

It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.  - peterknego
http://coding-and-more.blogspot.com/2011/06/its-official-developers-get-better-with.html

======
kmavm
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 were the weaker developers who found something
better to do with their time.

As a somewhat older developer, I find this a surprisingly difficult question
to answer honestly. Comparing myself to myself from 10 years ago, I sincerely
think I'm more effective, but self-delusion may play a part in that. I've
probably lost some of my "step", in terms of raw capacity to memorize and
compute mentally, and I have more commitments outside of the world of
software, which dilutes my efforts further. Then again, the strategic ideas I
have are more dependably correct, and I spend less time chasing down dead
ends, either because I've been down them before or had the good luck of
witnessing them second- or third-hand.

I've gotten a chance to see a world-class developer very closely between the
ages of 36 and 45. He started this period as, very easily, the greatest
engineer I'd ever even heard stories of, and I'm pretty sure he got better
over that decade. It can be done.

~~~
rbanffy
I don't feel any smarter than I were on my 20's. OTOH, software has gotten
much more complex. Mastering the Apple II ROM routines is one thing, but
understanding how every piece in a complex web application (app server, rdbms,
non-relational storage, cache) interact is much harder. After wrapping my
brain around some concepts, it feels very thin. We rely on Google and the web
to supplement our memories for things that 25 years ago depended on books and
synaptic pathways.

I'm quite sure I am much more effective today than I were 25 years ago, but a
lot has to do with cognitive prosthetics.

~~~
divtxt
I find web development less enjoyable than 5 or 10 years ago because of the
increasing size and complexity of the stack.

At least us old fogies have had the last 15 years to learn web development.
How the hell do young programmers learn such a big stack in a few years? I'm
guessing half using youthful energy and the other half skipped in blissful
ignorance?! :)

~~~
czDev
That's the point - you don't learn the whole stack, you let your framework
manage it.

~~~
rick888
This is one of my problems with younger developers. They slap framework code
together rather than actually figuring out what's going on underneath.

It's one of the reasons I still use PHP. It's the perfect balance between
framework and coding.

------
alanh
Aaargh! The data doesn’t say this, all the data says is “Older StackOverflow
users have disproportionately high SO reputation.”

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.

~~~
seldo
Yeah, my conclusion from the data was "senior developers know more things and
have more time on their hands to tell others about those things", which is
exactly what you'd expect. The more senior you get, the more your role is as
guide and mentor than immediate implementor.

~~~
brown9-2
One of alan's points is that it is incorrect to assign behaviors of "older
Stackoverflow users" to the universe of "older developers".

The population of "older Stackoverflow users" is not randomly drawn from the
population of "older developers", and nothing is put forward to claim that the
former is representative of the latter, so you cannot make this assumption.

~~~
jwhite
Exactly. The graph showing that older coders' answers are not significantly
better than those of younger coders is a case in point: maybe the good older
coders are too busy actually coding to spend time answering questions on
StackOverflow.

------
zwieback
I'm 45 with a little short of 30 years of programming experience. Our team at
HP (I'm not a manager) has a few programmers that are significantly older and
a few that are very young. From my observation, what's different about young
vs. old programmers is not related to the speed at which we pick up new
technologies (we all love to tinker with the latest stuff) but at the general
approach to problem solving.

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...

------
raganwald
Tell HN:

On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.

~~~
arohner
So that's why you're such a good blogger!

Thanks for blogging and contributing on HN, you've really improved my
understanding of software, and how to think about software.

Happy Birthday.

~~~
cema
Hmm. I have upvoted you automatically: in the past it did not just mean I
think your argument is interesting, but also (in cases like this one) that I
share the sentiment and do not want to litter HN with "+1" comments. Of
course, now that none except you can see your score, this is no longer working
like that.

Happy birthday to raganwald!

------
strlen
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...](http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_history.html)

~~~
jedbrown
Historically, it would seem like 30 is almost a "sweet spot" for language
creation.

