
Ask HN: How old were the most talented software engineers you've met? - diehunde
Talented in terms of general knowledge and practical skills
======
nlh
I've met two deeply talented software engineering minds in my life, and they
fall on opposite ends of the spectrum:

The first I met when I was in my mid-20s and he was about 17. Gifted kid,
absolutely. He'd published a programming book (!) and could do things with
JavaScript that, in 2001, nobody had even thought of doing until the mid
2010s. Totally undisciplined of course -- we hired him and he refused to
follow any instructions, got bored easily, thought he knew better than his
engineering manager, and was ultimately fired after about 3 months on the job.
Haven't kept up with him but I imagine he's gone on to do amazing things.

The second was someone I had the pleasure of working with over the past few
years. He's early 50s now and far and away one of the most productive and
intelligent engineers I've ever seen. Thinks about problems deeply and
thoroughly, codes quickly, optimizes when and only when it's time, and is the
purest measure of productivity I know. All the lessons one learns over a
career in engineering put to use. Proof that hands-down, the ageism in SV is
totally misplaced when it comes to skill level -- I'd work with that
50-something over any 20-something "rock star" any day of the week.

~~~
headalgorithm
It would be interesting to know what the 50-something was like when they were
younger. Did they have the characteristics of the 20-something rock star.

~~~
ArrayList
Please don't say "rock star". It's such a tired term, right behind "ninja".

~~~
elbrian
Please don't police other peoples' speech.

~~~
ArrayList
Thanks Mom.

~~~
dolessdrugs
Thanks Dad

~~~
8bitsrule
Damn this insubordination!

------
pjc50
I spent a decade working with some very talented people in my mid-20s to 30s,
and they aged along with me?

The single smartest person I worked with, the guy who wrote a h265 decoder by
himself and did Project Euler problems for fun, was also in his mid-30s and
worked 4 days a week to spend more time with his family. He was a
mathematician by background though, and they tend to peak early;
intellectually I think he would have been capable of doing all the same things
at 16 given time to learn the prerequisites.

From exposure to a lot of smart people at Cambridge, not just in software, I
would say that the biggest impairment to turning smartness into results was
depression. The second biggest was lack of common sense - it's very easy to be
_convincing_ as a smart person, and if you're convincing to yourself and
others about some piece of unconventional wisdom that turns out actually not
to work, it can go very wrong.

~~~
throwawaymath
Can you give an example of what you mean by common sense?

~~~
pjc50
I'd prefer not to, because the examples I had in mind were from people's
personal lives and are likely to generate needless controversy.

------
nothanksmydude
Wisest dude I've ever worked with was >50\. Sharpest was probably a friend I
grew up with, he was writing C before he was 12! Some mad productive cats from
30-45 too.

E: had to come back and say that the best PM's I've worked with have all been
>40 year old women who have bigcorp experience. They don't take shit from
anyone and protect their people.

~~~
hashhar
I have also seen the same regards to engineering mangers. The best ones have
tended to be older women with either bigcorp experience or have been in the
current company for a long time. They know how to maximise the developers
productivity and do a good job of allowing the dev to focus on work instead of
attending stupid meetings and makes sure to fight for your stance when needed.

------
diab0lic
40+

I always wonder about ageism in tech referenced regularly here. Without a
doubt the rockstars I know are more experienced and consequently older. If you
exclude older software engineers you're probably excluding the best talent and
thus can't claim to hire only the top x% of talent.

Note: I don't belong to this group in age or talent.

~~~
FundThrowaway
I work out in Asia and over here a big reason for ageism in tech is a
misunderstanding of development talent, there is a belief that coders are
coders and that's all there is to it, young coders tend to be willing to work
longer hours and basically work until they burn out so management sees them as
the superior option since salaries and benefits are lower.

edit: Since I'm getting down voted for whatever reason here's an article that
is along similar lines
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-02/china-
s-t...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-02/china-s-tech-
industry-wants-youth-not-experience)

~~~
closeparen
How does that work exactly? If no one is willing to pay higher salaries then
the salaries aren’t higher. Senior people would presumably take junior pay
over unemployment.

