Comment by OhHeyItsE | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OhHeyItsE | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder where the myth that older developers are "slower" comes from.

Dunno about you folks, but I get better and faster every year. And, for me, that productivity metric is probably approaching parabolic.

You learn enough languages, frameworks, tools - all the fundamentals start to merge together. You can pick the next one up faster than you did the one you just put down. You understand how to design software; how to organize code. Exactly when to reuse, refactor, or copy/paste.

You have a better understanding of how the market works and the competitive strategies around product development will manifest - not only within your own product and industry, but when analyzing and choosing vendors as well (you really want to leave it up to a 25 year-old to choose AWS vs GCP?).

Sure, I've got a ton of better things to spend my nights and weekends on than writing code for free. I can also spot a doomed project from a mile a way and have no qualms about delivering a very curt "yeah no thanks" to that project manager who waddles over with some deluded hero fantasy where they carry the flag on my back for something that's probably never going to see the light of day anyway.

Maybe that's it? That's probably it...

53-year-old coder here. (Although that's not my primary job) I still love programming. I love new frameworks and tools, I love solving problems for people. I love having fun with a good team.

I do reason a bit slower, but that's because -- I think -- I'm considering more options than I did when I was younger. I also have a tendency to like "grinding": you know, things like hooking up copy constructors for C++ classes in order to make a more complete type system. So I stay on the lookout for that.

If anything has changed, it's just I try to be much more careful about getting in a rut. And that's crazy, because that's the accusation people make about older coders. I always want to hold the problem in one hand and the tech in the other, looking to see what the minimum amount of work is required. When I was younger, people would describe the problem to me, then I would dive down and focus almost exclusively on whatever the tech was. It was like a big video game or mathematical puzzle that I enjoyed as much or more than making stuff people wanted.

I've seen a lot of people in the industry spend a lot of time, effort, and money doing that. I've seen good friends end up out of work because they fell in love with a certain tech that the rest of the industry decided wasn't cool any more. So now I try to look at solutions as much as tech -- more so, really. Ideally you wouldn't code anything, just make stuff people want without indulging your desire to work with detailed systems of symbols.

As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As their bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of history repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere. Younger devs fall in line much easier.

It can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Some older devs get hung up on bikeshedding and tunnel visioning about old specifics instead of just getting work done with whatever the new environment is. However, this problem is far more represented in the big slow-moving corporate world, and go-getter active old timers looking at startups wouldn't generally fit that stereotype.

But if 2 devs are agreeably working on a complex project, the old timer will probably be faster to finish than the younger one. For non-complex projects, it's a crap shoot.

> As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As their bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of history repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere. Younger devs fall in line much easier.

I've seen this in spades. One of my greatest frustrations as an older developer is seeing history about to repeat itself, yet being unable to convince management of that fact.

Because I need the paycheck I can't walk away from some work. But it makes me die a little every time I work on such projects.

Tasks assigned to older devs I've worked with generally sail through QA. So even if they're not as fast to put in a PR (though this has not been my personal experience either), they're a lot more efficient getting their code into production.

My thoughts: when there is a completely new industry being built (like transistors in the 60s or social networking in the 00's), no one has an advantage with respect to experience. Young brains seem to work better at adapting to new environments than old ones (e.g. learning foreign languages), and people like Bob Noyce and Mark Zuckerberg can use this to their advantage. But once industries establish, and actual knowledge is required to gain an edge, so experience is more valuable than adaptability. I don't think we have any industries at the moment where youth is better than knowledge, though. AI/ML is not an industry for kids, but rather the best brains having been trained for decades.

Unfortunately, I think the investing class, who tends to use crude proxies like founder age/college/gpa to evaluate business potential, is still calibrated to youth->success based on recent historical precedent of Facebook/Google. And this bleeds through to the job market, where young teams get funding easier than old ones.

The USA specializes in new industries for good or bad. Existing industries drift to low-wage countries with lighter labor & pollution regulations. Therefore, it may be harder to find industries that value experience in the USA. Perhaps it's time for a reverse H1B visa migration for older workers: "B1H".

The slow myth is at least partially from experienced developers putting more time into upfront planning. A novice may crank out a solution faster but it'll have far more bugs and result in technical debt.

I think the idea comes from earlier times where programming skills came in high demand but few actually knew how to code.

I resulted in high influx of older but inexperienced people, maybe with some background in a somewhat related field like electronics. And they were probably slower than young and equally inexperienced people. Experienced developers simply weren't available.

I understand why companies may prefer younger developers now. Cheaper, less constraints, more long term potential, ... but I think that the idea that older developers are "slower" is outdated.

I think the bias is against older people who are looking for jobs through the same channels as the younger people rather than having an established enough work history or a network that gives them an express lane.

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