I'm on the tail end of the boomers. I'm 1963. And I accept that I have nothing in common with the front end of the boomers.

I email back and forth with my front end Boomer old boss. Sometimes half a dozen times a day. Sometimes three times a month. He doesn't remember much of what I do. But it's a perspective thing. He was living his life on one side of the relationship equation while I was living my side on the other. So we remember totally different things.

I get him to occasionally tell a story. That's always a win.

He reminds me of Rand somewhat. Hey Rand, want his email for a connection? You will never see him, he's East Coast.

He was one of the initial startup owners of the village voice. He was an early day long hair hippie freak. He had this amazing jewfro.

I only saw a picture. Once. He disavowed those days. Sold out at the Village Voice and took his accounting degree and went on to do great things in the publishing industry and spent quite a while at Ziff Davis doing both Hands-On and executive things. That was pre dot.com run up.

So he's a real baby boomer. His parents came back from the war and got busy.

My generic rationalization of baby boomers? Those of us that can remember the moon landing and saw it in real time.

Yup, we are much different.

Keeping up with the Jones?

Yup.

Buy way too much house in way to good neighborhood on the assumption 10 years later your salary catches up with your costs and you can start getting "ahead". Live on peanut butter and eggs and ramen noodles until then.

Actually, took me about 5 years but I was a techie in early techie times. A 5% yearly raise was an absolute minimum. Don't forget the expected bonuses.

So I had it far better than most in my cohort. Even though interest rates sucked.

Speaking as someone born in '63. The boomers didn't apply to me. I got to watch the hippies and essentially play at being a hippie but the hippies were over. I never got to be a hippie. It was time to grow up, get a job, raise a family, get a house, move on with your life.

This was the second half. The first half that came before me either tuned in and dropped out or were their antithesis and I got to see them in the workforce. Those guys sucked. So in the workforce I was always the minority from that attitude. At least with the people I interacted with. Those guys hated the hippies. Can't be a hippie around those guys.

Since they typically constrain the cash flow to the people who want to eat well need to modify their default behavior. They don't. And assholes who talk like them but don't control the cash flow yet don't need to constrain it.

Owners hire the people. Depending on how many levels you are between the owner and the underlings, you control the culture. Many people talk about workplace culture but very few people have directly implemented it.

My elder brother was in control of all decisions and cash flow. There could be between 3 and 20 simultaneous projects running under him with various people in control of a group of people and then that person would be in charge of the culture, as long as it implemented his culture.

He was a left wing, seriously, left wing, with a masters in human resources and counseling. Counseling. He was in charge of technical projects. It was very hard to get him to fire anyone no matter how incompetent. He was a visioneer of impossible projects that got done.

And I rode with him 2 hours in the car everyday when we commuted and reviewed every project and discussed the technical aspects as well as the human resources and cash flow aspects. And we built a division, a separate department within a large company with its own p&l responsibility, over 10 years. And he rarely ever talked to any of the individual employees for more than 3 minutes a week.

It was my job to go out to lunch with everybody at least three times a week. I was one-on-one with new hires for at least a week. In the later days I worked from home and it didn't matter. But in the first 7 years of buildup I went to work.

I made the hiring decisions. I was the gatekeeper. I was the recruiter. And I was the person who guided them through the various steps of the HR gauntlet. Once they were hired, I trained them in the specifics of large-scale data processing, which meant I had to untrain anything they ever learned before. Even though most of them were experts to start off with. I was their best friend and their worst enemy. I was the guy they came to with both technical and personnel problems.

Everyone knew I commuted with the guy in charge, he was my elder brother and he always said yes to the last person he ever spoke to (or gave you a good brainwashing so you walked out of the office being told no without even realizing it) and the last person he spoke to was always me. I made the decisions.

I was the culture.

I managed to weasel around other people's cultures. Occasionally I had to interact with the owners. The primary 51% owner hated me, my background, my culture, my religion, my technical choices, and the reason I was hired for the job. He specifically did not want me to accomplish my job. Occasionally I was really stupid and said what I really thought. Occasionally I had to go to battle. Occasionally. I know when I'm doing it.

A thought on political attitudes of programmers of varying levels. We all know we have the top accomplishers in the top 10%. Obviously I made up that 10%, but you know there's a dramatic cut off between a certain level of programmer's ability and the next level.

The best programmers will get the programs and computers to get to do the work for them eventually. They will program themselves out of a job. And they will do it in such an imaginative way that they think is stupid and obvious. But the next level down say that's incredibly brilliant.

I'm not in that level. I'm in the pretend level. The best 1% are light years beyond me. That's bTilly. That's admin but he probably won't admit it. I'll still automate everything out of existence, but I'll do it a bit kludgier. I'm at the level that I want elegance, I know one line of code is better than 50 but sometimes I just can't pull it off, and that means the people behind me won't understand it, so I'll throw in what I consider a compromise.

But I am in the next level down. I'm still 10 times better than the next down level. My productivity is amazing compared to what the typical default programmer is. The vast majority of programmers who have jobs.

The next next level down gets stuff done but they need to be watched. They need to be able to take that old drudge code and then make modifications and make sure they didn't screw anything up worse than it already was. Most of the time they get right, sometimes they don't, sometimes all breaks loose but they really don't care. It's just a job to them.

I love to code. That's a generic term. I love to create systems and implement stuff and I even love to talk to customers and really figure out what to do to get things done. I love to get down into the nitty-gritty with the hardware and the software and I love to actually then code.

The next level down couldn't imagine playing at my level and the next level above couldn't imagine wasting the time with it.

My level and above are typically left-wing. The next level down are typically right-wing. They don't want anything to change. They're scared of change. My level and above always experience change and the change has almost always been for the better.

The second you are at the level of p&l, profit and loss, those imaginary building blocks are very real.

When I design systems that include people's jobs. How many people will be required to run the system for the next 3 years during the contract? Okay. Let's go find them, hire them, train them and make sure they get along with everybody else. Sometimes they didn't and had to be removed.

How much profit are we making during this contract and did it actually cover those people's jobs 2 years in? No? Can we use them in another department? No? Can we find a job for them anywhere else? Almost always. Hey, so and so, you're having difficulty here, and I hear this guy over there would really like to hire you. Wouldn't you like that job? No? We are having financial difficulties here and your job is in danger, wouldn't you really like that job?

Yes!

Sometimes that didn't always work out. But we tried. Sometimes. There is absolutely no other job to give them. They weren't working out for real reasons. Then it was my job to get rid of them.

Sometimes the entire division was in jeopardy based on a political, not technical decision. It was still my job to deal with it.

So yes, that moment of crossing from the arbitrary building blocks of a technical system that is self-contained except for data and electricity is vastly different from where I played.

And yes, our lawyers told me that I needed to print out all my code so we can copyright it all and then patent it and then go attack our competitors. I slow walked that one. Oops, it never got done.