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

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

#91

Post by dkrich »

adventured wrote: post #75
GabrielF00 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much the preference for youth has to do with the fact that younger workers are (1) generally cheaper and (2) more open to working longer hours since they are less likely to have families and more likely to be looking to make an impression.

Not to mention younger workers are often more risk tolerant / seeking. If you're 43 years old, with a family to support and a mortgage, it might make perfect sense to take a safer job. If you're 20 with no family, no mortgage, etc. you sign up with Zuckerberg to 'change the world,' with little concern over whether it crashes and burns. I think that equation artificially pumps up the pop culture relation between youth…

What does that have to do with the quality of the coder though? I've worked alongside developers young and old (as I suspect most here have) and I see no relationship whatsoever between age and effectiveness. If anything, the older developers are probably consistently better. Here I am defining older as 35+.

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

#92

Post by gknoy »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #88
voidlogic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being at least an average coder is a prerequisite to leading a team of coders. A team lead that can't code is like an Army officer that can't pass his physical tests or clean his rifle. He will not have the respect of the rank and file. A team lead (as opposed to a project manager) that can't code is doomed. (Notice I don't mention language, a good programmer can be coding in something new within a week or maybe two…

Depends on what the "lead" means. Certainly, he won't be able to be a technical lead, but non-technical people can lead technical people on other senses as long as the leader is humble, recognizes his shortcomings, and is willing to listen to and apply advice. It is extremely arrogant for developers to believe the only thing of value a leader can bring to the table is coding chops. Compared to what it really takes, c…

I think most of us would feel that "lead software architect" is a technical lead, or should be able to be in some capacity.

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

#93

Post by matula »

mtviewdave wrote: post #31
Evbn wrote: post #9

Before we backslap too much, note that the study isn't about programming skills, it is about sitting on SO all day answering questions instead of working.

That would be a more compelling argument if the startup community hadn't spent the last several years claiming that participation in online forums like StackOverflow is a good metric for evaluating the quality of potential hires.

Exactly. And lately, it seems to Github repos and open source projects you've contributed to (which actually isn't so horrible).

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

#94

Post by doktrin »

I'm curious as to how the situation will look 20 years down the line as the current (young'ish) workforce grows up. My hunch is that as the industry matures, the current trend of age discrimination will gradually fall by the wayside.

There will always be some predisposition, as within most industries, to tend towards age discrimination in certain situations. However, my guess is that software will begin to look more like established engineering professions, demographic wise, as time goes on.

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

#95

Post by ratsbane »

rayiner wrote: post #34
cl8ton wrote: post #6

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 d…

There is very little new under the sun, at least if you're talking about what's going on in the mainstream rather than what's happening in the theoretical space (with GADTs, dependent types, etc). It's been a very long time since I saw software development technology that wasn't just the application of something developed in the 1960's through 1980's. "Oh, Java has lambdas now? Here are the design patterns that take…

Yes. Twenty and even thirty years ago we did have essentially the same ML algorithms used in self-driving cars today, just not enough computing power to use them effectively (I think SVMs are only about 20 years old but neural nets have been around in some form since the late '50s) There is much to learn from those who have gone before.

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

#96

Post by ww520 »

beat wrote: post #43

As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more to being a useful tech than programming! And I'm much more sophisticated about big-picture thinking, business, and planning these days. Back when I was barely past "junior", I got to work on some really cool software at a dotcom-era startup. Technically, it wa…

"I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do"

Don't undercut yourself; you provide much greater value than that. People outside of engineering don't have a really clear picture about the roles and positions, and the cost structure of running a development team.

I remember a conversation with one of the clients. He was trying to interview candidates for project manager position and asked me for its job description. I explained to him what the typical structure of a development team is and what roles different people play, like project manager, development manager, architect, team lead, front-end developer, back-end dev, dba, UI designer, qa, etc. Then I casually mentioned I'm doing all those for you in this project and you are actually saving a lot of money despite my high billing rate. He appreciated that.

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

#97

Post by pjungwir »

benjamincburns wrote: post #25
voidlogic wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being at least an average coder is a prerequisite to leading a team of coders. A team lead that can't code is like an Army officer that can't pass his physical tests or clean his rifle. He will not have the respect of the rank and file. A team lead (as opposed to a project manager) that can't code is doomed. (Notice I don't mention language, a good programmer can be coding in something new within a week or maybe two…

Agreed, but with a caveat: > a good programmer can be coding in something new within a week or maybe two and after a couple of months should be completely fluent. It's a risky choice. The project we were working on had very, very heavy emphasis on idiomatic Java. In this situation a good manager would need to recognize the deficit in the prospective lead and only ever accept the candidate if they have a rock-solid tr…

> It's a risky choice.

Agreed. Learning a language is one thing. Learning its libraries is another; a stack a third; its idioms a fourth; its broad patterns a fifth. The J2EE part of my resume is an alphabet soup of supporting technologies. Rails is almost as bad, just with double entendres instead of acronyms. If you're learning the basics as you go, how are you going to make strategic, architect-level decisions? Did this potential hire ever encounter MVC in her work with Matlab/R?

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

#98

Post by chipsy »

bubbleRefuge wrote: post #70
beat wrote: post #43

As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more to being a useful tech than programming! And I'm much more sophisticated about big-picture thinking, business, and planning these days. Back when I was barely past "junior", I got to work on some really cool software at a dotcom-era startup. Technically, it wa…

Knowing a domain acquired with experience and which isn't taught in school is a big differentiator. Maybe game programming/graphics is like this ?

There are a number of such domains... security, DSP, real-time systems all have "unnamed" skills to them.

Games happen to be pretty good as well because they let you wrap several different kinds of technologies together - the tricky part with games is really that they need great design much more than they need good engineering, and yet you can ignore this as a coder because you can always make your renderers and simulations more generalized and complex.

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

#99

Post by freyr »

GabrielF00 wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #4

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…

I wonder how much the preference for youth has to do with the fact that younger workers are (1) generally cheaper and (2) more open to working longer hours since they are less likely to have families and more likely to be looking to make an impression.

These factors hold in any industry, though, so they're not sufficient to explain the preference for youth in the software industry.

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

#100

Post by SoftwareMaven »

gknoy wrote: post #92
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what the "lead" means. Certainly, he won't be able to be a technical lead, but non-technical people can lead technical people on other senses as long as the leader is humble, recognizes his shortcomings, and is willing to listen to and apply advice. It is extremely arrogant for developers to believe the only thing of value a leader can bring to the table is coding chops. Compared to what it really takes, c…

I think most of us would feel that "lead software architect" is a technical lead, or should be able to be in some capacity.

While that is fair enough, I've never seen a company put a non-technical person in a lead technical role. Conversely, I've see no end of "a non-engineer can't manage engineers", which is what this feels like.

Of course, all other qualities being equal, having the addition of technical skills on top of managerial skills is good, but I've had more non-technical bosses I'd choose to work for again than technical bosses.

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