Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by etjossem » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 2:17 PM UTC

hatu wrote: post #84

etjossem wrote: post #17

Dr. Murphy-Hill uses absolute StackOverflow reputation as the only metric. He demonstrates that older developers spend more time sharing knowledge than their younger counterparts, but I'm not sure about the jump to "skills improve over time." I suspect high reputation on SO reflects (at best) either a developer's perceived confidence in her skills or her desire to share whatever knowledge she has! Perhaps the title s…

Isn't "skills improve over time" kind of common knowledge though?

It's a piece of common knowledge that this study neither supports nor challenges.

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

#132

Post by btilly » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 3:07 PM UTC

stan_rogers wrote: post #130

D9u wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resemble that remark... I'm also old. I was writing RDBMS in dBase, compiled with Clipper, on MS-DOS, in the early 1990's, when I was about 30 years of age. (I was the "old guy" 20 years ago) Wow! The decades just keep passing by with increasing relevant speed.

It is a well-documented fact that time passes as a percentage of life lived. There is far less relative distance between decades for me now than there was between my fourth and fifth birthdays. I have kids who have kids, and they weren't around for that last episode of MASH (left out the asterisks for formatting reasons) that I'm pretty sure (in what's left of my mind) was first aired a couple of years ago.

A friend of mine told me this longer ago than I care to be reminded of. "The older you are, the faster time goes. The telescoping effect can be quite startling."

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

#133

Post by jrockway » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 9:45 PM UTC

saraid216 wrote: post #125

jrockway wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's really fair. Even if you work on a failed startup and invested all your money in it, you still have more programming experience than you started with. And programming experience is worth plenty of money in our field.

I'm actually referring to physical and mental health.

Young people recover quickly. Stay away from the sugary sodas, though.