It appears they used original historic images from 1930, and overlayed them with a recent picture taken from (roughly) the same position and with the same angle as the original one. So it’s basically like a leap in time of the very same perspective, 100 years apart.
As a 61-year-old with almost 50 years of programming experience who recently got a new job, I can testify how almost no one wants to hear from an old person. I program for fun, too, and could be doing that full-time if I weren't working.
I'm only employed now because I'm proficient in an older language (APL). Never mind my decades of experience in many other languages and extensive domain knowledge in finance, not that I'm bitter or anything.
> I can testify how almost no one wants to hear from an old person
I love working with people who are more than 40 or 50 years old. My experience is pretty limited in this matter but I have found older people too be more forgiving when I make mistakes.
Also, older people has that art of speaking thing figured out. In my experience, older professional people don't just say "thank you", they tend to say things that are positively meaningful. Even when they reject my proposal, they will make the effort to actually let me down easy and slowly.
Writing this I just realized the counterpoint of this post. With age people are naturally more suited for managerial roles rather then full time technical roles. Understanding programming may give someone an edge, but with age people have more to offer beyond programming, which is management and communication.
IME it's not pure 'ageism', but salary and workplace dynamics. Having had the privilege of working with many older devs, who played a big role in shaping my career...
After the first 2 decades your worth as an individual contributor (or at most, team lead) stagnates. You're probably at the top of the pay grade already, and the older you get the more you'll have to work with more junior people, as 'equals' despite having substantially more experience. It's very hard to give you any sort of career progression. You may be a lot more productive, but your 'multiplier effect' is small compared to a manager, or someone who deals with a lot more stakeholder complexity.
It's even more pronounced in current times where a 25 year old makes 100K (a lot in the UK). They're very unlikely to double their salary over the next 10 years in similar positions. Whereas most people start at 25K.. work their way up to 100K... exec level etc is 200K.
Successful 'pure' programmers who get jobs usually have an infra flavour of the month skillset, or make it clear that they're happy to get paid the same as someone with say 10 years of experience.
Most of them though go into strategy or become contractors.
I'm in the middle and I wonder how I would react if working with a 60yo buddy. I'm not biased much (I'm cool with people of all background and age when I service computers around my area) and I like esoteric/vintage. Which is funny because I'd probably run to spend time near your desk doing some APL pair programming than hearing the 25yo boast about the latest python release at the coffee machine :)
I read a review of the book "Becoming Trader Joe" by Joe Coulombe who founded the Trader Joe's supermarket chain. One of the very smart things he did was understand how expensive turnover is, so he oriented the company around keeping his employees motivated to stay.
Maybe it's because you cannot separate things that neatly. I see people here complaining that it's not all about tech but what is tech without the world that we live in and our effect on that world?
Without context, tech alone is a very sterile discussion.
Considering how diverse California's demographic composition is, as opposed to say, Vermont, they deserve credit for doing better than the country as a whole.
A programmer, an engineer, and a physicist are in adjacent hotel rooms. Each has a pitcher of water beside the bed. A fire starts in the wastepaper basket in each room.
The physicist wakes up, sees the fire, estimates exactly how much water is needed to put it out, and pours exactly that amount from the pitcher, dousing the flames.
The engineer wakes up, sees the fire, pours the entire pitcher of water on it, then refills the pitcher and douses it again to be safe.
The programmer wakes up, sees the fire, sees the pitcher of water, decides it's a solvable problem, and goes back to sleep.
The programmer looks online for documentation on how to use the water, finds it too complicated, dumps the water out the window, then dumps the contents of the wastebasket out after it. Seeing the fire gone the programmer later goes on to give a conference talk about the importance of a good throwing arm in fire safety.
Variant I heard, had a physicist, engineer, and mathematician sharing a room.
The first two wastepaper basket fires were taken care of the same ways by the physicist and engineer.
Then a third fire appears, but on the curtains. The mathematician says he'll take care of it, so the others go back to sleep. The mathematician removes the curtains, puts them in the wastepaper basket, and says, "Now it's a solved problem." He then goes back to sleep.
The preceding discussion is a good example of "whoosh!" because it fails to understand that APL is an array language. It eschews scalar representation like "A1x1 + A2x2 ...". In APL, you would write this as something like "A +.× x".
The same lack of understanding of the array context also underlies the earlier comment favoring "standard" order of operation that works well for maybe five functions with three levels of precedence but quickly becomes unwieldy for more functions.
Someone else already alluded to this lack of scalability but the power of a strictly positional precedence - not "no precedence" - shows up in array operations. For example, consider reduction by a non-commutative function like "-/A".
In the "standard" order of precedence, since all the subtractions are at the same level, this can be restated as the first item in A minus the sum of the remaining items. This is not particularly interesting or useful.
However, positional precedence interprets this expression as an alternating sum: (2-3) + (5-9) (for the "A" above). Alternating sum is a common, useful construction in mathematics.
