ThomaszKrueger

Start each day with the thought: "if I got fired today do I have what it takes to bridge it through to the next opportunity, and would there be companies out there in need and willing to hire me".

If you can't honestly answer that with "yes" you are either accommodated, or running risks higher than you realize.

In my experience outline.com does a bang up job of getting all that clutter out. I am not in any way affiliated with them and don't even know how they monetize but I hope they stick around for as long as possible.

"Gosh can anything be worse than a cube?" Management: "hold my beer"

I love WFH. It helps that I have been happily married for many years, I have home cooked meals, more family interaction (well when I am working I am working but whatercooler conversations in your own kitchen are great). And I can literally work from anywhere, be it visiting relatives or travelling to Europe. I really hope I can continue like this for a long time; I might accept going back to the office - but it better be a real one.

I joke that my career went downhill from when I started. At first I had my own office, with a door, desk, computer desk, bookshelf with books, two chairs in front of my desk for small meetings. Then I had a large, tall cube, with reasonable space. Next I had a small, short walled cube I could barely fit in and would bump into my neighbor. Finally I was in a open space, with tens of other people yapping in their speakerphones many times in the same online meeting, with maddening echo. One person got sick, everyone got sick. If you want to get any work done you need to wear Bose cancelling headphones. Finally I managed to work from home. Once again I have my private office, silence, communicate via Slack and email, and never been more productive in my life.

When I see the phrase "emailing like a CEO" I imagine mainly not asking for opinions or decisions rather making statements of fact or decisions. For example, I got into the habit of not asking for vacation, rather I say "I am taking time off from day X to day Y", or declaring my design decisions instead of asking for opinions.

In the case of asking for time off, my rationale is to avoid making someone spend time evaluating if my request is acceptable.

We may be looking at this the wrong way. It isn't a question of ageism, rather did that person keep up with the evolution of languages and ecosystems? It is OK to be old(er) as long as one has what companies are looking for. Waiting for the time go by and count on "seniority raises" alone is counterproductive.

I am 55. I am as current as I can be, including when it comes to cloud, nosql, APIs, and the javascript renaissance. I try to do what companies need. My experience is a bonus because of the things I don't do, because of the problems I did not cause, because of the things that didn't happen. These in my experience are valuable even though almost impossible to measure.

I still have my Faber-Castell slide rule, used it in college.

Amen to that. Where I work I see people adding await/async all over the place because "performance". So now when you get exception stack traces they are hard to follow or flat out useless.

Here's what have been working well for me. I wear dress pants (not jeans, not chino - Izod for example), colorful shirts (Nautica are my favorite) - always tucked in, good looking but comfortable shoes (not sneakers). I make sure they are always reasonably ironed. And silly socks - Happy Socks are the best. During the summer I use short sleeves, long sleeves in the winter if I feel like. I never use a tie, but you may if you feel like.

This is software development. We are not professionals, and I sometimes say there is no such thing as "software engineer". I am an engineer by education (EE) and I can tell you software development is a long way from being a regulatable profession. Heck if you want to install an outlet or a faucet in your home you need to be properly licensed and insured. But when it comes to developing software that arguably is having more and more importance on people's lives there is no such thing.

In the company's eyes you should be 100% or even more committed. Perception is everything in this case. But you must do it by creating your own reserve space, where you are really 90% (or less) committed while using the remainder to worry about your next gig, because it will come. That's when you learn to apply proactive procrastination (sometimes it pays off to hold off on something you suspect will be cancelled), and absolutely use all the time estimated and allocated. Say whatever they want, managers and people in general take estimates for what it must be. Therefore you make it so.

I learned the hard way to always be prepared to move on. I keep myself current. I actually assume the project will fail and prepare for it. If it succeed that's great news. I never had and probably never will have golden parachutes. My insurance is what I know and why I do. It must be valuable for the marketplace, not just for the company I am currently working for. That is my duty.