

Pervasive myths about older software developers - cpr
http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/pervasive-myths-older-software-developers/
A topic near and dear to my heart. ;-)
======
edw519
Another "I have witnessed X" so "Y must be true" post.

I've been programming commercially for 32 years and in all that time, I have
found very little correlation between age and ability to deliver quality
software.

I have worked with younger, inexperienced, and uneducated programmers who were
willing to learn, with minds like sponges and who were a pleasure to work
with. They often found or thought of things the rest of us overlooked.

I have worked with younger, inexperienced, and well educated programmers who
thought they knew better and were obstacles to progress.

I have worked with older programmers with the same one year's experience 22
times. Oy.

I have worked with older programmers with excellent domain knowledge and
limited technical range. Their personality and willingness to succeed were
often the key to progress.

I have worked with older programmers with excellent technical range and
limited domain knowledge. Sometimes it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks,
but when you can, results can be golden.

I have worked with brilliant older programmers with extensive experience and
open minds. The best of all worlds.

(By the way, I have also worked with programmers of many ethnicities, female,
handicapped, gay, Republican, religious, even left-handed, and have found
little or no correlation between their "description" and their "performance".
One of the beauties of programming is that the easiest way to evaluate your
performance is through your work itself and not much else.)

~~~
aaronblohowiak
I was right there with you until you mentioned southpaws. I really have little
tolerance for that sort of degenerate character. ;)

I think that a persistant dedication to improvement is the elusive common
trait among "successful" people and projects.

I agree with you that "code talks," but want to caution people who would be
demure that tooting your own horn when you have victories can get you more
pull with management when you have proposals of your own -- i've known too
many programmers far better than I be ignored by mgmt because they were the
"quiet type." Yes, the is a mgmt failure and I have endeavored to proactively
"pull out" the opinions of such people on the teams where I have influence,
but a light doesn't do as much good when it is under a bushel.

------
kabdib
I'm about to turn 50.

I've had a /great/ last ten years. I'm not sure what the next decade is going
to be like, but keeping fit and keeping up with industry stuff that matters
are high on my list.

I've seen many older developers "die" by

\- Getting into management (and not keeping up technically)

\- Becoming complacent and not learning new things on a continual basis

\- Getting stuck doing the same thing for years

I don't mean you should be a butterfly -- nobody likes working with someone
who's only spent three months on any project and to whom everything new and
flaky is "oooh, shiny!" -- but I've seen too many people just get stuck and
seem not to care.

My father in law retired as a C programmer when he was 75. I've seen people
considering starting a start-up at 60. If you take care of yourself and your
industry smarts, I don't see why this couldn't be you, too.

~~~
evo_9
Certainly it's about staying relevant no-matter where you are at in your
career age-wise.

Unfortunately though I think older developers face more scrutiny as far as
their skills go. It's funny but being more fit/healthy does take the edge of
of this 'problem' to some degree, but nothing cures it better than thorough
technical knowledge and a solid work history of 15-20+ years.

------
Isamu
Old developer here. Nice to affirm that these are "myths" in the sense that
they are often not true, but given a random old guy these may be quite
accurate. These are observations that people have made of real individuals
that do not generalize to the whole group.

> Myth: Older software developers are more jaded and cynical and therefore,
> less desirable in the workplace than younger ones. Younger developers are
> more enthusiastic than older ones.

I would have to say I have been both growing in enthusiasm and getting more
jaded. The getting jaded part means you no longer want to hurl yourself at
something that experience tells you is doomed from the start, but the
enthusiasm means maybe this new twist will make it work.

