It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

The original topic was: "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer."

I was answering the posted question "Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?".

So my post was that for teachers it is not accepted as given that they get better and scarcer with age. I did not make a statement whether that was true or not, just that it was not accepted as a given. In support of my view I would offer the numerous recent news stories calling for the end of last-hired, first-fired rule when laying off public school teachers.

Another minor nit:

You can still do a fit to a bell curve and find a chi-squared value. If your chi-squared is horrible, obviously you should be considering a different probability density function as your model is incorrect, but if it's decent enough you can omit the features and call it a "bell curve"

That being said, I could see this as a composition of two gaussian bell curves with the means correlating to the ages of people in college and their early/mid career (let's say 23 and 28 respectively)

I don't disagree with the conclusion: people who aren't as dedicated to or good at programming transition to people or product/program/project management[1]; the remaining folk receive additional experience which allows them to capitalize further on their passion and talent.

However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about programming. That's extremely useful (and helps career wise), but it isn't the same thing as being a better developer. Sometimes it correlates (the best programmers I've known have also participated in organizations like IETF, written RFCs and have also thoroughly documented their work), but it isn't a total ordering (I know plenty of programmers who are better than I, but who don't participate in any public forums).

On the other hand, I've yet to find a successful programming language made by someone before their thirties. Contrast it, on the other hand, with some of the most ground changing academic work in Computer Science and Mathematics being done by people in their twenties.

[1] There's nothing wrong with that: Google's APM program particularly is a great example of "engineers who don't want to code" being extremely useful. See also "The Russian Lit Major" by rands: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_his...

"I've worked with a lot of old code from self taught engineers."

Wait until you deal with code by university educated engineers who follow the rules of software development to the T. Design is emergent. If you see 5 different functions doing the same thing it sounds like you should go refactor it. Private variables that are unchecked? OMG, you might want to add a few asserts and a couple tests. These problems sound insurmountable.

It sounds like you're dealing with production code that makes money, probably so much that they can afford to pay you to improve it.

'63 was a good year!