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Comment by peapicker | Hacker News Reader

".. However, StackOverflow’s survey on age shows that there are just about 13% of developers after 40. Where are the others?"

Obviously not on StackOverflow. Perhaps they have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site because they either know how to read tech books and sites to get the info they need when they have a problem using pre-existing docs, or conversely, are fully able to debug issues themselves.

That's what I do, anyway. (I'm 46)

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> Obviously not on StackOverflow

Definitely. The content on Stack Overflow is heavily weighted towards languages and specialties less likely to be of interest to older programmers. We (I'm 51) are far more likely to be working on infrastructure and devops than on front-end. To do it, we're using C, maybe C++, maybe Python or even perl and bash, not Java, definitely not JavaScript or any of its variants, or Erlang, or Clojure, or whatever. Not always, but much of the time. The things we need to know are scantly represented on SO.

The atmosphere on SO is probably also more of a turn-off for older programmers. Those who are established don't need to bulk up their karma on some website, and the one-upmanship from the resident karma whores gets tiresome really fast. So does the rules lawyering that leads to answers being hidden, questions being closed, and so on. The few times I've found myself there, it has seemed like a game and a distraction that I just don't have the time or inclination to keep playing, so I get out and don't come back for months. For those with broad work responsibilities plus homes and families and other outside connections, life's too short to spend much of it in a virtual mosh pit. HN is enough for that. ;)

> To do it, we're using C, maybe C++, maybe Python or even perl and bash, not Java, definitely not JavaScript or any of its variants, or Erlang, or Clojure, or whatever. Not always, but much of the time. The things we need to know are scantly represented on SO.

The languages you mention using are all in the top 20 tags. Yes, JavaScript, Java, and C# are the top three, but Python is #7, C++ is #9, and C is #18. Bash is on the second page and Perl on the third, but there are a bunch of other, less trend-sensitive, tags in between (e.g. regex, string, and multithreading). http://stackoverflow.com/tags/

True, but ordinal position doesn't matter as much as absolute value, which tends to fall off according to a power-law distribution. For example, Python (#7) is tagged barely half as often. C (#18) is a third of that. Topic-based (instead of language-based) tags fare even worse. "Filesystems" has been used only 6K times, "storage" less than 4K. As someone interested in those areas, there's just not going to be much content for me - few answers to my own questions, even fewer opportunities to answer others'. When the density of interesting content falls below a decent threshold, my interest doesn't continue to decline linearly. It simply drops to zero. I suspect that's true for a lot of people working outside of the web/app/mobile space. SO is just not seen as a forum for them. It's a forum for a particular (common) kind of programmer, and everyone else feels like a bystander or gatecrasher.

I don't understand how someone can "have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site".

I use StackOverflow practically all the time. I always think to myself, "yep, this (Wikipedia, YouTube and... yah HN) is what the internet is for".

But maybe I'm just too young. (I'm 47 ;) )

I think the idea is that after being a developer for 20+ years, one may either develop some intuition about how to use some package even if the documentation is poorly written, or else you have so much experience reading source code that doing so is almost as fast as reading the documentation.

I'm not saying that either of these is correct, but they could be plausible explanations.

>I don't understand how someone can "have enough experience and knowledge to not need the site".

If you've been programming for a couple of decades and you don't follow the trends du jour it's actually quite easy (note: I'm not at that level myself).

Seasoned C and C++ programmers, for example, don't have much to learn from Stack Overflow in the same way a (1) new programmer, (2) 0-20 years programmer who constantly juggles languages, APIs and frameworks etc depending on the job and the fads of the season.

You think someone like Linus checks SO to get his answers?

There are tons of programmers with such levels of experience (even if somewhat less so than Linus).

Let's put it another way: before 2008 NO programmer checked "Stack Overflow" all the time. Before 2000 they didn't even have Google, and before 1995 or so they didn't have much (if anything) in the way of online documentation and similar resources.

That's not ancient history: a 20 year-ish programmer has managed for 10+ years of their career without Stack Overflow.

Windows programmers had the MSDN, or whatever it was called.

MS provided lots of example code and docs.

As many companies did. It came on discs. In the post.

I don't tend to use StackOverflow all that much. Once in a while I'll look up a poorly documented error code on Google and one of the results will be S.O. But, then again, I tend to stick with languages and libraries with adequate documentation.

Honestly, if one is constantly looking everything up on StackOverflow, they're either using a very poorly documented technology or they might want to hit the books a bit and work on proficiency. "Knowing the literature" is becoming more and more underrated.

I'm 48 and use StackOverflow... not so much because I can't read tech books and docs, but because often times it's faster to at least get a lead (and to be fair, I'm usually using a search engine which in turn places StackOverflow answers towards the top of my result list). Also, if it's tech that I'm less familiar with, I'm often times looking for how others think about the issue I'm looking at which you often times don't get from documentation. Sometimes, I'm looking for contrary arguments if I've decided on an approach/usage but am less confident of my direction.

Now I do use my experience and knowledge to decide if I think any given answer on StackOverflow is likely to be "correct" in some sense (and by no means are all the answers, accepted or not, good all the time)... and there are occasions where I end up just going back to straight docs.

I have worked with other very smart over 40's (and over 50's) that do something similar to what I do with StackOverflow. I know none of us would take an online survey either.

The number of new CS grads has grown year over year making a raw percentage meaningless. A more useful statistics would be the percentage of developers the exit the field at each age.

I am 50 and use StackOverflow all the time. In my view StackOverflow (and Wikipedia) is one of the best things coming from the internet.