One of the great powers of youth is ignorance - the kind of ignorance that
enables you to take on projects that are too big and require you to push
beyond your original capabilities until you conquer. This ignorance is the
source of tales that start: "if I had known what I was getting into...."

~~~
tjr
When I was about 14 years younger, I embarked on a project that, in
retrospect, was way more than I could handle, but I was, as you suggest, too
ignorant to realize it.

It took me a long time. Years of part-time effort. But I finally rolled out
the first release. I learned a whole lot along the way, and it felt awesome to
bring the project to some level of completion.

I'm probably too experienced now to be fooled into starting a project that I
know is way more than I could handle, but maybe I should do some of those
projects anyway.

------
silverbax88
The one point of contention I have with the article is about older programmers
'thinking more slowly'. This is again reiterated in the comments below the
article. This is not true, we actually learn faster as we get older as long as
we stay mentally active. In other words, we 'learn how to learn'. There are
things that I can grasp now so easily that eluded me when I was 20. If you
can't think faster and learn easier when you are 40 than when you were 20, you
aren't exercising your mind enough.

There's a reason why the best lawyers are NOT those right out of law school as
a general rule.

~~~
ohyes
This is a very good point. 'Thinking more slowly' isn't a problem in any other
field.

I think that in software development, a lot of the time, 'thinking more
slowly' with age is actually thinking more carefully. You have more
experience, therefore you have a larger knowledge base; so of course it takes
longer to query. It also means that you get better answers, rather than the
first answer that pops into your head. At 26, for me to get the same type of
results, I imagine that I might have to do some research.

Do you have any examples of what you do to stay mentally active? It also seems
important to keep physically active (from my experience with older guys, the
ones who are thinking best are typically in the best physical condition).

~~~
silverbax88
I think perhaps the best way to answer how to stay mentally active with the
question, posed to me, that got it through my own head.

Start by asking yourself this question:

Why do you think that time seems to speed up as we get older?

Now stop, and really think about that question. Don't skip ahead. Think of
some possible reasons. It's a phenomenon that we all experience. What's the
cause?

When we are preschool age, time seems to last forever. As we get older, the
years start rolling by more quickly and I've been told by more than one person
in their 70's that it never slows down, it only speeds up.

Why?

The answer is actually that we've 'been there, done that'.

When we are young, EVERYTHING is new. When we are experiencing something new,
time seems to slow down, especially because we are enjoying it and taking in
so much.

As we get older, our brains start to filter out what we have seen before. You
know that feeling when you drive home and don't remember driving home or
anything along the way? Boom. There you go. Your brain just ignored the trip.

Have you ever gone on a three day trip to some new place and felt like your
were gone for two months? It's only three days, right?

Well, what you effectively do when you experience new things, you slow things
down again. Your mind stays active, and here's the kicker...your brain
actually figures out better, more efficient ways to move information around
the synapses in your grey matter. No, that's not 'mumbo jumbo'. The reverse is
also true, which is why once someone experiences depression, they are always
susceptible to it. The brain learns the path to certain behavior.

This is why confidence mantras work. Want to make your mind more powerful
every year from here on?

Try new things.

~~~
georgieporgie
> You know that feeling when you drive home and don't remember driving home or
> > anything along the way? Boom. There you go. Your brain just ignored the
> trip.

That's your brain entering a sleep state, and it's dangerous. Counter this by
constantly sweeping your eyes across the road to stay alert.

I like everything else you wrote, but as a driver, motorcyclist, bicyclist,
and pedestrian, I hate to think that people would view "no memory of my
commute" as "my brain optimized it!"

~~~
pnathan
That's not a sleep state. That is a form of disassociation.

~~~
georgieporgie
I think you mean dissociation. I've seen studies indicating that brain
activity in this state is equivalent to sleeping. Regardless, being behind the
wheel in this state is dangerous.

------
ahi
From anecdotal evidence I will put forward another theory. Because CS and
programming are relatively new and rapidly growing fields a large number of
programmers in the early years were random office workers who could type,
press ganged into development duties. Education started to catch up in the 80s
and 90s so young kids with a real grounding in fundamentals were coming into
organizations staffed with older developers who didn't have a clue. On
average, older developers were incompetent, not because they were older, but
because they were less likely to a) have any formal education in what they
were doing and b) a particular interest in what they were doing besides the
paycheck.

~~~
russell
I can't comment about middle America banking, but this was definitely NOT the
case in Silicon Valley. People who became programmers were extremely bright
and a very diverse lot. A significant number were accomplished musicians. A
lot from mathematics and engineering. I even worked with a guy who dropped out
of physics because programming was personally more rewarding than being yet
another post-doc at Fermi Lab. My associates didnt learn CS, they invented it.
(OK a bit of hyperbole there, but that was what the times were like.)

