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Comment by asinglenet | Hacker News Reader

Author here - I can make an observation about old people because I myself am 49 years old. I'm not making a value judgement about older people. That would be ageism. I'm observing that the attendees "agile" events tend to be older than most programmers, and even most IT staff. That's just demographics. Why is that? That affects a lot of things.

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I can make an observation about old people because I myself am 49 years old

That doesn't make any logical sense. All that suggests is that you have n=1 experience with people over the age of forty.

As for observing that agile events in your neck of the woods are full of older people, there are many, many possible explanations for this and your blog post advances one without providing evidence that it is anything other than confirmation bias.

One thing I would do before making a statement like that is attend some other methodology events and check out the ages. If you go to a CMM conference, how old are the people? How about a PMP Institute gathering?

You may find that older people are more interested in methodologies while younger people are more interested in technologies. You might not, but your essay does nothing to establish that your explanation carries more weight than my conjecture.

And if my conjecture is correct, your point really should be that "Excessive interest in methodologies has the smell of death." That might be true!

I am not saying you're wrong, only that your essay is not persuasive on this one point.

I don't make a conjecture about the reason that agile events skew to an older crowd because I really, really don't know why it is true. I do know that it changes the whole perception of the effort. So, I have to be careful when I use the word "agile". It's got a demographic implication that isn't positive, isn't "us" for many younger people. You can argue about the wisdom of my saying it this way, but the word has a real demographic and emotional association. This article is a chance to express my doubts about the word "agile". It's done. I'll be more positive from here on out.

CMM and PMP are basically anti-agile. They are useful, but useful for projects that just shouldn't be agile. The fact that agile events attract a similar demographic isn't a positive, in my opinion.

It's got a demographic implication that isn't positive, isn't "us" for many younger people

Compared to what, exactly? What development management practices do have an "us" demographic for younger people? One possibility is that you will reply and name one or more named practices with a "young" demographic, and I will accept your point.

The other possibility is that there really isn't a development management practice that has a "young" demographic, that young developers just aren't into spending a lot of time thinking about practices.

If the second case is true, I really believe it undermines your point. If young developers don't really align towards any particular named repeatable practice, Agile is no better and no worse than anything else on account of the age of the people interested in it enough to attend events. It isn't worth "hating" agile for its lack of traction any more than hating PERT charts or Theory of Constraints.

My hunch is one of the main reasons people who attend Agile events tend to be on the mature side is because they've have families so they can't (and don't want to) spend their weekends at beer-fuelled hackathons and have seen that the root of software project success & failure is in the processes rather than the tools.

That kind of stuff is pretty boring for the younger generations who are still caught up in the idea that shiny technologies and gargantuan coding sessions can save the world and make them all billionares.

You are either a hypocrite or cannot remember your own writing. "The smell of death" permeates agile gatherings, because the attendees are largely over 50. That's not a statement of fact. It might have been a factual statement, had you written that the attendees were animated, rotting corpses.

You associated old people with "the smell of death." I consider that a value judgement: Old people: Agile has the smell of death on it.

If you want to see a lot of young people then go to a 48-hour hack-a-thon. That's a development methodology where you'll find fewer 40-50 year old devs.

You find mostly older devs at meetups about process and methodology not because it's and old and boring subject. Rather, because they're the ones who are concerned about process and methodology and are more likely to be at a management level.

As I explain above the oldies are there because their 401ks tanked and they had to get back into the workforce somehow without programming skills. Hence, the Agile Coaches in the AARP set

Women can be misogynistic. Where are you getting your sense of the demographics of "most programmers," anecdata?

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