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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.

#121

Post by cema »

arohner wrote: post #78
raganwald wrote: post #34

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

So that's why you're such a good blogger! Thanks for blogging and contributing on HN, you've really improved my understanding of software, and how to think about software. Happy Birthday.

Hmm. I have upvoted you automatically: in the past it did not just mean I think your argument is interesting, but also (in cases like this one) that I share the sentiment and do not want to litter HN with "+1" comments. Of course, now that none except you can see your score, this is no longer working like that.

Happy birthday to raganwald!

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

#122

Post by jt2190 »

alanh wrote: post #94

Aaargh! The data doesn’t say this, all the data says is “Older StackOverflow users have disproportionately high SO reputation.” An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow. A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you ar…

I also wonder: Do developers who spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow get "better" than those who actually write code? I've met more than one "Aristotelian Programmer" who could quote you every design pattern from heart and draw UML diagrams on a white board all day, but who actually couldn't write code.

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

#123

Post by ChuckMcM »

dusklight wrote: post #112
ChuckMcM wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"When I say "older" developer, I mean the 40-50 year old who probably was a really good developer 10 years ago, got a steady, cushy job, with a salary that he/she is more than happy with, and stopped learning because he didn't need to anymore." Which I'd agree with, but that eviscerates your thesis about the new mind training regimen does it not? After all the learning engaged developer missed out on the training you…

In reference to your comment on discrimination. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html Reading my original post, I think you are right I should have qualified myself better. I was just really upset by the tone of the OP. IMO the reason why many older developers are worse than younger developers is because they THINK they are better than the younger developers. They don't have the hunger to improve themselves anymore, and…

Personally, if Paul does a 'greatest hits' list for his essays I would vote to include that one in the list. I'm interested in your reference to it though, can you say more about how it relates to this discussion?

Are you suggesting that discrimination is one of the 'fashions' that Paul refers to?

Its statements liks this:

"IMO the reason why many older developers are worse than younger developers is because they THINK they are better than the younger developers."

Which causes me to wonder. We could certainly debate the results of a study that polled a few thousand developers between the ages of 20 and 60 and asked them to self evaluate themselves with developers older, the same age, or younger than them. Except we don't have that study, do you know of one ?

Paul's essay is a good one on open mindedness, and it gives great examples of how people can over-turn or distance themselves group-think by seeking out the unthinkable.

I certainly cannot claim to know what you are thinking but it reads like you think that labelling older developers as lazy, self-deluded, parasites is an example of giving voice to something that is 'true' but 'unsayable' because of some sense of societal impropriety.

I can't really comment on whether or not its 'true' because I've not seen any process where that question has been analyzed. The data from the Stack Overflow study says that people who self-report as older on Stack Overflow give more answers and have higher karma as a result. I didn't see anything in the data that would support a conclusion that these folks are making value judgements about their younger peers or that they no longer wish to improve.

"I was just really upset by the tone of the OP."

Paul wrote in his essay:

"The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't."

I guess I'm trying to figure out is what you're trying to say. Are you threatened by the idea that someone "older" who has more experience than you is probably "better" than you are by some definition? Or are you trying to argue that your youth and mad social skillz has permanently elevated you above the skill set of people who came before you?

I'm not critical of either view, I'm just trying to understand the data that leads to it. I liked the analysis of the Stack Overflow answers because it was data + analysis. As someone who is always looking to hire top talent, understanding effectiveness is something that helps me do my job better.

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

#124

Post by gwern »

3pt14159 wrote: post #85
gwern wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard for anything dealing with age to be a true symmetrical bell curve - it usually winds up being cut short by old age & death, or foreshortened by, well, not existing. Notice that the ages start at 16. You'd have to be pretty precocious to give high quality answers at age 10 or 5.

Not hard, impossible. Bell curves go to infinity. Edit: Shouldn't have said that. Everyone knows basic stats here and I was being pedantic.

Yeah, it is literally impossible for a real bell curve to exist, but if you want to be pedantic, that's also because people are clumpy. The bell curve might say there ought to be 0.00000067 excellent answerers at age 12, say, but reality insists on there being 0 or 1 excellent answerers aged 12.

Whenever we look at real data, we acknowledge that it's a discretized approximation to a bell curve and not a real (continuous) one; the point was that on top of the discrete approximation, we have the additional problem of anthropic biases - people not existing or dying at either end.

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

#125

Post by kmavm »

andrewcooke wrote: post #45
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…

is it fair to call it a bias in this case? it doesn't alter the conclusion that older developers are both better and scarcer, on average. [disclaimer: 44 yo ;o] [ps. google has mitigated memory loss, i suspect.]

I think "bias" is technically applicable. I.e., the population of older developers is not comparable to the population of younger developers because of survival (or if you prefer, self-selection) effects. Any non-trivial conclusions (e.g., that individual programmers should expect to get better with age, that your company should make an effort to recruit/retain older programmers, ...) from this data are confounded by these effects.

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

#127

Post by ams6110 »

divtxt wrote: post #120
rbanffy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I find web development less enjoyable than 5 or 10 years ago because of the increasing size and complexity of the stack. At least us old fogies have had the last 15 years to learn web development. How the hell do young programmers learn such a big stack in a few years? I'm guessing half using youthful energy and the other half skipped in blissful ignorance?! :)

How the hell do young programmers learn such a big stack in a few years?

They don't. Witness the never-ending repetition of basic mistakes leading to SQL injection vulnerabilities, script injection, etc.

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

#128

Post by nutjob123 »

alanh wrote: post #94

Aaargh! The data doesn’t say this, all the data says is “Older StackOverflow users have disproportionately high SO reputation.” An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow. A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you ar…

Thank you. I'm not against speculating but we all should know that correlation does not imply causation.

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

#129

Post by jamesbritt »

divtxt wrote: post #120
rbanffy wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I find web development less enjoyable than 5 or 10 years ago because of the increasing size and complexity of the stack. At least us old fogies have had the last 15 years to learn web development. How the hell do young programmers learn such a big stack in a few years? I'm guessing half using youthful energy and the other half skipped in blissful ignorance?! :)

I find web development less enjoyable than 5 or 10 years ago because of the increasing size and complexity of the stack.

Part of this is that stacks that start off all light and fresh "we're not Struts!" before long acquire a few too many "must-have" features until, Lo! they are Struts.

Then it's time to drop that framework and find something more fresh, light, and lean, and enjoy it while it lasts.

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

#130

Post by benatkin »

coliveira wrote: post #102
benatkin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progr…

Stack Overflow is geared towards developers and doesn't have anything I can see to attract a particular kind of developer, except the curious kind. I can't think of a place to get a better sampling of developers right off hand. Certainly, while Hacker News is popular among developers, it would be a less accurate sampling of developers than Stack Overflow, because people here tend to be attracted to startups.

I disagree with what you said in your first post, that it is completely wrong, and that no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers. It's not perfect but it's far from being a terrible sample. It's a general-interest developer site rather than a specific-interest one. There are all types of developers. In a reverse-sorted list of popular recent tags, there are c#, javascript, php, java, jquery, .net, and android. Also, developers didn't choose to be a part of this graph; they merely got put into the survey result because they had Stack Overflow accounts. If it had been a survey that was announced on twitter it would be biased towards people who want to take surveys. This would be a worse bias IMO than people who want to ask and answer technical questions.

I wouldn't take issue if you had said it was problematic, but instead you went straight to a one-sided conclusion.

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