~~~
FundThrowaway
Junior developer salaries here are low enough that people just change
industry. It's also not just about the salary but the way that they work. That
all being said there are start ups out here that do look for experienced devs
and pay accordingly, my previous comments mostly relate to large local
businesses.

~~~
PakG1
[https://kotaku.com/game-programmer-quits-job-to-sell-
street-...](https://kotaku.com/game-programmer-quits-job-to-sell-street-food-
doubles-864816450)

------
navinsylvester
Most talented were a russian(18 year old) and two brits(early 20's) with whom
i have worked with. But i would say talent doesn't guarantee more
productivity. In fact in most cases it can have adverse effect on
productivity.

Let me list few points:

# Tend to deviate from task and try to fix functional things which they think
are not elegant engineering

# They are motivated to learn new technology so they will squeeze one without
thinking about long term side effects like shipping delays and maintenance
issue

# They think they will be productive working alone and mostly avoid
collaboration which can be very costly down the road

# Failing to understand that trade offs to achieve business goals is a good
trait to have

# Code maintenance doesn't motivate them like new shinier stuff

# Can slowly turn the business to be people dependent

# Going over board with code reuse and in the end introducing too many
dependencies

~~~
romeisendcoming
These are shit programmers. Complexity != talent.

~~~
navinsylvester
Most gifted talent in my experience exhibit these negative traits which impact
productivity. If you have a counter point based on your experience - would
love to hear that.

~~~
sp527
I think his point is that truly intelligent people would know better than to
do this because it requires more holistic thinking (i.e. accounting for the
reality of other people). The person you’re describing may be intelligent in
some ways, but not enough to zoom out and understand the bigger picture.

Elon Musk is another good example. Someone who is so much a victim of his
behavioral impulses and savior complex that he’s a catastrophically negligent
leader, as recounted by Tesla employees in a recent story.

I’m of the opinion that you’re not truly intelligent if you are unable to
recognize and correct for your own character flaws.

~~~
navinsylvester
That is the subtle point i was trying to make. In most cases talented young
people are easily noticed and usually given more credit than due without
measuring the overall contribution to productivity.

Eventually most with the tag will mellow down with experience. But when that
switch slowly happens - many would hardly notice anything but a seasoned
bankable asset.

------
ideonexus
Two very different examples come immediately to my mind. These remind me of
the fox and hedgehog kinds of intellectual. The fox knows many clever things,
while the hedgehog does one thing extremely well.

The first was a 65-year-old DBA I had the honor of working with on Aviation
Logistics Systems for the Coast Guard. He was a brilliant architect who re-
engineered our database to accommodate any asset and any business rule the
organization could throw at us. He had been programming from the days of
typing out code on paper and then renting time on IBM mainframes to see it
run. He did one thing, database administration, but he was a genius at it. He
was a hedgehog.

The second is a 20-something full-stack developer I worked with for six
months. He built a laboratory information system that was visually dazzling.
It blew customers' minds. I found supporting the code was overwhelming. There
were dozens of frameworks at play with layer upon layer of abstraction. Making
even small changes to the business model would take me hours to implement. I
bowed out of the project, and watched him put in 80-hour work weeks developing
it for years. He eventually sold it for a good deal of money, but there was
definitely a tax on his health because of it. He was a fox who knew a lot of
different solutions and how to patch them together.

Both of these were brilliant developers with very different approaches. I know
foxes in their 40s who know how to balance work-life (I consider myself one),
but all the 60-plus developers I currently know are hedgehogs with a deep
institutional knowledge that makes them invaluable to their organizations.
That said, I think we will see foxes in their 60s in the future as full-stack
developers age.

~~~
Rooster61
> There were dozens of frameworks at play with layer upon layer of
> abstraction. Making even small changes to the business model would take me
> hours to implement.

Does that really make him a good software engineer though? Clearly a smart
fellow, but in my experience, code maintainability is absolutely crucial. A
system that isn't maintainable, no matter how clever at the time, will quickly
become old news if non-genius level engineers (like myself) can't get their
head around it.

------
saulrh
Universally 35+. Several in their late 40s, a couple 60+ (tenured professors
and the like). You know how books or movies that talk about martial arts
masters use phrases like "no wasted motion" and "elegant grace"? Yeah. Like
that. But with architectural design docs springing fully-formed from their
foreheads and data manipulations that reveal their meaning in a single line
when I'd have needed a page.

Edit: Oops, forgot one. Senior PhD student in my lab while I was in college.
Might've been 28 or 30 at that point?

