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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."
Older developers are always one of two things. They are invaluable wizards who have tons of experience, adaptability and know all the new technologies, or they are completely burnt out and useless. There is almost no middle ground. 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. If they have just been doing the same old job for decades, and do few tech projects for fun, they will be burnt out.
They can command higher incomes based on their experience. They are harder to exploit, again because of their experience. Their health insurance costs more (more a product of poorly managed health care policies that are often beyond the employers control).
Any other excuse for not hiring them is a smokescreen, or worse, an attempt to stigmatize them to drive down the price that their experience can command.
That depends on the individual. I've known people in their 20s who were already set in their ways, and people in their 70s who were still open to new ideas. It's got nothing to do with age as such - it's entirely a state of mind. If you keep using your brain to learn new things, there's no reason you shouldn't be as capable of it at 80 as you were at 18 really.
I'm 55 and i'm studying science at university. I'm having less difficulty than some of my 20-something uni mates. I taught myself PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a few years ago, so i could work as a web developer for a while. I taught myself Java in the uni break last year so i could play with developing Android apps.
If you use it, you don't lose it!
I know 20 years old guys who can learn nothing new, like lazy teenagers. The question is biased. Of course, there is a biological neural decay with age, but like any other muscle, the brain need exercise, and that don't depends on age but on attitude about life. If you like and enjoy to learn new things, you will enjoy that the whole life, that's a fact.
I fall into the burn out catagory - I guess.
I spent over a decade working on applications and OSes. Then to keep up with tech, I would go home and program some more - and I was ruthless about trying to incorprate any new tech into my job so that I could have paid experience on my resume. I was working what comes to 80 - 100 hours a week programming.
I can't stand to program - let alone for fun, now.
I'll do it to solve a problem and even enjoy it - the solving the problem. But to program for the sake of programming? NFW.
I'm pushing 50, btw.
Of course, I'd LOVE to do something else, but trying to move out of development or anything IT is proving to be difficult for many reasons. One of them is that people insist on pidgeonholing you.
The problem is that programming was a rapidly changing field up until a few decades ago.
It simply wasn't possible to be a good programmer (by today's standards) in the 1970's. You could be a good programmer for the time. Many of those people have kept current with new design methodologies and many haven't. The ones that haven't kept up, continue to think of themselves as badass programmers who know everything, when in reality the world has just passed them by.
It is not that old people are bad programmers. It is that people who learned how to program before the field of programming really matured tended to have "stone age" tools and didn't always keep up to date. As time passes, the "old programmers" are changing. I am 33. People considered "old" are not even that much older than me. They had a much different experience learning to program. They didn't learn to program in "the wild west" like some of the really old programmers. Many received formal training at universities where they learned a lot of the theory of computing. They also benefited for learning in a time when more was known about how to program in a way that minimizes mistakes and increases scalability, maintainability, etc.
A faculty advisor mine really loved his work. He never retired, worked until he died at age 93.
His university tried to force him into retirement, cut his lab space and other wise tried to hassle him. He was 70 at the time.
In his early 70's he published some work on electrospray mass spectroscopy (ESMS) which was applicable to the analysis of proteins.
ESMS led directly the development of protease inhibitors and was a key part of the founding of the science of Protenomics.
That led to his being awarded a share in a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002. He was 85 and by then had moved on to another university with less discriminatory attitudes towards older faculty.
Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time
This is a non-sequitur. Even if it is true that every single programmer becomes better with age, this doesn't mean older programmers are better than young programmers. Younger programmers can (and actually do) get better faster, because they are educated in a time with better tools and methodologies. The bar is higher now than it was before.
There were some really smart mathematicians back in ancient greece, like euclid. Now we teach highschool kids what it took Euclid to figure out over the course of his entire life. Is an average high school kid a batter mathematician than Euclid? No not really, but that's only because we put everything into historical perspective. An average college kid can do calculus, which was invented 2000 years after Euclid died, and in that sense an average college kid is better at "doing math" (not necessarily discovering math) than Euclid, simply by virtue of having learned math in a time of greater knowledge.