13 ms·

It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

375 points by peterknego 15y ago

figure8 15y ago
Seeing that 70% decline in number of developers (on SO) from age 30 to age 40 and assuming they are still working, what do the older "has-been" developers do now and what titles do they have? Perhaps they have never heard of SO? Or they have stopped needing and/or using SO? Statistics based on educational website usage seem to always skew younger. Analogously, if I measured academic skills and availability by time spent in libraries and time spent teaching, I'm sure we'd see a similar peak in 20's because grad students spend so much time doing both these things and productive professors need this less.
Vivtek 15y ago
How did this post title come from that article? If anything, we old fogies are just more prolix - but not necessarily better. (Judging from his statistics, anyway.)
cstuder 15y ago
What's up with the 48 year olds?
- AdamTReineke 15y ago
  There are 148 of them, I'd wager there are a couple with super-high stats who throw off the average.
  - klochner 15y ago
    Also note the significant 34 y.o. bump from the legendary Jon Skeet [1] [1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
  - peterknego 15y ago
    If you look at original linked doc, you'll see that there are three 68-yr olds, that have on average 19.000+ points. That's why I only used in graphs age groups that have at least 100 developers.
  - jonnytran 15y ago
    Using a median instead of a mean might help w/ this.
    - brown9-2 15y ago
      Yes - median is a far better method to use in a situation like this, especially when what is being measured (reputation) has a bounded minimum and an unbounded maximum, and double especially when the sample size in each age bucket is relatively small.
AdamTReineke 15y ago
Is the decrease in number of developers due to real scarcity or due to fewer people that actively using Stack Overflow?
- marshray 15y ago
  I think it's real scarcity. I'm 41 and am always one of the oldest in any group of devs (except for that Usenix event I attended :-). Most people get into their career in their twenties. For computers it's often even younger. But it seems relatively rare for someone to pick up programming in their 30s or older. If you're 40+ today, your twenties were ending around the time that the "tech boom" was beginning. But there just wasn't as much information and inspiration around for getting into software development. Even through the mid-90s a college degree and programming skills was no sure ticket to cushy employment.
  - 5teev 15y ago
    Sometimes it's good to be a late bloomer.
    - Vivtek 15y ago
      Or just so obsessed that you stayed in programming even when it wasn't obviously a good idea. Come to think of it, it's still not obviously a good idea.
Fargren 15y ago
Hardly seems like they get better with age, just more active in educating other developers. The quality of posts doesn't look related to age at all. As far as I can tell, that should be the parameter to measure if you are going to make any sort of induction about the quality of a dev from their SO profile. And obviously, the fact that this only takes data from SO means whatever the conclusions, they only hold true for the kind of people that post there.
- groby_b 15y ago
  The main question, if you really were to judge something like quality, is why older devs answer more questions. Is it your assumption that they are just more invested in educating others, or is it e.g. because they have a broader range of experience and can answer more/more difficult questions. As it is, this data set is merely an interesting conversation starter. I hope somebody takes it and does some research on it, because it sure could be interesting
  - 5teev 15y ago
    It's probably the former. Older people--developers included--can enter a phase of "generativity" wherein they seek to give something back to the world in which they've prospered by helping following generations. See "Generativity vs. Stagnation" in this list of Erickon's Psychosocial Stages of Development: http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.html http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.htm...
  - reinhardt 15y ago
    The cynic view: they may have more time on their hands to was^C^C^Cspend on StackOverflow.
    - groby_b 15y ago
      Even if I subscribed to the cynical viewpoint - how come they do have that time? The snooty old dev in me counters the cynic with "Because we get stuff done" ;) So, still, lots of room for a more detailed look. Edit: The reply is of course tongue-in-check. The second reply to the GP seems to provide a better explanation.
KeyBoardG 15y ago
By looking at the Reputation by Age graph it looks more like there are just a few really good older developers. The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. In my experience it has been that older developers hold on to old coding habits that are today considered dangerous and are reluctant to change that.
- mkn 15y ago
  The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. If you're curious about the down-votes, it may be because the above quote is an example of the particular kind of bigotry commonly referred to as "ageism". For future reference, if you are ever in a management position, that kind of thing is actionable in a work environment. You could get your backside sued off, is what I mean, if you are found to have used that in a hiring decision, for example.
  - marshray 15y ago
    I'm old enough to feel like employers may sometimes find younger and cheaper people to do dumb stuff faster. What you say about the HR liability potential agrees with what I've heard from HR people, but never seen it be a factor in reality. In practice I can't imagine suing over a development gig. I can think of a million bad reasons people might not hire/let go a good developer (e.g. questions about manhole covers) but the "he's a curmudgeon who's reluctant to slap stuff together quickly" argument seems halfway legitimate. So I say, bring it on, let's have an open discussion about who's smart, who's fast, who's wise, and when it even matters.
    - KeyBoardG 15y ago
      I agree with you. Experienced developers with skills are key for higher level functions such as architecture and system planning due simply to the "been-there" factor. My statement above was geared toward the "curmudgen".
- georgieporgie 15y ago
wccrawford 15y ago
I'm a little surprised to see that they provide more answers, but that they aren't of better quality. I would have expected experience to show more. Of course, we only know they are older, not that they have more years of experience.
- kenjackson 15y ago
  I think its one of those things where the real issue is if you have an answer at all. Of those ppl that have answers the quality of answers, I'd expect to be similar (across a population).
zdw 15y ago
Age correlates with experience. If you've been something longer, you've had time to learn what works and what doesn't, and why. Thus, you can do a better job at guiding people who are newer to the material.
- rawsyntax 15y ago
  But if you started programming at 50... that's different than having done it for the last 30 years.
  - tjogin 15y ago
    That's pretty rare though, I think most programmers in their fifties have been doing it for many years.
  - varjag 15y ago
    I doubt there are enough such cases to distort the statistics.
maresca 15y ago
My guess is that the older developers have more time to comment and follow up. Plenty of times I have looked for solutions on stackoverflow, but have been too busy to post responses because of looming deadlines. This is like saying my grandparents would make for better farmers because they spend their whole day on Farmville.
- gbelote 15y ago
  I don't think a 45-year-old developer has inherently more free time than a 25-year-old. Given that a 45-year-old is more likely to have a family than a 25-year-old, I'd expect them to have less free time.
  - maresca 15y ago
    While this is true, you also don't see many 45-year-olds doing 60 and 70 hour work weeks.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - gbelote 15y ago
      Yes, but presumably they aren't spending those extra 20-30 hours writing StackOverflow answers.
  - markkanof 15y ago
    It could be though that a 45-year-old has better perspective on what's important and what's not and therefore has better time management skills. I know when I was first starting out as a developer I spent a lot of long days and weekends working but not really getting a whole lot accomplished. As I've matured, I've gotten better at picking out what's really important and am now much more productive while working less hours. I anticipate this trend to continue as I gain more experience.
adamc 15y ago
