

Older and Wiser... Up to a Point - 31reasons
http://beta.spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/at-work/tech-careers/older-and-wiser-up-to-a-point

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justin_vanw
Meaningless study is meaningless. There are so many complete breakdowns of
basic logic here that it makes my head spin.

>>> Prejudice against older programmers is wrong, but new research suggests
it's also inaccurate.

Setting aside the issue at hand for a second, I want to point out that holding
some true belief is neither morally right nor morally wrong, it is just the
state of being correct. I think most of us would agree being correct is always
preferable to being incorrect. Yet here the author claims that believing
something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? That's a little
weird.

>>> A dandy natural experiment to test the technical chops of the old against
the young has been conducted—or discovered—by two computer scientists at North
Carolina State University, in Raleigh. Professor Emerson Murphy-Hill and Ph.D.
student Patrick Morrison went to Stack Overflow, a Web site where programmers
answer questions and get rated by the audience. It turned out that ratings
rose with contributors' age...

No. Just no.

I see no reason to accept the assumption that how high your score is on stack
overflow relates in any meaningful way to how effective you are at computer
programming. For example, if I took two programmers who were equal in every
way, except that one spends the entire workday on stack overflow and the other
works very hard all day, the one that has the lower stack overflow score is
far more effective.

I see no reason to accept the assumption that stack overflow is in any way
representative of the programming community in any way. It is a self selected
group of people that may or may not be employed as programmers.

This isn't a study, it's a joke.

The fact is, the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and
experience. However, the average quality of all programmers of a given age
decreases above some age. How are these two facts both true? People get
promoted out of being programmers all the time, but very few people become
programmers past a certain age. People become managers, consultants,
executives, entrepreneurs.

~~~
derleth
> Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong
> even if it is a true belief?

This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it.

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics>

> the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience.

Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that
negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize
problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.

~~~
ido

        Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in,
        especially ones that negatively impact the ability to
        concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and 
        express concepts in symbolic form.
    

We're not talking about 80 year old programmers here, there's age
discrimination against people in their 40s too.

------
trippy_biscuits
Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have
something solely by the virtue of being old?

From John Ciardi “About Crows” (Fast & Slow, March 1975, 3):

    
    
       The old crow is getting slow; the young crow is not.
       Of what the young crow does not know, the old crow knows a lot.
       At knowing things, the old crow is still the young crow’s master.
       What does the old crow not know? How to go faster!
       The young crow flies above, below, and rings around the slow old crow.
       What does the fast young crow not know? Where to go!

~~~
6d0debc071
> Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks
> have something solely by the virtue of being old?

It's difficult to talk about this sort of stuff without sounding like I'm a
kid throwing a fit, but I guess it's worth a shot:

Growing up it feels like older people should be, fairly uniformly from the
perspective of a child, _incredibly formidable_. You've had three or four
times our experience and you should really know your stuff. You should have
done your homework on your opinions and actions, you should be more self-
controlled, more insightful, more... everything that doesn't relate fairly
directly to muscles really. And you don't exactly try to deny that either -
build up this image of yourselves as people whose judgement should be deferred
to and ... when does any of it ever get backed up?

When we talk to an adult, it's very rare to feel like we're dealing with
someone more knowledgeable or experienced than us at all, let alone three or
four times so.

Adults lock kids up in school for the a lot of their waking lives and even
your average kids still manage to get up to a competitive standard with your
average adult in a year or so. The difference on forty years of age should not
be a single year.

Maybe part of that's selection bias, adults just never get to do anything
particularly difficult in front of us - but I don't think so in this case.
Unlike many people my age in this country, I've worked a real job before -
doing things that require thought - and the job wasn't hard to learn or
anything like that. The people there, while friendly and nice, didn't strike
me as being people with positive multiples of my own skills, despite some of
them being multiples of my age.

Which isn't to say that some old people _can't_ be incredibly formidable, from
time to time you run into such people and can learn a lot from them - but most
people seem to get to, say, their first job after school and some of the
damage that school did them fades a bit, and then they just stop growing. If a
kid like me can match or exceed most of the older people she meets, then
there's something very wrong in the idea that you get something extra just
from being old.

 _An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?_

You don't get better by ageing, I think - at least, not _solely_ by virtue of
being older. Age represents opportunities to seek out new experiences and
knowledge, and thus to get wiser. However, lots of people never _take_ them
and make much of themselves at all.

My fifty year old father's response to locking his washing in the washing
machine was to run another wash cycle, and when that didn't work to run the
spin cycle - it was only when I came along and released the child-lock that he
was able to get his washing. The manual was right there besides the machine.

And he's not suffering from dementia or anything like that. It's tempting to
think he is but he isn't. He's just spent all his life working the same
mediocre arts job and sitting in front of the TV every spare moment he gets.

Respect that, as better than me just because he's older? It's like looking at
a cripple. But... he's still meant to be healthy, he was always that smart.
And so many adults are like him. There doesn't seem to be anything
biologically wrong with them. And I love him dearly, but what does he have
that I don't? And if he doesn't have anything just by virtue of being older,
why should I assume that anyone else does -- if age is the sole criteria?

~~~
trippy_biscuits
> Respect that, as better than me just because he's older?

He's not better because he's older. He's more experienced because he's older.
That experience has value because you cannot earn it any other way.

> what does he have that I don't?

Knowledge, tolerance, sacrifice, endurance, and perspective perhaps? When you
are 50 you will have some of the same things simply due to the fact that you
lived to that age. Older folks are human and make many mistakes just like
every other human. It's because they've made more mistakes than younger folks
that they are ahead on the opportunities to learn. There's nothing special,
other than having been able to do everything you'll do, long before you can do
it.