* Dennis Ritchie was 27 or 28 in 1969 when C got going.

* McCarthy was about 30 in 1958 for Lisp.

* Sussman was 28 and Steele was 21 in 1975 for Scheme.

* Alan Kay made Smalltalk between 28 and 31.

And while it used to be true that lots of game-changing mathematics was done
early, I don't see much of that lately. A huge amount is done by junior
faculty and postdocs, but that's usually late 20s and 30s.

------
adamc
What this really shows is that developers get better at answering technical
questions with age. There is probably _some_ correlation to development skill,
but the data doesn't demonstrate that. I'd expect developers to know more
things as they get older, and I wouldn't be surprised if they got better at
answering questions. Not sure that makes them better at the development part.

~~~
tednaleid
I think that this is showing a correlation between those programmers that
enjoy programming and want to share their knowledge with others, and those
programmers that stick with it for more than a decade.

I bet that if you could separate out the younger developers who will still be
developing in 10-20 years, that their rep on SO is similar to that of older
developers. Those developers that'll wash out in the next 5 years are dragging
down the participation numbers of their peers.

So it isn't the age that's important, it's the personality type which is
correlated to those people that'll stick with development.

------
6ren
I used to think younger developers were better, but with the experience of
age, I now realize that older developers are better.

Honestly, though, I think programming is a "young man's game", partly because
you are sharper, have more energy etc when young; but mostly because when
everything is reinvented each decade, you are better off starting fresh,
without being aware of other choices.

The exception is for higher-level tasks, such as marketing, managing people,
strategic business decisions, and code architecture. Also, I would think,
language/library/API/framework design. I hesitate a little, because many of
these are based on the needs of current programmers, which the front-line
troops know better because they are doing it (they are the users). However,
for deeper insights, age has the benefit of seeing deeper patterns over
decades, and over generations of usage. Most language designers seem to be
older (but is that just because their languages are now old?)

------
zdw
Age 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.

~~~
rawsyntax
But if you started programming at 50... that's different than having done it
for the last 30 years.

~~~
tjogin
That's pretty rare though, I think _most_ programmers in their fifties have
been doing it for many years.

------
imack
Honest question: what happens to developers after they are no longer
"Developers"?

As a 29-year-old I'm kind of freaked out by the fact that I'm on the older
part of that distribution.

~~~
sukuriant
I do not have stats to base this claim, but when I worked at my last job, I
heard from an employee in another department that the normal lifespan for a
software developer was 7 years, after which they have some sort of career
change, be it management or logging.

------
jimmarq
Maybe with coding, it's either up or out. Older developers who have better
skills most likely enjoy what they are doing and are somewhat good at it. If
they weren't, they would have left the profession, maybe to become project
managers or some related position. It's not like you're always forced out of
your position, it's just that when you look down the road, you can see that if
you're not a great coder, it may be best to find something you're better at. A
25 year old coder may still be figuring out if that line of work is
sustainable over the course of a career.

------
mark_l_watson
Wow, the chart only goes up to 49 years old?

For me, that is about 4 programming languages ago :-)

~~~
Vivtek
He said he only took age cohorts for which he had 100 or more data points.

------
bryanalves
A quote from this really stuck out for me:

"So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not
by having answers of (significantly) higher quality."

A lot of people here are focused on "being smarter" or "doing a better job" or
"higher quality"

Excluding all of the self-taught developers, and limiting ourselves only to
people who follow the standard "get a 4-year college degree then go out in the
real world and work" crowd, as that's pretty sizable. Make extrapolations as
necessary.

Remember your first year (or two?) of development? Looking back, you were
probably way in over your head, had mentors looking after you, making tons of
mistakes etc.

Fast forward 5 years. Can you write code faster? Probably not. Can you write
better code? Sometimes. It's all about experiences and learning from them.
When you take a new job, or a new project, or a new anything, you call upon
past experiences to guide the efforts of this process. It might be something
as vague as "I am going to write tests first because I found it helped me
earlier", or (ignoring TDD), "I'm not going to write this function like this,
because I know the code will be hard to test when I get around to writing a
test for it later"

You learn this all from experience. Senior people who have been in the field
longer have more experience. They aren't "better" in the sense that they are
smarter or have more intelligence, they just know MORE because they've been
exposed to more.

It's also why so many people (especially in hacker news) have been successful
without degrees. It's not a degree that matters it's EXPERIENCE.

It might be a fine line differentiating between smartness gained from pure
intelligence and "smartness" gained via experience, but I think it's an
important distinction, and one that I think this post highlights well.

------
Fargren
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 for the kind of people that post there.

