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Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

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Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#41

Post by jorgeleo »

benjamincburns wrote: post #36
jorgeleo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, it has happen to me too. I have around 20 years in software development. Around 9 years ago... Me: We can abstract most of that data access with a simple table oriented orm. Not all of it, but a good 80%. Younger Developer: Nope, That is what record sets are for, it is right here in the Microsoft docs (pointing to the ado api) ... 5 years later, he had moved to a different company, and I received a phone call fr…

Respectfully, I have to disagree with your assessment that age is the contributing factor here. I'd argue that pragmatism is what you're seeing. Pragmatism might correlate with experience, and experience is only gained with time (thus age), but I'd be careful about jumping to that conclusion. There's nothing beyond assumption (this article included) that says younger people are always, or even usually, less pragmatic…

Respectfully I submit that we might not be in a big disagreement here.

Pragmatism is a very high contributing facts. My personal experience has not show me IF pragmatism is better. Instead experience has show me WHAT is worth to be pragmatic about.

My observation is that experience leads to emotional maturity, which leads to better pragmatic choices. It is the fear to make mistakes, hence the industry coined "Fail fast". It is the ego boost of "I just learned this cool technology", as opposed to "If this is so cool, hasn't been invented before? How did it look like?" (Another post showed an example with MVC). It is the "I own the world" feeling that we all have as young adults. And there are some "bad" apples in the VC culture that can exploit that.

[And I don't think the tech lead is an idiot, he is where I was 18 years ago]

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#42

Post by btilly »

arethuza wrote: post #35
btilly wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were lots of MVC frameworks for web development that predated Rails. For example Struts.

And MVC was talked about a lot as a design pattern for Web apps before Struts was started - I remember we rolled our own rather nifty one in 2001 or so and failed to get our execs to open source it so it died when the team withered away after our acquisition.

Struts was released in 2000, so it predates yours. However I know people who were using MVC as a design pattern in Perl in the 90s.

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#43

Post by beat »

As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more to being a useful tech than programming! And I'm much more sophisticated about big-picture thinking, business, and planning these days. Back when I was barely past "junior", I got to work on some really cool software at a dotcom-era startup. Technically, it was a blast. As a business decision, it was absolutely idiotic, and it was a massive management failure to have us wasting our time on it at all. (Basically, the idea was that six man-months of code at the time would save the company millions in the future. Which would have been true, if it HAD a future. Never, ever waste precious development effort on something that can be bought easily off-the-shelf and isn't core competence for your product! That's not even a good use of time in an established company, much less a ticking-clock startup!)

As I'm prone to saying, I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do. And actually, cost is one of the problems older programmers have... senior == expensive. On the other hand, if you're in the industry for 20+ years and haven't found a way to make yourself and your work more valuable than what some drone straight out of college can do, but you expect to get paid more than said drone, you're asking to get sidelined.

The problem isn't the myth that older programmers are less flexible than younger ones. The problem is that so many older programmers haven't attended to their careers in a way to make themselves substantially more valuable than some pliant kid. It's not enough to do the kid's job better... you have to do things the kid CANNOT do.

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#44

Post by ajross »

benjamincburns wrote: post #12
ap22213 wrote: post #2

Wow - is this what constitutes 'research' these days? Look at some data on stackoverflow.com as if it's a representative sample, and then make some general conclusions?

Indeed. > They found that an individual’s reputation increases with age, at least into a user’s 40s. I really hope that's some bad paraphrasing, because I take that to mean for user X at time T, rep(X, T1) <= rep(X, T2). Unless you're very actively malicious (for which you'll get banned) your reputation should never go down by a meaningful amount over time.

Honestly I think it's more poor interpretation than bad paraphrasing. They were sampling reputation and correlating with age, not tracking reputation scores of single users with time. So a more precise, if not clearer statement would be "They found that median reputation increases with poster age at least into a user's 40's". Better?

