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."

Comments

most young developers are at least as bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:most young developers are at least as bad

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Exactly. I read this and actually laughed:

2. Embrace new technologies. Many mature developers have found themselves with an outdated skillset because their employers stuck with what works, rather than encouraging modern technologies. Employers need to embrace the latest open-source tools, languages, and frameworks, in order to grow and retain the best talent.

Yeah, those crazy employers, sticking with things that work! What were they thinking?!

Perhaps if this guy hired a few more experienced developers, they could have explained the relatively value of the terms "tried and tested" and "unproven and risky". Good older programmers are just as capable of learning useful new technologies as good younger programmers. The real difference is that the experienced ones tend not to waste their time learning five different [JS frameworks]* that they know will all be obsolete long before the project built on them is finished, because they were too busy building something that would actually get the job done using [jQuery]*.

*Please substitute respectively an overhyped but underperforming technology and an established reliable technology in your fields of choice.

Re:most young developers are at least as bad

[lgw]

The thing about technology is: the absolute best thing today, really the best, is utter crap in 20 years. And there are too damn many developers, old and young who stick with what was the best at one point in history but just isn't any more.

It's wise to reject 90% of new ideas as silly fads, but the problem is when you reject 100%. And it's not just older guys like me with the problem, it just matters more as what you settled on ages. If you combine rejecting all new ideas as fads with age, you can easily become unemployable.

For example, look at all the /.ers who still dismiss "the cloud" as a passing fad, mistaking "I have less obsessive-geek control over my precious" for business judgement. Guys? It's not going away, and it keeps getting cheaper and more reliable. There are many areas today where you just can't put stuff in the cloud for compliance reasons, but the cloud guys have checkbooks and senators phone numbers, and that last barrier won't last long. Not every new idea is a fad.

Heck, I see people here that still think using an IDE is some sort of scam. "VI was good enough for grandpappy and it's good enough for me". Code review tools still get resistance in some quarters, but thinking you don't need a Review Board-like system is like thinking you don't need version control: it will end in tears.

Sure, don't run off with every fad, but this is a poor industry to cross the line from change-adverse to change-resistant in.

Train Yourself, Peon

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Train Yourself, Peon

[Anonymous Coward]

You should also make your own money instead of expecting your employer to pay you, taker.

Yes, all about the skills - and attitude!

[bunyip]

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.

Short Sighted

[ImprovOmega]

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.

Re:Yes, and No.

[Jane Q. Public]

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.