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Comment by eschneider | Hacker News Reader

I'm not even sure that coding _much_ faster than necessary is even required to give a 3-5x multiple on "average", let alone "worst case" developers. Some of the biggest productivity wins can be had by being able to look at requirements, knowing what's right or wrong about them, and getting everyone on the same page so the thing only needs to be made once. Being good at test and debug so problems are identified and fixed _early_ are also big wins. Lots of that is just having the experience to recognize what sort of problem you're dealing with very quickly.

Being a programming prodigy is nice, but I don't think you even really need that.

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All of the things you list are the product of the experience that OP is talking about. Anyone can get there with 20 years of (sufficiently rigorous) experience by ~40, but people who start as a child have a head start and it does show.

It's probably especially obvious in the child-prodigy types because we as an industry have a tendency to force people out of IC roles by 40, so the child prodigies are the only ones who have enough time to develop 20 years of experience working directly with code.

the other factor I noticed from the days I was programming for fun vs these days where I'm programming for pay.

in those early years the tasks that you take on are probably above your skillset and fight through it, you're not accountable to anyone.

in a job you're usually hired for what you already know, +/- some margin for more gradual learning , not really that much room for moonshots. the work need to be divided into bit sized parts that you can justify to the higher-ups when needed. you have less room for exploring really non linear paths toward the solution which can be harder to explain but where you learn more.

so in the end this end up sometimes amounting to 10years of experience outside work being more impactful than 10 years at work. ,

It doesn't have to be that way. Sure, if you can get a reputation for being sharp, reliable, quick to learn, and happy to work on things you haven't seen before, it's not so hard to move into completely new tech areas.

People will hire you more for your problem solving ability, reliability, and ability to work with people than your experience with any particular tech. If you've demonstrated you can pick up a new tech area easily, it's not too hard to do it again.

That sort of thing will let you build deep experience in a lot of areas and keep you current with the latest technologies. Keeps things interesting, too. :)

The challenge becomes editing down the resume. Mine is something like 5 or 6 pages even after some paring down. That's still probably way too long.

It's not just that people get pushed out of IC work, but everyone tends to have less energy as they get older + other life demands accumulate.

The combination of 10-15 years of experience and the energy/time of 20s is very powerful.

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