------
oldmancoyote
I actually haven't met many being a scientific programmer in a science with
little need for programming. So, I guess I'm the most talented. I was at my
best in my 40's, but at 72 I'm still very good, but slow.

~~~
minipci1321
Care to tell what makes you slower, compared to your 40-ies? We need to
prepare ;-)

~~~
abraae
Not the OP but to me, as best as I can tell from some self-analyzing, as you
get older your brain just doesn't fizz and spark like it did way back when. It
works in a different way - more pattern recognition, less raw grunt. Could be
because of biochemistry, or maybe just that you don't have the blissful
ignorance of youth, you know there are limits, you don't tend to just hurl
yourself against the fences quite as readily.

Another factor might be that the industry has changed substantially, which
makes you feel slower by comparison. When I started out, there were few
libraries or open source. To do anything, you knuckled down and churned out
code, a lot of it. These days the first step in any greenfield project is a
lot of Googling, and your job is more about identifying products, libraries,
APIs and stitching them together. I personally find that a lot more
frustrating because of the context switching - hence feeling of slowness, less
time churning out your own code.

~~~
lbriner
I think this might describe what you are referring to:
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206155947.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206155947.htm)

I heard somebody say that as you age, you rely more on memory to infer the
correct decision whereas when you are young, memories are few and decisions
based either on gut feel or the current context.

I guess that means that older people are more likely to do something they have
already done because it is familiar and will _work_ rather than do something
that might be newer/better/faster but which would only be deduced by more
abstract analysis?

~~~
thanatropism
There's still a lot of nature vs. nurture to that. A lot more experience = a
lot more failures.

~~~
oldmancoyote
"A lot more experience = a lot more failures." YES. Your failures both form
you and inform you at least as much as your successes.

~~~
thanatropism
They also make you more pessimistic. Maybe rightly so.

~~~
oldmancoyote
I look at that differently. My favorite epigram goes like this:

Very few worthwhile projects are ever successful on the first attempt. Failure
is just another useful metric giving guidance on the re-formulation of the
problem and the solution. Failure has nothing what-so-ever to do with guilt.

For the longest time as a young man I did not understand this. I though
something was wrong with me because I failed so often.

------
scarejunba
When I met him he was 30. Very skilled engineer and he’s on one or two AWS
talks for “how we use AWS”. He was also a terrific manager to me but left
because he wanted to spend more time developing so he’s now an early employee
at a startup.

The second one was the CTO of a company we acquired. Truly the intellectual
superior of nearly every person I know. Mid 30s. Helped write a well-used
standard.

Funnily enough, while both were great at the leaps of logic often necessary to
build new exciting things, both were also remarkably well-disciplined in code.
People often tell me that writing good commit messages or variables, indenting
their code, writing tests get in the way of their expression or iteration.
These guys just did it in passing. I’ve watched them work and they didn’t
consciously do it. Like a Navy SEAL and trigger discipline. It wasn’t
exceptional. It was the default.

Oh and, the young chap who was 21 or so when I was a grad student who wrote
lots of cool utilities at uni. Once, in my insecurity, I remarked that I’d
love to work on stuff like that if I had the time (being a grad student). He
told me I should make time if I actually loved it that much. Graybeard wisdom
from a child. Well, it was good advice.

------
femto113
“Talent” I would say has been invariant with age. I’ve met very young (teens)
and people in their seventies who show obvious talent. It also seems to hold,
those young talents are still exceptional 20 years later. For knowledge and
skills (perhaps we could call that “wisdom”?) that seems roughly linear with
age, perhaps plateauing somewhat as skills learned earlier become obsolete.
Productivity is kind of another axis, I’ve known prolific and successful
developers who I think are of only middling talent, these almost always did
better while young. (For context I’m 49 now have been working in software
since my late teens.)

------
EnderMB
I've worked with a few, and they've been a mixed bunch.

One of them was one of the nicest guys I ever worked with, and his mind had a
real understanding for what we do. When he learned something, he learned it
well, and understood it deeply. A few weeks after being introduced to regular
expressions, he had learned them to the extent where he could implement
complex expressions, alongside knowing the differences between implementations
in C#, PHP, and JavaScript. He was also very helpful, and despite being
considered a junior-level dev was helping the more senior-level members of
staff all the time.

Sadly, he had his own demons. One day we were all called into a meeting and
were told he wouldn't be coming back. He had been battling drug issues that
had resurfaced due to the heavy amount of painkillers he was taking for past
injuries. Work had discovered that he hadn't done anything on a project he had
been working on for a month, and when challenged on it he quit. This was a
number of years ago, and by all accounts he's still without a job and lives
with his parents.

One other is smart, but in a different way. I met him when he was a contractor
at one of my old work places. At the time, he was brought in to do some Flash
work, and after a work night out he told us that he didn't enjoy programming,
so he made the decision a few years back to learn legacy tech. He had no
interest in learning the best/most popular languages, only the most lucrative,
because "you won't earn shit as a standard dev (in the UK)". I still talk to
him a few times a year, and it's a gamble that paid off very well for him. He
travels across the country and the continent working on things like
ActionScript for shop kiosk displays, enterprise-grade Salesforce builds, and
ColdFusion support and development. In terms of smarts, he's not the best
developer in the world, but you have to have something about you to decide to
go against the grain and back technology that many developers actively fight
against.

------
tluyben2
My definition of talented changed: it used to be very obviously smart people
that could solve ‘shit’ fast. But those (and I was one of them) suffer from a
lot of issues (the ones I met anyway; I am talking about having worked with
roughly 400 software engineers which had a few of these); the most annoying
one (for me at this moment being) that the throughput is very inconsistent.
These were 17-23.

Now it is people who consistently deliver high quality, well thought out
software. The speed matters far less to me (or my clients). These are over 40.

------
blueside
I can honestly say that the two most intelligent programmers I have ever met
are no longer programmers and not even in tech related jobs now. I try not to
think about this, it makes me wonder what they figured out that I haven't.

