge amount of pleasure from breaking out of the infinity of abstractions that make up modern operating systems and getting into electronics and microcontrollers (which can now be purchased for pennies). There’s something great about truly understanding a system (also true about larger scale and even non technical systems, but I have particularly felt the change you describe from pioneer&#x2F;settler to controller citizens on modern computers).

&gt; I think my message for people who want to stay involved with the tech is to decouple their enjoyment of it from their career aspirations.Thank you for your words! I hope to retire soon from headless chicken corporate job and to bring back a joy of programming art.

Respect! I&#x27;ve only been programming since approx 1979. I still remember the first time that I saw internet technology used in 1982 - transferring a file from the US to the Uni of Leeds in the UK. I also have no plans to stop although I have retired from full-time employment. Now just a hobbyist, who programs every few days, at my own pace and on my own projects.Here&#x27;s my own thought. My last place of work did a lot of research into teaching and simulation tech, and was heavily pushing AR &#x2F; VR solutions from a disruptor perspective. Some of the theoreticians were heavily into their generation X&#x2F;Y&#x2F;Z perspectives and made a lot the advantages that young people would have as &#x27;digital natives&#x27;.As someone who&#x27;d been using computers since before they were born, I was quietly amused as being characterised as someone who couldn&#x27;t properly understand tech because I didn&#x27;t program until I was age 17&#x2F;18. It could be argued that many modern digital natives are really the locked-in inhabitants of digital cities and walled gardens. I now characterise myself as a sort of &#x27;digital settler&#x27; who in retrospect could be viewed as a pioneer on the digital frontier (although this is not how I perceived it in the early 80s when I was learning Pascal and then C on DEC, Amdhal and Vaxen).I think my message for people who want to stay involved with the tech is to decouple their enjoyment of it from their career aspirations. Of course, YMMV!

Bob Smith who codes the NARS2000 APL interpreter was programming from at least 1969:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nars2000.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nars2000.org</a><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sudleyplace.com&#x2F;APL&#x2F;projects.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sudleyplace.com&#x2F;APL&#x2F;projects.html</a>

That is great to see someone who has being doing this for so long. True respect for someone like this instead of someone who is just jumping the band wagon because tv show like Mr. Robot, the React FB, side effect.

This is really great! Keep doing what you are doing, Sir.I once had the pleasure of interviewing a German consultant who was into Android programming and he was like 48 or 50 years old. The interview was like listening to stories of his programming days with various hardware(Commodore etc) and it was fascinating that too with his precise German English accent.

Awesome! I have no plans to retire. I turn 50 in a few weeks and just returned back to the technology field after leaving it for 14 years.Eventually I plan on getting another masters or a PhD in data science, statistics or some other computer science field.If I could I&#x27;d buy you a cup of coffee and pick your brain. If you went to FAU then we are relatively close.

Respect! I plan to do the same when I get old. You are an inspiration Sir.

Was it anything like the NASA engineers putting men into space as we see them now? Proper shirts and neckties?

When I started out, business casual was the norm, just as it is today.  A big difference was that many of us had &quot;pocket protectors&quot; where we carried our pens, pencils and slide rule.  You may have seen those in some movies as a distinguishing feature for nerds.

Sir, when you were first starting out what was the standard dress for coders and how have you seen it evolve over the years?

ho, man I feel real lonely not finding any people who are like to screw around and code for pleasure. so many smart polished developers that would do something else if enviroment was different, but kills my heart. I would love to code forever, but I am not as tenacious as those are superprofessional I rather would like to enjoy and freeride the waves of code, And I find conversing within community dispiriting.Am I alone?

Phew. I am about 30 and i fear age discrimination. Love to hear more of these stories.

&gt; Paul Lutus comes to mind nowI used GraFORTH and TransFORTH so much...I&#x27;m in my 50&#x27;s now, started my career during college, writing educational software for Apple II clones (not in FORTH, sadly). Now mostly Python, since the early 2000&#x27;s, with little bits of other languages here and there.I find HN delightful for the diversity we see here.

Just keep up the good work, glasses or no glasses

Thanks a lot @jv22222 for sharing your own perspective apart from highlighting @genedangelo &#x27;s reply.Just to clarify, I am also not going through a crisis as such, thankfully. Just a doubt on future continued ability lingers on occasions.What you say, makes sense to me. After a few decades, we just see some patterns repeating with different names - RPC -&gt; CORBA -&gt; RMI -&gt; Web servcies (based on SOAP) -&gt; REST (based on JSON) -&gt; Google RPC (going again to binary style) ... and so on. Not being cynical. Things progress in a way, but also have echos of the past.

