I'm a young dev (26) that works with a lot of older developers (40-50) rather new to the field. My biggest annoyance with the older inexperienced devs is that they DON'T ask questions resulting in very bad design decisions. Keep asking questions but maybe frame them differently. i.e. instead of "How do I do this?" say "I'm planning on implementing it this way, do you think this will work or is there a better way?" This shows that you did some research and value their opinion.
According to their website they have 1000s of customers paying 1200+/m. At the low end they're getting 1.2 million in revenue a month and only have 9 employees. Why did they sell? Something is not adding up.
It is a necessary evil in my opinion. Typing code perfectly without the aid of code completion reinforces the idea that attention to detail in coding is extremely important. Furthermore, it forces the user to read every letter which is very important when first starting out.
True, but to be fair I did praise the 40+ year olds who stay up to date and know their stuff. Just slightly jaded due to the ageism at my current job and lack of fact checking by management.
"A hit to the pride is nothing compared to the pain of shipping something broken."
Well said. This should be the golden rule of development. I feel that too often we (both young and old) don't ask questions because we fear the repercussions of appearing ignorant.
"B) Are overly emotional and they all take things way too seriously."
This can be a positive. My experience with 40+ year olds is that they tend to sacrifice user experience/security for what they know. "Our customers won't care if they have to use Internet Explorer with ActiveX as long as it gets the job done." My point is that an experienced programmer who is not up to date can be as detrimental an arrogant 20 year old. The 40+ year old programmer who stay up to date though... They are worth their weight in gold and I aspire to join them one day.
Edit: Background - Got really pissed off at a 40+ dev using active x to launch external programs and making it a requirement that our end users use IE with ActiveX enabled. Almost lost my job because management sided with the person who had more experience.
There are a few products I made just to solve a problem for myself that I was too shy to share. I was very surprised how many people found my product and used it when I did 0 advertising and told 0 people about it. But to answer your question, no I do not think it is probable for a product to take off with 0 marketing/advertising. The only way a product takes off with 0 marketing is when an end-user finds your product and loves it so much that they share it with the world (free marketing.) This is very rare but a few developers found success with this model such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin but they are more of an exception than the rule.
Or plan C. For younger engineers start thinking about financial independence. Software Engineers enjoy a high starting salary and an even higher mid career salary so it is entirely possible to achieve financial independence in your 30s-40s with a frugal lifestyle and smart investing.
Apple is going for a paradigm shift with how we view watches; similar to what they did with the iPhone. It is best not to think of the iWatch as a watch but rather as a 2nd screen for the iPhone with sensors and haptic feedback.