~~~
groby_b
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

~~~
reinhardt
The cynic view: they may have more time on their hands to was^C^C^Cspend on
StackOverflow.

~~~
groby_b
Even if I subscribed to the cynical viewpoint - how come they _do_ have that
time? The snooty old dev in me counters the cynic with "Because we get stuff
_done_ " ;)

So, still, lots of room for a more detailed look.

Edit: The reply is of course tongue-in-check. The second reply to the GP seems
to provide a better explanation.

------
AdamTReineke
Is the decrease in number of developers due to real scarcity or due to fewer
people that actively using Stack Overflow?

~~~
marshray
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 there just wasn't as much information and inspiration
around for getting into software development. Even through the mid-90s a
college degree and programming skills was no sure ticket to cushy employment.

~~~
5teev
Sometimes it's good to be a late bloomer.

~~~
Vivtek
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.

------
trentonstrong
I think there might also be another selection bias here, in that StackOverflow
might be a bit self-selecting for developers who know their stuff.

It's hard to say what this says about developers as a whole, including the
ones not on SO, which I assume is a large number.

An alternative hypothesis might be this: Good developers get better over time,
whatever that means.

I would suspect that people who form bad habits early on don't enjoy the same
benefits of experience as those who built on solid foundations.

------
cek
Interesting hypothesis, but the faulty data renders the results presented
useless. Namely, only 53% of SO users enter their age. Therefore the data may
be wildly biased towards people who are willing to enter their age in an
online profile.

In addition this only represents SO programmers, which while a great bunch, is
hardly representative of all programmers.

------
coliveira
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.

~~~
benatkin
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.

~~~
coliveira
The bell curve is a result of the distribution for any population: developers,
guitar players, sci-fi readers, etc. In this case, the curve happens to
represent SO readers.

~~~
benatkin
The bell curve can be choppy when you've got too little data or bad data.

~~~
coliveira
You're just looking at the shape of the bell curve. It tells you that it
represents a population, but it doesn't tell you _what_ population it actually
is. That bell curve could be for the age of people owning cats, for example.
There is no evidence that SO users is a good sample of the developers
population, in fact it makes sense that it is skewed towards young people that
have lots of time to search and answer programming questions on the web.

~~~
benatkin
Stack Overflow is geared towards developers and doesn't have anything I can
see to attract a particular kind of developer, except the curious kind. I
can't think of a place to get a better sampling of developers right off hand.
Certainly, while Hacker News is popular among developers, it would be a less
accurate sampling of developers than Stack Overflow, because people here tend
to be attracted to startups.

I disagree with what you said in your first post, that it is _completely
wrong_ , and that _no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers_.
It's not perfect but it's far from being a terrible sample. It's a general-
interest developer site rather than a specific-interest one. There are all
types of developers. In a reverse-sorted list of popular recent tags, there
are c#, javascript, php, java, jquery, .net, and android. Also, developers
didn't choose to be a part of this graph; they merely got put into the survey
result because they had Stack Overflow accounts. If it had been a survey that
was announced on twitter it would be biased towards people who want to take
surveys. This would be a worse bias IMO than people who want to ask and answer
technical questions.