If you're having trouble seeing this point of view, compare your abilities and
life experience to that of a 10 year old. Explain yourself to that 10 year old
such that the youth will possess the sum total of your experiences and be able
to act as you would act. Not possible you say? Perhaps now you can appreciate
the value of aged experience?

~~~
6d0debc071
_> He's not better because he's older. He's more experienced because he's
older. That experience has value because you cannot earn it any other way._

If I put a pound coin in a fire, it doesn't become valuable to put your hand
in the fire just because there's no other way to get it. You might, after
being burnt, rationalise it as valuable because it had cost you dearly. It
might even become a ritual; a way to prove that you were a manly man who liked
money or something, _'I'm tough, look at me make small gains at massively
disproportionate costs.'_ I don't know. However, beforehand, it would seem
insane to value the pound in the fire above a pound that someone else might
offer you in its stead without the risk of getting maimed.

Difficulty in attaining something makes sense for fashion, because it displays
your fitness. However, the worth of things doesn't scale along every axis of
value in proportion to the suffering or cost involved in attaining them - and
I don't see how the suggested measure is of worth with respect to experiences
that have nothing but age to recommend them. As far as experience goes, it
seems that the experiences should be worth something for what they give you -
whether that be hedons or skills or whatever - and that age is part of the
cost you're paying.

They're going to cost you something you're never going to get back, a portion
of your life, and the return shouldn't just be that they've cost you
something.

The idea behind age seems to be that it's been pretty darned expensive and
they must have bought something valuable with their lives because ... _well,
look at how much they spent._ But that's not how spending works - people buy
extended warranties and the like all the time. Maybe they're just bad
consumers.

 _> Knowledge, tolerance, sacrifice, endurance, and perspective perhaps? When
you are 50 you will have some of the same things simply due to the fact that
you lived to that age. Older folks are human and make many mistakes just like
every other human. It's because they've made more mistakes than younger folks
that they are ahead on the opportunities to learn. There's nothing special,
other than having been able to do everything you'll do, long before you can do
it._

He hasn't been able to do everything I'll ever do, he can't even do everything
I can do right now. He's never had the opportunity to learn about monads
because he's never tried programming at all and gave up on maths when he left
school. He's never had the opportunity to learn to fight properly because he's
never put in the work to find decent teachers and then to practice diligently.
He's never really had the opportunity to learn a great number of things about
a great number of areas because he's never learnt the pre-requisites.

I suppose it's true enough that they show up as potentials if you go far
enough down the tree of choices that he might make and might previously have
made. That he could have made better choices to net himself wider/more
interesting parts of the tree. But he's followed one path through life on
which those things didn't show up.

Some opportunities multiply as they're seized, and if you never seize them
then your range of opportunities is only ever linear with respect to time.

 _> If you're having trouble seeing this point of view, compare your abilities
and life experience to that of a 10 year old. Explain yourself to that 10 year
old such that the youth will possess the sum total of your experiences and be
able to act as you would act. Not possible you say? Perhaps now you can
appreciate the value of aged experience?_

When I was ten, people of my age now, who'd lived the life I've lived, were
visibly smarter than me. Just as people who continue to live the sort of life
I intend to live are visibly smarter than me nine years later on from this
point.

But that was not my argument anyway - my argument was that age is just the
chance to make something of yourself, that since many adults don't kids tend
not to respect age. The two don't strongly correlate, the latter is not good
evidence of the former.

------
tomfakes
Interestingly, I find that a lot of the questions on Stack Overflow are from
such noobs that I'd have to spend time explaining how to program before
getting to their actual question. This disuades me from participating, as it's
hard to find the questions from programmers who I could help.

As a professional, if I can't find a way to contribute my expertise in a
timely and efficient way, then I'll get on with something interesting and more
lucrative. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of useful stuff on SO, and
I'd like to contribute at a high level, but I'm not willing to put in 2 hours
a day to find the 1 or 2 questions that would be worth the time.

I'm an older programmer, and this may be one explanation of why older
programmers answers on SO aren't as useful - the good ones are not the ones
answering questions!

This is just an anecdote, but one that certainly applies to me

~~~
msoad
The score in StackOverflow is meaningless without looking at profile of an
individual and see what question they ask or how is their level of knowledge
in their answers. Spending time to contribute to StackOverflow is not
necessary a bad behavior. Programmers can meet challenges that they might have
in feature and get ready for them.

I personally answer to questions that have no answer or not correct answer
when I google for them but finally I've solved myself. I even googled and
reached to my own answers!

------
Jabbles
The idea that I will not get better at software engineering as I continue to
practise it is baffling, and slightly scary. Perhaps I do not want it to be
true, but I cannot see how I will get worse with added experience.

------
dusklight
No comments about the truth of the prejudice against older programmers, but
this study does not prove anything. There is a huge self-selection bias going
on here, as not all programmers go on stack overflow and certainly not all
programmers answer questions on stack overflow. There could be many older
programmers who have not kept up to date with the latest skills and best
practices, who know the only reason why their job is secure at BigCorp is
because their code is so bad/intentionally obfuscated that no one else can
read it, who don't answer questions on stack overflow.

------
tom_b
Find joy in working with accomplished hackers regardless of age. On this very
forum I have discovered several worth following - I read their blogs, look at
their code, aspire to learn from them, and sometimes despair at all that I
still need to learn.

This article mentions how chess training software has sped the training of
chess players to the IM level from a baseline rating of 2200.

Wouldn't it be fun if a similar training setup was available for hackers . . .
I wonder what that would look like.

------
rjempson
I think this has parallels with the saying "I'm not young enough to save the
world".

