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I can vouch for this completely. It's a pretty well ingrained idea, and I imagine for a reason, that skill and talent are useless without being able to interac
by SamUK96 10y ago
I can vouch for this completely.
It's a pretty well ingrained idea, and I imagine for a reason, that skill and talent are useless without being able to interact with people well and with a good personality.
At the place I work, most of the developers are eccentric, reclusive, position-protectionist, "geniuses". They are smart, theoretically very knowledgeable. Basically...academic.
And their code? Some of the shoddiest I've seen. Let's just say, we have a database that EIGHT API's are reading and writing to...
In the end, without a decent personality and ability to interact with your fellow work mates, you work increasingly more isolated, on your own, not communicating, and this leads to your produce becoming increasingly isolated and not aware of other people's produce. In the programming world, that's suicide, hence why where I work is losing customers and money FAST from system breakages.
It's sad to see these washed-up 40 year olds drag the place under with their poor team work. I mean, there's 40 jobs that have gone because we have lost so much revenue we couldn't afford the better developers that were here.
Interact and communicate folks.
- durzagott 10y agoYou have some good points there, but keep an eye on those biases ;-) One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set.
- SamUK96 10y agoMaybe I phrased it poorly, I didn't mean it such that all 40yo+ progammers are like this, likely just a coincidence that they are all 40+.
- kosma 10y ago> One day you might be the 'washed-up' 40 year old programmer who the younger guys curse for your outdated skill set. Or who the younger guys curse for being stubborn and not adapting to reality. I've seen plenty experienced engineers think they can get away with not knowing git (released 2005) or ISO C99 (released 2000) because "they have seen it all and done it all". The skill set is not outdated because of age; it's outdated because someone refuses to learn. It usually happens at graduation: "I learned my job and now it's time to earn money". The reason it only shows up at 40yo is that it takes a while for one's skills to become antique enough to become a burning problem.
- dsgriffin 10y ago> It's sad to see these washed-up 40 year olds drag the place under with their poor team work. I haven't seen any evidence that the whole lone-wolf programming mindset has anything to do with age. Bad habits can develop over years for sure but I've seen plenty of teenage interns stubbornly refuse to adhere to coding styles/company practices despite plenty of reminders, for example.
- Klockan 10y agoI'd bet that good communication correlates with tendencies to go into management, which would explain why people who still program at 40 tend to be bad communicators.