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Older programmers aren't obsolete
Oct. 4th, 2008 08:50 pmIt is a common misconception, especially popular amongst engineers who live in ex-USSR, that when you become 35 or even 30, your head turns to a pumpkin and you are no longer able to keep up with new programmer's trick, slowly degrading as a professional.
For example:
>I know how difficult nowadays it to find a decent s/w engineer, my goal is get away from coding so I am looking for my
> replacement. IT development is so fast, that it takes roughly 2 months to get out of the context, and it will get up to a year
> to catch up again. Human ability to grasp new things is lower when you are more then 30 - so effective s/w engineer who is
> older then 30 - is a nonsense. If you are older then 20-22 then it's impossible to start studying s/w engineering... You should
> have started when you were 13-14..
This text was posted on one of the forums by a decent programmer, and it is quite common.
In ex-USSR, a lot of professionals agree that programming is a trade for young, like soccer. Learning new tricks after 35 is impossible, etc. I think the main reason why this misconception is common is there are very few examples. A lot of professionals from 80s had moved abroad, switched careers or founded businesses in the vacuum of early 90s. In countries where programmer's job market is more mature, this whole idea sounds like a nonsenses because too many counter-examples do exist.
If some of my Russian colleagues have not seen such examples, I can bother to list just a few.
1. My ex-customers, R and A, founders of a start-up that is developing one of the key technologies used to speed up trades in LSE and few other exchanges. Both are about 50, less then 10 ppl in company and everybody is writing code, founders being most productive developers. R founds time to make 1-2 important commits to open source like Linux kernel.
2. V, she is almost 70, but when I met her last time she had filed about 2 US patents annually. She writes DSP code in C faster then I am able to understand how it works.
3. C, I am not sure how old is he, but he looks like 50+. One of the prominent consultants in the middle east, specializes on optimizing scientific software.
4. I have more then 10 examples of the programming stars 40+ I've met, and even more just good programmers, but it will be too much typing.
The last one, (just for fun :) - Linus Torvalds. He is almost 40. There was a time, when some people started recognizing him more as a talented s/w architect and organizer, but not a brilliant coder any more. And then he had developed GIT...
For example:
>I know how difficult nowadays it to find a decent s/w engineer, my goal is get away from coding so I am looking for my
> replacement. IT development is so fast, that it takes roughly 2 months to get out of the context, and it will get up to a year
> to catch up again. Human ability to grasp new things is lower when you are more then 30 - so effective s/w engineer who is
> older then 30 - is a nonsense. If you are older then 20-22 then it's impossible to start studying s/w engineering... You should
> have started when you were 13-14..
This text was posted on one of the forums by a decent programmer, and it is quite common.
In ex-USSR, a lot of professionals agree that programming is a trade for young, like soccer. Learning new tricks after 35 is impossible, etc. I think the main reason why this misconception is common is there are very few examples. A lot of professionals from 80s had moved abroad, switched careers or founded businesses in the vacuum of early 90s. In countries where programmer's job market is more mature, this whole idea sounds like a nonsenses because too many counter-examples do exist.
If some of my Russian colleagues have not seen such examples, I can bother to list just a few.
1. My ex-customers, R and A, founders of a start-up that is developing one of the key technologies used to speed up trades in LSE and few other exchanges. Both are about 50, less then 10 ppl in company and everybody is writing code, founders being most productive developers. R founds time to make 1-2 important commits to open source like Linux kernel.
2. V, she is almost 70, but when I met her last time she had filed about 2 US patents annually. She writes DSP code in C faster then I am able to understand how it works.
3. C, I am not sure how old is he, but he looks like 50+. One of the prominent consultants in the middle east, specializes on optimizing scientific software.
4. I have more then 10 examples of the programming stars 40+ I've met, and even more just good programmers, but it will be too much typing.
The last one, (just for fun :) - Linus Torvalds. He is almost 40. There was a time, when some people started recognizing him more as a talented s/w architect and organizer, but not a brilliant coder any more. And then he had developed GIT...