Whether this constitutes good science or not is not something I'll speak to, having only skimmed it. But certainly stackoverflow.com looks like good data for this kind of research to me. I'd hope they'd have done things like control for different fields, different activity times for the accounts, etc... But I don't know.

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#45

Post by yaddayadda »

_pmf_ wrote: post #37
api wrote: post #4

The prevalence of discrimination toward extreme youth in the software industry is probably a historical artifact of the fact that it's a new industry, so for the most part young people were the ones who "got it." That being said, I think it cuts both ways. Both younger and older developers have advantages. Older developers tend to see pitfalls and avoid them better. They tend to have a more diverse skill set, better…

> I think it's easier for a young developer to focus laser-like on one thing for a long time. Or at least as long he/she isn't distracted by the next shiny new thing.

I believe research (sorry no link) is showing that older people tend to actually have much better focus than younger people, and better memory of what they were focusing on (in the absence of actual neurological problems, e.g., Alzheimers).

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#46

Post by benjamincburns »

jorgeleo wrote: post #41
benjamincburns wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, I have to disagree with your assessment that age is the contributing factor here. I'd argue that pragmatism is what you're seeing. Pragmatism might correlate with experience, and experience is only gained with time (thus age), but I'd be careful about jumping to that conclusion. There's nothing beyond assumption (this article included) that says younger people are always, or even usually, less pragmatic…

Respectfully I submit that we might not be in a big disagreement here. Pragmatism is a very high contributing facts. My personal experience has not show me IF pragmatism is better. Instead experience has show me WHAT is worth to be pragmatic about. My observation is that experience leads to emotional maturity, which leads to better pragmatic choices. It is the fear to make mistakes, hence the industry coined "Fail fa…

> Respectfully I submit that we might not be in a big disagreement here.

I like it when that happens. :-)

> And I don't think the tech lead is an idiot, he is where I was 18 years ago

I shouldn't have phrased it that way. The idea that you're more valuable than someone who can solve a core business problem when you can't is idiotic. He himself is probably not an idiot - we've all let our emotions get the better of us.

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#47

Post by benjamincburns »

ajross wrote: post #44
benjamincburns wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. > They found that an individual’s reputation increases with age, at least into a user’s 40s. I really hope that's some bad paraphrasing, because I take that to mean for user X at time T, rep(X, T1) <= rep(X, T2). Unless you're very actively malicious (for which you'll get banned) your reputation should never go down by a meaningful amount over time.

Honestly I think it's more poor interpretation than bad paraphrasing. They were sampling reputation and correlating with age, not tracking reputation scores of single users with time. So a more precise, if not clearer statement would be "They found that median reputation increases with poster age at least into a user's 40's". Better? Whether this constitutes good science or not is not something I'll speak to, having…

> "They found that median reputation increases with poster age at least into a user's 40's". Better?

Better. And admittedly this is what I was hoping they meant - I was probably being a bit too pedantic.

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#49

Post by jorgeleo »

beat wrote: post #43

As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more to being a useful tech than programming! And I'm much more sophisticated about big-picture thinking, business, and planning these days. Back when I was barely past "junior", I got to work on some really cool software at a dotcom-era startup. Technically, it wa…

"I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do"

Love it. I'm about the same place in my career, and I completely agree.

Re: Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

#50

Post by beat »

jorgeleo wrote: post #49
beat wrote: post #43

As a 40-something who is 20 years into his career, I don't think I'm a particularly better PROGRAMMER than I was about five years in. But there is SO much more to being a useful tech than programming! And I'm much more sophisticated about big-picture thinking, business, and planning these days. Back when I was barely past "junior", I got to work on some really cool software at a dotcom-era startup. Technically, it wa…

"I cost as much as two junior programmers, but I can do things that two junior programmers can't do" Love it. I'm about the same place in my career, and I completely agree.

This reminds me of a conversation with an old friend... a pic of the two of us when I was 20 or so appeared on Facebook, and he asked that if 20 year old me met today's me, what would surprise him most? I replied that it would be how today's me kept calling 20 year old me "dumbass".
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