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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

FWIW I turned 55 this week and feel smarter and more capable than any time before in my life.

I feel I write better code, and faster, than before. I understand articles and books better.

I can't ski, bike, run, or backpack like I used to in my 20s. This is not a huge surprise.

Similarly, I turned 55 last month, but I have noticed a definite decline in some aspects of my intelligence with regard to software development.

I work in a company that's committed to pair programming: two of us working together on one computer to develop. In some ways it's like a footrace, me against a twenty-five-year-old, except it's software development, not a footrace.

I marvel at my twenty-something pair's ability to hold a complex model in their head. I can do it, but it takes me longer, and usually I need to scratch notes on a piece of paper to help.

Their memory has better retention than mine. "Remember we ran into that problem in November?" I'll have absolutely no recollection.

And sometimes it takes me longer to figure something out. I remember last week waking up and realizing the reason why we hadn't been able to recreate a certain failure was that we were using a layer 4 load balancer instead of a layer 7 with a redirect — something I was confident I would have figured out sooner ten years ago.

I also notice that, in respect to programming languages that I've picked up in the last ten years, I tend to rely on stackoverflow for syntax, even simple things like, "How do a write a for loop in {Ruby,Python,Golang,JS}?" whereas I know the syntax cold for my earlier languages (Perl, C++, C, Pascal).

On the plus side I have 35 years of experience to draw upon, both from a development side as well as from a managing-expectations side. When I'm on a project with little oversight the project managers don't worry about it going off the rails. Still, I envy the elasticity of the minds of my younger fellow developers.

I can't say about others but since I know a bit about programming I think programming is more about experience than intelligence or iq. I think it's like any other skill that we hone with time and at least in my case we subconsciously pick up things while debugging and looking at other people's code, snippets and examples that makes us better as we get older.

FWIW, I am 35 and I feel like my memory has declined from when I was 10 - 20. I used to be able to remember a lot of content for exams, song lyrics, and general knowledge.

Nowadays, I sometimes have this occur to me: I am thinking about something that I know that I know, but I cannot recall it.

How much sleep are you getting? I found that was the case for me, but once I started sleeping and exercising more regularly, I feel like that dissipated.

I wonder though how much of that has to do with the wealth and ease of information that is available now vs. 30 years ago? Not that I am saying that you feel smart because you have read more. But the fact that there is so much information that would not have been as easily attainable 20 or 30 years ago as there is now. At the very least the fact that I can read and comment here definitely impacts my 'intelligence'. Plus all the information that I am exposed to and so easily with no effort other than reading. It's simply not the same as back in the library or 'read books' days. Here I can be doing one thing and then easily learn (to take a break) about something entirely different. With almost zero overhead to do so. Once again I am talking about the potential mental sharpness that produces independent of the actual information that may or may not be retained.

Lucky you!

I feel like my coding peak was at 35 and is slowly declining ever since.

I'm slowly getting better in dealing with people though.

I don't believe that "coding" is a single axis of quality, either. I'm now better at some types, and worse at others.

When I was young, I was much better at reading or writing complex functions that worked correctly. As I get older, I'm much less able to, but I also wouldn't want to even if I could.

I don't think that's just sour grapes. I don't want to inflict complex code on my coworkers, either. And there's many times (when I'm tired, when I'm fixing an emergency bug, etc) that I'm not at 100% mental capacity and I value not having to work right at my brain's complexity limit.

16 year old me would probably not have believed that.

At 50, I have noticeable fast and slow periods. But when everything is firing correctly the correlations and ability to quickly see the forest for the trees is better than at any other time in my life. People are also more interesting and I tend to enjoy each nice day a little more than the last. Most importantly for professional work I now know when to give up and move on or dig in and finish.

It is orders of magnitude harder to write a “simple” solution. Developers should not be proud of complexity at any age.

Are you suggesting one should be proud of something just because it's harder?

No, one should be proud of creating an elegant solution.

At 42 I feel like my coding gets better as my context increases. Getting worse with people though.

Man, that gives me a lot of hope :)

I feel the same way at the same age. I've been feeling that I've been at my intellectual peak for many years now, and keeping my fingers crossed for the years to come.

I think it was Michael Jordan who said he was at his physical best at 25 but 35 was when he was playing his best basketball. Though he declined physically, he made up for it with his knowledge of the game and experience.

Though at 55, you are not at your intellectual peak of the your 20s, you have gained knowledge and experience that can more than compensate for loss of brain power.

I like to think of it in terms of hardware and software. While the hardware may stagnate and decline, you can always update the software to get improved performance.

> Though at 55, you are not at your intellectual peak of the your 20s...

I am not convinced I was at a peak 30 years ago.

From a narrow physical aspect, pretty much everyone peaks sometime in their 20s. Your brain is a physical organ and it declines along with the rest of your body. Like your eyesight, endurance, strength, etc. It's the inevitable biological aspect of aging.

But from a holistic wider view, you don't necessarily peak in your 20s as your gains in knowledge, experience and wisdom compensates for the decline in pure physical performance.

Basically, you know lots of shortcuts.

One thing should be clarified... Everyone is not at their physical best around 25. They may, on average, have the -potential- to be at their physical best around age 25, but excercise and training has a lot to do with it.

35 year old me could beat 25 year old me in almost any physical contest. Because I am in much, much better shape now. I do regular cardio and I train and lift weights. I was chubby and out of shape at 25.

I suspect the same could easily be true for mental prowess.

That's true. However, if we look at one's peak, your 25 yr old self had a higher peak than your 35 yr self. If you had exercised as a 25 yr old self and reached your potential, you would be physically better than your 35 yr old self.

It's like driving 25 mph in a porsche vs 50 mph in a SUV. In this instance, the SUV is faster because you chose to go 25 mph in a porsche. You didn't fully explore the full potential of the porsch.

Your physical peak could be at 25, but you also could choose not to exploit it fully.

That's the "natural potential plateau" question - if we are to believe this theory, then it means that you can reach your absolute maximum potential in 10-15 years.

I am not so sure - I wonder if there are ways, in some fields, to keep getting better well into your 50s. For example, I don't really know of the ability to gain strength decreasing. So it seems like you could lift well into your 50s and end up stronger than a peak 25 year old.

I.e. an elite 25 year old wouldn't drop off in strength.

...I just answered my own question: https://torokhtiy.com/blogs/warm-body-cold-mind/weightliftin...

Seems like 35 is where Olympic weight lifters stop winning medals. There is also this: "Harvard University says the average man loses up to 5 percent of muscle mass every decade, starting at age 30; most men lose about 30 percent of muscle mass as they age."

Well, I guess I am going to have to stick with the guy who posted "older people just stop giving a " to comfort myself about getting old.

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