Tell HN: On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.
Happy birthday, and thank you for all the wonderful things you've written over the years! I hope you find time to write many more.
It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
151–160 of 175 posts
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
It goes past even that-- how many devs today do you figure see Rails as a black box?
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#153The myth that engineers lose their game when they get older always seemed a little off to me. It usually gets clumped in with all the software jobs are going to go to China. I have met a lot of very bad developers that were older as well as very good ones. The same goes for young developers.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#154A quote from this really stuck out for me:
"So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality."
A lot of people here are focused on "being smarter" or "doing a better job" or "higher quality"
Excluding all of the self-taught developers, and limiting ourselves only to people who follow the standard "get a 4-year college degree then go out in the real world and work" crowd, as that's pretty sizable. Make extrapolations as necessary.
Remember your first year (or two?) of development? Looking back, you were probably way in over your head, had mentors looking after you, making tons of mistakes etc.
Fast forward 5 years. Can you write code faster? Probably not. Can you write better code? Sometimes. It's all about experiences and learning from them. When you take a new job, or a new project, or a new anything, you call upon past experiences to guide the efforts of this process. It might be something as vague as "I am going to write tests first because I found it helped me earlier", or (ignoring TDD), "I'm not going to write this function like this, because I know the code will be hard to test when I get around to writing a test for it later"
You learn this all from experience. Senior people who have been in the field longer have more experience. They aren't "better" in the sense that they are smarter or have more intelligence, they just know MORE because they've been exposed to more.
It's also why so many people (especially in hacker news) have been successful without degrees. It's not a degree that matters it's EXPERIENCE.
It might be a fine line differentiating between smartness gained from pure intelligence and "smartness" gained via experience, but I think it's an important distinction, and one that I think this post highlights well.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I would bet more SQL injections occur due to lazyness than inexperience.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 exp…
"I am saying that the older programmers who are downvoting me are feeling nervous."
That is an interesting conclusion.
"Since you mention data so much, I am curious, have you ever read "Fool of Randomness" by Nassim Taleb?"
No, however many folks have suggest that Gladwell's article on him [1] covered all the bases in the book. So I did take a moment to read that article.
I think he brought a fascinating perspective to stock trading and I found his discipline in removing confirmational bias from his observations seems to work for him. Since you brought it up, have you read the book?
It seemed from Gladwell's article, that Nassim would make the argument, in this context, that age and experience don't matter in the quality of the designs and implementations, rather some folks will simply arrive independently at a more optimum answer for any given problem than others.
Gladwell states that Nassim is/was a quant focused on the derivative system (the stock market) in which randomness appears to dominate. I have not read the book but Nathan Berg (UTexas) takes this a bit further by showing that 1/N diversification wins (see the article 'Simple Heresy', by Bruce Bower, Science News, 4-Jun-2011, pp 26-29). It read like a pretty solid endorsement of Nassim's take on the behavior of markets.
What I did not get out of Gladwell's article was that Nassim was promoting an 'ignore all data' philosophy. It sounds like you've come to a different conclusion than I did about what constitutes a useful experimental result.
If it helps I'm sorry you've had to deal with some less than helpful people in your career so far.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 exp…
"I am saying that the older programmers who are downvoting me are feeling nervous." That is an interesting conclusion. "Since you mention data so much, I am curious, have you ever read "Fool of Randomness" by Nassim Taleb?" No, however many folks have suggest that Gladwell's article on him [1] covered all the bases in the book. So I did take a moment to read that article. I think he brought a fascinating perspective…
I really urge you to read the book, the first half is a bit slow, but the second half I couldn't put down.
Here's a more succinct way to get (one of) his points across:
My emotional outburst is certainly non-scientific, and should not be taken seriously. But it is equally non-scientific to be blinded by data. A good example would be to reward your programmers based on how many lines of code they check in -- you will find yourself regretting that quite quickly.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
If I recall correctly, Clarke's Law originally applied to fiction.
There it makes perfect sense.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#159One could also find another, not so positive trend in the article: The older the developer, the less curious they are Of course you could say it's because the older developers are more experienced. But would that quality per se quell the thirst for new knowledge? Just thinking aloud...
Alternatively, as you get better and deal with complex issues and have more sophisticated thoughts, you realize that SO can't answer the majority of your problems. That's what I've learned about SO: it's fine for popcorn questions, but for the in-depth knowledge and discussions... meh .
That's a very fair point. Overall the deeper answers are probably more in the books or at conferences, not in blogs and online forums.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#160Since 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.]
The question wasn't about finding out if older programmers are better, but if programmers get better as they grow older.
Measuring the latter in terms of the former is highly prone to the survivor bias. The OP's data is evidence in favour of progress over time, but it's weak. Now, progress over time doesn't sound like such a silly idea, so even weak evidence counts for me.