~~~
dve
Reading this comment just made me realize the same. The two best developers I
have worked with no longer write code.

------
Cthulhu_
Most were early and mid twenties; they were my colleague for at most a couple
of years before moving on to e.g. Google in Europe or SV startups (working
from Ireland until he could get a green card). Another one was iirc late
twenties / early 30's, great Scala developer - perhaps too good because his
work didn't really land at our customers because they couldn't find any
developers that could work with it. (that's more down to Scala than the guy
though).

But I don't actually know any developer above the age of 40. If they do
anything it's code challenges like Advent of Code, but they've long moved on
from software development to e.g. architecture, management, coaching, etc and
making more money through that - and giving off an air that they're much more
content and at peace with it - than they could with software development.

I'm in my early to mid 30's myself and I'm pondering what I'd like to do
beyond software development, I've had enough and ten years of making websites
without an opportunity to branch out wears on you.

~~~
moonlet
Hey! I’d actually say that’s a... reflection on your friend. I thought for a
couple hours about whether to reply to this comment, and I ultimately decided
that writing maintainable or readable code in any language is the engineer’s
primary responsibility. So if nobody could maintain this person’s code after
they were done with it, maybe they were truly brilliant, but not so good on
the “raise up the others who come after me” part of engineering :/

------
ashelmire
I’ve seen some kids on the internet doing crazy algorithms stuff. But I was
like that at that age too - at 16, 17, 18, I was able to do a lot. But I’m
much better now that I’ve hit 30. I don’t really do any algorithms anymore,
but my code is cleaner, I resolve tickets quickly and with robust, tested
solutions, and I can anticipate business needs and problems that relate to my
job way better than someone without professional experience.

There’s a lot of people like that - the best blogs are from devs in their late
30s or 40s. The answer is basically that older is almost always better.

------
agotterer
How about this 9 year old speaking at ReactNYC:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbiryVTIJ4Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbiryVTIJ4Q)

edit: removed gender

~~~
nv-vn
WOW. What blew me away was not his programming skills, but his ability to
explain. There are many levels to understanding, and you can tell that Revel
intuitively understands not just how to build things, but also how the code is
working on top of that. From the very beginning he speaks so confidently and
concisely that you can immediately tell he's a genius. Big contrast to many
other "child prodigies" that I've seen.

------
StavrosK
One of them is a friend of mine who is around 55 now, maybe 57. He's seen
enough shit that he knows how design scalable, maintainable and well-
documented software. He wrote this:

[https://github.com/SilentCircle/scpf](https://github.com/SilentCircle/scpf)

The other one is around 40, I think, and he's both one of the best business
people I've ever met, easily the best manager and best developer as well. I
have a suspicion that he never sleeps, as I've never seen him asleep.

------
jmcminis
This is kind of an odd question. It only indicates how old they were when you
were lucky enough to meet them. Presumably, that person has been gifted before
and would be gifted after as well, not just when they were XX years old.

I would be interested to know the trajectory these engineers had as they aged.
Were they average until they got some experience under their belt? Genius from
day one, but productivity improved? How did they develop over time and what
were the predictors of greatness?

