6 ms·

Older and Wiser... Up to a Point

32 points by 31reasons 13y ago

rjempson 13y ago
I think this has parallels with the saying "I'm not young enough to save the world".
dusklight 13y ago
No comments about the truth of the prejudice against older programmers, but this study does not prove anything. There is a huge self-selection bias going on here, as not all programmers go on stack overflow and certainly not all programmers answer questions on stack overflow. There could be many older programmers who have not kept up to date with the latest skills and best practices, who know the only reason why their job is secure at BigCorp is because their code is so bad/intentionally obfuscated that no one else can read it, who don't answer questions on stack overflow.
tomfakes 13y ago
Interestingly, I find that a lot of the questions on Stack Overflow are from such noobs that I'd have to spend time explaining how to program before getting to their actual question. This disuades me from participating, as it's hard to find the questions from programmers who I could help. As a professional, if I can't find a way to contribute my expertise in a timely and efficient way, then I'll get on with something interesting and more lucrative. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of useful stuff on SO, and I'd like to contribute at a high level, but I'm not willing to put in 2 hours a day to find the 1 or 2 questions that would be worth the time. I'm an older programmer, and this may be one explanation of why older programmers answers on SO aren't as useful - the good ones are not the ones answering questions! This is just an anecdote, but one that certainly applies to me
- msoad 13y ago
  The score in StackOverflow is meaningless without looking at profile of an individual and see what question they ask or how is their level of knowledge in their answers. Spending time to contribute to StackOverflow is not necessary a bad behavior. Programmers can meet challenges that they might have in feature and get ready for them. I personally answer to questions that have no answer or not correct answer when I google for them but finally I've solved myself. I even googled and reached to my own answers!
- dasil003 13y ago
  Why do you think you have to put in 2 hours a day to find a good question to answer? I usually end up on SO because I was searching for something, and I see interesting questions often enough through serendipity. I don't think I've ever spent a whole hour on SO.
justin_vanw 13y ago
Meaningless study is meaningless. There are so many complete breakdowns of basic logic here that it makes my head spin. >>> Prejudice against older programmers is wrong, but new research suggests it's also inaccurate. Setting aside the issue at hand for a second, I want to point out that holding some true belief is neither morally right nor morally wrong, it is just the state of being correct. I think most of us would agree being correct is always preferable to being incorrect. Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? That's a little weird. >>> A dandy natural experiment to test the technical chops of the old against the young has been conducted—or discovered—by two computer scientists at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh. Professor Emerson Murphy-Hill and Ph.D. student Patrick Morrison went to Stack Overflow, a Web site where programmers answer questions and get rated by the audience. It turned out that ratings rose with contributors' age... No. Just no. I see no reason to accept the assumption that how high your score is on stack overflow relates in any meaningful way to how effective you are at computer programming. For example, if I took two programmers who were equal in every way, except that one spends the entire workday on stack overflow and the other works very hard all day, the one that has the lower stack overflow score is far more effective. I see no reason to accept the assumption that stack overflow is in any way representative of the programming community in any way. It is a self selected group of people that may or may not be employed as programmers. This isn't a study, it's a joke. The fact is, the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. However, the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age. How are these two facts both true? People get promoted out of being programmers all the time, but very few people become programmers past a certain age. People become managers, consultants, executives, entrepreneurs.
- derleth 13y ago
  > Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics > the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
trippy_biscuits 13y ago
Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? From John Ciardi “About Crows” (Fast & Slow, March 1975, 3): The old crow is getting slow; the young crow is not. Of what the young crow does not know, the old crow knows a lot. At knowing things, the old crow is still the young crow’s master. What does the old crow not know? How to go faster! The young crow flies above, below, and rings around the slow old crow. What does the fast young crow not know? Where to go!
- derleth 13y ago
  > older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? Not always, no. Sometimes, old people are just plain stupid. Not necessarily bigoted, hateful, and mean, all of which can be explained if not forgiven, but stupid. Age only brings experience if you're smart enough to gain experience from what happens to you. If you're not, you don't have thirty years' experience, you have one year of experience repeated thirty times. Now, add to that the Cult Of Age, the idea that old people deserve special respect simply because they're old, and the unchallengeable idea that old people must be wise because they're old. (We can go back and forth on whether respect is deserved or earned, because the two camps of people on that issue are apparently not operating from the same definition of 'respect'. What I'm talking about is the idea that, whatever 'respect' is, old people deserve more of it simply because they happen to be old.) Throw in a little bit of people disrespecting anyone younger than them, especially when the young person is more right than they are, and you get a lot of anger.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - trippy_biscuits 13y ago
    You make some fair points. I don't believe stupid gets constrained by age. In counterpoint I offer the truism, "you don't know what you don't know," using the collective you while referring to someone with a given point of view. A person that's ignorant of a certain body of knowledge may not even be aware of that ignorance let alone its size and scope. Generally, the younger the person, the exponentially larger the size and scope because that body of knowledge is not academic, it's earned through life experiences. I know an 80+ year old former farmer. He does not have a smart phone and cannot operate a computer or any other advanced technology. He's not stupid by any means even though many points of view could judge him so. Despite any rubric that measures him as stupid, he knows things that cannot be learned through experience because things just aren't done that way anymore. He knows the how and why of something in many more ways than someone half his age can even fathom. Take the older sys admin that used to build firewalls and sendmail.cf files by hand, for example. Just because there's no need to do that anymore doesn't mean that the experience is null and void. Older folks often know how and why something works (technology, human relations, etc.) while the younger folks just know how to repeat observed actions until it looks like it works. Granted, this behavior isn't just limited to the young (some people never learn). Don't discount someone's ability to contribute meaningfully just because of age. That's exactly what the sampling from stackoverflow revealed.
tom_b 13y ago
Find joy in working with accomplished hackers regardless of age. On this very forum I have discovered several worth following - I read their blogs, look at their code, aspire to learn from them, and sometimes despair at all that I still need to learn. This article mentions how chess training software has sped the training of chess players to the IM level from a baseline rating of 2200. Wouldn't it be fun if a similar training setup was available for hackers . . . I wonder what that would look like.
Jabbles 13y ago
The idea that I will not get better at software engineering as I continue to practise it is baffling, and slightly scary. Perhaps I do not want it to be true, but I cannot see how I will get worse with added experience.

