Research explodes myth that older programmers are obsolete

[klr]

Ahem ... *cough*

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/02 ... _research/ (includes link to comments)

Research explodes myth that older programmers are obsolete
Old dogs can learn new tricks, if they're allowed to

By Iain Thomson in San Francisco • Get more from this author
Posted in Developer, 2nd May 2013 01:04 GMT

There's a prevailing ethos among IT hirers that younger is better when it comes to programmers, but a study by academics in North Carolina suggests that employers might be missing a trick by not hiring the grizzled veterans of the coding world.

Research into how our brains evolve over time suggests our intelligence functions alter. Younger minds are more able at "fluidic" intelligence – being able to see complex and innovative connections from large data sets – while older brains have "crystalline" intelligence that's better at applying experience and long-term learning to solve problems.

IT recruiters typically look for younger, fluidic thinkers (who are coincidentally cheaper and more likely to work long hours on an inspiring project) but the research suggests that adding some crystalline intelligence to programming projects could have serious benefits

The team used data from the Stack Overflow developer forum's 1.6 million registered members (300,000 of whom listed their age), and whittled down the sample to 84,284 programmers who were active in 2012 and had decent reputation rankings.

The mean age of the sample base was just over 29, but there's a long tail of older code monkeys who still dispense advice to the young guns. These advisories were tagged and showed that what older developers lacked in numbers they more than made up for in the number of queries correctly answered or problems solved.

"The research stemmed from a panel of veteran developers we had a couple of years ago who claimed that everything that's old is being reinvented again, such as the focus on virtual machines coming from mainframes many years ago," Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, told The Register.

"Any knowledge that people have of the past should be completely relevant today – even if the technology is 'new' there should be knowledge transfer. We can’t prove it exhaustively but it's a reasonable theory."

The Stack Overflow data showed that, contrary to received wisdom, veteran coders are just as able as young pups to adopt new programming languages, and in some cases they enjoy an advantage. Knowledge of C gives them a statistically relevant advantage when it comes to iOS and Windows Phone programming, for example.

Programmers in their 50s and 60s did as well if not better than their younger counterparts in some skill ranges, and Dr. Murphy-Hill cited research in Finland showing older coders were adept at picking up new skills. But unfortunately, management practices aren’t helping.

"There's a perception that older developers are less able to cope with new technologies and the issue is that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy," he said.

"If you perceive older developers can't update to new technology you will put them in roles where they have no opportunity to learn and throw the younger programmers into new training and use older programmers for legacy systems."

[pErvinalia]

yeah.

[rasetsu]

Soylent green is coders!


I have my own viewpoint on matters. In the 70s, programming as a field was booming and there was lots of money to be had. So every cloven hooved idiot from the Ozarks decided that being a programmer was the way to get rich. So thereafter the field was inundated with a bunch of clueless gold diggers, dropping the average competence in the field like a rock. And now today we're reaping the results of that gold rush in the form of tech that doesn't work, programs that violate basic design principles and just basic shit in IT. Maybe it's not that older programmers can't learn so much as that the younger ones never could learn.

[cronus]

Machine code separated the weak from the very weak in the eighties. No one does machine code no more and most have forgotten the machine runs on logic at all. If computers don't learn to do it for themselves I foresee a cognitive crunch very shortly where most coders wont haven't a clue what they are doing or why. They'll be blind monkeys listening to orders from deaf monkeys and in the pay of silent monkeys.

[Jason]

Ah.. for the good old days of the early-mid 90s when anyone who claimed to be a coder and could write a spiffy hello world program could get a job in IT. Hell, my best friend was sysadmin on one of the backbones in southern Ontario. When he was 16.

[klr]

The early 90's being the good old days? Nah, that's much too late for that. The "good old days" of programming were when at least 90% of programmers looked like this:

[Rum]

I learnt simple Assembly including calling machine code from Basic 25 years ago - even designed a few simple games for fun. I would be totally at sea if I looked at a page of code now.

[klr]

I learnt simple Assembly including calling machine code from Basic 25 years ago - even designed a few simple games for fun. I would be totally at sea if I looked at a page of code now.

If you could manage that, then you'd very likely be able to live with the syntax and structure of most programming languages. What has changed out of all recognition in that time is the environment in which programming is done, by which I mean the sorts of things that modern code must do, and the sorts of things it interacts with.

[Rum]

Most is done with C+ or C++ from what I can see. Am I right? It looks straightforward enough, but the learning curve for me would be far too steep sadly.

[klr]

Most is done with C+ or C++ from what I can see. Am I right? It looks straightforward enough, but the learning curve for me would be far too steep sadly.

You would certainly think that almost all programmers used either C/C++ or Java, but there is a world of programming beyond those. I've never really used either myself. It's not that I've anything against them, but they're not the right tools for the work that I do. And they do have something a steep learning curve IMHO.

[rachelbean]

I love Stack Overflow

[Rum]

I love Stack Overflow

Is that a bit like 'divided by zero''?

[klr]

I love Stack Overflow

Is that a bit like 'divided by zero''?

There's only one way to find out.

[Pappa]

I love Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is teh awesomez.

[pErvinalia]

Soylent green is coders!


I have my own viewpoint on matters. In the 70s, programming as a field was booming and there was lots of money to be had. So every cloven hooved idiot from the Ozarks decided that being a programmer was the way to get rich. So thereafter the field was inundated with a bunch of clueless gold diggers, dropping the average competence in the field like a rock. And now today we're reaping the results of that gold rush in the form of tech that doesn't work, programs that violate basic design principles and just basic shit in IT. Maybe it's not that older programmers can't learn so much as that the younger ones never could learn.

That's not programmers fault. Most programmers I know are still uber-geeks. The problem is with the business model being used these days.