------
cperciva
As a general rule: Old enough that I feel that it would be rude to ask their
age. Wikipedia entries for three of them indicate 41, 52, and 64, though.

~~~
tchaffee
Please don't treat old timers any differently than anyone else. If you're
comfortable asking someone in their 20s what their age is, you should figure
out what is making you hesitate for someone past a certain perceived age.

~~~
cperciva
I know what's making me hesitate: In my culture it's generally considered rude
to ask someone older than you what their age is. (And the larger the age
difference, the ruder it is.)

~~~
tchaffee
Cultural factors are important. I would just challenge you a little to
consider that some people who are older than you might not like this cultural
tradition. I don't know if there is a polite way to find out, but I personally
don't feel like an older person. Even my Mom doesn't feel like an older
person! Being treated like an older person when you still have that same young
enthusiastic person inside of you can feel like you are being excluded for
nothing more than how you look.

------
wccrawford
Mid 30s. I'm thinking of someone in particular for that who taught me a lot of
stuff that really improved my process and code cleanliness. At the time I felt
like I was really hot stuff because I was hired as a "junior programmer" but
was managing all the code across a few languages for an entire tech-based
company. He was hired after the company hired half a dozen other programmers
and he really helped all of us improve our skills in just a couple months. He
then quit because the company wasn't taking his advice, and went back to
freelancing. (Advice that 2 entire programming teams agreed on at that time.)

There was one programmer in his mid-20s that many co-workers thought was
amazing, but I thought he was full of himself and produced overly complicated
work that even he had trouble fixing and those around him found impossible.

Below that, I know of programmers who are very quick to learn things but just
don't have the raw experience to really take care of things on their own yet.

------
andrei_says_
May I recommend “The Talent Code”?

It’s an excellent book discussing the concept of “talent” in the context of
practice and quality attention.

The word talent implies something one is born with. Turns out that how good
one is at something has much more to do with the quality of the neuropathways
generated by specific practice habits.

~~~
Kaveren
Talent exists, and is very real. [0] Talent is immensely important, and I find
that there's a growing movement to dismiss it and pretend it's all about hard
work.

Most people can get pretty good at a particular task if they dedicate enough
time. But you're never, ever going to be as good as Magnus Carlsen, Terrence
Tao, Michael Phelps, Euler, or DaVinci just by hard work and a positive
mindset.

[0] [https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-
tal...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/)

~~~
pkd
You don't need talent to be successful. Not every chess player is as talented
as Carlsen but there are several thousand chess players making a living as
professionals. Using talent as a prerequisite to success in a field is just
dishonest.

