"On the graph we can see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve."
Is this an actual bell curve? It's not symmetrical. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution)
It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
41–50 of 175 posts
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)…
I agree with you. Experienced developers with skills are key for higher level functions such as architecture and system planning due simply to the "been-there" factor. My statement above was geared toward the "curmudgen".
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#43This analysis is completely wrong because the bell shaped curve is not measuring number of developers. It is measuring number of SO users. There are SO users that are not developers, and a lot of developers that are not SO users, so there is no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers about the general population of developers.
The bell-shaped curve gives me more confidence in the result, not less. It shows that Stack Overflow has enough developers that the graph isn't choppy.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#44Wow, the chart only goes up to 49 years old?
For me, that is about 4 programming languages ago :-)
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#45Since 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.]
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Its an interesting claim. You could contribute positively to the discussion by providing some sort of experiement to test it.
Would it be fair to say you believe that your high level of interaction with various social media sites and technologies has 'trained' your mind's agility? If so, several useful questions arise which I'd love to know answers too;
1) Can you produce more lines of production code over unit time?
If you use a source repository you might be able to analyze this by check-ins. I suspect a large open source project like KDE or Hadoop etc where you could correlate 'agility' of committer with the commits could shed some light here.
2) Do the designs and implementations produced have similar, better, or worse levels of qualities than designs and implementations done by 'less agile' developers?
I'd probably track bug reports and rewrites against lines of code committed.
3) Does the scale of problem change the effectiveness ratio? Which is to say if you're coding/designing/implementing at the top level of a big project vs at the fringe, does the difference between people trained with social media exposure continue?
Bascially correlating the above two data points across all levels of the code and design.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#47My guess is that the older developers have more time to comment and follow up. Plenty of times I have looked for solutions on stackoverflow, but have been too busy to post responses because of looming deadlines. This is like saying my grandparents would make for better farmers because they spend their whole day on Farmville.
I don't think a 45-year-old developer has inherently more free time than a 25-year-old. Given that a 45-year-old is more likely to have a family than a 25-year-old, I'd expect them to have less free time.
While this is true, you also don't see many 45-year-olds doing 60 and 70 hour work weeks.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#48What this really shows is that developers get better at answering technical questions with age. There is probably _some_ correlation to development skill, but the data doesn't demonstrate that. I'd expect developers to know more things as they get older, and I wouldn't be surprised if they got better at answering questions. Not sure that makes them better at the development part.
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Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#49The title s/b "Stackoverflow developers get better with age. And scarcer." Stackoverflow is not representative of the overall developer population. As an example of an alternate view compare the relative number of items tagged on SO with C#, Java, and PHP. Then compare that to the number of listings of those tags on Dice.
So why the downvote? If you disagree with what I wrote then offer a rebuttal. Simply downvoting is churlish.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#50A minor nit, I know, but a bell curve is symmetrical. So the graph shows some sort of fat-tailed distribution, and we cannot "see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve".