161–170 of 175 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier 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."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean I am lazy, but not so much that I would knowingly write insecure code for my customers; I'm can't imagine that many developers are different in that respect?
Earlier 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?! :)
Specialization. When I was starting out, I did design, frontend dev, backend dev, and ops work. Over the last 15 years these positions have all split into specializations: design was the first to go, then ops. The split between frontend and backend opened up in the middle of the last decade, and continues to split even further into controller and model devs on the back end and Javascript and CSS people on the fronten…
And 'frontend dev' at the moment seems to be as malleable as a SEO was, sometimes it means a designer who can add jQuery and a couple of modules to a page, sometimes it means a talented javascript programmer with an in depth knowledge of HTML/CSS.
And young programmers can't know way more than older programmers, if you keep learning.
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…
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…
Having the right answers counts for a lot. I see a lot of less knowledgeable developers spend a day or two figuring something out that I know off the top of my head. These days, people tend to come by my cube and ask questions before they struggle too long with something, which makes me feel pretty darn good about myself. I've also learned that before I go too far down a rabbit hole in some area I'm shallow in (OS re…
You're seriously telling me that they were stumped with "set?foo:0"??
And you stayed? :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having the right answers counts for a lot. I see a lot of less knowledgeable developers spend a day or two figuring something out that I know off the top of my head. These days, people tend to come by my cube and ask questions before they struggle too long with something, which makes me feel pretty darn good about myself. I've also learned that before I go too far down a rabbit hole in some area I'm shallow in (OS re…
LOL, what? You're seriously telling me that they were stumped with "set?foo:0"?? And you stayed ? :-)
Even setting aside my love for the ?: operator, I never understood that attitude. One of the major selling points of Java in the early days was that it was simple enough for everyone to understand pretty completely. It was supposed to be impossible for a guru to write code that a junior programmer couldn't understand at the small scale with some effort, line-by-line, if not at the large scale. Training programmers to be competent at only a subset of the language undermined the purpose of having such a simple language.
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…
The text didn't seem to do much besides present the stats. But he say this:
I knew that with age coders tend to switch careers, but I
was surprised to see the size of the drop. After the peak
age of 27, number of developers halves every 6 to 7 years.