32 points by 31reasons 13y ago

I think this has parallels with the saying "I'm not young enough to save the world".

No comments about the truth of the prejudice against older programmers, but this study does not prove anything. There is a huge self-selection bias going on here, as not all programmers go on stack overflow and certainly not all programmers answer questions on stack overflow. There could be many older programmers who have not kept up to date with the latest skills and best practices, who know the only reason why their job is secure at BigCorp is because their code is so bad/intentionally obfuscated that no one else can read it, who don't answer questions on stack overflow.

tomfakes 13y ago

Interestingly, I find that a lot of the questions on Stack Overflow are from such noobs that I'd have to spend time explaining how to program before getting to their actual question. This disuades me from participating, as it's hard to find the questions from programmers who I could help. As a professional, if I can't find a way to contribute my expertise in a timely and efficient way, then I'll get on with something interesting and more lucrative. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of useful stuff on SO, and I'd like to contribute at a high level, but I'm not willing to put in 2 hours a day to find the 1 or 2 questions that would be worth the time. I'm an older programmer, and this may be one explanation of why older programmers answers on SO aren't as useful - the good ones are not the ones answering questions! This is just an anecdote, but one that certainly applies to me

msoad 13y ago
The score in StackOverflow is meaningless without looking at profile of an individual and see what question they ask or how is their level of knowledge in their answers. Spending time to contribute to StackOverflow is not necessary a bad behavior. Programmers can meet challenges that they might have in feature and get ready for them. I personally answer to questions that have no answer or not correct answer when I google for them but finally I've solved myself. I even googled and reached to my own answers!
dasil003 13y ago
Why do you think you have to put in 2 hours a day to find a good question to answer? I usually end up on SO because I was searching for something, and I see interesting questions often enough through serendipity. I don't think I've ever spent a whole hour on SO.

