"So, how's work been these days?" you ask... Abbi sums it up quite nicely, thank you.

update: I saw this missive on Andre Torrez's site, and it gave me pause. Not because I think that I'm exactly in his situation, but because I wonder what it all exactly means to me. Perhaps he's right about the apparent lack of old programmers. I certainly don't ever want to become "the stapler guy", but I also don't think I ever want to do management, either. As much as I like to tell people I work with how shortsighted, schizophrenic, or otherwise idiotic they are, I usually like to do it to people who are in a different discipline than programming, and I know it would be hard to be telling a younger version of myself what to do and when to have it done by.

I kind of like where I'm at right now; I work with other programmers who want to learn about new things, and I can "mentor" or "coach" or whatever the fuck (both of those are too strong of terms, I just find something that's cool/fun/makes business sense and we all basically learn it together)... but I sometimes wonder how much longer I can keep doing it. Programming seems to be a young person's game, but I think I'm interested enough in new technologies to keep myself marketable. Besides, I have both my parents to look up to for examples; my dad still does basically what i do, writes code, talks to customers, and still looks forward to going to work in the morning. My mom even got back in game after sending all us kids off to college; becoming a Java developer until she got laid off (along with everyone else) from Lucent.

So, I suppose all is not dark. I might not always be "the smart programmer" at work, but I can always hope to be "the weird one", or at the very least, "the old one." I don't think there's anything wrong with that, actually.