~~~
ahi
That's kind of my point. During that era, if you knew what you were doing you
were really impressive, not just another coder at BigCorp.

------
NxguiGui
I am at 35. Just last year i managed to find balance and value in life. I
don't care anymore about "quick success" or coolness. I care about value. Age
discrimination is a niche for some businesses to minimize expenses in a short
run, but small, dedicated and experienced teams can bring so much profit and
value. When you are young you operate on blind fate, you don't have proven
methodology to attack "The problem", you don't know when to stop and make
turn, simply put you are giant ball of energy without direction.

You need supervising on regular basis :)))

And if you didn't hear - life begins at 40.

If you are healthy and smart you can push your energy more effectively and
find satisfaction in so many things.

------
tungwaiyip
This is some highlight from the book "The Secret Life of the Grown Up Brain"
by Barbara Strauch

Neuroscientists found that:

* Longitudinal studies shows cognitive skills peak at middle age.

* Older people are happier. As one ages, they become calmer, more positive, and being able to regular them emotion better.

* The amount of white matter in the brain, myelin, continue to increase well into middle age. (i.e. better brain function)

* Older people are using both hemispheres of the brain to handle complex task, a phenomenon known as bilateralization. This is linked to higher cognitive ability.

[http://tungwaiyip.info/blog/2010/10/29/secret_life_of_the_gr...](http://tungwaiyip.info/blog/2010/10/29/secret_life_of_the_grown_up_brain)

------
codypo
If you accept the article's theses that older developers are a big asset AND
that they're at a disadvantage in the marketplace due to discrimination,
there's an opportunity here. Rather than try to woo and retain 30 hotshot
developers in their 20s, it'd be easier to hire 18 or 20 developers in their
40s. The turnover would certainly be lower, the output should be equal (or
greater?), and there'd be less need for extensive management oversight.

Anybody know of a company that's tried that approach? If none exist, that
leads me to think that either we're onto something interesting or that this
approach simply doesn't work.

~~~
blacksmythe

      >> it'd be easier to hire 18 or 20 developers in their 40s. 
    

Great developers in their 40s have a wide range of contacts from their years
of working, and rarely if ever look for jobs on job boards. Finding great
developers in their 40s, and prying them out of their present jobs, is a non-
trivial task. (One I am actually in the process of this week).

------
dandrews
I'm 58, doing arcane mainframe systems stuff, mostly in my sleep. Pays well
and got the kids through college, but I've been doing it for a long time.

The days are past when I could routinely wrap the clock on an interesting
problem. If I did that now I'd be a zombie for a couple of days. Oh well:
there aren't all that many interesting problems that come along in the day job
anyway, so I make up interesting ways to solve the mundane problems. I wrote
some REXX code not so long ago that builds and traverses trees to process an
obscure many-to-many relationship in our database schema. One of my comments
said that I was trying to see "how much of TAOCP I can remember".

If anybody ever looks at that code I'll bet a buck they won't know what TAOCP
means.

None of the people at work my age know what HN is, and only one has ever even
heard of Slashdot. Hell, I run the only Linux desktop in the whole enterprise
- everybody else is plain vanilla MS-Windows. The kids who run the MS-Windows
server farm, 20-somethings, have their own set of blinders on and if studying
something doesn't lead to a Cisco or Microsoft certificate they won't bother
with it. Young mercenaries, harumph. One of them admits to having heard about
tomshardware so there may be some hope for him.

Sigh... nobody to talk to. I checked out a hackerspace in my area, but the
kids there (don't mean that to sound pejorative, but I _do_ have 30 years on
them) were doing odd web hacks and Makerbot tricks and drinking cheap beer,
none of which I found very interesting.

So I take out my creative frustrations at home, hacking at my personal
machines. My darling this past year has been Clojure, and going to the Conj
back October was an exciting thing. I kept up pretty well and discovered I
wasn't _quite_ the oldest guy there, so I haven't gone completely stale.

Have to pay a bit more attention to my body than I used to; I was immortal
when I was 24, but now I've got those wrists and my liver to take care of.

(Man, they can't get those telomere therapies going fast enough.)

------
Kilimanjaro
It has nothing to do with age, it is just a spark, I still have it in my eyes,
burning as bright and hot as when it all started for me twenty years ago.

------
ubermajestix
I'm a "young gun" (26) without a formal degree in CS. I believe the number of
graduates in CS dropping isn't affecting finding talented people. The talented
people aren't taking CS and are not even graduating or going to college.

I graduated with a degree in mathematical economics from a liberal arts school
and took some CS (Java and C++) along the way, but ended up not pursuing a
degree because I could tell the technology being taught was outdated and
largely irrelevant. I taught myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails mostly through
reading books and blogs while trying to solve a problem for a client I was
providing desktop support.

A friend's consulting shop recently hired their 20 year old intern b/c he is a
great hacker, and he, in turn, dropped out of a CS program largely recognized
as "very good" b/c it was he thought they were basically teaching "solved
problems."

The point here is that a good hacker comes at any age, and your technical
ability and attitude mater regardless.

I love working with the older guys b/c they have failed, a lot, and can steer
me in the right direction and offer wisdom whereas I bring enthusiasm and an
open mind.

------
d0m
I totally agree with most points.. it's really more of a mentality thing than
an age thing. The only part I don't totally agree is the commitment part. It's
hard to deny that you have much more free time at 20 years old than at 40. I
mean, I'm ~25 and I feel I don't have enough time to do and learn everything I
want.. I can't imagine that I'll have any more time with children.