What this really shows is that developers get better at answering technical questions with age. There is probably _some_ correlation to development skill, but the data doesn't demonstrate that. I'd expect developers to know more things as they get older, and I wouldn't be surprised if they got better at answering questions. Not sure that makes them better at the development part.
- billswift 15y ago
  Since programming is a skill based on the technical information, and since practice/experience is even more important for skill development than for other types of learning, I would expect their abilities to be even better than predicted by a test of their knowledge.
- tednaleid 15y ago
  I think that this is showing a correlation between those programmers that enjoy programming and want to share their knowledge with others, and those programmers that stick with it for more than a decade. I bet that if you could separate out the younger developers who will still be developing in 10-20 years, that their rep on SO is similar to that of older developers. Those developers that'll wash out in the next 5 years are dragging down the participation numbers of their peers. So it isn't the age that's important, it's the personality type which is correlated to those people that'll stick with development.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
jimmarq 15y ago
Maybe with coding, it's either up or out. Older developers who have better skills most likely enjoy what they are doing and are somewhat good at it. If they weren't, they would have left the profession, maybe to become project managers or some related position. It's not like you're always forced out of your position, it's just that when you look down the road, you can see that if you're not a great coder, it may be best to find something you're better at. A 25 year old coder may still be figuring out if that line of work is sustainable over the course of a career.
coliveira 15y ago
This analysis is completely wrong because the bell shaped curve is not measuring number of developers. It is measuring number of SO users. There are SO users that are not developers, and a lot of developers that are not SO users, so there is no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers about the general population of developers.
- benatkin 15y ago
  The bell-shaped curve gives me more confidence in the result, not less. It shows that Stack Overflow has enough developers that the graph isn't choppy.
  - coliveira 15y ago
    The bell curve is a result of the distribution for any population: developers, guitar players, sci-fi readers, etc. In this case, the curve happens to represent SO readers.
    - benatkin 15y ago
      The bell curve can be choppy when you've got too little data or bad data.
      - coliveira 15y ago
        You're just looking at the shape of the bell curve. It tells you that it represents a population, but it doesn't tell you what population it actually is. That bell curve could be for the age of people owning cats, for example. There is no evidence that SO users is a good sample of the developers population, in fact it makes sense that it is skewed towards young people that have lots of time to search and answer programming questions on the web.
        benatkin 15y ago
        Stack Overflow is geared towards developers and doesn't have anything I can see to attract a particular kind of developer, except the curious kind. I can't think of a place to get a better sampling of developers right off hand. Certainly, while Hacker News is popular among developers, it would be a less accurate sampling of developers than Stack Overflow, because people here tend to be attracted to startups. I disagree with what you said in your first post, that it is completely wrong, and that no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers. It's not perfect but it's far from being a terrible sample. It's a general-interest developer site rather than a specific-interest one. There are all types of developers. In a reverse-sorted list of popular recent tags, there are c#, javascript, php, java, jquery, .net, and android. Also, developers didn't choose to be a part of this graph; they merely got put into the survey result because they had Stack Overflow accounts. If it had been a survey that was announced on twitter it would be biased towards people who want to take surveys. This would be a worse bias IMO than people who want to ask and answer technical questions. I wouldn't take issue if you had said it was problematic, but instead you went straight to a one-sided conclusion.
josegonzalez 15y ago
Number of developers by age is likely inversely proportional to the growth in the industry. I'd also say people get into development at a later date in their lives - late 20s - because they started doing something else before making the jump - marketers, engineers, painters, physicists.
dusklight 15y ago
What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing to do anything to fix it. My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be done in 2 minutes now, but they are still used to thinking that they did it quickly if they finish it in 2 days, so that's how long it takes them to do it. Also my personal experience is that older developers can't handle the asynchronous nature of modern communications very well. They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things, whereas younger developers will happily be able to switch in between tasks while waiting for the previous task to finish compiling/running without problems.
- romaniv 15y ago
  They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things This is the case with everyone. Multitasking negatively affects overall performance. There are many studies that confirm that. If some developers avoid it, maybe it means they are better at evaluating their own productivity?
  - dusklight 15y ago
    So how old are you? Do you have any coworkers below 25? How well do they do with multitasking? Better than you? Twitter, text messages and facebook have trained our minds to work differently. Have you been keeping up?
    - ChuckMcM 15y ago
      Its an interesting claim. You could contribute positively to the discussion by providing some sort of experiement to test it. Would it be fair to say you believe that your high level of interaction with various social media sites and technologies has 'trained' your mind's agility? If so, several useful questions arise which I'd love to know answers too; 1) Can you produce more lines of production code over unit time? If you use a source repository you might be able to analyze this by check-ins. I suspect a large open source project like KDE or Hadoop etc where you could correlate 'agility' of committer with the commits could shed some light here. 2) Do the designs and implementations produced have similar, better, or worse levels of qualities than designs and implementations done by 'less agile' developers? I'd probably track bug reports and rewrites against lines of code committed. 3) Does the scale of problem change the effectiveness ratio? Which is to say if you're coding/designing/implementing at the top level of a big project vs at the fringe, does the difference between people trained with social media exposure continue? Bascially correlating the above two data points across all levels of the code and design.
Hominem 15y ago
Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?
- forgotAgain 15y ago
  Teaching, from grade school through college professors.
  - pflats 15y ago
    Why would you say that? Teachers have an incredibly high attrition rate. Barely half of the new teacher classes make it 5 years. The vast majority of the highly-regarded teachers I know are ones who have been doing it for 25 years or more.
    - forgotAgain 15y ago
      The original topic was: "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer." I was answering the posted question "Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?". So my post was that for teachers it is not accepted as given that they get better and scarcer with age. I did not make a statement whether that was true or not, just that it was not accepted as a given. In support of my view I would offer the numerous recent news stories calling for the end of last-hired, first-fired rule when laying off public school teachers.
      - pflats 15y ago
        I see your point, but I'm not quite sure that the two things go hand in hand. If the vast majority of developers were publically financed and had LIFO laws, I'd imagine that there'd be calls to end that practice as well. In both cases, though, I'd argue it's outliers that are the source of the consternation. I think most education reform advocates would agree teachers get better as they gain experience.
forgotAgain 15y ago
The title s/b "Stackoverflow developers get better with age. And scarcer." Stackoverflow is not representative of the overall developer population. As an example of an alternate view compare the relative number of items tagged on SO with C#, Java, and PHP. Then compare that to the number of listings of those tags on Dice.