I wouldn't take issue if you had said it was problematic, but instead you went
straight to a one-sided conclusion.

~~~
brown9-2
What about developers that don't spend much time online? Or that don't find
much personal joy in answering the questions of strangers?

Just because Stack Overflow might be one of the best places to get a sampling
online doesn't mean it is actually a correct sampling of the population of
software developers.

~~~
benatkin
Those are good points and I agree that there are numerous reasons why it isn't
a correct sample. What I'm trying to say is that it's hard to get a correct
sample for developers and that if someone is curious about the subject matter
it's worth keeping this data until some clearly superior data comes along.
There are plenty of datasets that are worse than this, either by having fewer
data points or by being even more biased.

------
Hominem
Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?

~~~
forgotAgain
Teaching, from grade school through college professors.

~~~
pflats
Why would you say that? Teachers have an incredibly high attrition rate.
Barely half of the new teacher classes make it 5 years.

The vast majority of the highly-regarded teachers I know are ones who have
been doing it for 25 years or more.

~~~
forgotAgain
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.

~~~
pflats
I see your point, but I'm not quite sure that the two things go hand in hand.

If the vast majority of developers were publically financed and had LIFO laws,
I'd imagine that there'd be calls to end that practice as well. In both cases,
though, I'd argue it's outliers that are the source of the consternation.

I think most education reform advocates would agree teachers get better as
they gain experience.

------
forgotAgain
The title s/b "Stackoverflow developers get better with age. And scarcer."

Stackoverflow is not representative of the overall developer population. As an
example of an alternate view compare the relative number of items tagged on SO
with C#, Java, and PHP. Then compare that to the number of listings of those
tags on Dice.

~~~
forgotAgain
So why the downvote? If you disagree with what I wrote then offer a rebuttal.
Simply downvoting is churlish.

------
engtech
There's one huge hole in the analysis: the dataset.

The older someone is, the less chance they'll spend time on an internet
community site, especially at work, which is when a lot of people access
stackoverflow.

Old dudes work while they're at work, because they learned their work ethic in
pre-internet times.

------
sbochins
The myth that engineers lose their game when they get older always seemed a
little off to me. It usually gets clumped in with all the software jobs are
going to go to China. I have met a lot of very bad developers that were older
as well as very good ones. The same goes for young developers.

------
zephyrfalcon
_"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>)

~~~
gwern
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.

~~~
3pt14159
Not hard, impossible. Bell curves go to infinity.

Edit: Shouldn't have said that. Everyone knows basic stats here and I was
being pedantic.

~~~
gwern
Yeah, it is literally impossible for a real bell curve to exist, but if you
want to be pedantic, that's also because people are clumpy. The bell curve
might say there ought to be 0.00000067 excellent answerers at age 12, say, but
reality insists on there being 0 or 1 excellent answerers aged 12.

Whenever we look at real data, we acknowledge that it's a discretized
approximation to a bell curve and not a real (continuous) one; the point was
that on top of the discrete approximation, we have the additional problem of
anthropic biases - people not existing or dying at either end.

------
figure8
Seeing 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.

------
Revisor
One could also find another, not so positive trend in the article:

The older the developer, the less curious they are <= the less questions they
have.

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...

~~~
pnathan
Alternatively, as you get better and deal with complex issues and have more
sophisticated thoughts, you realize that SO can't answer the majority of your
problems.

That's what I've learned about SO: it's fine for popcorn questions, but for
the in-depth knowledge and discussions... _meh_.

~~~
Revisor
That's a very fair point. Overall the deeper answers are probably more in the
books or at conferences, not in blogs and online forums.

------
Tichy
I hope it doesn't mean that older developers are more likely to be unemployed
and therefore have more time to waste on SO.

------
josegonzalez
Number of developers by age is likely inversely proportional to the growth in
the industry. I'd also say people get into development at a later date in
their lives - late 20s - because they started doing something else before
making the jump - marketers, engineers, painters, physicists.