Did you fill out the survey?

Of course not :-), What survey?

I grew up in an era where if I somehow forgot the option for recursive for the rm command I reflexively typed "man rm" and "/recursive" and maybe "/" a couple times. It seems younger people will context switch from the console to the web browser, pull up a google window, search for "unix.stackexchange rm recurse" and slowly scroll thru "About 43,700 results (0.97 seconds)" for perhaps hours, opening multiple tabs. Perhaps they'll very sloooooly use a touch screen phone, or even worse scream across an open office interrupting 100 people who were in flow mode, but hey it saved them five seconds with the "man" command.

The other problem is I removed my training wheels in the 80s or 90s, and my problems are almost purely subjective, like "what is the best virtualization system running on FreeBSD" Google search of stackoverflow finds no question asked. Thanks stackoverflow you're really helpful when I forget what command copies files on linux (kidding), but not for the important stuff.

The next problem is seen at this URL

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14966014/whats-the-best-...

OK thanks stackoverflow for having the same question but for linux perhaps I can work off that ... wait, whats that, "asked 4 years, 2 months ago" Well I can't work with data that old, may as well not even be on line... And whats this... "As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance." Well, stackoverflow can just go F itself. It certainly doesn't answer any question I need answered.

My examples above were pretty staged, but across real topics, SO does boil down to a medium-to-slow speed way of answering relatively low level questions. Old timers work too quick, and they've already learned too much to ask the kind of question SO can answer.

Must these posts always devolve into bashing young people?

Every thread there is some old guy going on about how stupid young people are.

Maybe elsewhere. My specific examples were inexperience leads to massive time inefficiency which is hardly limited to age, and young people are sometimes a bit inconsiderate of others which seems so universal its not even a bash, almost a definition of being youthful, could be filed as social inexperience. If I wanted to imply they're stupid I'd falsely claim they just don't have the IQ/mental horsepower to figure it out, or they can't generalize that a lot of CLI recursive options tend to be dash-R, or they can't remember and have to look it up every time. But I didn't...

The meta observation is inexperience can lead to not understanding critique. Which again is not even a "youth" thing.

I do this, but I googled it first to know that the recursive option actually exists and what it is called. Those man pages are decent references, but are usually useless for actually learning the tool.

Mid 40's and older had to learn without the use of the internet. Programming as a profession wasn't ubiquitous as it is now for that same age group.

Above 50 and they didn't have a computer in their house growing up. I'm mid 40's and I had one by 9th grade, but it was a high bar for entry compared to today.

Late 40s and you probably graduated college with USENET but not the web.

I would say that during the 8-bit computer era having a home computer was not that odd (well, excluding the Apple II because that was expensive).

52 and I started with a KIM-1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1 (mowed lawns to save up for it, still have it, still works). Been programming ever since and rarely use SO (most of the time I just read the code when I'm trying to grock some aspect of a library.)

ooo, I am same age and KIM-1 was one of first computers I worked with , thanks for memories

Or perhaps they are less likely to create an account.

That's my bet. I've gotten away without asking any questions on stack overflow since its genesis. There's usually enough already asked on there that I can synthesize the answer or trigger an idea for something to try that ends up working.

Yeah, and I feel there's not much point contributing answers either, because it seems most situations are either:

1. Simple and quickly snapped up by other users who are aggressively trying to grow their reputation on the site (perhaps with more free-time than I) and there's a first-response advantage that crowds out later answers.

2. Duplicate of something else. Why bother making a good answer when it'll get closed because somebody else happens to think a different question is the "better" one?

3. Way outside my expertise and it's probably better for everyone involved if I don't try to answer when I'm not sure.

So in a way SO is a victim of its own success when it comes to lowered engagement.

P.S.: I've even had an answer I was proud of converted into a "community wiki" just for a few tiny wording changes, with the side-effect that I get no reputation from it. So yeah, it seems like a rat-race.

48 here, programming since my early teens and I enjoy contributing to StackOverflow when I can and leaning on it in return for help keeping up with the explosion of 'modern' programming techniques. I'm not too proud to recognize it for the invaluable resource that it is.

It's also safe to assume that after 40, most software developers find themselves in a higher level of hierarchy.

Or free-lance.

I use it to look up things now and then as the result of a google search but generally its a distraction and I'm not there to find validation so I don't even have a login. I don't think this has anything to do with age though. Maybe older people just have less enthusiasm for filling out surveys.

Great! Thank you for sharing this!

Wow, you sound salty and defensive.

Using StackOverflow is often the fastest way to find results. Your implication that it means we don't know how to debug issues ourselves or use pre-existing docs is insulting and farcical. I'm perfectly capable of using other resources—that doesn't change the fact that a quick Google is often the fastest way to reference something I forgot.

I'd never hire someone who saw using Stack Overflow (when it made sense) as a flaw.

nowhere did the OP say it was a 'flaw'. he theorized that more experienced developers may just not need to go there as much.

I'd theorize that perhaps older developers don't put as much stock in participating in those sorts of surveys.

He assumed that Stack Overflow users don't have the experience to read books or debug themselves, which from the other replies is obviously incorrect and naive.

It's not a flaw, but you certainly are making it sound like a requirement.

Besides, for some of the stuff some of us do, the technology isn't on Stack overflow.

I think for certain roles it absolutely is a requirement. If a web or backend software developer insisted that they refused to use Stack Overflow I don't think they'd make a good employee. It sounds like they're letting ideological hangups and tradition override practicality.

> Wow, you sound salty and defensive.

No, he doesn't. You do though.

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