- forgotAgain 15y ago
  So why the downvote? If you disagree with what I wrote then offer a rebuttal. Simply downvoting is churlish.
raganwald 15y ago
Tell HN: On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- arohner 15y ago
  So that's why you're such a good blogger! Thanks for blogging and contributing on HN, you've really improved my understanding of software, and how to think about software. Happy Birthday.
  - cema 15y ago
    Hmm. I have upvoted you automatically: in the past it did not just mean I think your argument is interesting, but also (in cases like this one) that I share the sentiment and do not want to litter HN with "+1" comments. Of course, now that none except you can see your score, this is no longer working like that. Happy birthday to raganwald!
- route66 15y ago
  Don't get scarce!
- 6ren 15y ago
  Really? I could've sworn you were in your twenties from this photo: http://reginald.braythwayt.com http://reginald.braythwayt.com
  - raganwald 15y ago
    IIRC, That photo was taken at MeshU in Spring of 2008, so I would have been 45 or so.
- rbanffy 15y ago
  Happy Birthday!!! And I agree with 6ren. You definitely look like a 20-something.
kmavm 15y ago
Since I don't see this specifically addressed in the text: I suspect this is a classic case of survivorship bias. The same way the stock market looks better and better the further back you go, because you aren't tracking the stocks of companies that are no longer in business, developers probably look better and better the further they are into their careers, since all the ones who've fallen by the wayside probably were the weaker developers who found something better to do with their time. As a somewhat older developer, I find this a surprisingly difficult question to answer honestly. Comparing myself to myself from 10 years ago, I sincerely think I'm more effective, but self-delusion may play a part in that. I've probably lost some of my "step", in terms of raw capacity to memorize and compute mentally, and I have more commitments outside of the world of software, which dilutes my efforts further. Then again, the strategic ideas I have are more dependably correct, and I spend less time chasing down dead ends, either because I've been down them before or had the good luck of witnessing them second- or third-hand. I've gotten a chance to see a world-class developer very closely between the ages of 36 and 45. He started this period as, very easily, the greatest engineer I'd ever even heard stories of, and I'm pretty sure he got better over that decade. It can be done.
- andrewcooke 15y ago
  is it fair to call it a bias in this case? it doesn't alter the conclusion that older developers are both better and scarcer, on average. [disclaimer: 44 yo ;o] [ps. google has mitigated memory loss, i suspect.]
  - juiceandjuice 15y ago
    You are 100% right, a developer is a developer, so it's not bias. It could even be argued that the reason there are less older developers is because the better ones went into management and are no longer active developers. Now, this all assumes that developer activity on Stack Overflow is correlated roughly equivalently over most ages. If it is, then these plainly state that for any random developer you would interview, they are more likely to be more knowledgable (according to the definition extracted by Stack Overflow activity) the older they are. The fact that there may be fewer developers at an older age is irrelevant. Disclaimer: I'm 25
cek 15y ago
Interesting hypothesis, but the faulty data renders the results presented useless. Namely, only 53% of SO users enter their age. Therefore the data may be wildly biased towards people who are willing to enter their age in an online profile. In addition this only represents SO programmers, which while a great bunch, is hardly representative of all programmers.
zephyrfalcon 15y ago
"On the graph we can see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve." Is this an actual bell curve? It's not symmetrical. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution)
- gwern 15y ago
  It's hard for anything dealing with age to be a true symmetrical bell curve - it usually winds up being cut short by old age & death, or foreshortened by, well, not existing. Notice that the ages start at 16. You'd have to be pretty precocious to give high quality answers at age 10 or 5.
  - 3pt14159 15y ago
    Not hard, impossible. Bell curves go to infinity. Edit: Shouldn't have said that. Everyone knows basic stats here and I was being pedantic.
    - gwern 15y ago
      Yeah, it is literally impossible for a real bell curve to exist, but if you want to be pedantic, that's also because people are clumpy. The bell curve might say there ought to be 0.00000067 excellent answerers at age 12, say, but reality insists on there being 0 or 1 excellent answerers aged 12. Whenever we look at real data, we acknowledge that it's a discretized approximation to a bell curve and not a real (continuous) one; the point was that on top of the discrete approximation, we have the additional problem of anthropic biases - people not existing or dying at either end.
mark_l_watson 15y ago
Wow, the chart only goes up to 49 years old? For me, that is about 4 programming languages ago :-)
- Vivtek 15y ago
  He said he only took age cohorts for which he had 100 or more data points.
llimllib 15y ago
A minor nit, I know, but a bell curve is symmetrical. So the graph shows some sort of fat-tailed distribution, and we cannot "see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve".
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  Another minor nit: You can still do a fit to a bell curve and find a chi-squared value. If your chi-squared is horrible, obviously you should be considering a different probability density function as your model is incorrect, but if it's decent enough you can omit the features and call it a "bell curve" That being said, I could see this as a composition of two gaussian bell curves with the means correlating to the ages of people in college and their early/mid career (let's say 23 and 28 respectively)
strlen 15y ago
I don't disagree with the conclusion: people who aren't as dedicated to or good at programming transition to people or product/program/project management[1]; the remaining folk receive additional experience which allows them to capitalize further on their passion and talent. However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about programming. That's extremely useful (and helps career wise), but it isn't the same thing as being a better developer. Sometimes it correlates (the best programmers I've known have also participated in organizations like IETF, written RFCs and have also thoroughly documented their work), but it isn't a total ordering (I know plenty of programmers who are better than I, but who don't participate in any public forums). On the other hand, I've yet to find a successful programming language made by someone before their thirties. Contrast it, on the other hand, with some of the most ground changing academic work in Computer Science and Mathematics being done by people in their twenties. [1] There's nothing wrong with that: Google's APM program particularly is a great example of "engineers who don't want to code" being extremely useful. See also "The Russian Lit Major" by rands: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_history.html http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_his...
- gvb 15y ago
  I thought I had a counter example with Yukihiro Matsumoto and Ruby, but Yukihiro was born April 14, 1965 and Ruby was released December 21, 1995. Thirty years an a handful of months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29#First_publication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...
- guelo 15y ago
  The greater number of answered questions could either be because they are better at talking about programming as you say, or it could be that they just know more answers. It could also be that they have more time to answer questions, maybe because they have cushier jobs.
- jedbrown 15y ago
  Historically, it would seem like 30 is almost a "sweet spot" for language creation. * Dennis Ritchie was 27 or 28 in 1969 when C got going. * McCarthy was about 30 in 1958 for Lisp. * Sussman was 28 and Steele was 21 in 1975 for Scheme. * Alan Kay made Smalltalk between 28 and 31. And while it used to be true that lots of game-changing mathematics was done early, I don't see much of that lately. A huge amount is done by junior faculty and postdocs, but that's usually late 20s and 30s.
BasDirks 15y ago
'63 was a good year!
astrofinch 15y ago
What if there's a filtering effect where lower-quality developers are less likely to stick with the profession past age 27?
trentonstrong 15y ago
