Tell HN: On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.
Don't get scarce!
It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
81–90 of 175 posts
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#82One could also find another, not so positive trend in the article:
The older the developer, the less curious they are Of course you could say it's because the older developers are more experienced. But would that quality per se quell the thirst for new knowledge?
Just thinking aloud...
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#83Since 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…
I think Clarke's first law applies to programmers as well:
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
When you are older you maybe really spend less time chasing dead ends, I agree with that, but to be fully sincere with oneself, some of those ends might end up not being that dead anymore 10 or 20 years after you've last bothered to visit them.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#84Age correlates with experience. If you've been something longer, you've had time to learn what works and what doesn't, and why. Thus, you can do a better job at guiding people who are newer to the material.
But if you started programming at 50... that's different than having done it for the last 30 years.
That's pretty rare though, I think most programmers in their fifties have been doing it for many years.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#85"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 hard for anything dealing with age to be a true symmetrical bell curve - it usually winds up being cut short by old age & death, or foreshortened by, well, not existing. Notice that the ages start at 16. You'd have to be pretty precocious to give high quality answers at age 10 or 5.
Not hard, impossible. Bell curves go to infinity.
Edit: Shouldn't have said that. Everyone knows basic stats here and I was being pedantic.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#86How did this post title come from that article? If anything, we old fogies are just more prolix - but not necessarily better. (Judging from his statistics, anyway.)
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#87Since 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…
I think Clarke's first law applies to programmers as well: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." When you are older you maybe really spend less time chasing dead ends, I agree with that, but to be fully sincere with oneself, some of those ends might end up not being that dead…
Oh man, I agree with this. Stuff I intended to get around to someday back in the 90's is just a CPAN download away now.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#88Wow, the chart only goes up to 49 years old? For me, that is about 4 programming languages ago :-)
He said he only took age cohorts for which he had 100 or more data points.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sometimes it's good to be a late bloomer.
Or just so obsessed that you stayed in programming even when it wasn't obviously a good idea. Come to think of it, it's still not obviously a good idea.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#90Seeing that 70% decline in number of developers (on SO) from age 30 to age 40 and assuming they are still working, what do the older "has-been" developers do now and what titles do they have? Perhaps they have never heard of SO? Or they have stopped needing and/or using SO? Statistics based on educational website usage seem to always skew younger.
Analogously, if I measured academic skills and availability by time spent in libraries and time spent teaching, I'm sure we'd see a similar peak in 20's because grad students spend so much time doing both these things and productive professors need this less.