Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?
Teaching, from grade school through college professors.
It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
31–40 of 175 posts
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#32What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing to do anything to fix it. My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be done in 2 minutes…
When I set to write that post I was trying to base it on some real data, not personal experience.
Your layout is nearly illegible in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 11.04. The "sky and clouds" background image + light blue text... why? Am I doing wrong? Did I miss something?
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#33What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing to do anything to fix it. My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be done in 2 minutes…
They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things This is the case with everyone. Multitasking negatively affects overall performance. There are many studies that confirm that. If some developers avoid it, maybe it means they are better at evaluating their own productivity?
So how old are you? Do you have any coworkers below 25? How well do they do with multitasking? Better than you?
Twitter, text messages and facebook have trained our minds to work differently. Have you been keeping up?
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#34Tell HN:
On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I set to write that post I was trying to base it on some real data, not personal experience.
Your layout is nearly illegible in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 11.04. The "sky and clouds" background image + light blue text... why? Am I doing wrong? Did I miss something?
I have Google Chrome 10 on OSX and everything is fine. I won't say great, but fine. And the background is snow. Text is grey.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#36Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#37Since 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 were the weaker developers who found something better to do with their time.
As a somewhat older developer, I find this a surprisingly difficult question to answer honestly. Comparing myself to myself from 10 years ago, I sincerely think I'm more effective, but self-delusion may play a part in that. I've probably lost some of my "step", in terms of raw capacity to memorize and compute mentally, and I have more commitments outside of the world of software, which dilutes my efforts further. Then again, the strategic ideas I have are more dependably correct, and I spend less time chasing down dead ends, either because I've been down them before or had the good luck of witnessing them second- or third-hand.
I've gotten a chance to see a world-class developer very closely between the ages of 36 and 45. He started this period as, very easily, the greatest engineer I'd ever even heard stories of, and I'm pretty sure he got better over that decade. It can be done.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#38By looking at the Reputation by Age graph it looks more like there are just a few really good older developers. The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. In my experience it has been that older developers hold on to old coding habits that are today considered dangerous and are reluctant to change that.
The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. If you're curious about the down-votes, it may be because the above quote is an example of the particular kind of bigotry commonly referred to as "ageism". For future reference, if you are ever in a management position, that kind of thing is actionable in a work environment. You could get your backside sued…
I'm old enough to feel like employers may sometimes find younger and cheaper people to do dumb stuff faster.
What you say about the HR liability potential agrees with what I've heard from HR people, but never seen it be a factor in reality. In practice I can't imagine suing over a development gig. I can think of a million bad reasons people might not hire/let go a good developer (e.g. questions about manhole covers) but the "he's a curmudgeon who's reluctant to slap stuff together quickly" argument seems halfway legitimate.
So I say, bring it on, let's have an open discussion about who's smart, who's fast, who's wise, and when it even matters.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#39Interesting hypothesis, but the faulty data renders the results presented useless. Namely, only 53% of SO users enter their age. Therefore the data may be wildly biased towards people who are willing to enter their age in an online profile.
In addition this only represents SO programmers, which while a great bunch, is hardly representative of all programmers.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#40By looking at the Reputation by Age graph it looks more like there are just a few really good older developers. The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. In my experience it has been that older developers hold on to old coding habits that are today considered dangerous and are reluctant to change that.
Outside of, say, medical software, or embedded automotive stuff, can you give me an example of a coding 'habit' which is dangerous?
Functions that return multiple types. Relying on private variables declared many level up with no intention of checking their existance or value, or sitting on perticular record numbers in tables from some other process blindly. 5 different versions of code doing the same relative process in slightly different ways depending on whichever developer's habit all live in a system. I've worked with a lot of old code from self taught engineers. You all may not like it or non-PC statement but it exists and its not pretty.