justin_vanw 13y ago

Meaningless study is meaningless. There are so many complete breakdowns of basic logic here that it makes my head spin. >>> Prejudice against older programmers is wrong, but new research suggests it's also inaccurate. Setting aside the issue at hand for a second, I want to point out that holding some true belief is neither morally right nor morally wrong, it is just the state of being correct. I think most of us would agree being correct is always preferable to being incorrect. Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? That's a little weird. >>> A dandy natural experiment to test the technical chops of the old against the young has been conducted—or discovered—by two computer scientists at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh. Professor Emerson Murphy-Hill and Ph.D. student Patrick Morrison went to Stack Overflow, a Web site where programmers answer questions and get rated by the audience. It turned out that ratings rose with contributors' age... No. Just no. I see no reason to accept the assumption that how high your score is on stack overflow relates in any meaningful way to how effective you are at computer programming. For example, if I took two programmers who were equal in every way, except that one spends the entire workday on stack overflow and the other works very hard all day, the one that has the lower stack overflow score is far more effective. I see no reason to accept the assumption that stack overflow is in any way representative of the programming community in any way. It is a self selected group of people that may or may not be employed as programmers. This isn't a study, it's a joke. The fact is, the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. However, the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age. How are these two facts both true? People get promoted out of being programmers all the time, but very few people become programmers past a certain age. People become managers, consultants, executives, entrepreneurs.

derleth 13y ago
> Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics > the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

trippy_biscuits 13y ago

Why is it so difficult for the younger folks to concede that older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? From John Ciardi “About Crows” (Fast & Slow, March 1975, 3): The old crow is getting slow; the young crow is not. Of what the young crow does not know, the old crow knows a lot. At knowing things, the old crow is still the young crow’s master. What does the old crow not know? How to go faster! The young crow flies above, below, and rings around the slow old crow. What does the fast young crow not know? Where to go!

derleth 13y ago
> older folks have something solely by the virtue of being old? Not always, no. Sometimes, old people are just plain stupid. Not necessarily bigoted, hateful, and mean, all of which can be explained if not forgiven, but stupid. Age only brings experience if you're smart enough to gain experience from what happens to you. If you're not, you don't have thirty years' experience, you have one year of experience repeated thirty times. Now, add to that the Cult Of Age, the idea that old people deserve special respect simply because they're old, and the unchallengeable idea that old people must be wise because they're old. (We can go back and forth on whether respect is deserved or earned, because the two camps of people on that issue are apparently not operating from the same definition of 'respect'. What I'm talking about is the idea that, whatever 'respect' is, old people deserve more of it simply because they happen to be old.) Throw in a little bit of people disrespecting anyone younger than them, especially when the young person is more right than they are, and you get a lot of anger.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- trippy_biscuits 13y ago
  You make some fair points. I don't believe stupid gets constrained by age. In counterpoint I offer the truism, "you don't know what you don't know," using the collective you while referring to someone with a given point of view. A person that's ignorant of a certain body of knowledge may not even be aware of that ignorance let alone its size and scope. Generally, the younger the person, the exponentially larger the size and scope because that body of knowledge is not academic, it's earned through life experiences. I know an 80+ year old former farmer. He does not have a smart phone and cannot operate a computer or any other advanced technology. He's not stupid by any means even though many points of view could judge him so. Despite any rubric that measures him as stupid, he knows things that cannot be learned through experience because things just aren't done that way anymore. He knows the how and why of something in many more ways than someone half his age can even fathom. Take the older sys admin that used to build firewalls and sendmail.cf files by hand, for example. Just because there's no need to do that anymore doesn't mean that the experience is null and void. Older folks often know how and why something works (technology, human relations, etc.) while the younger folks just know how to repeat observed actions until it looks like it works. Granted, this behavior isn't just limited to the young (some people never learn). Don't discount someone's ability to contribute meaningfully just because of age. That's exactly what the sampling from stackoverflow revealed.

tom_b 13y ago

Find joy in working with accomplished hackers regardless of age. On this very forum I have discovered several worth following - I read their blogs, look at their code, aspire to learn from them, and sometimes despair at all that I still need to learn. This article mentions how chess training software has sped the training of chess players to the IM level from a baseline rating of 2200. Wouldn't it be fun if a similar training setup was available for hackers . . . I wonder what that would look like.

Jabbles 13y ago

The idea that I will not get better at software engineering as I continue to practise it is baffling, and slightly scary. Perhaps I do not want it to be true, but I cannot see how I will get worse with added experience.