I think there might also be another selection bias here, in that StackOverflow might be a bit self-selecting for developers who know their stuff. It's hard to say what this says about developers as a whole, including the ones not on SO, which I assume is a large number. An alternative hypothesis might be this: Good developers get better over time, whatever that means. I would suspect that people who form bad habits early on don't enjoy the same benefits of experience as those who built on solid foundations.
engtech 15y ago
There's one huge hole in the analysis: the dataset. The older someone is, the less chance they'll spend time on an internet community site, especially at work, which is when a lot of people access stackoverflow. Old dudes work while they're at work, because they learned their work ethic in pre-internet times.
Revisor 15y ago
One could also find another, not so positive trend in the article: The older the developer, the less curious they are <= the less questions they have. Of course you could say it's because the older developers are more experienced. But would that quality per se quell the thirst for new knowledge? Just thinking aloud...
- pnathan 15y ago
  Alternatively, as you get better and deal with complex issues and have more sophisticated thoughts, you realize that SO can't answer the majority of your problems. That's what I've learned about SO: it's fine for popcorn questions, but for the in-depth knowledge and discussions... meh.
  - Revisor 15y ago
    That's a very fair point. Overall the deeper answers are probably more in the books or at conferences, not in blogs and online forums.
imack 15y ago
Honest question: what happens to developers after they are no longer "Developers"? As a 29-year-old I'm kind of freaked out by the fact that I'm on the older part of that distribution.
- sukuriant 15y ago
  I do not have stats to base this claim, but when I worked at my last job, I heard from an employee in another department that the normal lifespan for a software developer was 7 years, after which they have some sort of career change, be it management or logging.
alanh 15y ago
Aaargh! The data doesn’t say this, all the data says is “Older StackOverflow users have disproportionately high SO reputation.” An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow. A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you are on SO, the higher your reputation, period, regardless of your answer quality, partly because downvoting is strongly disincentivized. And the article itself notes that older programmers don’t receive significantly more upvotes per post!) Until that’s shown, the article’s conclusion is highly suspect. Frankly, I’m embarrassed so few people seem to be calling out the terrible reasoning behind this post. It may well be that older programmers are “better,” but what we have here is nothing more than a colossal failure to understand science, reasoning, and evidence.
- skeeterbug 15y ago
  If you have a higher reputation and give correct answers, couldn't we then assume that the older developers have a wider range of knowledge to be able to participate in more responses? Also, it is not really clear how "better" is defined in this case. Maybe it is "better" == I know more technologies than you?
- jt2190 15y ago
  I also wonder: Do developers who spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow get "better" than those who actually write code? I've met more than one "Aristotelian Programmer" who could quote you every design pattern from heart and draw UML diagrams on a white board all day, but who actually couldn't write code.
- nutjob123 15y ago
  Thank you. I'm not against speculating but we all should know that correlation does not imply causation.
- seldo 15y ago
  Yeah, my conclusion from the data was "senior developers know more things and have more time on their hands to tell others about those things", which is exactly what you'd expect. The more senior you get, the more your role is as guide and mentor than immediate implementor.
zwieback 15y ago
I'm 45 with a little short of 30 years of programming experience. Our team at HP (I'm not a manager) has a few programmers that are significantly older and a few that are very young. From my observation, what's different about young vs. old programmers is not related to the speed at which we pick up new technologies (we all love to tinker with the latest stuff) but at the general approach to problem solving. Older engineers tend to compare new problems to experiences from the past. The tools at our disposal have become much better but the fundamental mechanisms haven't changed that much so it's easier to identify whether there's a real benefit to using a new tool or if it's better to stick with what you have. As an experienced developer it's a little easier to avoid sinking effort into novel but misguided technologies. As a young developer it's a little easier to be open-minded about promising technologies. But don't pay any attention to me - my SO rep is less than 30% of the average for my age bracket...
Tichy 15y ago
I hope it doesn't mean that older developers are more likely to be unemployed and therefore have more time to waste on SO.
sebastianavina 15y ago
Maybe it's because great developers end up in management positions... each day I write less and less code...
6ren 15y ago
I used to think younger developers were better, but with the experience of age, I now realize that older developers are better. Honestly, though, I think programming is a "young man's game", partly because you are sharper, have more energy etc when young; but mostly because when everything is reinvented each decade, you are better off starting fresh, without being aware of other choices. The exception is for higher-level tasks, such as marketing, managing people, strategic business decisions, and code architecture. Also, I would think, language/library/API/framework design. I hesitate a little, because many of these are based on the needs of current programmers, which the front-line troops know better because they are doing it (they are the users). However, for deeper insights, age has the benefit of seeing deeper patterns over decades, and over generations of usage. Most language designers seem to be older (but is that just because their languages are now old?)
MaysonL 15y ago
I wonder that they didn't do the correlation of length of time on SO (i.e., since join date) vs. reputation. Did the older developers join SO earlier, on average? How many rep points per day did older vs. younger devs accumulate?
sbochins 15y ago
The myth that engineers lose their game when they get older always seemed a little off to me. It usually gets clumped in with all the software jobs are going to go to China. I have met a lot of very bad developers that were older as well as very good ones. The same goes for young developers.
bryanalves 15y ago
A quote from this really stuck out for me: "So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality." A lot of people here are focused on "being smarter" or "doing a better job" or "higher quality" Excluding all of the self-taught developers, and limiting ourselves only to people who follow the standard "get a 4-year college degree then go out in the real world and work" crowd, as that's pretty sizable. Make extrapolations as necessary. Remember your first year (or two?) of development? Looking back, you were probably way in over your head, had mentors looking after you, making tons of mistakes etc. Fast forward 5 years. Can you write code faster? Probably not. Can you write better code? Sometimes. It's all about experiences and learning from them. When you take a new job, or a new project, or a new anything, you call upon past experiences to guide the efforts of this process. It might be something as vague as "I am going to write tests first because I found it helped me earlier", or (ignoring TDD), "I'm not going to write this function like this, because I know the code will be hard to test when I get around to writing a test for it later" You learn this all from experience. Senior people who have been in the field longer have more experience. They aren't "better" in the sense that they are smarter or have more intelligence, they just know MORE because they've been exposed to more. It's also why so many people (especially in hacker news) have been successful without degrees. It's not a degree that matters it's EXPERIENCE. It might be a fine line differentiating between smartness gained from pure intelligence and "smartness" gained via experience, but I think it's an important distinction, and one that I think this post highlights well.
spinlock 15y ago
It's official: developers spend more time on stack overflow with age.
jongraehl 15y ago
Older people have, on average, been using stackoverflow for longer. SO rep scales roughly linearly with time spent contributing. This probably isn't enough to explain the entire effect shown in the graph, but in 10 years (if people still use SO), it would be.

