Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

coding-and-more.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 175 posts

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

#141

Post by dusklight »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #123
dusklight wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 THI…

I am saying that the older programmers who are downvoting me are feeling nervous.

"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."

That's not from the report, just my personal unhappiness bubbling up. I entered the workforce expecting to learn how to be a better programmer from my more experienced co-workers. It was a bit traumatic to realize that they didn't even understand basic things like why using a hashmap is better than a nested for-loop or why one of the basic OOP principles is "favor composition over inheritance."

Since you mention data so much, I am curious, have you ever read "Fool of Randomness" by Nassim Taleb?

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

#142

Post by [deleted] »

kmavm wrote: post #125
andrewcooke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#143

Post by brown9-2 »

seldo wrote: post #134
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…

Yeah, my conclusion from the data was "senior developers know more things and have more time on their hands to tell others about those things", which is exactly what you'd expect. The more senior you get, the more your role is as guide and mentor than immediate implementor.

One of alan's points is that it is incorrect to assign behaviors of "older Stackoverflow users" to the universe of "older developers".

The population of "older Stackoverflow users" is not randomly drawn from the population of "older developers", and nothing is put forward to claim that the former is representative of the latter, so you cannot make this assumption.

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

#144

Post by brown9-2 »

benatkin wrote: post #130
coliveira wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disagr…

What about developers that don't spend much time online? Or that don't find much personal joy in answering the questions of strangers?

Just because Stack Overflow might be one of the best places to get a sampling online doesn't mean it is actually a correct sampling of the population of software developers.

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

#145

Post by brown9-2 »

jonnytran wrote: post #36
AdamTReineke wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are 148 of them, I'd wager there are a couple with super-high stats who throw off the average.

Using a median instead of a mean might help w/ this.

Yes - median is a far better method to use in a situation like this, especially when what is being measured (reputation) has a bounded minimum and an unbounded maximum, and double especially when the sample size in each age bucket is relatively small.

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

#146

Post by lurker17 »

stiff wrote: post #83
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 think Clarke's first law applies to programmers as well: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." When you are older you maybe really spend less time chasing dead ends, I agree with that, but to be fully sincere with oneself, some of those ends might end up not being that dead…

That quote sounds deep, but it reduces almost exactly to:

"Almost everything is possible."

More precisely: "If a distinguished but elderly scientist passes judgement on in idea, it is probably possible. Only ideas whose possibility are not judged might be impossible."

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

#147

Post by benatkin »

brown9-2 wrote: post #144
benatkin wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disagr…

What about developers that don't spend much time online? Or that don't find much personal joy in answering the questions of strangers? Just because Stack Overflow might be one of the best places to get a sampling online doesn't mean it is actually a correct sampling of the population of software developers.

Those are good points and I agree that there are numerous reasons why it isn't a correct sample. What I'm trying to say is that it's hard to get a correct sample for developers and that if someone is curious about the subject matter it's worth keeping this data until some clearly superior data comes along. There are plenty of datasets that are worse than this, either by having fewer data points or by being even more biased.

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

#148

Post by nostrademons »

shubber wrote: post #136
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 tend to think inherent in your reply is an idea that I only see with older developers: that we should actually understand the whole stack. Newer developers are content to let more and more of the development ecosystem be someone else's problem. So, I empathize strongly, but I think the issue isn't that we need to use prothetics as much as the conventional wisdom is that "that's devops problem."

People have always been content to let parts of the development ecosystem be someone else's problem. It's only the boundaries that have shifted over time.

Today's webdevs consider the webserver and database to be black boxes that are just "there" to be used. The people writing those webservers and databases in the 90s and 00s usually considered the OS and compiler to be black boxes that were somebody else's problem. The people writing those OSes and compilers in the 70s and 80s considered the hardware to be a black box to be trusted (at least at a high level; they knew processor architecture, but I doubt very many thought hard about how to build a flip-flop, NAND gate, or multiplexer). The people designing those chips in the 50s and 60s considered the vacuum tubes and silicon wafers to be black boxes; you don't think very much about how your silicon gets out of the ground, but that's a pretty huge project on its own.

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

#149

Post by billybob »

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 started programming in web development about 4 years ago: first HTML and CSS, then adding Javascript and AJAX, then PHP, then Ruby and Rails. In the process I learned a fair amount about MySQL and I can do the most basic Unix server administration.

I'm on my third full-time web development job and I now feel decently confident in my abilities. But yes: it's a big stack, and overwhelming. Everywhere I turn I see more things I don't know. I'm always reading and trying to improve.

Were there ever simpler times? It's an interesting thought to me. I find the constant challenge to be interesting, but admittedly, sometimes tiring.

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

#150

Post by wisty »

kmavm wrote: post #125
andrewcooke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, survivorship bias can still be a reason to recruit older programmers - you want the survivors. As for retention, you would hope that a company will know which of their older programmers are valuable.
Post reply on HN