~~~
sergiotapia
Put two people on equal effort paths, the talented one is going to come out
ahead. 100% of the time.

~~~
pkd
"equal effort" in your sentence is very important. Effort is rarely equal and
life is not a simulated situation like a race. Success is not a one-variable
equation that can be solved with "talent".

------
arandr0x
It's a bit hard to answer, because the most talented I know became more
talented as they aged (so I'm tempted to answer their current age which is 30s
or 40s because of my own age range) but they were definitely noticeably more
talented than their peers when young, too. They would have been decent hires
at 17 for those who were coding then -- not better than the best experienced
people, but decent, definitely leagues above other first year students.

Some of them weren't coding until 25 or so but in that case same applies --
they were noticeably very competent at 25, and better at 35 than they were at
25.

Obviously motivation, desire to stay in tech, specific technology stack, etc,
varies.

------
tehlike
He was probably mid thirties. I watchrd him grow as a rock solid engineer. He
consistently blogs, and owns a database startup among other things.

[http://ayende.com](http://ayende.com) is him. Have infinite respect for him.

------
pasbesoin
One very bright guy maybe still in his 30's.

Otherwise, 40's and 50's.

Not just experience. Problem solving, including creative thought.
Practicality. Reduction in B.S. -- although that can cut both ways, with age,
depending upon the person.

P.S. A lack of ego/defensiveness can also be very helpful. It becomes about
fixing the problem, not excessively defending one's turf and an unrealistic
reputation.

P.P.S. Younger people can have these things, and be quite excellent. Maybe a
bit more insecurity is still common -- whether overt or over-compensated for
in expression. I spent a lot of time in BigCorps; that may have influenced the
demographics of my environment and thus my observations.

------
pxeboot
I work with a 'rockstar' programmer in his mid 30s. This guy can hammer out
good code ridiculously fast and probably does close to half the total work on
our team of 8.

------
uhhhhhhh
Worst person I've worked with is >50\. Second worst was <25.

Best person I worked with was in their 20's, second best in their 40's.

I think it matters less about age and more about mentality.

------
sierdolij
17, ~25, ~30, ~40, ~45, ~65 and even ~70. I think it depends on the
personality property of curiosity to delve into the software-hardware stack
turtles of details all the way down and not see anything as a real barrier
that can't be overcome with effort.

There's something to be said for lots of experience shipping product under a
deadline, politely questioning technically-expensive features that wouldn't be
good for the user and managing stakeholders' expectations.

------
szajbus
About 10 years ago I attended a small local conference in Poland and met a guy
who came there with his ~10yo son. As it turned out, the father was only an
escort.

The kid was the most active person from the audience when it came to QA
sessions after the talks. He asked genuine and interesting questions and spoke
from his own experiences about building web apps and browser extensions.

I've never met anyone like him, even though I worked with some really good
engineers in their 20s and 30s.

------
r-s
Ive worked with 100s of developers, and 2 stand out. One was around 60 and the
other was early 20s.

The one who was around 60 would think through problems at a much deeper level
then the entire team. I remember one instance where most of the senior members
of the team had been trying to figure out a pretty complex problem and we had
little luck. He walked in, we explained the problem, then we went for lunch.
Once we got back to the office he submitted a PR a few minutes later,
essentially avoiding the problem all together. This guy knew everything from
low level computing, to the newest JS trends.

The second young guy was a front end specialist. I have yet to meet a
developer who could write code as quickly as this guy. He wrote an entire
front end in 2 days for a project I had budgeted a month for. 0 tests, but I
could not find a single bug. I taught him how to write some tests, and 24
hours later the entire thing had unit tests, integration tests, and he had
refactored some of the code so it would be easier to test. My jaw dropped. He
had no formal education, attended a boot camp, and in my opinion was more
valuable to the team then I was (at near 3x his salary and 15 years more
experience!).

------
danjayh
Late 30s up to late 60s for people who consistently do stuff right on the
first try regardless of complexity ( and I only say late 60s because everybody
over about 35 has a pension in our industryn so they all retire when they hit
their 60s). In aerospace there isn't as much age discrimination as on startup
culture, and we are blessed with a lot of these fantastic senior engineers.

------
fooddood
One of the most talented engineers I ever met was 24. He built a 3D engine in
JavaScript for fun as well as a raycaster for fun. He also enjoyed challenging
himself in all sorts of interesting ways like doing Advent of Code in C++.

~~~
pxx
What's weird about doing Advent of Code in C++? You'll find a sizable number
of the people on the leaderboard do it that way. I think it's partially due to
competition programming habits dying extremely hard.

Of course, Python is by far the most popular, but C++ isn't _that_ much more
verbose.

~~~
sgillen
it depends, I think some people do advent of code did it as sort of race every
day, in which case I think C++ would be a pretty big challenge IMO.

------
pimmen
I've met two that made my jaw drop. One was a guy I went to university with,
19 yo first time I met him, who was extremely good and had been running his
own web developing business as a side gig since he was 16 (for Swedish
readers, just to get a sense of how good he is, he made www.breakit.se in
2014, no idea if he's still maintaining it though or if they've switched to a
different stack). I haven't heard of anyone who knows who he is know in this
city who's also seen a better JS developer. However, he was a real pain to
work with. If you didn't work quickly enough for his taste he would tell you
to move away from the keyboard and he'd show you how it's done. He also did
not like compromising with other people in discussions and he liked to do
other people's tasks without telling them. Despite that, I recommended him
when my boss asked about him with the caveat that he should ask honest
questions about expectations on the work culture, specifically team work.
Turns out he insulted my boss and my company pretty quickly in the interview.
My boss told this guy about how we've worked hard to do continuous delivery
the way we do today and this guy laughed my boss in his face and basically
said "well, you might win over a lot of people who write software for the
government with that story of how you guys put on your big boy pants but I do
six deploys on a bad day". Apparently he instead went to a game studio and is
a better fit at that place.

The second dev who took my breath away was a man in his late 40s who had
consistently moved from companies as soon as they wanted to put him into
management. He loved to code and was very good at it, but for some reason
management wanted him to make room for younger hires (can anyone with more
experience explain why that would be the case? This man has 20+ years of
experience and loves to code, shouldn't he be more preferable to some kid?) so
he was able to leverage his contacts he picked up as a consultant to change
into high paying developer jobs. He was very understanding of how bad I was
when I started out as a developer and was my mentor for a long time and his
discipline still inspires me. It was an honor working for him, why people want
to make such a good developer into anything but a developer, I'll never know.

------
mettamage
I have a strong bias: the university crowd (haven't seen old programmers yet).

One guy who was about 24/25\. He came in already experienced in creating
extensions for clang and LLVM. He wanted to do a masters in cyber security. I
told him to get a job, but we became friends instead.

When I wrote my first if-statement for an operating system course, he finished
the entire program. It was unreal to see. Funnily enough I was quick enough to
read his code and to see where he'd be sub-optimal in his architecture.