------
jongraehl
Older people have, on average, been using stackoverflow for longer. SO rep
scales roughly linearly with time spent contributing.

This probably isn't enough to explain the entire effect shown in the graph,
but in 10 years (if people still use SO), it would be.

------
wccrawford
I'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.

~~~
kenjackson
I think its one of those things where the real issue is if you have an answer
at all. Of those ppl that have answers the quality of answers, I'd expect to
be similar (across a population).

------
MaysonL
I wonder that they didn't do the correlation of length of time on SO (i.e.,
since join date) vs. reputation. Did the older developers join SO earlier, on
average? How many rep points per day did older vs. younger devs accumulate?

------
llimllib
A minor nit, I know, but a bell curve is symmetrical. So the graph shows some
sort of fat-tailed distribution, and we cannot "see a textbook example of a
bell distribution curve".

~~~
juiceandjuice
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)

------
Vivtek
How 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.)

------
astrofinch
What if there's a filtering effect where lower-quality developers are less
likely to stick with the profession past age 27?

------
maresca
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.

~~~
gbelote
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.

~~~
maresca
While this is true, you also don't see many 45-year-olds doing 60 and 70 hour
work weeks.

~~~
gbelote
Yes, but presumably they aren't spending those extra 20-30 hours writing
StackOverflow answers.

------
cstuder
What's up with the 48 year olds?

~~~
AdamTReineke
There are 148 of them, I'd wager there are a couple with super-high stats who
throw off the average.

~~~
jonnytran
Using a median instead of a mean might help w/ this.

~~~
brown9-2
Yes - median is a far better method to use in a situation like this,
especially when what is being measured (reputation) has a bounded minimum and
an unbounded maximum, and double especially when the sample size in each age
bucket is relatively small.

------
spinlock
It's official: developers spend more time on stack overflow with age.

------
BasDirks
'63 was a good year!

------
sebastianavina
Maybe it's because great developers end up in management positions... each day
I write less and less code...

------
KeyBoardG
By 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.

~~~
mkn
_The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer
communities such as Stack Overflow._

If you're curious about the down-votes, it may be because the above quote is
an example of the particular kind of bigotry commonly referred to as "ageism".
For future reference, if you are ever in a management position, that kind of
thing is actionable in a work environment. You could get your backside sued
off, is what I mean, if you are found to have used that in a hiring decision,
for example.

~~~
marshray
I'm old enough to feel like employers may sometimes find younger and cheaper
people to do dumb stuff faster.

What you say about the HR liability potential agrees with what I've heard from
HR people, but never seen it be a factor in reality. In practice I can't
imagine suing over a development gig. I can think of a million bad reasons
people might not hire/let go a good developer (e.g. questions about manhole
covers) but the "he's a curmudgeon who's reluctant to slap stuff together
quickly" argument seems halfway legitimate.

So I say, bring it on, let's have an open discussion about who's smart, who's
fast, who's wise, and when it even matters.

~~~
KeyBoardG
I agree with you. Experienced developers with skills are key for higher level
functions such as architecture and system planning due simply to the "been-
there" factor. My statement above was geared toward the "curmudgen".

------
dusklight
What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask
questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing
to do anything to fix it.

My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They
haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have
had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be
done in 2 minutes now, but they are still used to thinking that they did it
quickly if they finish it in 2 days, so that's how long it takes them to do
it.

Also my personal experience is that older developers can't handle the
asynchronous nature of modern communications very well. 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, whereas younger developers will happily be able to
switch in between tasks while waiting for the previous task to finish
compiling/running without problems.

~~~
romaniv
_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?

~~~
dusklight
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?

~~~
gwern
> 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...](http://memorylab.stanford.edu/Publications/papers/OPH_PNAS09.pdf)

~~~
dusklight
If you read the details of that paper, they are really not relevant to what I
mean.

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.

