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Comment by sosomoxie | Hacker News Reader

I've gone years without coding and when I come back to it, it's like riding a bike! In each iteration of my coding career, I have become a better developer, even after a large gap. Now I can "code" during my gap. Were I ever to hand-code again, I'm sure my skills would be there. They don't atrophy, like your ability to ride a bike doesn't atrophy. Yes you may need to warm back up, but all the connections in your brain are still there.

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Have you ever learnt a foreign language (say Mongolian, or Danish) and then never spoken it, nor even read anything in it for over 10 years? It is not like riding a bike, it doesn’t just come back like that. You have to actually relearn the language, practice it, and you will suck at it for months. Comprehension comes first (within weeks) but you will be speaking with grammatical errors, mispronunciations, etc. for much longer. You won‘t have to learn the language from scratch, second time around is much easier, but you will have to put in the effort. And if you use google translate instead of your brain, you won‘t relearn the language at all. You will simply forget it.

Anecdotally, i burned out pretty hard and basically didn't open a text editor for half a year (unemployed too). Eventually i got an itch to write code again and it didn't really feel like I was really worse. Maybe it wasn't long enough atrophy but code doesn't seem to quite work like language though ime.

Six months is definitely not long enough of a break for skills to degrade. But it's not just skills, as I wrote in another comment, the biggest thing is knowledge of new tools, new versions of language and its features.

I'd say there's at most around 2 years of knowledge runtime (maybe with all this AI stuff this is even shorter). After that period if you don't keep your knowledge up to date it fairly quickly becomes obsolete.

I would imagine there is probably some reverse S-curve of skill loss going on. The first year you may retain like 90% (and the 10% are obscure words, rare grammar structures, expressions, etc.), then in the next 2 years you loose more and more every year, and by the 3rd year you’ve lost like 50% of the language, including some common words, useful grammar structures, but retain common greetings, basic structures, etc. and then after like year 5 the regression starts to slow down and by year 10 you may still know 20%, but it is the most basic stuff, and you won‘t be able to use the language in any meaningful way.

I have not and I'm actually really bad at learning human languages, but know a dozen programming languages. You would think they would be similar, but for some reason it's really easy for me to program in any language and really hard for me to pick up a human language.

Learning human languages is not a similar process to learning programming languages at all. I've never been sure why so many people think it is.

I provided it as a counter example to the learning how to bike myth.

Learning how to bike requires only a handful of skills, most of them are located in the motor control centers in your brain (mostly in the Cerebellum), which is known to retain skills much better then any other parts of your brain. Your programing skills are comprised of thousands of separate skills which are mostly located in your frontal-cortex (mostly in your frontal and temporal lobes), and learning a foreign language is basically that but more (like 10x more).

So while a foreign language is not the perfect analogy (nothing is), I think it is a reasonable analogy as a counter example to the bicycle myth.

Maybe something that keeps programming skills fresh is that after you learn to think like a programmer, you do that with problems away from the keyboard. Decomposition, logic... in the years I wasn't programming, I was still solving problems like a programmer. Getting back behind the keyboard just engaged the thought processes I was already keeping warm with practice.

I studied Spanish for years in school, then never really used it. Ten years later, I started studying Japanese. Whenever I got stuck, Spanish would come out. Spanish that I didn't even consciously remember. AFAIK, foreign languages are all stored in the same part of the brain, and once you warm up those neurons, they all get activated.

Not that it's in any way relevant to programming. I will say that after dropping programming for years, I can still explain a lot of specifics, and when I dive back in, it all floods right back. Personally, I'm convinced that any competent, experienced programmer could take a multi-year break, then come back and be right up to speed with the latest software stack in only slightly longer than the stack transition would have taken without a break.

You might still have the skillset to write code, but depending on length of the break your knowledge of tools, frameworks, patterns would be fairly outdated.

I used to know a person like that - high in the company structure who would claim he was a great engineer, but all the actual engineers would make jokes about him and his ancient skills during private conversations.

I’d push back on this framing a bit. There's a subtle ageism baked into the assumption that someone who stepped away from day-to-day coding has "ancient skills" worth mocking.

Yes, specific frameworks and tooling knowledge atrophy without use, and that’s true for anyone at any career stage. A developer who spent three years exclusively in React would be rusty on backend patterns too. But you’re conflating current tool familiarity with engineering ability, and those are different things.

The fundamentals: system design, debugging methodology, reading and reasoning about unfamiliar code, understanding tradeoffs ... those transfer. Someone with deep experience often ramps up on new stacks faster than you’d expect, precisely because they’ve seen the same patterns repackaged multiple times.

If the person you’re describing was genuinely overconfident about skills they hadn’t maintained, that’s a fair critique. But "the actual engineers making jokes about his ancient skills" sounds less like a measured assessment and more like the kind of dismissiveness that writes off experienced people before seeing what they can actually do.

Worth asking: were people laughing because he was genuinely incompetent, or because he didn’t know the hot framework of the moment? Because those are very different things.

This has nothing to do about ageism. This applies to any person of any age who has ego big enough to think that their knowledge of industry is relevant after they take prolonged break and be socially inept enough to brag about how they are still "in".

I don't disagree with your point about fundamentals, but in an industry where there seems to be new JS framework any time somebody sneezes - latest tools are very much relevant too. And of course the big thing is language changes. The events I'm describing happened in the late 00s-early 10s. When language updates picked up steam: Python, JS, PHP, C++. Somebody who used C++ 98 can't claim to have up to date knowledge in C++ in 2015.

So to answer your question - people were laughing at his ego, not the fact that he didn't know some hot new framework.

I beg to differ. I started with C in the 90s, then C# in '05, then PHP in '12, then Go in '21. The things I learned in C still apply to Go, C#, and PHP. And I even started contributing to open source C projects in '24 ... all my skills and knowledge were still relevant. This sounds exactly like ageism to me, but I clearly have a different perspective than you.

Yes, we clearly have different perspectives. I observed an arrogant person who despite their multi-year break from engineering of any kind strongly believed that they still were as capable as engineers who remained in the field during that time.

Maybe you had to be there.

I code in Vim, use Linux... all of those tools are pretty constant. New frameworks are easy to pick up. I've been able to become productive with very little downtime after multi-year breaks several times.

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