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Comment by idolaspecus | Hacker News Reader

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 ;)

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

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'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/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.

details.

what technologies is your grandpa using?

what's his opinion on javascript?

any epic kids these days stories?

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.

> Either that or I just doxxed myself ;)

I wager, everything will be retroactively doxxed in about 20 years or so...

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