Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met?

I've met two that made my jaw drop. One was a guy I went to university with, 19 yo first time I met him, who was extremely good and had been running his own web developing business as a side gig since he was 16 (for Swedish readers, just to get a sense of how good he is, he made www.breakit.se in 2014, no idea if he's still maintaining it though or if they've switched to a different stack). I haven't heard of anyone who knows who he is know in this city who's also seen a better JS developer. However, he was a real pain to work with. If you didn't work quickly enough for his taste he would tell you to move away from the keyboard and he'd show you how it's done. He also did not like compromising with other people in discussions and he liked to do other people's tasks without telling them. Despite that, I recommended him when my boss asked about him with the caveat that he should ask honest questions about expectations on the work culture, specifically team work. Turns out he insulted my boss and my company pretty quickly in the interview. My boss told this guy about how we've worked hard to do continuous delivery the way we do today and this guy laughed my boss in his face and basically said "well, you might win over a lot of people who write software for the government with that story of how you guys put on your big boy pants but I do six deploys on a bad day". Apparently he instead went to a game studio and is a better fit at that place.

The second dev who took my breath away was a man in his late 40s who had consistently moved from companies as soon as they wanted to put him into management. He loved to code and was very good at it, but for some reason management wanted him to make room for younger hires (can anyone with more experience explain why that would be the case? This man has 20+ years of experience and loves to code, shouldn't he be more preferable to some kid?) so he was able to leverage his contacts he picked up as a consultant to change into high paying developer jobs. He was very understanding of how bad I was when I started out as a developer and was my mentor for a long time and his discipline still inspires me. It was an honor working for him, why people want to make such a good developer into anything but a developer, I'll never know.

Early '20s. By late '20s most programmers (and I include myself in that) seem to have accumulated a bunch of intuition that's out of date, so that even though they might have a deeper skillset than their younger colleagues, they apply those skills in the wrong places and optimize for the wrong things.

I spent a decade working with some very talented people in my mid-20s to 30s, and they aged along with me?

The single smartest person I worked with, the guy who wrote a h265 decoder by himself and did Project Euler problems for fun, was also in his mid-30s and worked 4 days a week to spend more time with his family. He was a mathematician by background though, and they tend to peak early; intellectually I think he would have been capable of doing all the same things at 16 given time to learn the prerequisites.

From exposure to a lot of smart people at Cambridge, not just in software, I would say that the biggest impairment to turning smartness into results was depression. The second biggest was lack of common sense - it's very easy to be convincing as a smart person, and if you're convincing to yourself and others about some piece of unconventional wisdom that turns out actually not to work, it can go very wrong.

About 10 years ago I attended a small local conference in Poland and met a guy who came there with his ~10yo son. As it turned out, the father was only an escort.

The kid was the most active person from the audience when it came to QA sessions after the talks. He asked genuine and interesting questions and spoke from his own experiences about building web apps and browser extensions.

I've never met anyone like him, even though I worked with some really good engineers in their 20s and 30s.

Most talented were a russian(18 year old) and two brits(early 20's) with whom i have worked with. But i would say talent doesn't guarantee more productivity. In fact in most cases it can have adverse effect on productivity.

Let me list few points:

# Tend to deviate from task and try to fix functional things which they think are not elegant engineering

# They are motivated to learn new technology so they will squeeze one without thinking about long term side effects like shipping delays and maintenance issue

# They think they will be productive working alone and mostly avoid collaboration which can be very costly down the road

# Failing to understand that trade offs to achieve business goals is a good trait to have

# Code maintenance doesn't motivate them like new shinier stuff

# Can slowly turn the business to be people dependent

# Going over board with code reuse and in the end introducing too many dependencies