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Can Older Software Developers Still Learn New Tricks?
An anonymous reader writes "There's a persistent bias against older programmers in the software development industry, but do the claims against older developers' hold up? A new paper looks at reputation on StackOverflow, and finds that reputation grows as developers get older. Older developers know about a wider variety of technologies. All ages seem to be equally knowledgeable about most recent programming technologies. Two exceptions: older developers have the edge when it comes to iOS and Windows Phone."
If your old dog can't learn any new tricks, the chances are he couldn't learn any tricks when he was young as well.
Yeah, this old fart knows Cobol, Assembly, C, C++, Java, a little C# and several other languages. I enjoy when you younger guys come to me for help because you can't read a log file, resolve a memory leak, write a test plan up, or optimize your SQL. :)
It's one of the benefits of experience that you know what to skip... although it's not always the same things for everybody.
There is also a strong correlation between interest and hobbies - if they are doing techie things for fun, they will usually be in the wizard category.
I can't really disagree here, but I wouldn't say that the correlation be restricted to what is considered a 'tech hobby'.
I have known a number of men in their upper years that I would classify in the 'wizard' category, yet their hobbies included things like fly fishing, baseball statistics, flying small planes, etc. I would really consider any of these a 'tech hobby', but I would consider them hobbies that require a great deal of technical aptitude to also be a wizard in.
Keeping the mind sharp is the key. If you do that by observing local caddis fly species, tying your own imitations, nailing the presentation to the fish (including time of day, weather conditions, season, physical stealth), and ultimately landing a 22 inch trout on 7x tippet, I imagine that keeps you just as sharp in the day job than simply doing more day job like things in your free time.
Hobbies are meant to be hobbies for a reason. If you are an aspiring musician gigging at the local clubs to make your cash and you then spend your free time doing more of the same, but "just for fun", your musical career is probably not going to take you where you'd like it to.
Completely detaching from concepts related to your occupation/career during your "me time" is absolutely essential to having a long enough career to ever become one of those "wizards". If you're a programmer, and you spend your free time programming for fun, you'll certainly become a solid developer, but there are very few people who love code enough to be able to sustain that for 20 or more years.
TL;DR - going fishing is better than having a 'tech hobby'.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
old people have higher Health Care and don't like pulling 80+ weeks.
Or even 40+ weeks. And don't need to because they tend to do their work more efficiently as opposed to galloping odf enthusiastically in all directions. Ultimately producing stronger, more maintainable code. By way of substantiation, note that the typical European worker at ~37 hours/week is typically as productive as an American or Asian worker supposedly putting in way more hours. The equalizer is, Europeans tend to plan better and waste less time.
BTW, note that being an older programmer does not obviate the possibility of having a young lover. Far from it. In work or love it's about keeping your stamina up: take care of your eyes and your body. Treasure your enthusiasm for life. Keep your mind active and never stop learning. The rest just falls into place.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
amen. The thing with old guys is that we've seen the fads come and go - did you jump to learn Silverlight, Linq2SQL, etc? Yes, well, fool you. The old dogs take their time to see if a tech is actually any good and worthwhile before going crazy for it - unlike a lot of younger guys who seem to think that if they haven't completed a project they can move to a different tech and then fail to complete that too, but without anyone noticing!
Its the same with a lot of stuff- .net moves so quickly that no-one really became a true expert in it, as soon as you learned one tech, it was scrapped and a different one with the same name and different version came along - ho hum. The old guys remember when you made things properly first time (or, if a MS dev, waited for version 3 before taking notice of it)
I'm not so sure about the contacts. I have recruiters ask if I know people who are looking for jobs, and to be honest, I never do. The ones I know out of work I also know aren't a fit (hardware guy for a software job, etc). Plus lets face it, I'm a techie, not a social butterfly, I don't keep up the contacts with all my past coworkers.