375 points by peterknego 15y ago

Seeing that 70% decline in number of developers (on SO) from age 30 to age 40 and assuming they are still working, what do the older "has-been" developers do now and what titles do they have? Perhaps they have never heard of SO? Or they have stopped needing and/or using SO? Statistics based on educational website usage seem to always skew younger. Analogously, if I measured academic skills and availability by time spent in libraries and time spent teaching, I'm sure we'd see a similar peak in 20's because grad students spend so much time doing both these things and productive professors need this less.

Vivtek 15y ago

How did this post title come from that article? If anything, we old fogies are just more prolix - but not necessarily better. (Judging from his statistics, anyway.)

cstuder 15y ago

What's up with the 48 year olds?

AdamTReineke 15y ago
There are 148 of them, I'd wager there are a couple with super-high stats who throw off the average.
- klochner 15y ago
  Also note the significant 34 y.o. bump from the legendary Jon Skeet [1] [1] http://stackoverflow.com/users/22656/jon-skeet
- peterknego 15y ago
  If you look at original linked doc, you'll see that there are three 68-yr olds, that have on average 19.000+ points. That's why I only used in graphs age groups that have at least 100 developers.
- jonnytran 15y ago
  Using a median instead of a mean might help w/ this.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    Yes - median is a far better method to use in a situation like this, especially when what is being measured (reputation) has a bounded minimum and an unbounded maximum, and double especially when the sample size in each age bucket is relatively small.

AdamTReineke 15y ago

Is the decrease in number of developers due to real scarcity or due to fewer people that actively using Stack Overflow?

marshray 15y ago
I think it's real scarcity. I'm 41 and am always one of the oldest in any group of devs (except for that Usenix event I attended :-). Most people get into their career in their twenties. For computers it's often even younger. But it seems relatively rare for someone to pick up programming in their 30s or older. If you're 40+ today, your twenties were ending around the time that the "tech boom" was beginning. But there just wasn't as much information and inspiration around for getting into software development. Even through the mid-90s a college degree and programming skills was no sure ticket to cushy employment.
- 5teev 15y ago
  Sometimes it's good to be a late bloomer.
  - Vivtek 15y ago
    Or just so obsessed that you stayed in programming even when it wasn't obviously a good idea. Come to think of it, it's still not obviously a good idea.

Fargren 15y ago

Hardly seems like they get better with age, just more active in educating other developers. The quality of posts doesn't look related to age at all. As far as I can tell, that should be the parameter to measure if you are going to make any sort of induction about the quality of a dev from their SO profile. And obviously, the fact that this only takes data from SO means whatever the conclusions, they only hold true for the kind of people that post there.

groby_b 15y ago
The main question, if you really were to judge something like quality, is why older devs answer more questions. Is it your assumption that they are just more invested in educating others, or is it e.g. because they have a broader range of experience and can answer more/more difficult questions. As it is, this data set is merely an interesting conversation starter. I hope somebody takes it and does some research on it, because it sure could be interesting
- 5teev 15y ago
  It's probably the former. Older people--developers included--can enter a phase of "generativity" wherein they seek to give something back to the world in which they've prospered by helping following generations. See "Generativity vs. Stagnation" in this list of Erickon's Psychosocial Stages of Development: http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.html http://www.psychpage.com/learning/library/person/erikson.htm...
- reinhardt 15y ago
  The cynic view: they may have more time on their hands to was^C^C^Cspend on StackOverflow.
  - groby_b 15y ago
    Even if I subscribed to the cynical viewpoint - how come they do have that time? The snooty old dev in me counters the cynic with "Because we get stuff done" ;) So, still, lots of room for a more detailed look. Edit: The reply is of course tongue-in-check. The second reply to the GP seems to provide a better explanation.

KeyBoardG 15y ago

By looking at the Reputation by Age graph it looks more like there are just a few really good older developers. The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. In my experience it has been that older developers hold on to old coding habits that are today considered dangerous and are reluctant to change that.

mkn 15y ago
The rest probably are so out of touch they do not participate in developer communities such as Stack Overflow. If you're curious about the down-votes, it may be because the above quote is an example of the particular kind of bigotry commonly referred to as "ageism". For future reference, if you are ever in a management position, that kind of thing is actionable in a work environment. You could get your backside sued off, is what I mean, if you are found to have used that in a hiring decision, for example.
- marshray 15y ago
  I'm old enough to feel like employers may sometimes find younger and cheaper people to do dumb stuff faster. What you say about the HR liability potential agrees with what I've heard from HR people, but never seen it be a factor in reality. In practice I can't imagine suing over a development gig. I can think of a million bad reasons people might not hire/let go a good developer (e.g. questions about manhole covers) but the "he's a curmudgeon who's reluctant to slap stuff together quickly" argument seems halfway legitimate. So I say, bring it on, let's have an open discussion about who's smart, who's fast, who's wise, and when it even matters.
  - KeyBoardG 15y ago
    I agree with you. Experienced developers with skills are key for higher level functions such as architecture and system planning due simply to the "been-there" factor. My statement above was geared toward the "curmudgen".
georgieporgie 15y ago

wccrawford 15y ago

I'm a little surprised to see that they provide more answers, but that they aren't of better quality. I would have expected experience to show more. Of course, we only know they are older, not that they have more years of experience.

kenjackson 15y ago
I think its one of those things where the real issue is if you have an answer at all. Of those ppl that have answers the quality of answers, I'd expect to be similar (across a population).

zdw 15y ago

Age correlates with experience. If you've been something longer, you've had time to learn what works and what doesn't, and why. Thus, you can do a better job at guiding people who are newer to the material.

rawsyntax 15y ago
But if you started programming at 50... that's different than having done it for the last 30 years.
- tjogin 15y ago
  That's pretty rare though, I think most programmers in their fifties have been doing it for many years.
- varjag 15y ago
  I doubt there are enough such cases to distort the statistics.

maresca 15y ago

My guess is that the older developers have more time to comment and follow up. Plenty of times I have looked for solutions on stackoverflow, but have been too busy to post responses because of looming deadlines. This is like saying my grandparents would make for better farmers because they spend their whole day on Farmville.

gbelote 15y ago
I don't think a 45-year-old developer has inherently more free time than a 25-year-old. Given that a 45-year-old is more likely to have a family than a 25-year-old, I'd expect them to have less free time.
- maresca 15y ago
  While this is true, you also don't see many 45-year-olds doing 60 and 70 hour work weeks.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - gbelote 15y ago
    Yes, but presumably they aren't spending those extra 20-30 hours writing StackOverflow answers.
- markkanof 15y ago
  It could be though that a 45-year-old has better perspective on what's important and what's not and therefore has better time management skills. I know when I was first starting out as a developer I spent a lot of long days and weekends working but not really getting a whole lot accomplished. As I've matured, I've gotten better at picking out what's really important and am now much more productive while working less hours. I anticipate this trend to continue as I gain more experience.