~~~
ojbyrne
Not everyone in their 40s have children. And some of those who do have seen
them off to college.

------
KedarMhaswade
What we need (to really prove the point of article) is a _number of_
successful software startups where average age is say 38. How many of us (I am
turning 40 soon) dare cross the Paul Graham Limit (23-38) on higher side?
Looking at the cream of younger software craftsmen (e.g. @github) I feel many
older programmers (forget outliers, please) have a mountain to climb.

~~~
Gibbon
Outside the echo chamber of Silicon Valley and the web, the average age of a
startup founder IS 38.

------
Meiscooldude
I started programming when I was 14. I'm now 19 and have had the opportunity
to work with several other programmers from a very wide age range.

As a young programmer, anyone who has been programming for 10+ years is an
ABSOLUTELY necessary resource. Us younger software engineers have a lot to
benefit from their experience, and the quicker we realize this the better.

Personally, I haven't noticed any difference in cognitive ability or agility
between programmers I've worked with in their early 20's vs 40's. And
typically, those who have that extra experience seem to almost always build
more reliable and extensible solutions.

I really hate to say it (being as I am 19), I would hire my friend Virgil
(who's in his 60's) along with anyone with over 10+ years of experience before
I would myself or anyone fresh out of college.

~~~
Meiscooldude
And I disagree with the "Thinks more slowly" idea. Its just absurd. Really, I
think most people in this industry would agree, its a lot more like "Thinks
about a lot more".

------
b_emery
My random assortment of thoughts (subject to revision):

Myths are just that. Some, but not much basis in reality. My experience based
suspicion is that skills are weakly correlated with age, but more dependent on
total focused-hrs spent.

A key realization for me was that the benefits of 'deeply focused hours spent'
are not linear. While older programmers have more chance of achieving level X
skills, the highly focused and motivated 16 year old can do great work.
Greatness is a function of getting to the edge and pushing it. Age is becoming
less relevant, meaning that great work can be done regardless of age (I
hope!).

------
pnathan
In my highly limited experience, subjectively, one of the key differentiators
is being okay with change, and being ready to go into the unknown: the unknown
language, the unknown tool, the unknown unknown.

------
StrawberryFrog
Inspiring but ... he's trying to refute anecdote with more anecdotes, which
can't really go past the point of pointing out that we really don't know what
the true situation is. Some data would be more informative. However,
individuals are not averages, so these generalisations aren't that useful even
when they have data.

------
PaulHoule
Personally, I've grown a lot as a software developer because of my experience
with project failures. I had one that turned my life upside down, but that
helped me gain the attribute of fearlessness.

