51–60 of 175 posts
Since 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…
My 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.
I know when I was first starting out as a developer I spent a lot of long days and weekends working but not really getting a whole lot accomplished. As I've matured, I've gotten better at picking out what's really important and am now much more productive while working less hours. I anticipate this trend to continue as I gain more experience.
Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?
Teaching, from grade school through college professors.
The vast majority of the highly-regarded teachers I know are ones who have been doing it for 25 years or more.
"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 )
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?…
But I see where you are going there.
I mean come on, if you are comparing a fresh out-of-school graduate with someone with 10 years experience I think most people will agree that the older guy in this case will be more productive. There are things you need to know about working with a large code base that can't be taught by school but can only be learnt with experience.
When I say "older" developer, I mean the 40-50 year old who probably was a really good developer 10 years ago, got a steady, cushy job, with a salary that he/she is more than happy with, and stopped learning because he didn't need to anymore.
I know a lot of exceptions to the rule. The older programmer who got into it because he loves to code, who stayed in it because he loves to code, he keeps up with the times and continues to be relevant. The older programmer who just wants to make a buck and go home to his family? He fell behind a long time ago and doesn't want to catch up.
Hardly seems like they get better with age, just more active in educating other developers. The quality of posts doesn't look related to age at all. As far as I can tell, that should be the parameter to measure if you are going to make any sort of induction about the quality of a dev from their SO profile. And obviously, the fact that this only takes data from SO means whatever the conclusions, they only hold true fo…
The main question, if you really were to judge something like quality, is why older devs answer more questions. Is it your assumption that they are just more invested in educating others, or is it e.g. because they have a broader range of experience and can answer more/more difficult questions. As it is, this data set is merely an interesting conversation starter. I hope somebody takes it and does some research on it…
See "Generativity vs. Stagnation" in this list of Erickon's Psychosocial Stages of Development:
http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.htm...
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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.
edit: Disregard, your background image http://blogblog.com/1kt/travel/bg_black_70.png is blocked by firewall @ work.
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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?
Have you?
> In a much-cited 2009 paper* in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, Stanford's Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony D. Wagner show that heavy media multitaskers demonstrate significantly less cognitive control than light multitaskers. The heavy multitaskers "have greater difficulty filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment" and are also less able to suppress irrelevant memories from intruding on their work. The heavy multitaskers were actually less efficient at switching between tasks - in other words, they were worse at multitasking.
* http://memorylab.stanford.edu/Publications/papers/OPH_PNAS09...
Is the decrease in number of developers due to real scarcity or due to fewer people that actively using Stack Overflow?
I think it's real scarcity. I'm 41 and am always one of the oldest in any group of devs (except for that Usenix event I attended :-). Most people get into their career in their twenties. For computers it's often even younger. But it seems relatively rare for someone to pick up programming in their 30s or older. If you're 40+ today, your twenties were ending around the time that the "tech boom" was beginning. But ther…
This 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.
