Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

Wow - is this what constitutes 'research' these days? Look at some data on stackoverflow.com as if it's a representative sample, and then make some general conclusions?

The prevalence of discrimination toward extreme youth in the software industry is probably a historical artifact of the fact that it's a new industry, so for the most part young people were the ones who "got it."

That being said, I think it cuts both ways. Both younger and older developers have advantages.

Older developers tend to see pitfalls and avoid them better. They tend to have a more diverse skill set, better organizational skills, and more knowledge of related domains outside programming (such as marketing, business, finance, etc.). Older developers are also less vulnerable to faddish thinking, choosing tools that they can ship with over the latest faddish language or technique. (And recognizing today's fads as yesterday's fads repackaged, which they often are.) Finally, older developers sometimes remember things that didn't work long ago but that might work today. Younger folks might not have a clue that certain things don't have to be the way they are, while an older person might be able to explain why a certain decision was made and then help them question whether it's still necessary today. A lot of innovation can be realized by searching through the discarded piles of yesteryear's ideas and asking, for each one, "are the reasons this was discarded still valid?"

Young developers have the advantage of fresh eyes. They don't carry the accumulated baggage of prior environments and old ways of doing things. They can more easily dump legacy cruft, embrace genuinely novel and interesting ways of doing things, etc. They also sometimes have more energy, having simpler lives and lacking things like kids and mortgages and personal accountants. I think it's easier for a young developer to focus laser-like on one thing for a long time.

I think the ideal team has both, and listens to both.

It's also possible for anyone, regardless of age, to take on either of these sets of characteristics. It's possible for younger programmers to take the time to scratch the surface of fads, or listen to the older ones and learn from them. It's also possible for older programmers to intentionally "forget what they have learned" and open themselves to the possibility that such-and-such isn't needed anymore, etc.

Edit: I also think it's important for teams to avoid the dark side of both. For older developers, it's the curmudgeon, or the developer so set in their ways they are not open to any new idea. For younger developers it's the cowboy who thinks they know more than they really know and will waste a lot of time reinventing wheels, chasing things already known not to work for provable reasons, etc.

I am one of the older'ish programmers

One day a young programmer flies into the office talking about the new MVC frameworks and how it would revolutionize how we write programs.

He was mystified when I explained how MVC works to him without even looking at what framework he was ranting about.

He asked how I knew? I told him it was invented at PARC in the 70's and I've used them starting in 1995 with the MFC C++ for document view. This was more of a reintroduction of an older methodology suited to web.

Older developers also get to see the linear progression of current technologies and how they arrived at current day implementation. What worked and what didn't work.

Wow, when kids don't even know that the latest fad was originally popularised by Apple, we have entered postmodern hipsterdom.

Hire an individual. Don't hire an old person or a young person or a guy or a girl or a... just.. don't.

An individual at age 40 is generally more qualified than he or she was at age 25. However, absent of other context the fact that one individual is 25 and another is 40 has no bearing on the prediction of whether the one individual or the other is a better fit for a technical role. Go for the individual who can show adaptability and/or a history of compounding success in the areas that you need.

My anecdote:

I once had an argument with my former non-technical manager. She was arguing in favor of hiring a woman in her late 30s with two masters degrees to serve as a lead software architect. The degrees were in two subfields of physics, one theoretical, one applied. This would be the candidate's first position outside of academia. I participated in the candidate's entire interview process, and I recommended against hiring her for any position. She didn't have enough experience and she was awful at all of the technical portions of the interview process, especially her code. At the same time I was arguing that I should've been the lead, as this was a position the rest of the team had thrust me into and I was effective in the role. The manager's argument was that the candidate was more qualified. After some discussion, "more qualified" turned out to mean older (we both agreed the degrees weren't a strong indicator).

In the end, the candidate was hired for nearly twice my salary (apparently upper management likes letters after a candidate's name). She never fit the lead role, so the team never accepted her for it. Further, she was very ineffective as a developer (we were working in Java, her experience was in Matlab and R), so we either had to refactor a lot of her work or let it go to review and decline to accept it. Everything that went her way took months longer than necessary. In the end I think she wound up working in some type of higher-end sales/administrative capacity.