~~~
ndnxhs
Why do these people even go to uni when its such a waste of time. I went to
uni for a year and learned absolutely nothing because it was all so incredibly
basic that its only useful if you don't know how to learn on your own.

~~~
tekkk
Some people use the university not only as an opportunity to learn but to
nurture friendships and connections that last for life. You are only young
once, why you have to hurry to jump into the rat race? Especially someone
whose identity is so tied with their ability to "be a good programmer" it
might be a great chance to digest new perspectives towards life. Also if the
bachelor level courses felt too easy you should probably haven take some
master's level stuff.

The most annoying type of people in CS studies I encountered were those who
thought they "knew it all" yet in fact, in the large scale, they knew very
little. And whatever knowledge they had they often communicated poorly,
perhaps disparaging others for not knowing what they did.

~~~
ndnxhs
I wasn't aware that there was any way to skip the basic stuff.

------
fluffycat
Most of them >30 years old. Some were a bit younger, I have seen some raw
talent at earlier ages, but their usefulness were severely limited because of
lack of experience.

------
meddlepal
Late 30s through mid 50s.

They've all had diverse experience, were great mentors for younger engineers,
very adaptable, and mostly dependable... especially during crisis moments.

------
Intermernet
First is an early 30s guy who currently works on search and NLP (amongst other
things) and has a PhD in mathematics. He optimizes things for fun, and does it
with the same flair and ease a musical virtuoso would do variations on
chopsticks.

Second is a mostly retired RPG / CL programmer in his 60s who occasionally
contracts to IBM i shops and can make that platform sing like a supercomputer
on steroids.

Both are inspiring in different ways.

------
purplezooey
At any American company if you are past a certain age you are perceived as
expensive and slowly ushered out, regardless of talent.

------
matthewhall
The guy is ~35 in the Air Force Research Lab. My group would work on a project
for days before he'd come in and show us a better way. The key though was that
he'd work us through the problem and the rationale behind his decision.
Probably the best programmer and one of the most talented teachers I've ever
worked with.

------
lmm
Early '20s. By late '20s most programmers (and I include myself in that) seem
to have accumulated a bunch of intuition that's out of date, so that even
though they might have a deeper skillset than their younger colleagues, they
apply those skills in the wrong places and optimize for the wrong things.

~~~
dasil003
LOL, there’s more to programming than gluing together npm libs.

------
acadien
Age has nothing to do with talent. Older devs tend to have more experience, go
figure.

------
SwellJoe
One was mid-50s, and nearing an early retirement. He'd worked in a dozen or
more languages, was working mostly in Python and C (for performance-critical
Python extensions) when I worked with him. He'd been significantly involved in
the development of the IBM Oberon compiler and environment in the past, as
well as done something with OS/2, though I don't know the specifics. Very
broad experience, though, including a lot of low-level stuff. He was treated
uniquely in the company at the time. He was the only person with an office by
himself, he skipped most meetings, and was generally a bit quiet and
introverted. He liked to come in, do his work, and go home. He didn't stay
late, didn't work weekends, didn't do crunch-time even if everyone else was
(because his part of the project was already done, on schedule), didn't go out
for drinks after work, usually, though he would go out for lunch with
everyone. He was a super nice guy, and generous with his knowledge, he just
wasn't into being very social. He wanted to go home, be with his family, and
work on his hobbies (some involved code, others were gaming and video
production and 3D modeling...so lots of tech hobbies).

The other I met when he was in his mid-20s, he's in his mid-40s now, and I
still work with him. He was extremely talented and productive then, and
remains so today. He maintains roughly a million lines of code that he mostly
wrote by himself (mostly while working an unrelated full-time job). It's a
world unto itself (for better or worse, it looks nothing like any other
project you'd find in the same language, and his coding style hasn't changed
notably in at least a decade), but he delivers new features in an absurdly
short time. He's a completely different sort of developer than the previous
one I mentioned; the first was always eager to try new things. The latter has
built up a system that works for him, and rarely changes...he just keeps
churning out code every year at an alarming rate, because he knows the system
inside and out. Bugs evaporate in seconds sometimes, once identified and
reproduced.

In the former case, I was impressed with the breadth of his knowledge and his
ability to drop in on a project and figure it out extraordinarily quickly, and
his ability to zero in on what needed to be solved _today_ and what would fall
out naturally and easily once the core problems were solved. While in the
latter case, I've always been impressed by how quickly he can deliver pretty
much anything the project needs. He's written everything from the ground up
(including things most people would pull in via libraries)...so, no element of
the codebase is a mystery to him. He's looked at the same codebase nearly
every day for two decades and he can sit down and be productive immediately.