adamc 15y ago

What this really shows is that developers get better at answering technical questions with age. There is probably _some_ correlation to development skill, but the data doesn't demonstrate that. I'd expect developers to know more things as they get older, and I wouldn't be surprised if they got better at answering questions. Not sure that makes them better at the development part.

billswift 15y ago
Since programming is a skill based on the technical information, and since practice/experience is even more important for skill development than for other types of learning, I would expect their abilities to be even better than predicted by a test of their knowledge.
tednaleid 15y ago
I think that this is showing a correlation between those programmers that enjoy programming and want to share their knowledge with others, and those programmers that stick with it for more than a decade. I bet that if you could separate out the younger developers who will still be developing in 10-20 years, that their rep on SO is similar to that of older developers. Those developers that'll wash out in the next 5 years are dragging down the participation numbers of their peers. So it isn't the age that's important, it's the personality type which is correlated to those people that'll stick with development.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

jimmarq 15y ago

Maybe with coding, it's either up or out. Older developers who have better skills most likely enjoy what they are doing and are somewhat good at it. If they weren't, they would have left the profession, maybe to become project managers or some related position. It's not like you're always forced out of your position, it's just that when you look down the road, you can see that if you're not a great coder, it may be best to find something you're better at. A 25 year old coder may still be figuring out if that line of work is sustainable over the course of a career.

coliveira 15y ago

This analysis is completely wrong because the bell shaped curve is not measuring number of developers. It is measuring number of SO users. There are SO users that are not developers, and a lot of developers that are not SO users, so there is no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers about the general population of developers.

benatkin 15y ago
The bell-shaped curve gives me more confidence in the result, not less. It shows that Stack Overflow has enough developers that the graph isn't choppy.
- coliveira 15y ago
  The bell curve is a result of the distribution for any population: developers, guitar players, sci-fi readers, etc. In this case, the curve happens to represent SO readers.
  - benatkin 15y ago
    The bell curve can be choppy when you've got too little data or bad data.
    - coliveira 15y ago
      You're just looking at the shape of the bell curve. It tells you that it represents a population, but it doesn't tell you what population it actually is. That bell curve could be for the age of people owning cats, for example. There is no evidence that SO users is a good sample of the developers population, in fact it makes sense that it is skewed towards young people that have lots of time to search and answer programming questions on the web.
      - benatkin 15y ago
        Stack Overflow is geared towards developers and doesn't have anything I can see to attract a particular kind of developer, except the curious kind. I can't think of a place to get a better sampling of developers right off hand. Certainly, while Hacker News is popular among developers, it would be a less accurate sampling of developers than Stack Overflow, because people here tend to be attracted to startups. I disagree with what you said in your first post, that it is completely wrong, and that no valid conclusion that can be taken from these numbers. It's not perfect but it's far from being a terrible sample. It's a general-interest developer site rather than a specific-interest one. There are all types of developers. In a reverse-sorted list of popular recent tags, there are c#, javascript, php, java, jquery, .net, and android. Also, developers didn't choose to be a part of this graph; they merely got put into the survey result because they had Stack Overflow accounts. If it had been a survey that was announced on twitter it would be biased towards people who want to take surveys. This would be a worse bias IMO than people who want to ask and answer technical questions. I wouldn't take issue if you had said it was problematic, but instead you went straight to a one-sided conclusion.

josegonzalez 15y ago

Number of developers by age is likely inversely proportional to the growth in the industry. I'd also say people get into development at a later date in their lives - late 20s - because they started doing something else before making the jump - marketers, engineers, painters, physicists.

dusklight 15y ago

What this post shows me is that older developers are less willing to ask questions, less willing to admit when they don't know something, less willing to do anything to fix it. My personal experience is that older developers just don't get it. They haven't kept up with the exponential increases in productivity that we have had in the last 5 years. Things that used to take 2 days 10 years ago can be done in 2 minutes now, but they are still used to thinking that they did it quickly if they finish it in 2 days, so that's how long it takes them to do it. Also my personal experience is that older developers can't handle the asynchronous nature of modern communications very well. They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things, whereas younger developers will happily be able to switch in between tasks while waiting for the previous task to finish compiling/running without problems.

romaniv 15y ago
They always want to work on only one thing at a time and get confused/ much slower if they have to work on multiple things This is the case with everyone. Multitasking negatively affects overall performance. There are many studies that confirm that. If some developers avoid it, maybe it means they are better at evaluating their own productivity?
- dusklight 15y ago
  So how old are you? Do you have any coworkers below 25? How well do they do with multitasking? Better than you? Twitter, text messages and facebook have trained our minds to work differently. Have you been keeping up?
  - ChuckMcM 15y ago
    Its an interesting claim. You could contribute positively to the discussion by providing some sort of experiement to test it. Would it be fair to say you believe that your high level of interaction with various social media sites and technologies has 'trained' your mind's agility? If so, several useful questions arise which I'd love to know answers too; 1) Can you produce more lines of production code over unit time? If you use a source repository you might be able to analyze this by check-ins. I suspect a large open source project like KDE or Hadoop etc where you could correlate 'agility' of committer with the commits could shed some light here. 2) Do the designs and implementations produced have similar, better, or worse levels of qualities than designs and implementations done by 'less agile' developers? I'd probably track bug reports and rewrites against lines of code committed. 3) Does the scale of problem change the effectiveness ratio? Which is to say if you're coding/designing/implementing at the top level of a big project vs at the fringe, does the difference between people trained with social media exposure continue? Bascially correlating the above two data points across all levels of the code and design.

Hominem 15y ago

Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?

forgotAgain 15y ago
Teaching, from grade school through college professors.
- pflats 15y ago
  Why would you say that? Teachers have an incredibly high attrition rate. Barely half of the new teacher classes make it 5 years. The vast majority of the highly-regarded teachers I know are ones who have been doing it for 25 years or more.
  - forgotAgain 15y ago
    The original topic was: "It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer." I was answering the posted question "Is there any other career where this would not be accepted as a given?". So my post was that for teachers it is not accepted as given that they get better and scarcer with age. I did not make a statement whether that was true or not, just that it was not accepted as a given. In support of my view I would offer the numerous recent news stories calling for the end of last-hired, first-fired rule when laying off public school teachers.
    - pflats 15y ago
      I see your point, but I'm not quite sure that the two things go hand in hand. If the vast majority of developers were publically financed and had LIFO laws, I'd imagine that there'd be calls to end that practice as well. In both cases, though, I'd argue it's outliers that are the source of the consternation. I think most education reform advocates would agree teachers get better as they gain experience.

forgotAgain 15y ago

The title s/b "Stackoverflow developers get better with age. And scarcer." Stackoverflow is not representative of the overall developer population. As an example of an alternate view compare the relative number of items tagged on SO with C#, Java, and PHP. Then compare that to the number of listings of those tags on Dice.

forgotAgain 15y ago
So why the downvote? If you disagree with what I wrote then offer a rebuttal. Simply downvoting is churlish.

