I've also worked with developers in their fifties who are awful.
Age bias is awful, and I have worked with a lot of older developers who know their stuff and are extremely competent, but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong. Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
I've also worked with developers in their fifties who are awful.
Me to.
And I've worked with devs in the 20s who are awful. And their 30s. And their 40s. And their 60s.
I've also worked with great devs in all those age ranges.
Proportions seem about the same to me.
Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
I've not noticed a difference.
I have noticed that it's harder to spot the folk in their 20s who don't learn and adapt quickly since folk in their 20s have to learn something to make any progress at all. Once that pressure is off and they've become fixated on Rails / C# / whatever they seem just as unlikely to change as any other age range. They just get fixated on the "cool" thing - so it takes longer to spot.
Are you sure the proportion was the same? Reason I am asking is because for people who are bad at programming, there are various process/ management roles available that might better suit.
It seems rather impossible to me that someone would voluntarily continue programming for a couple of decades and not be excellent.
Beyond the 30's, I imagine people would be passionate about it to continue taking up programming roles. And this passion should translate into excellence.
Happy to be corrected if you have any data-points.
It seems rather impossible to me that someone would voluntarily continue programming for a couple of decades and not be excellent.
I don't have any hard data I'm afraid - just my fallible recollections ;-)
Some of ways of getting non-excellent old developers that I've observed:
* Not all old developers have been programming for a couple of decades. People can and do come into development late - and suffer all the normal problems of newbie developers.
* You'll be amazed at how little work you can get away with in some large organisations. When you have a couple of hundred people on a project you will find one or two Wallys from Dilbert.
* The devs who have sunk deep into some gnarly legacy system or language. Being the person who knows the right bit to tweak in the middle of a 1500 line procedure in the middle of a big-ball-of-mud project might be stupidly valuable to a company - but produce a lousy developer in any other context.
* The "senior" developer / architect / lead who has been Peter Principled to their level of incompetence, but whose team is good enough to cover up the deficit in leadership ability.
* The large chunk of bad developers (of all ages) who don't realise they're bad developers. Folk can't improve until they understand where they suck.
> but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong
No one is suggesting that it does. However, to dismiss 25 years of experience as nothing is equally, if not more wrong. Consider that all other things being equal, the person with 25 years of experience will be better than the person with 0.
> Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
What you are saying here is: Often, older developers aren't good. Maybe that's not what you mean, but that is what you are saying.
As for your assertion that good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, I'm not sure what you mean (not sure of the context here).
No personal experience here but my gut feeling is that older developers are more likely to be closer to the one or the other extreme. The theory being that those who are average tend to move to middle/senior management, leaving behind those that are either brilliant hardcore hackers or incompetent clock punchers.
I find there are less awful developers over 40 than under 40. Eventually your reputation catches up with you and it is very difficult to hide decades of incompetence.
There's an old quote that I've seen attributed to lots of different people that for this situation can be paraphrased:
"Some people have 25 years of experience in a field while others have one year of experience repeated 25 times"
So yeah, anyone who is developing software and keeps learning new things and pushing their boundaries is going to improve quite a bit over those years, but someone who just sticks with the same language/framework and basically reimplements the same CRUD app over and over is probably not going to knock your socks off no matter how long they've been at it.
Source: I'm a 39 year old developer and have worked with fantastic older developers and terrible older developers.
Yeah, I do. I think the only constant thing in software engineering is that you need to be able to learn and adapt. If you spend 25 years at a single organization where you aren't forced to continuously learn and adapt, you'll be at a disadvantage when you are inevitably forced to do something outside of your comfort zone.
You are addressing the statement "a person with 25 years experience is always going to be better than a person with 5 years experience" - and I agree with you, that's not always the case.
But, I'm saying, all other things being equal (which is what I meant by "You think you can do something for 25 years without getting better at it?" I mean, I meant the /you/ specifically, but it applies to "any one individual")
I mean, there are a lot of other factors. I'm just saying, all other things being equal, you get better with experience. UNIX is far older than I am. So is C. Yeah, how you use both has changed a lot... but most people that have remained employed that long follow those changes.
>I think the only constant thing in software engineering is that you need to be able to learn and adapt.
Lisp, anyone? Most concepts in programming are older than I am. Many of the "new" concepts are rehashes of old concepts.
Actually, I think this goes back to what someone else was saying; It's harder to say "This time it's different" to someone with experience.
I know I've been watching these articles about how vc is switching to "enterprise" and away from "consumer" - My first thought was "wow, I remember the same thing in the very late '90s. they called it 'b2b' but it was the same thing- people eventually realized they needed to start making money."
Many companies seem to want employees that buy into the 'vision' even if that vision is clearly as ridiculous as selling dogfood over the internet. (I mean, selling dogfood over the internet is a valid business model, but it's not the billion dollar business that pets.com hyped it up to be. Just like facebook has a reasonable business model; it's just not the billion dollar business everyone thinks it is.)
Of course, I'm not sure how much that has to do with being old. I wasn't old enough to drink until after the first .com crash, and living and working through it, even as a kid, it was obviously ridiculous.
Age bias is awful, and I have worked with a lot of older developers who know their stuff and are extremely competent, but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong. Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.