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Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
101–110 of 133 posts
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
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+.
It doesn't actually have anything to do with the quality of the coder, it has everything to do with the perception.
The hackers that built Facebook would be perceived (by the public / media / whatever) to be better because of the halo that comes with their involvement in creating FB.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#103Those 40 somethings? Yeah, they built the modern Web and Internet. To use an easy example: who do I want on my team, John Carmack (42), or some 19 year old kid that is working on his first engine (and is likely to stumble over a million landmines due to lack of experience)? Easy choice, I'll take the ridiculously vast experience and refined skillset.
To be fair, John Carmack WAS "some 19 year old kid ... working on his first engine" and within a few years had launched some very successful projects.
Sure, and the programming work he was doing back then required very little prior knowledge. He invented a lot of it as he went, and has been able to scale from day one with the radical increase in complexity.
Try building something like the latest id Tech engine or the Unreal Engine from scratch. Carmack could do it, a 19 year old kid writing his first engine could not.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#104I'm not old, per se, I'm probably at my peak marketability-- old enough that, if I were stupid, I would have washed out by now, young enough to be stereotypically perceived as vigorous. I can grow a nice lush beard and there's no gray in it yet.
The only real doomsday issue I ever ran into with older programmers was an increasing unwillingness (in some) to add onto their stack. The good news is that after the third or fourth new language you pile on, the next one gets a lot easier. If you know C, a lisp variant (although I prefer an ML variant), and a decent scripting language (I learned perl first, but I sort of hate it), you're not likely to get surprised by much. The programming hivemind really can't process new ideas all that quickly, so you rapidly gain exposure to the core ideologies that form the foundation of the fancy 'new' trends. And then you're just learning some syntax and getting comfy with a new API. Unless you get lazy, shit really does get a lot easier. But with tech, the next wave is inevitably coming, and you're either on it or under it.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#105Earlier 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…
I might be wrong, but you seem to think that "young software developers" equates to "people working on startups". Programmers working on startups represent a very very small fraction of working developers.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#106The 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…
Are you a politician? :)
(On a serious note, great exploration of the topic)
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#107The discrimination towards extreme youth is all about money, because they can pay them 1/4 what a senior developer would ask for. They also will probably do a bunch of free overtime and not complain, until they've been there a few years and realize the shaft they are getting.
I was surprised how little the young Sr Android developer at Google makes. They obviously hired him to pay him as little as possible as compared to an experienced lifelong developer. Google I guess doesn't care about bugs or experience seems like most tech companies they just want to keep pushing new releases to get you to buy and upgrade to them.
The Sr Android developer is constantly complaining about a lack of free time on his google+ page and has been taking a lot of leave. He's yet another young developer working obscene amounts of hours so Google doesn't have to pay for extra employees.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? Di…
I've never understood why the common line is that any good hacker can pick up a new language and be just as effective as someone who has used it for year in a short time.
I've been thrown into overdue projects in languages I hadn't used before, and have been able to start fixing bugs almost immediately... but "tweaking existing code" is a far cry from implementing new functionality, which in turn is far below making architectural decisions.
Languages exist in ecosystems that develop over years; knowing those ecosystems in depth takes a lot of time.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's interesting. What is it about Typescript specifically that you think aligns it with "A Theory of Objects"? (not expecting a thesis in your answer)
Abadi and Cardelli lay out an object oriented calculus with object literals and structural object types. Typescript's object literals and structural object types seem very similar.
Thanks for that.
Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The slightly different statement "young folk use technology the best" is closer to the truth. Just the other day I was saw my cousin's toddler pick up her father's iPhone, unlock it, and pick the game she wanted to play. Even at 4 years of age, she's a decent user of technology. But they don't necessarily understand the technology they're using. For example, teenagers these days are addicted to their cell phones, and…
I was lucky to be a kid around the time NES was the new thing and people were starting to get PC's at home so I've played video games from 5 years old. Still when I first started programming games, I had to start from square 0. I don't think there's any correlation with being a "natural" user of the web and understanding the technology behind it. As a engineer though, you'll immediately start dismantling that tech in…
I was luckier, because I got an actual computer instead of a console, and in the era when kids were just as likely to get an Usborne book of BASIC programs to type into their computer if they wanted to play games.
Kids getting consoles and similar hermetically-sealed boxes depresses me.