raganwald 15y ago

Tell HN: On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
arohner 15y ago
So that's why you're such a good blogger! Thanks for blogging and contributing on HN, you've really improved my understanding of software, and how to think about software. Happy Birthday.
- cema 15y ago
  Hmm. I have upvoted you automatically: in the past it did not just mean I think your argument is interesting, but also (in cases like this one) that I share the sentiment and do not want to litter HN with "+1" comments. Of course, now that none except you can see your score, this is no longer working like that. Happy birthday to raganwald!
route66 15y ago
Don't get scarce!
6ren 15y ago
Really? I could've sworn you were in your twenties from this photo: http://reginald.braythwayt.com http://reginald.braythwayt.com
- raganwald 15y ago
  IIRC, That photo was taken at MeshU in Spring of 2008, so I would have been 45 or so.
rbanffy 15y ago
Happy Birthday!!! And I agree with 6ren. You definitely look like a 20-something.

kmavm 15y ago

Since I don't see this specifically addressed in the text: I suspect this is a classic case of survivorship bias. The same way the stock market looks better and better the further back you go, because you aren't tracking the stocks of companies that are no longer in business, developers probably look better and better the further they are into their careers, since all the ones who've fallen by the wayside probably were the weaker developers who found something better to do with their time. As a somewhat older developer, I find this a surprisingly difficult question to answer honestly. Comparing myself to myself from 10 years ago, I sincerely think I'm more effective, but self-delusion may play a part in that. I've probably lost some of my "step", in terms of raw capacity to memorize and compute mentally, and I have more commitments outside of the world of software, which dilutes my efforts further. Then again, the strategic ideas I have are more dependably correct, and I spend less time chasing down dead ends, either because I've been down them before or had the good luck of witnessing them second- or third-hand. I've gotten a chance to see a world-class developer very closely between the ages of 36 and 45. He started this period as, very easily, the greatest engineer I'd ever even heard stories of, and I'm pretty sure he got better over that decade. It can be done.

andrewcooke 15y ago
is it fair to call it a bias in this case? it doesn't alter the conclusion that older developers are both better and scarcer, on average. [disclaimer: 44 yo ;o] [ps. google has mitigated memory loss, i suspect.]
- juiceandjuice 15y ago
  You are 100% right, a developer is a developer, so it's not bias. It could even be argued that the reason there are less older developers is because the better ones went into management and are no longer active developers. Now, this all assumes that developer activity on Stack Overflow is correlated roughly equivalently over most ages. If it is, then these plainly state that for any random developer you would interview, they are more likely to be more knowledgable (according to the definition extracted by Stack Overflow activity) the older they are. The fact that there may be fewer developers at an older age is irrelevant. Disclaimer: I'm 25

cek 15y ago

Interesting hypothesis, but the faulty data renders the results presented useless. Namely, only 53% of SO users enter their age. Therefore the data may be wildly biased towards people who are willing to enter their age in an online profile. In addition this only represents SO programmers, which while a great bunch, is hardly representative of all programmers.

zephyrfalcon 15y ago

"On the graph we can see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve." Is this an actual bell curve? It's not symmetrical. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution)

gwern 15y ago
It's hard for anything dealing with age to be a true symmetrical bell curve - it usually winds up being cut short by old age & death, or foreshortened by, well, not existing. Notice that the ages start at 16. You'd have to be pretty precocious to give high quality answers at age 10 or 5.
- 3pt14159 15y ago
  Not hard, impossible. Bell curves go to infinity. Edit: Shouldn't have said that. Everyone knows basic stats here and I was being pedantic.
  - gwern 15y ago
    Yeah, it is literally impossible for a real bell curve to exist, but if you want to be pedantic, that's also because people are clumpy. The bell curve might say there ought to be 0.00000067 excellent answerers at age 12, say, but reality insists on there being 0 or 1 excellent answerers aged 12. Whenever we look at real data, we acknowledge that it's a discretized approximation to a bell curve and not a real (continuous) one; the point was that on top of the discrete approximation, we have the additional problem of anthropic biases - people not existing or dying at either end.

mark_l_watson 15y ago

Wow, the chart only goes up to 49 years old? For me, that is about 4 programming languages ago :-)

Vivtek 15y ago
He said he only took age cohorts for which he had 100 or more data points.

llimllib 15y ago

A minor nit, I know, but a bell curve is symmetrical. So the graph shows some sort of fat-tailed distribution, and we cannot "see a textbook example of a bell distribution curve".

juiceandjuice 15y ago
Another minor nit: You can still do a fit to a bell curve and find a chi-squared value. If your chi-squared is horrible, obviously you should be considering a different probability density function as your model is incorrect, but if it's decent enough you can omit the features and call it a "bell curve" That being said, I could see this as a composition of two gaussian bell curves with the means correlating to the ages of people in college and their early/mid career (let's say 23 and 28 respectively)

strlen 15y ago

I don't disagree with the conclusion: people who aren't as dedicated to or good at programming transition to people or product/program/project management[1]; the remaining folk receive additional experience which allows them to capitalize further on their passion and talent. However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about programming. That's extremely useful (and helps career wise), but it isn't the same thing as being a better developer. Sometimes it correlates (the best programmers I've known have also participated in organizations like IETF, written RFCs and have also thoroughly documented their work), but it isn't a total ordering (I know plenty of programmers who are better than I, but who don't participate in any public forums). On the other hand, I've yet to find a successful programming language made by someone before their thirties. Contrast it, on the other hand, with some of the most ground changing academic work in Computer Science and Mathematics being done by people in their twenties. [1] There's nothing wrong with that: Google's APM program particularly is a great example of "engineers who don't want to code" being extremely useful. See also "The Russian Lit Major" by rands: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_history.html http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_his...

gvb 15y ago
I thought I had a counter example with Yukihiro Matsumoto and Ruby, but Yukihiro was born April 14, 1965 and Ruby was released December 21, 1995. Thirty years an a handful of months. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29#First_publication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_%28programming_language%29...
guelo 15y ago
The greater number of answered questions could either be because they are better at talking about programming as you say, or it could be that they just know more answers. It could also be that they have more time to answer questions, maybe because they have cushier jobs.
jedbrown 15y ago
Historically, it would seem like 30 is almost a "sweet spot" for language creation. * Dennis Ritchie was 27 or 28 in 1969 when C got going. * McCarthy was about 30 in 1958 for Lisp. * Sussman was 28 and Steele was 21 in 1975 for Scheme. * Alan Kay made Smalltalk between 28 and 31. And while it used to be true that lots of game-changing mathematics was done early, I don't see much of that lately. A huge amount is done by junior faculty and postdocs, but that's usually late 20s and 30s.

