Older and Wiser... Up to a Point
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beta.spectrum.ieee.org
>>> Prejudice against older programmers is wrong, but new research suggests it's also inaccurate.
Setting aside the issue at hand for a second, I want to point out that holding some true belief is neither morally right nor morally wrong, it is just the state of being correct. I think most of us would agree being correct is always preferable to being incorrect. Yet here the author claims that believing something can be morally wrong even if it is a true belief? That's a little weird.
>>> A dandy natural experiment to test the technical chops of the old against the young has been conducted—or discovered—by two computer scientists at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh. Professor Emerson Murphy-Hill and Ph.D. student Patrick Morrison went to Stack Overflow, a Web site where programmers answer questions and get rated by the audience. It turned out that ratings rose with contributors' age...
No. Just no.
I see no reason to accept the assumption that how high your score is on stack overflow relates in any meaningful way to how effective you are at computer programming. For example, if I took two programmers who were equal in every way, except that one spends the entire workday on stack overflow and the other works very hard all day, the one that has the lower stack overflow score is far more effective.
I see no reason to accept the assumption that stack overflow is in any way representative of the programming community in any way. It is a self selected group of people that may or may not be employed as programmers.
This isn't a study, it's a joke.
The fact is, the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience. However, the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age. How are these two facts both true? People get promoted out of being programmers all the time, but very few people become programmers past a certain age. People become managers, consultants, executives, entrepreneurs.
This is entirely consonant with deontological ethics, as I understand it.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-deontological/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics
> the quality of any individual programmer increases with age and experience.
Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in, especially ones that negatively impact the ability to concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and express concepts in symbolic form.
Until senility and other age-related infirmities set in,
especially ones that negatively impact the ability to
concentrate, remember details, visualize problems, and
express concepts in symbolic form.
I really hope this wasn't published in a peer reviewed journal.
No, the author is claiming that belief in a statement can be morally wrong in the absence of definitive proof or disproof of that statement. In other words, morality can tell us how to treat a statement whose truth or falsehood we don't yet know.
The author is saying "if we didn't know whether older programmers are better or worse than younger programmers, it would be morally wrong to discriminate against them; however, new research says that prejudice isn't just morally wrong, it's also mistaken."
But you're right, the idea of using Stack Overflow scores as a proxy for programming skill seems a bit sloppy.
On the other hand, do you have any evidence for "the average quality of all programmers of a given age decreases above some age"? I'm not convinced that promotion out of being a programmer is that strongly correlated with programming ability. But I may be biased, as an older programmer who's tried (with gradually decreasing success) to avoid all managerial responsibility.
From John Ciardi “About Crows” (Fast & Slow, March 1975, 3):
The old crow is getting slow; the young crow is not.
Of what the young crow does not know, the old crow knows a lot.
At knowing things, the old crow is still the young crow’s master.
What does the old crow not know? How to go faster!
The young crow flies above, below, and rings around the slow old crow.
What does the fast young crow not know? Where to go!Not always, no. Sometimes, old people are just plain stupid. Not necessarily bigoted, hateful, and mean, all of which can be explained if not forgiven, but stupid. Age only brings experience if you're smart enough to gain experience from what happens to you. If you're not, you don't have thirty years' experience, you have one year of experience repeated thirty times.
Now, add to that the Cult Of Age, the idea that old people deserve special respect simply because they're old, and the unchallengeable idea that old people must be wise because they're old. (We can go back and forth on whether respect is deserved or earned, because the two camps of people on that issue are apparently not operating from the same definition of 'respect'. What I'm talking about is the idea that, whatever 'respect' is, old people deserve more of it simply because they happen to be old.) Throw in a little bit of people disrespecting anyone younger than them, especially when the young person is more right than they are, and you get a lot of anger.
I know an 80+ year old former farmer. He does not have a smart phone and cannot operate a computer or any other advanced technology. He's not stupid by any means even though many points of view could judge him so. Despite any rubric that measures him as stupid, he knows things that cannot be learned through experience because things just aren't done that way anymore. He knows the how and why of something in many more ways than someone half his age can even fathom.
Take the older sys admin that used to build firewalls and sendmail.cf files by hand, for example. Just because there's no need to do that anymore doesn't mean that the experience is null and void. Older folks often know how and why something works (technology, human relations, etc.) while the younger folks just know how to repeat observed actions until it looks like it works. Granted, this behavior isn't just limited to the young (some people never learn). Don't discount someone's ability to contribute meaningfully just because of age. That's exactly what the sampling from stackoverflow revealed.
It's difficult to talk about this sort of stuff without sounding like I'm a kid throwing a fit, but I guess it's worth a shot:
Growing up it feels like older people should be, fairly uniformly from the perspective of a child, incredibly formidable. You've had three or four times our experience and you should really know your stuff. You should have done your homework on your opinions and actions, you should be more self-controlled, more insightful, more... everything that doesn't relate fairly directly to muscles really. And you don't exactly try to deny that either - build up this image of yourselves as people whose judgement should be deferred to and ... when does any of it ever get backed up?
When we talk to an adult, it's very rare to feel like we're dealing with someone more knowledgeable or experienced than us at all, let alone three or four times so.
Adults lock kids up in school for the a lot of their waking lives and even your average kids still manage to get up to a competitive standard with your average adult in a year or so. The difference on forty years of age should not be a single year.
Maybe part of that's selection bias, adults just never get to do anything particularly difficult in front of us - but I don't think so in this case. Unlike many people my age in this country, I've worked a real job before - doing things that require thought - and the job wasn't hard to learn or anything like that. The people there, while friendly and nice, didn't strike me as being people with positive multiples of my own skills, despite some of them being multiples of my age.