@aws_ls I wanted to surface this answer to a question about burnout answered by genedangelo. I is on page 2 here but I think it is relevant to what you are asking.&gt; genedangelo 1 day ago&gt; The one thing that comes to mind is to avoid the &quot;hammer looking for a nail&quot; syndrome. I see this all the time, especially in academia. Rather than worry about learning all the latest stuff, concentrate on solving the problem at hand in the simplest and most effective manner. If that requires you to learn new things, then that&#x27;s a great time to expand your repertoire - working on a specific problem. Of course you have to strike a balance, but mainly concentrate on solving problems rather than being up-to-date on all the latest stuff and trying to find the proverbial nail for your new hammer.Additionally, I am in a coder in my 50s and I have to say I am not going through any kind of mid life crisis in programming!Like genedangelo, I just focus on problems that need to get solved and I really don&#x27;t care how I solved it as long as I use a great tool that is meant for that job.Super happy to learn a new tech if it makes sense for the problem.There was a phase a few years ago where folks were using node.js to build all kinds of websites, including content heavy text based sites that would be better served as static html or dynmaic Ruby, PHP etc.I think that&#x27;s the classic mistake of a hammer looking for a nail and I can imagine it was really unsatisfying to build those kinds of sites with that kind of tech and might even contribute to burnout (just speculating).

Welcome to HN and for making this place more magical by your presence. Have seen other very senior programmers here over the years. Paul Lutus comes to mind now[1].One question: Do you go through a mid life crisis in programming in your 40s&#x2F;50s?My story (just felt like sharing): I am in my 40s and have been programming for 30 years (I first wrote in Fortran in my Engineering College, 1st semester). Later professionally coded in C++ for around 10 years (and still keep coming back to it, as needed). Java for 10 years. Golang for 7 years. And Python for last 2-3 years. And there were other languages like Visual basic (late 90s). A lot of Unix shell scripting. I still think, I am at my best. But do have occasional self doubts. The main difference from younger days, which is perceptible to me, is the need for eye glasses, and needing slightly bigger fonts on occasions (HN is perfect that way).I teach&#x2F;guide my elder son, in programming, who just turned 20, and doing well as a programmer - did half of K&amp;R C chapters and decent in algorithmic programming. Spent few months at Codeforces website and reached specialist level (Next level is Expert, which is generally considered respectable by any standard). And he also likely lurks on HN. :)So now, when I see your message, it only makes me happy, that HN has likely at least 3 generation of programmers if not more.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=lutusp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;user?id=lutusp</a>Edit: typo

Hats off to you, genedangelo! I retired last year after about 40 years of work but I am still programming. I think that we as programmers are lucky to be in a profession where our personal interest and professional work can coincide. More importantly, we can carry our interest well into retired life. This is a golden age for people like us: we can buy microcontrollers for peanuts or we could have a supercomputer-like cluster in the cloud (for a brief period) for a reasonable amount of money. And anything in between.

I wonder if you got any health issues related to your profession? What do you do to keep yourself in shape physically and mentally? Congratulations on your success.

@genedangelo As a programmer, do you feel pressure with time passage?
Have you felt any problem with memory or speed of thinking, have you ever thought about how it was in certain stages of your life from the perspective of abilities to do things?No disrespect, after only 20 years (third of your time) sometimes I feel that it was much easier to solve things in the beginning, so sometimes I am kind of worried what will happen if I ever live to that age. Generally I am interested how does cognitive ability changes with age.

I fear this, too. Too many of the new brains are helpless without frameworks.

The current crop of coders is not going to age well

This comment is emblematic of the confusing times we are in. You cannot say anything - even &quot;congratulations&quot; - without stepping on someone&#x27;s toes. Every assumption undoubtedly reveals some sort of partiality, privilege and discrimination. There are so many assumptions from which we must extricate ourselves that we are effectively prohibited from saying anything.

Every single person who calls you “inspirational” or “impressive” is actually revealing their own age prejudice. A programmer still programming while growing old is not something to marvel at, it is the normal state of things. Please do not allow people to put you on a pedestal; this would only strengthen the age prejudice present in the industry.Note: You deserve considerable respect and deference for the experience and skill you have no doubt acquired over the years. Also, since there are so few people like you who started programming in those years, you are an unusual and notable person. But don’t let anyone insinuate that it would have been normal for you to have stopped programming by now. It is not.

In May of 1963, I started my first full-time job as a computer programmer for Mitchell Engineering Company, a supplier of steel buildings.  At Mitchell, I developed programs in Fortran II on an IBM 1620 mostly to improve the efficiency of order processing and fulfillment.  Since then, all my jobs for the past 57 years have involved computer programming.  I am now a data scientist developing cloud-based big data fraud detection algorithms using machine learning and other advanced analytical technologies.  Along the way, I earned a Master’s in Operations Research and a Master’s in Management Science, studied artificial intelligence for 3 years in a Ph.D. program for engineering, and just two years ago I received Graduate Certificates in Big Data Analytics from the schools of business and computer science at a local university (FAU).  In addition, I currently hold the designation of Certified Analytics Professional (CAP).  At 74, I still have no plans to retire or to stop programming.

Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?