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Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

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Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#51

Post by kageneko »

ruffel wrote: post #35
pleasecalllater wrote: post #24

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…

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

In my experience, growing older, I've found both of these generalizations to be true in myself. There are plenty of times that I've watched junior developers make literally the exact same mistakes I made 10 years ago. At the same time, I've learned that technology has continued to move on and things that were wrong 10 years ago may not be wrong today.

I remember when I started out that I'd scour every line of code for memory leaks and optimize the hell out of it. Today we've got more memory, faster machines, and the code doesn't need to be quite as tight.

Mentorship goes both ways. I help newer devs about processes and patterns. They help me with new technology and trends. I think it works well but it requires patience on everyone's parts.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#52

Post by Doradus »

chandler wrote: post #14

Consider smartness as "what you can do with what you know," while experience is "what you know"--then, what follows is that having more experience makes up for not being as clever. Able to make good choices = Intellect * Experience Moreover, employers can _try_ to assess intelligence with whiteboard interviews...but the easier factor to evaluate is experience. It's right there on the resume!

Agreed. I remember being in my early 20s, watching my more experienced colleagues, and realizing this. I had had a different (incorrect) mental model: I had thought intellect was as good as experience, so Ability = Intellect + Experience. I was wrong.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#53

Post by Doradus »

spodek wrote: post #17

Is this post not promoting age discrimination? Isn't age discrimination illegal? Why would discriminating against younger people be any more fair or legal than against against older? I expect discriminating by amount of relevant experience is fair, but that's not the same as age.

> I expect discriminating by amount of relevant experience is fair, but that's not the same as age.

As someone who started coding at age 9, I agree. :-)

It's not about hiring someone in their 40s per se, but rather about recognizing the value of 20 years' experience. Age alone doesn't impart wisdom.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#54

Post by kronos29296 »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
1ba9115454 wrote: post #9

I know more this year than I did a year ago. I will know more next year than I do today. This will never stop.

My grandmother knows less today than she did ten years ago.

Most things in life are like Gaussian distribution. After a peak there is long decline. What matters is how long to the peak and how high it is.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#55

Post by david-gpu »

sokoloff wrote: post #15
1ba9115454 wrote: post #9

I know more this year than I did a year ago. I will know more next year than I do today. This will never stop.

My grandmother knows less today than she did ten years ago.

We are talking of ordinary folks in their forties and fifties, not senescent folks in nursing homes.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#56

Post by tmoertel »

autokad wrote: post #8

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.

Counterpoint: Because these companies place so much emphasis on your actual performance at coding during interviews, they can be better for older programmers because they are not hiring based on how you look but on what you can do.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#57

Post by protomyth »

arethuza wrote: post #44
ruffel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely I find that a number of the old(er) programmers I've worked with are incredibly stubborn and bigoted. They refuse to see anything from another persons perspective especially if that person is young. As well refusing to keep up with 'modern' technologies and paradigms because "that's not how I'm used to doing it". It's a lot of the "I've been round the block a few times I know what I'm doing" bullshit attit…

"that's not how I'm used to doing it" To be fair - I'm not sure how that is age related. e.g. I've had very strong reactions from some inexperienced developers who literally only had knowledge of one way of doing things to the possibility that another option might be possible and better.

Yep, pattern bias happens to a lot of people in a lot of age groups in a lot of professions. One of the consequences of having a massive pattern matching machine for the human CPU.

It's irritating in programmers because we can write prototypes to prove out our theories. It is really irritating in the fuzzy areas (like government and organization grant readers).

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#58

Post by polote »

This guy assumes that old programmers are not super enthusiast and hard worker but they have experience, while young ones are enthusiast, hard worker and motivated but they know nothing, that's not a very rigorous way to prove something ...

All that is just nonsense !

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#59

Post by notacoward »

autokad wrote: post #8

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.

Well enough, apparently. I had to go through this at Facebook pretty recently. I was 51 at the time, and there were a half dozen guys of similar age in my subsequent bootcamp class. (It's interesting that my age cohort was all guys even though the class overall seemed pretty balanced, but that's another topic.) Two things definitely helped with this.

(1) I've always been a bit of an algorithms guy. I've met many people who were better at debugging, a few who were better at systems design or straight-out coding, but if you need someone to pick the exact right algorithm and tweak it a bit to suit a particular situation then I'm all over it.

(2) The interviewers were obviously well trained. The problems were well chosen and presented, and I was allowed to think through things my own way at my own pace. The followup questions clearly indicated that the interviewers were looking at more than just whether I could solve this particular problem - how I broke it down and handled edge cases, how I handled changing requirements, testability, communication, and so on. Having written before about how such interviews are usually an exercise in ego and a total waste of time (or worse), I was pleasantly surprised.

I think a lot of older programmers do avoid such interviews. They'd never admit fear is a factor, but it is. I'll admit I hesitated before going through it myself, but then I realized that even if I "failed" it didn't diminish me. It just meant there was a difference of opinion about what mattered or made someone a good fit for a job. I can live with that.

Re: Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

#60

Post by eternalban »

dagw wrote: post #20
autokad wrote: post #8

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? i feel like those advantage people who just finished their algorithms class, or have time to practice specifically for it.

How do older programmers deal with coding interviews from companies like facebook / google? Badly. The unfortunate truth is that if you've hit 40+ without having built up enough expertise and contacts to bypass those types of interviews then finding a programming job is going to be really hard.

> if you've hit 40+ without having built up enough expertise and contacts to bypass those types of interviews then finding a programming job is going to be really hard.

This I think is true in most professional fields and doesn't answer the question posed.

The interview-fail of the software industry is all about knowledge gaps:

- the knowledge gap of most practitioners in this field of the most basic fundamental findings, constructs, etc. of their field;

- the knowledge gap of discerning actual skills based on presented CV credentials;

- the knowledge gap of the interviewers themselves -- who are of course paid members of the same under-educated industry -- resorting to popular trends as substitute for the ability to distinguish between capable and incapable candidates;

When an arts and crafts "industry" [has] pretensions to being "engineering" or "science", this is what you get. Throw in a healthy dose of age discrimination, and voila.

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