Which isn't to say that some old people can't be incredibly formidable, from time to time you run into such people and can learn a lot from them - but most people seem to get to, say, their first job after school and some of the damage that school did them fades a bit, and then they just stop growing. If a kid like me can match or exceed most of the older people she meets, then there's something very wrong in the idea that you get something extra just from being old.
An nescis, mi fili, quantilla prudentia mundus regatur?
You don't get better by ageing, I think - at least, not solely by virtue of being older. Age represents opportunities to seek out new experiences and knowledge, and thus to get wiser. However, lots of people never take them and make much of themselves at all.
My fifty year old father's response to locking his washing in the washing machine was to run another wash cycle, and when that didn't work to run the spin cycle - it was only when I came along and released the child-lock that he was able to get his washing. The manual was right there besides the machine.
And he's not suffering from dementia or anything like that. It's tempting to think he is but he isn't. He's just spent all his life working the same mediocre arts job and sitting in front of the TV every spare moment he gets.
Respect that, as better than me just because he's older? It's like looking at a cripple. But... he's still meant to be healthy, he was always that smart. And so many adults are like him. There doesn't seem to be anything biologically wrong with them. And I love him dearly, but what does he have that I don't? And if he doesn't have anything just by virtue of being older, why should I assume that anyone else does -- if age is the sole criteria?
He's not better because he's older. He's more experienced because he's older. That experience has value because you cannot earn it any other way.
> what does he have that I don't?
Knowledge, tolerance, sacrifice, endurance, and perspective perhaps? When you are 50 you will have some of the same things simply due to the fact that you lived to that age. Older folks are human and make many mistakes just like every other human. It's because they've made more mistakes than younger folks that they are ahead on the opportunities to learn. There's nothing special, other than having been able to do everything you'll do, long before you can do it.
If you're having trouble seeing this point of view, compare your abilities and life experience to that of a 10 year old. Explain yourself to that 10 year old such that the youth will possess the sum total of your experiences and be able to act as you would act. Not possible you say? Perhaps now you can appreciate the value of aged experience?
If I put a pound coin in a fire, it doesn't become valuable to put your hand in the fire just because there's no other way to get it. You might, after being burnt, rationalise it as valuable because it had cost you dearly. It might even become a ritual; a way to prove that you were a manly man who liked money or something, 'I'm tough, look at me make small gains at massively disproportionate costs.' I don't know. However, beforehand, it would seem insane to value the pound in the fire above a pound that someone else might offer you in its stead without the risk of getting maimed.
Difficulty in attaining something makes sense for fashion, because it displays your fitness. However, the worth of things doesn't scale along every axis of value in proportion to the suffering or cost involved in attaining them - and I don't see how the suggested measure is of worth with respect to experiences that have nothing but age to recommend them. As far as experience goes, it seems that the experiences should be worth something for what they give you - whether that be hedons or skills or whatever - and that age is part of the cost you're paying.
They're going to cost you something you're never going to get back, a portion of your life, and the return shouldn't just be that they've cost you something.
The idea behind age seems to be that it's been pretty darned expensive and they must have bought something valuable with their lives because ... well, look at how much they spent. But that's not how spending works - people buy extended warranties and the like all the time. Maybe they're just bad consumers.
> Knowledge, tolerance, sacrifice, endurance, and perspective perhaps? When you are 50 you will have some of the same things simply due to the fact that you lived to that age. Older folks are human and make many mistakes just like every other human. It's because they've made more mistakes than younger folks that they are ahead on the opportunities to learn. There's nothing special, other than having been able to do everything you'll do, long before you can do it.
He hasn't been able to do everything I'll ever do, he can't even do everything I can do right now. He's never had the opportunity to learn about monads because he's never tried programming at all and gave up on maths when he left school. He's never had the opportunity to learn to fight properly because he's never put in the work to find decent teachers and then to practice diligently. He's never really had the opportunity to learn a great number of things about a great number of areas because he's never learnt the pre-requisites.
I suppose it's true enough that they show up as potentials if you go far enough down the tree of choices that he might make and might previously have made. That he could have made better choices to net himself wider/more interesting parts of the tree. But he's followed one path through life on which those things didn't show up.
Some opportunities multiply as they're seized, and if you never seize them then your range of opportunities is only ever linear with respect to time.
> If you're having trouble seeing this point of view, compare your abilities and life experience to that of a 10 year old. Explain yourself to that 10 year old such that the youth will possess the sum total of your experiences and be able to act as you would act. Not possible you say? Perhaps now you can appreciate the value of aged experience?
When I was ten, people of my age now, who'd lived the life I've lived, were visibly smarter than me. Just as people who continue to live the sort of life I intend to live are visibly smarter than me nine years later on from this point.
But that was not my argument anyway - my argument was that age is just the chance to make something of yourself, that since many adults don't kids tend not to respect age. The two don't strongly correlate, the latter is not good evidence of the former.
As a professional, if I can't find a way to contribute my expertise in a timely and efficient way, then I'll get on with something interesting and more lucrative. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of useful stuff on SO, and I'd like to contribute at a high level, but I'm not willing to put in 2 hours a day to find the 1 or 2 questions that would be worth the time.
I'm an older programmer, and this may be one explanation of why older programmers answers on SO aren't as useful - the good ones are not the ones answering questions!
This is just an anecdote, but one that certainly applies to me
I personally answer to questions that have no answer or not correct answer when I google for them but finally I've solved myself. I even googled and reached to my own answers!
This article mentions how chess training software has sped the training of chess players to the IM level from a baseline rating of 2200.
Wouldn't it be fun if a similar training setup was available for hackers . . . I wonder what that would look like.