Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I've found that young vs. old is a trade-off.
Older workers frequently have a better work-ethic in the workplace, and have more experience to draw upon. Younger workers have a better work-ethic in terms of the amount of time they are willing to dedicate to work and frequently (but not always) contribute new ideas.
What it seems to come down to is: do you want experienced workers who will contribute more per hour, but who will also draw a firm line between their work and personal life, or a young worker who is willing to put in the extra time, even though a lot of their time will be spent relearning what a more experience worker already knows?
I suppose software development also has other factors. Some products depends upon experienced developers (e.g. anything considered mission critical) while other products depend upon fresh ideas (e.g. most software targetted at consumers).
Back in the 1980s, I had the good fortune to work with a man who had started at IBM the same year I was born. He not only knew the current landscape of development tools, he also had a vast knowledge of how we got here, what things had been tried and abandoned along the way, and he was very good at spotting tasks that people hadn't realized were necessary. I learned a lot from him.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."