Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

This is usually delineated by wisdom vs intelligence. Intelligence is raw horsepower, and wisdom is the ability to make good decisions.

In the context of older developers, I don't think you can really assume wisdom has been an outcome of all of those years of experience. Wisdom grows with a certain affinity for introspection and self-correction, and not everyone has those traits.

When talking with young programmers I too often think "well, you are doing that wrong, been there, done that". They don't want to listen. A couple of months later they notice that the gray beard ones were right. From a company perspective, that's just too late, as the money loss is not recoverable.

There is nothing wrong with being a young one with no experience. There is so much wrong when a company has only a bunch of young programmers and no experienced one who lead them.

Yeah, except 10 years at certain companies could teach you less than 6months to 1 year at one company that's actually doing it right.

I hesitate to try and prescribe an answer for the "how employers should find good employees" question, because it's so difficult, but I imagine the ideal hiring process would:

- Allow candidates a choice on how they want to be tested (take home thing, online code test, whiteboard, whatever else)

- Ask better questions at the abstraction level that would show experience. For example, if you want to know whether someone has experience, give them an architectural diagram (or process diagram) of your current project/workflow/whatever, and ask them how they would improve it (and if they've ever been through the steps they suggest themselves/how they would roll it out).

There was an excellent post on HN a while back detailing what a specific company (whose job is doing interviews, I can't for the life of me remember what company it was), learned from doing thousands and thousands of interviews.

Also I'm not super good at math, but in the equation you posted wouldn't the intellect variable be pretty much equal to experience, and you could make up for one with the other? Or maybe you're implying that the scales for each multiplier are different (like intelligence might only go 1 to 10 but experience might go 1-100?)? I agree with what you're getting at, basically that someone who has seen lot but isn't as clever will often make better choices than someone that's very clever, but completely green.

the article is interesting yet based. Most notably, it's clearly written by an old programmer.

Could you give some examples of where you first got your contracts (outside of personal connections)? The contract market seems great (I'm in it right now), but finding decent positions seems pretty difficult without a pre-existing large network.

Also, a lot of the sites that feature contract work ask for way too many details, and are basically a race to the bottom on price, sometimes at the expense of quality, and I don't feel panicked enough yet to join that race.