Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

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I'm in my 50's and I think it's our age.

I started coding in the 80's, and got my first coding job early 90's, and the tech was moving even faster then.

I now have computers that last more than 3 years without becoming completely obsolete.

There's been one fairly consistent programming environment for at least 10 years now. We had "micro" in the 80's , Object-oriented in the 90's, internet in the 90's, and mobile in 2007. I spent less than 10 years making desktop applications in VB, and then both of those things stopped being at all relevant, while I've been coding web stuff in Go for 10 years now and it's still very relevant.

But I do find changes annoying now. I used to embrace it all, and be keen to learn all the new stuff. Now, not so much. I don't know whether I'm jaded with experience, or just old and want the world to stop changing around me.

Also in that age group, but I was tired already back in 1995. I was an enthusiastic hobby Win32 programmer. Win32 was considered "hard" back then because it was a flat set of 1000+ functions, plus an event-loop-based programming model. It had a complete printed reference over two thick books. But then to make Windows programming easier, MS introduced MFC (Foundation Classes). Well that had 7 or 9 reference books for it, equalling 3 times the total thickness of the Win32 ones. Since then I've done a lot less Windows programming.

Anyway, that's just one of a million examples of this phenomenon. You have to keep learning more things just to be able to make the same stuff you could have made 20 years ago with simpler tools. This doesn't bother some people, but I think that set of people is getting smaller.

In my opinion this is the reason why women, who used to choose programming careers in the 70s and 80s, do not get involved as often today. Only people who are obsessive can continue to care about all the new versions of every software product or API, despite them offering little improvement. And the people at the high end of the obsessiveness curve are primarily men. If you think a healthy work environment needs proportionally more women, fix this.

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