91–100 of 175 posts
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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.
While this is true, you also don't see many 45-year-olds doing 60 and 70 hour work weeks.
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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?…
I think it's an open question how to measure developer productivity objectively. I don't think we really have a good way to answer this question right now, but definitely lines of code checked in is one of the worst. Checking in a 1k line class file with lots of dependencies that easily breaks when other code is changed, using a slow algorithm, with lots of difficult to follow code, would not be more productive than…
Which I'd agree with, but that eviscerates your thesis about the new mind training regimen does it not? After all the learning engaged developer missed out on the training you got from social media.
I think everyone here knows 'bad' developers, I was astonished at the number of people who I knew responded to the question "Why computer science?" with "I hear it pays well."[1] I suspect those folks stop being developers as quickly as they can and move into management (since it has a higher pay cap). So whether you are 20 something and programming by 'cut-n-paste' or 40 something and 'retired-in-grade'
It's wrong to generalize, and it's often a prelude to discrimination to generalize an opinion based on race, color. religion, sex, or age.
I'd love to get better tools and insights into developer productivity. I think it could be a useful differentiating factor on a source code control system.
[1] This contrasts with the people who respond "What? They'll pay me to do this? Cool."
As a 29-year-old I'm kind of freaked out by the fact that I'm on the older part of that distribution.
An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow.
A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you are on SO, the higher your reputation, period, regardless of your answer quality, partly because downvoting is strongly disincentivized. And the article itself notes that older programmers don’t receive significantly more upvotes per post!) Until that’s shown, the article’s conclusion is highly suspect.
Frankly, I’m embarrassed so few people seem to be calling out the terrible reasoning behind this post. It may well be that older programmers are “better,” but what we have here is nothing more than a colossal failure to understand science, reasoning, and evidence.
Older engineers tend to compare new problems to experiences from the past. The tools at our disposal have become much better but the fundamental mechanisms haven't changed that much so it's easier to identify whether there's a real benefit to using a new tool or if it's better to stick with what you have.
As an experienced developer it's a little easier to avoid sinking effort into novel but misguided technologies.
As a young developer it's a little easier to be open-minded about promising technologies.
But don't pay any attention to me - my SO rep is less than 30% of the average for my age bracket...
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is it fair to call it a bias in this case? it doesn't alter the conclusion that older developers are both better and scarcer, on average. [disclaimer: 44 yo ;o] [ps. google has mitigated memory loss, i suspect.]
You are 100% right, a developer is a developer, so it's not bias. It could even be argued that the reason there are less older developers is because the better ones went into management and are no longer active developers. Now, this all assumes that developer activity on Stack Overflow is correlated roughly equivalently over most ages. If it is, then these plainly state that for any random developer you would intervi…
On the contrary in my experience, engineers who are fed up with coding or find maintaining their skillset too tedious or time consuming to fit in with other responsibilities generally move into management (have kids? : move to an exec role). I've been offered several CTO positions, but still building systems while many collegues have chosen the ladder (33 yrs old here) - if anything a subset of older programmers is healthy for the ecosystem.
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Functions that return multiple types. Relying on private variables declared many level up with no intention of checking their existance or value, or sitting on perticular record numbers in tables from some other process blindly. 5 different versions of code doing the same relative process in slightly different ways depending on whichever developer's habit all live in a system. I've worked with a lot of old code from…
"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 i…
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Outside of, say, medical software, or embedded automotive stuff, can you give me an example of a coding 'habit' which is dangerous?
Functions that return multiple types. Relying on private variables declared many level up with no intention of checking their existance or value, or sitting on perticular record numbers in tables from some other process blindly. 5 different versions of code doing the same relative process in slightly different ways depending on whichever developer's habit all live in a system. I've worked with a lot of old code from…
I think you have the wrong adjective.
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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?
> 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…
Let me be more specific.
So when I talk about the asynchronous nature twitter/texting/facebook what I mean is that there are people now (usually young people) who are comfortable with carrying out multiple conversations with different people/groups of people that occur at different rates of time. I am not suggesting that someone who is frequently using twitter/texting/facebook while at work would be more productive than someone who doesn't, but that this experience helps them be able to manage multiple workflows better.
From my own experience, when I talk about multi-tasking as far as it relates to a developer anyway, let me give you an example of something that I can do all the time: I get assigned a bug, I look at the bug board to see what other similar or related bugs there might be, and I assign them to me. Usually this means that some or all of the steps to reproduce the bug are the same, so that if I have to step into the debugger to identify the problem I can set breakpoints in places that should help me figure out more than one bug at a time. In the middle of this, a co-worker sends me an instant message asking for something. I don't immediately know the answer, but I know the general area of the code to look for the answer, so I dig around for a few minutes and then either reply with what was asked or a "I don't know but xyz worked with that code and might be able to help you better." Then I go back to my debugging. I find the bug, or I find a clue that will lead me to the bug, and I write some code, deploy it on the test server, and start a test, which I know will take 20 minutes or so. In the meantime I might reply to some e-mail, do some code review to see what might be refactored to be more readable and/or maintainable, or work on another set of bugs. Then when the earlier test completes I go back to check on it. I might not immediately go back to it after 20 minutes depending on where I am with my other tasks, I would probably find a good natural stopping point first, but the point is at the end of the day I am able to finish all these tasks much faster than if I did them one at a time sequentially.
I don't think what I just described takes particular mental prowess and most of the younger people at my work (and a few of the older ones too) do the same as well. But there are enough older workers who just get hopelessly lost if you ask them to do more than one thing at a time, whereas if I ask a younger co-worker to do the same thing they have no problems, that I have noticed it.