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Programmers: It's OK To Grow Up
Nemo the Magnificent writes: " Everybody knows software development is a young man's game, right? Here's a guy who hires and manages programmers, and he says it's not about age at all — it's about skills, period. 'It's each individual's responsibility to stay fresh in the field and maintain a modern-day skillset that gives any 28-year-old a run for his or her money. ... Although the ability to learn those skills is usually unlimited, the available time to learn often is not. "Little" things like family dinners, Little League, and home improvement projects often get in the way. As a result, we do find that we face a shortage of older, more seasoned developers. And it's not because we don't want older candidates. It's often because the older candidates haven't successfully modernized their developer skills.' A company that actively works to offer all employees the chance to learn and to engage with modern technologies is a company that good people are going to work for, and to stay at."
they just happened to have learned the most recent stuff (which all too frequently is all the managers care about)
The experienced developer will know when not to use a new fad because they will have seen a prior version of that fad before.
We want people to spend their own time and money to train the skills that we need. There's no way we would invest in such things -- it hurts the bottom line!
One of my colleagues in in his mid-60s, and happily puttering around in modern technologies and adapting what he knows about systems to the latest tools. Writing prototype code in Clojure, using network databases (neo4j), doing interesting data modeling and generally just making stuff happen. He's learning new stuff every day, having fun - and getting to say no to job offers on a regular basis. I've been in this industry for more than 30 years and I'm currently mucking around with Hadoop, cloud computing and a bunch of the new things.
People talk about time to learn, but it's a question about making time. Would you want to visit a doctor that hasn't updated their skills in 20 years?
Alan.
When you go to hire a developer you're not just looking to hire someone who can code in the latest fad language/API/SDK. You need someone who knows software development like a captain knows his ship. I promise you that 20+ years of software development will be worth way more than the 22 year old kid who knows Ruby on Rails because he learned it while studying in college. That experienced developer can pick up whatever tool your company standardized on and yeah, it may be three months before he's all the way up to speed on it, but then the years of experience will begin to make themselves tellingly felt vs. a kid who happens to know the tool already.
Hiring for the tool is stupid. It would be like looking for a columnist who specifically has Microsoft Office 2013 experience and filtering all the applicants who only used Google Docs in their previous jobs. Either one of them can write copy.
it's about the money. same with age.
Even better would be the 20 year veteran who can take those fresh out of school enthusiastic newbies and get high quality software out of them on a predictable schedule, without the "back in the day, we coded with patch cords on EAM equipment". Or the 20 year vet who is doing the new stuff and the old stuff, and can help the inexperienced new stuff guys and gals avoid the traps.
Face it, on a large project, there aren't enough skilled veterans on the market to get the job done, you MUST do it with average or below average folks. The challenge is seeding the crowd with just enough experience so that all those contributors are net positive, no matter how small.
Companies often times prefer younger developers because they are cheaper. It is as simple as that.
That older, incompetent developer was probably just as incompetent when he/she was in their 20's.
We've hashed this out on Slashdot before, more than once. OP is just wrong that older programmers in general don't keep up.
Study after study have shown that older programmers are generally more productive, even after adjusting for the higher salary they tend to expect.
While he appears to be genuinely sympathetic, his personal theories don't quite qualify as statistics.
Everybody knows software development is a "young man's game"? Did you seriously say that?
HELLS no, man.
First off: I've been programming since I was 8, but I was never a man, and I will never be a man, and I have never suffered under the idiotic delusion that this was ever exclusively a man's game -- young or otherwise. This is my game.
I am still programming at 40, and I assure you that youth offers no advantages over experience, either.
But, that doesn't stop me from mentoring. My interns may not be able to program like I do, but I'll give 'em every advantage I can. It's great to teach them some of those intrinsics that they don't get in school. That gives them some of the advantages an experienced developer, even if they're younger. This isn't a zero sum game. We all need good devs, so we should try to make everyone who is working with us better -- whether they are young or old. We all get better software, that way.