~~~
tilolebo
Guru working alone on a project: looks pretty much like a silo to me.

------
luord
Usually in their thirties, although I've met a few quite talented ones (just
maybe lacking in experience) in their twenties.

So the usual I guess; I haven't met whiz kids nor luminaries, sadly.

------
danmaz74
The only one I met who really stood out was 34 at the time. He was a very
hands on cto at a small company.

------
segmondy
Mostly +10 yrs older than me. But lately, I've been meeting some my age and
about +10 yrs younger.

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cerberusss
What is this question trying to find out? A connection between talent and age?

------
quickthrower2
30 but that’s mostly because most as engineers I’ve met are late 20 early 30s

------
stefanmichael
the majority 40+, one around 38 one in early 30s

------
FahadUddin92
Know someone who is 47. He is super awesome.

------
wmf
Old, like 50-60.

------
gamma-male
40+

He is incredible. Rigorous. He wrote a book.

------
glandium
One year-old older every year.

------
startupflix
17+

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Older than me- always.

------
m23khan
All the talented devs I have seen:

\- They had no kids

Or with 1-2 kids:

\- They were old (45+) and had worked as Developer for so long that they
became very good at it.

ONLY 1 guy with 2 kids in mid-30s I know is pretty good.

tl;dr - perhaps there is a co-relation between kids and brain cells of a
Software Developer.

..I have kids myself...

------
AnthonBerg
Early 40s, so far.

------
srikanthkalin
i met with 20 years old software enginer

------
jimjimjim
53, 41, and 27

------
seanplusplus
this dude at pixar named lars.

------
miguelrochefort
35

------
toomuchtodo
40+

------
ams6110
40+

------
sonnyblarney
During the .com I was quite young, my friends were all doing nascent
e-commerce in SF, I was doing Telecom stuff in the Valley.

My friends were all 'architects', while I was maybe one of only a couple of
people out of 100 Engs. who were under 30!

I could walk to any cubicle and 'learn for days' from whoever was there about
so many subjects. Such specialization that nobody knew precisely what their
cubicle neighbours were doing!

You want to know what 'full stack' really means? We did proprietary ASICS,
hardware, firmware, control plane software, networking control UI and servers!
From the silicon all the way up!

The team was mostly 35-45 and they were amazing, I'll never work with people
like that again.

I've run into a fair number of 'young geniuses' and astonishingly talented
young folk ... but not the kind I would trust a major project to.

That said, they were a little bit more 'set in their ways'. It was a time when
people 'went deep' as opposed to 'wide' generally. Very high degrees of
specialization, typically only one professional grade language.

------
lincpa
I think that the ability to measure a person is: "innovation and execution
ability" to solve problems. age is not a problem.

I am an ICD (International Classification of Diseases) coder.

Before I was 30, I wrote some foxpro programs, and 1~2K lines VB and C#
programs.

After the age of 30, I started using clojure, core.logic (miniKanren) and R,
fusion financial analysis, artificial intelligence, statistical knowledge,to
write a formal project in my spare time, the financial analysis expert
system([https://github.com/linpengcheng/fa](https://github.com/linpengcheng/fa)),
and therefore, based on finance and management, created a software engineering
methodology ---- Pure function pipeline data flow
([https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow)).

------
_robbywashere
I met a 12-year-old kid the other day that can write React and Redux apps like
nobodies business! He's currently CTO at a FAANG that I won't mention here
(this is a throwaway account btw)