BasDirks 15y ago

'63 was a good year!

astrofinch 15y ago

What if there's a filtering effect where lower-quality developers are less likely to stick with the profession past age 27?

trentonstrong 15y ago

I think there might also be another selection bias here, in that StackOverflow might be a bit self-selecting for developers who know their stuff. It's hard to say what this says about developers as a whole, including the ones not on SO, which I assume is a large number. An alternative hypothesis might be this: Good developers get better over time, whatever that means. I would suspect that people who form bad habits early on don't enjoy the same benefits of experience as those who built on solid foundations.

engtech 15y ago

There's one huge hole in the analysis: the dataset. The older someone is, the less chance they'll spend time on an internet community site, especially at work, which is when a lot of people access stackoverflow. Old dudes work while they're at work, because they learned their work ethic in pre-internet times.

Revisor 15y ago

One could also find another, not so positive trend in the article: The older the developer, the less curious they are <= the less questions they have. Of course you could say it's because the older developers are more experienced. But would that quality per se quell the thirst for new knowledge? Just thinking aloud...

pnathan 15y ago
Alternatively, as you get better and deal with complex issues and have more sophisticated thoughts, you realize that SO can't answer the majority of your problems. That's what I've learned about SO: it's fine for popcorn questions, but for the in-depth knowledge and discussions... meh.
- Revisor 15y ago
  That's a very fair point. Overall the deeper answers are probably more in the books or at conferences, not in blogs and online forums.

imack 15y ago

Honest question: what happens to developers after they are no longer "Developers"? As a 29-year-old I'm kind of freaked out by the fact that I'm on the older part of that distribution.

sukuriant 15y ago
I do not have stats to base this claim, but when I worked at my last job, I heard from an employee in another department that the normal lifespan for a software developer was 7 years, after which they have some sort of career change, be it management or logging.

alanh 15y ago

Aaargh! The data doesn’t say this, all the data says is “Older StackOverflow users have disproportionately high SO reputation.” An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow. A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you are on SO, the higher your reputation, period, regardless of your answer quality, partly because downvoting is strongly disincentivized. And the article itself notes that older programmers don’t receive significantly more upvotes per post!) Until that’s shown, the article’s conclusion is highly suspect. Frankly, I’m embarrassed so few people seem to be calling out the terrible reasoning behind this post. It may well be that older programmers are “better,” but what we have here is nothing more than a colossal failure to understand science, reasoning, and evidence.

skeeterbug 15y ago
If you have a higher reputation and give correct answers, couldn't we then assume that the older developers have a wider range of knowledge to be able to participate in more responses? Also, it is not really clear how "better" is defined in this case. Maybe it is "better" == I know more technologies than you?
jt2190 15y ago
I also wonder: Do developers who spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow get "better" than those who actually write code? I've met more than one "Aristotelian Programmer" who could quote you every design pattern from heart and draw UML diagrams on a white board all day, but who actually couldn't write code.
nutjob123 15y ago
Thank you. I'm not against speculating but we all should know that correlation does not imply causation.
seldo 15y ago
Yeah, my conclusion from the data was "senior developers know more things and have more time on their hands to tell others about those things", which is exactly what you'd expect. The more senior you get, the more your role is as guide and mentor than immediate implementor.

zwieback 15y ago

I'm 45 with a little short of 30 years of programming experience. Our team at HP (I'm not a manager) has a few programmers that are significantly older and a few that are very young. From my observation, what's different about young vs. old programmers is not related to the speed at which we pick up new technologies (we all love to tinker with the latest stuff) but at the general approach to problem solving. Older engineers tend to compare new problems to experiences from the past. The tools at our disposal have become much better but the fundamental mechanisms haven't changed that much so it's easier to identify whether there's a real benefit to using a new tool or if it's better to stick with what you have. As an experienced developer it's a little easier to avoid sinking effort into novel but misguided technologies. As a young developer it's a little easier to be open-minded about promising technologies. But don't pay any attention to me - my SO rep is less than 30% of the average for my age bracket...

Tichy 15y ago

I hope it doesn't mean that older developers are more likely to be unemployed and therefore have more time to waste on SO.

sebastianavina 15y ago

Maybe it's because great developers end up in management positions... each day I write less and less code...

6ren 15y ago

I used to think younger developers were better, but with the experience of age, I now realize that older developers are better. Honestly, though, I think programming is a "young man's game", partly because you are sharper, have more energy etc when young; but mostly because when everything is reinvented each decade, you are better off starting fresh, without being aware of other choices. The exception is for higher-level tasks, such as marketing, managing people, strategic business decisions, and code architecture. Also, I would think, language/library/API/framework design. I hesitate a little, because many of these are based on the needs of current programmers, which the front-line troops know better because they are doing it (they are the users). However, for deeper insights, age has the benefit of seeing deeper patterns over decades, and over generations of usage. Most language designers seem to be older (but is that just because their languages are now old?)

MaysonL 15y ago

I wonder that they didn't do the correlation of length of time on SO (i.e., since join date) vs. reputation. Did the older developers join SO earlier, on average? How many rep points per day did older vs. younger devs accumulate?

sbochins 15y ago

The myth that engineers lose their game when they get older always seemed a little off to me. It usually gets clumped in with all the software jobs are going to go to China. I have met a lot of very bad developers that were older as well as very good ones. The same goes for young developers.

bryanalves 15y ago

A quote from this really stuck out for me: "So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality." A lot of people here are focused on "being smarter" or "doing a better job" or "higher quality" Excluding all of the self-taught developers, and limiting ourselves only to people who follow the standard "get a 4-year college degree then go out in the real world and work" crowd, as that's pretty sizable. Make extrapolations as necessary. Remember your first year (or two?) of development? Looking back, you were probably way in over your head, had mentors looking after you, making tons of mistakes etc. Fast forward 5 years. Can you write code faster? Probably not. Can you write better code? Sometimes. It's all about experiences and learning from them. When you take a new job, or a new project, or a new anything, you call upon past experiences to guide the efforts of this process. It might be something as vague as "I am going to write tests first because I found it helped me earlier", or (ignoring TDD), "I'm not going to write this function like this, because I know the code will be hard to test when I get around to writing a test for it later" You learn this all from experience. Senior people who have been in the field longer have more experience. They aren't "better" in the sense that they are smarter or have more intelligence, they just know MORE because they've been exposed to more. It's also why so many people (especially in hacker news) have been successful without degrees. It's not a degree that matters it's EXPERIENCE. It might be a fine line differentiating between smartness gained from pure intelligence and "smartness" gained via experience, but I think it's an important distinction, and one that I think this post highlights well.

spinlock 15y ago

It's official: developers spend more time on stack overflow with age.

jongraehl 15y ago

Older people have, on average, been using stackoverflow for longer. SO rep scales roughly linearly with time spent contributing. This probably isn't enough to explain the entire effect shown in the graph, but in 10 years (if people still use SO), it would be.