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It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

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Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#101

Post by georgieporgie »

dusklight wrote: post #21

What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing to do anything to fix it. My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be done in 2 minutes…

They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years.

I would love to know where you've seen exponential increases in productivity in the last five years. In my experience, developer technology has been largely chasing its own tail for quite some time. Productivity improves dramatically on individual, emerging platforms, but seems little changed in a wider, overall view.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#102

Post by coliveira »

benatkin wrote: post #64
coliveira wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bell curve is a result of the distribution for any population: developers, guitar players, sci-fi readers, etc. In this case, the curve happens to represent SO readers.

The bell curve can be choppy when you've got too little data or bad data.

You're just looking at the shape of the bell curve. It tells you that it represents a population, but it doesn't tell you what population it actually is. That bell curve could be for the age of people owning cats, for example. There is no evidence that SO users is a good sample of the developers population, in fact it makes sense that it is skewed towards young people that have lots of time to search and answer programming questions on the web.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#103

Post by rbanffy »

kmavm wrote: post #37

Since I don't see this specifically addressed in the text: I suspect this is a classic case of survivorship bias. The same way the stock market looks better and better the further back you go, because you aren't tracking the stocks of companies that are no longer in business, developers probably look better and better the further they are into their careers, since all the ones who've fallen by the wayside probably we…

I don't feel any smarter than I were on my 20's. OTOH, software has gotten much more complex. Mastering the Apple II ROM routines is one thing, but understanding how every piece in a complex web application (app server, rdbms, non-relational storage, cache) interact is much harder. After wrapping my brain around some concepts, it feels very thin. We rely on Google and the web to supplement our memories for things that 25 years ago depended on books and synaptic pathways.

I'm quite sure I am much more effective today than I were 25 years ago, but a lot has to do with cognitive prosthetics.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#106

Post by raganwald »

6ren wrote: post #104
raganwald wrote: post #34

Tell HN: On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.

Really? I could've sworn you were in your twenties from this photo: http://reginald.braythwayt.com

IIRC, That photo was taken at MeshU in Spring of 2008, so I would have been 45 or so.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#107

Post by reinhardt »

groby_b wrote: post #9
Fargren wrote: post #5

Hardly seems like they get better with age, just more active in educating other developers. The quality of posts doesn't look related to age at all. As far as I can tell, that should be the parameter to measure if you are going to make any sort of induction about the quality of a dev from their SO profile. And obviously, the fact that this only takes data from SO means whatever the conclusions, they only hold true fo…

The main question, if you really were to judge something like quality, is why older devs answer more questions. Is it your assumption that they are just more invested in educating others, or is it e.g. because they have a broader range of experience and can answer more/more difficult questions. As it is, this data set is merely an interesting conversation starter. I hope somebody takes it and does some research on it…

The cynic view: they may have more time on their hands to was^C^C^Cspend on StackOverflow.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#108

Post by guelo »

strlen wrote: post #65

I don't disagree with the conclusion: people who aren't as dedicated to or good at programming transition to people or product/program/project management[1]; the remaining folk receive additional experience which allows them to capitalize further on their passion and talent. However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about prog…

The greater number of answered questions could either be because they are better at talking about programming as you say, or it could be that they just know more answers. It could also be that they have more time to answer questions, maybe because they have cushier jobs.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#109

Post by jedbrown »

strlen wrote: post #65

I don't disagree with the conclusion: people who aren't as dedicated to or good at programming transition to people or product/program/project management[1]; the remaining folk receive additional experience which allows them to capitalize further on their passion and talent. However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about prog…

Historically, it would seem like 30 is almost a "sweet spot" for language creation.

* Dennis Ritchie was 27 or 28 in 1969 when C got going.

* McCarthy was about 30 in 1958 for Lisp.

* Sussman was 28 and Steele was 21 in 1975 for Scheme.

* Alan Kay made Smalltalk between 28 and 31.

And while it used to be true that lots of game-changing mathematics was done early, I don't see much of that lately. A huge amount is done by junior faculty and postdocs, but that's usually late 20s and 30s.

Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

#110

Post by juiceandjuice »

feralmoan wrote: post #96
juiceandjuice wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are 100% right, a developer is a developer, so it's not bias. It could even be argued that the reason there are less older developers is because the better ones went into management and are no longer active developers. Now, this all assumes that developer activity on Stack Overflow is correlated roughly equivalently over most ages. If it is, then these plainly state that for any random developer you would intervi…

"It could even be argued that the reason there are less older developers is because the better ones went into management and are no longer active developers." On the contrary in my experience, engineers who are fed up with coding or find maintaining their skillset too tedious or time consuming to fit in with other responsibilities generally move into management (have kids? : move to an exec role). I've been offered s…

"have kids? : move to an exec role"

Exactly - My point was that it is presumptuous (and irrelevant) to assume people leave development as they get older because they aren't very good at it. It's irrelevant because those people are, by definition, no longer developers.

A bias could come into play if you could prove:

Older developers who are (more/less) knowledgable are (more/less) likely to participate in Stack Overflow.

or

Younger developers who are (more/less) knowledgable are (less/more) likely to participate in Stack Overflow.

The latter proposition of bias is probably less likely since the sample size of younger developers is much larger.

I still think the conclusion is correct assuming the provided definitions: For any random developer you would interview from Stack Overflow, they are more likely to be more knowledgable the older they are. If the population on Stack Overflow is representative of the general developer population, than that assumption also holds true to the general population.

Also, you highlight another interesting thing: The average age a man in the US gets married is close to 28, right smack in the middle of that distribution. http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GRTTable?_bm=y&-geo...

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