

Average age of StackExchange users for each tag - timothybone
http://www.brianbondy.com/stackexchange/#expected-age

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stared
Excuse me for not being objective, but a bit more interesting statistics of
tags from Stack Overflow is here [https://www.kaggle.com/c/predict-closed-
questions-on-stack-o...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/predict-closed-questions-on-
stack-overflow/prospector#211) (average and median reputation of persons
posting questions, % of non-closed questions, average number of additional
tags, median body length, freshness of the topic).

And my full project, Tag Graph Maps of Stack Exchange:
[https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-
stackexchange/wik...](https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-
stackexchange/wiki)

~~~
enginous
It's cool, although you could have easily done without saying that yours is
more interesting.

~~~
stared
You are right, I shouldn't have said that. Sorry.

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michael_h
_Each list includes only the users who have social networking links in their
profile_

Well, that's going to skew the results beyond usefulness.

~~~
bbondy
That comment is for a totally different study. The study only includes users
with an age in their stack exchange profile. It is not related in any way to
if they have a social media account.

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japhyr
To save some scrolling, the last tag listed for stackoverflow is war-stories
at 35.91 years old.

~~~
GFischer
And perceptions match up with reality, the oldest users are the ones with the
COBOL, Delphi, ADO and Legacy Code tags :)

The young guys are working on Chrome extensions, JQuery animations, HTML5 and
CSS3. There are also several young users of PHP so beware :) .

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simulate
Under "Statistical Analysis" the "Weighted-Mean" tag expected age is 72. Under
"Mathematics" the "Non-Standard Analysis" tag expected age is 19. I suspect
samples of 1 for each of these tags.

This is fun to look at but I wouldn't base any conclusions on these averages.
Providing histograms for each tag along with some summary statistics such as
sample size, min, max, and median would give a lot more transparency into the
dataset.

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aw3c2
The absense of detailed methodology makes me doubt the worth of this number
dump. As a start it would be good to know the number of users that led to the
average numbers. And anything about the representative quality.

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Jolandatsv
Yeah I too would be curious to see how the age is distributed among ALL the SO
users and tags rather than the "top users" and their social media profiles.

~~~
bbondy
Actually you are seeing what you want. The social media stuff is about a
related study for mining the social media links for top users and not for the
expected age study. The expected age study was for all users that have an age
in their StackExchange profile.

~~~
dbdoug
I would be interested in seeing an age profile. I, for one, removed my birth
date after being flamed about my age. I've been programming since 1962 :)

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laurent123456
Does anybody know how he actually knows the age of the SO members? He wrote "I
call the statistic the Expectd Age because it is calculated using Expected
Value from statistics" but that doesn't mean much to me.

~~~
geoffschmidt
It's explained higher up on the page:

"I mined the Stack Overflow (and related sites) data dumps to extract the
social networking accounts of the top users. Each list includes only the users
who have social networking links in their profile ..."

~~~
andreasklinger
Would be interesting to know how he did it in detail.

Twitter does not contain age, neither does LinkedIn (or at least not show it)
And in facebook you need to jump through loops like user_birthday and
friends_birthday[1]. I don't know how to get the birthday of 3rd parties.

[1]
[https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET...](https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET&path=me%3Ffields%3Did%2Cname%2Cbirthday)

~~~
awy
You can input your age on a Stack Exchange profile.

~~~
andreasklinger
ok that was too easy.

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fasouto
Site is down for me(over quota), here's the google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.bri...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.brianbondy.com/stackexchange/#expected-
age)

To go to any page in google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:<UR...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:<URL_WITHOUT_http://>);

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jiggy2011
So by the looks of it as a 28 year old I'm pretty much the exact mean for
stack overflow.

I love the fact that "war stories" has the highest average age (of 35).

~~~
ricardobeat
I noticed that. I wonder if it's nudged a bit higher by younger generations
not being as fond of the war analogy.

~~~
jiggy2011
Well, I guess it's more to do with older people having more experience and
seniority thus having more stories to share.

~~~
bodegajed
I agree and maybe young people are who are in college are the lurkers.

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bbondy
I'm the owner of the site, here is the associated blog post that summarizes
some of that data: <http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/117/>

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diminish
would be a good indicator for some future estimates, but lisp, ruby, python
etc are all around 30yrs.

~~~
rvkennedy
\- as are c and c++. What gives?

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dexter313
That mostly younger generation uses Stack Overflow and thus age-over-languages
cannot be extracted from the data analysis. We are just learning statistics
and probability and i think this happens if the sample data is incorrect or
not diverse enough.

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DanBC
I would freain' love a "Wikipedia: age of people rapidly using automatic tools
(such as rollback; twinkle; etc)", and then extend that to "How many of those
were good changes vs how many of those were poor changes vs how many of those
are discussable changes".

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petsos
The average age for COBOL doesn't seem right. I would expect it to be higher.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I wonder if that's because there are lots of younger folks who have to
maintain old COBOL projects, and are looking for help on SO.

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sbierwagen
Average age? So who's the oldest user on SE, dragging all the numbers up?

~~~
bbondy
I only considered acceptable ranges.

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dbecker
Nice job.

It's interesting as a list... and I think there's scope to do a visualization
that is even more interesting (and also easier to read).

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gorm
Does anyone know which service he is running this on? There is no logo on the
overload page. Ty

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mylittlepony
Headers say:

 _Server Google Frontend_

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gorm
Thanks, didn't show on my android with opera mobile

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jnazario
LaTeX -> thesis ~= 29. sounds about right.

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ExpiredLink
StackOverflow is almost a kindergarten.