I've seen the worst that can happen, and that's given me both courage and
maturity.

------
jhrobert
I'm 45. I don't feel as efficient as when I was 25. But I still really enjoy
programming.

Most moderately (in)competent developers stop programming in their mid 30 if
not earlier, this is a blessing.

Without passion nothing great can be done in this world -- Hegel

------
bayareaguy

      There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old, and
      therefore good." And one says, "This is new, and therefore
      better."
    
      -- John Brunner, "The Shockwave Rider"

------
JoeAltmaier
Old guys also rant about how being old is not actually a disadvantage.

~~~
Isamu
Downvoted? As an old guy it's the first thing I thought when I read the
article.

~~~
praptak
It is an uninsightful thought at best and an ad personam argument at worst.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Lets look to the article itself for 'uninsightful'?

'5 Pervasive myths' indeed - the article actually supports all five, and all
five are in fact true.

    
    
      - old guy

~~~
klbarry
I think he was saying the downvoted guy's comment is uninsightful.

------
nika
One thing that I think hasn't been recognized by popular engineering culture
is that the guys who started programming in the 1970s had a lot less to work
with, and had a harder time. They often worked in assembly, and a soldering
iron was a legitimate debugging tool.

Those who started programming in the 1980s had compilers but languages were
something you went out and bought, and they were sold like enterprise
software, expensive, slow to be updated and not sophisticated.

Those who started programming in the 1990s came of age when a major revolution
was being effected by Java. But you still had to build a lot of
infrastructure, and engineering involved a large amount of tedium.

The last decade has seen a huge advancement in the quality of the tools, and
thus the barrier for entry for programmers is a lot lower.

I even remember meeting one young gun who was proud of the fact that he didn't
have a computer at home because this was a job, why would he do it at home?

this is the opposite of the hacker mentality. In the 1970s you had to be a
rare breed of hacker, and by the 1990s mainstream hackers could get into the
business.

Now people who never wrote a program before entering college are graduating
with CS degrees. So it is not only that they don't have a lot of real world
work experience, they often haven't been programming at all for more than 4
years.

This is a huge shift in demographics and attitudes. I'm sure many of them are
very intelligent and genuine hackers... but they are a very different culture.

~~~
bootload
_"... Those who started programming in the 1990s came of age when a major
revolution was being effected by Java. ..."_

Java revolutionary?

C was revolutionary. It allowed hardware independence compared to assembler.
BASIC was revolutionary because it made programming a computer easy enough for
kids. Perl was revolutionary to hack the web, as is PHP. TMTOWTDI. But the
true revolutionary language is still probably Lisp. Python, Ruby, Javascript
are still evolving in a Lispy sort of direction.

~~~
chromatic
_Java revolutionary?_

It dragged C++ programmers halfway to Lisp, in the sense that hardware
abstraction through a VM and automatic GC gradually became acceptable.

~~~
bootload
_"... It dragged C++ programmers halfway to Lisp, in the sense that hardware
abstraction through a VM and automatic GC gradually became acceptable. ..."_

that's funny in a bad sort of way, funny but true.

------
nika
The thing is, when you're older, there's really no way to reach the younger
generation. They aren't listening to you because you're older, for the most
part, and they've been listening to their "out of touch" parents their whole
lives. They won't understand until their your age, and then they'll have to
deal with another younger generation.

This isn't a criticism of anyone, just my obeservation about why there is a
gap.

It is a shame too, because youth has the energy and age has the wisdom, and if
the two could be combined, companies would benefit.

~~~
ohyes
Isn't this kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy type situation.

Older workers aren't relevant because the younger generation won't listen to
them.

The younger generation won't listen to older workers because older workers
aren't relevant.

I work with two older guys and its great. They've got all of the domain
knowledge and I can just bounce ideas off of them. They can tell me 'we don't
really need that', 'that won't work because xyz' or 'we already tried that and
it didn't work because xyz'. It has saved me a ton of pain multiple times.

The big deal is the domain knowledge however. Most companies just aren't
willing to pay enough to keep domain expert software engineers around.

