It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
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It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
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Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#2What's up with the 48 year olds?
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#3What's up with the 48 year olds?
There are 148 of them, I'd wager there are a couple with super-high stats who throw off the average.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#4Is the decrease in number of developers due to real scarcity or due to fewer people that actively using Stack Overflow?
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#5Hardly 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 for the kind of people that post there.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#6By looking at the Reputation by Age graph it looks more like there are just a few really good older developers. The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow.
In my experience it has been that older developers hold on to old coding habits that are today considered dangerous and are reluctant to change that.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#7I'm a little surprised to see that they provide more answers, but that they aren't of better quality. I would have expected experience to show more.
Of course, we only know they are older, not that they have more years of experience.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#8Age 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.
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#9Hardly 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, because it sure could be interesting
Re: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.
#10My 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.