This is the case with everyone. Multitasking negatively affects overall performance. There are many studies that confirm that. If some developers avoid it, maybe it means they are better at evaluating their own productivity?

The younger developers get confused/much slower when they work on multiple things, too, they just don't realize it. I'm pretty sure there is experimental data showing that everyone performs worse when they switch tasks often.

I actually just watched The Social Network for the first time a couple of nights ago, and one of the things I appreciated most about the movie is how they would yell at people who tried to interrupt someone who was coding with a question ("Don't interrupt Chris, he's in the zone!"). I suspect that attitude had a lot to do with the productivity needed to get Facebook off the ground, and they were certainly all young people.

(Or maybe the writers of The Social Network just made it all up.)

I would love to know where you've seen exponential increases in productivity in the last five years. In my experience, developer technology has been largely chasing its own tail for quite some time. Productivity improves dramatically on individual, emerging platforms, but seems little changed in a wider, overall view.

But I see where you are going there.

I mean come on, if you are comparing a fresh out-of-school graduate with someone with 10 years experience I think most people will agree that the older guy in this case will be more productive. There are things you need to know about working with a large code base that can't be taught by school but can only be learnt with experience.

When I say "older" developer, I mean the 40-50 year old who probably was a really good developer 10 years ago, got a steady, cushy job, with a salary that he/she is more than happy with, and stopped learning because he didn't need to anymore.

I know a lot of exceptions to the rule. The older programmer who got into it because he loves to code, who stayed in it because he loves to code, he keeps up with the times and continues to be relevant. The older programmer who just wants to make a buck and go home to his family? He fell behind a long time ago and doesn't want to catch up.

As a somewhat older developer, I find this a surprisingly difficult question to answer honestly. Comparing myself to myself from 10 years ago, I sincerely think I'm more effective, but self-delusion may play a part in that. I've probably lost some of my "step", in terms of raw capacity to memorize and compute mentally, and I have more commitments outside of the world of software, which dilutes my efforts further. Then again, the strategic ideas I have are more dependably correct, and I spend less time chasing down dead ends, either because I've been down them before or had the good luck of witnessing them second- or third-hand.

I've gotten a chance to see a world-class developer very closely between the ages of 36 and 45. He started this period as, very easily, the greatest engineer I'd ever even heard stories of, and I'm pretty sure he got better over that decade. It can be done.

An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow.

A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you are on SO, the higher your reputation, period, regardless of your answer quality, partly because downvoting is strongly disincentivized. And the article itself notes that older programmers don’t receive significantly more upvotes per post!) Until that’s shown, the article’s conclusion is highly suspect.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed so few people seem to be calling out the terrible reasoning behind this post. It may well be that older programmers are “better,” but what we have here is nothing more than a colossal failure to understand science, reasoning, and evidence.

Older engineers tend to compare new problems to experiences from the past. The tools at our disposal have become much better but the fundamental mechanisms haven't changed that much so it's easier to identify whether there's a real benefit to using a new tool or if it's better to stick with what you have.

As an experienced developer it's a little easier to avoid sinking effort into novel but misguided technologies.

As a young developer it's a little easier to be open-minded about promising technologies.

But don't pay any attention to me - my SO rep is less than 30% of the average for my age bracket...

However, this isn't exactly proven by the data: what Stackoverflow shows is that older developers are better at talking intelligently about programming. That's extremely useful (and helps career wise), but it isn't the same thing as being a better developer. Sometimes it correlates (the best programmers I've known have also participated in organizations like IETF, written RFCs and have also thoroughly documented their work), but it isn't a total ordering (I know plenty of programmers who are better than I, but who don't participate in any public forums).

On the other hand, I've yet to find a successful programming language made by someone before their thirties. Contrast it, on the other hand, with some of the most ground changing academic work in Computer Science and Mathematics being done by people in their twenties.

[1] There's nothing wrong with that: Google's APM program particularly is a great example of "engineers who don't want to code" being extremely useful. See also "The Russian Lit Major" by rands: http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2006/09/06/russian_his...

On a barely related subject, tomorrow is my 49th birthday.

Honestly, though, I think programming is a "young man's game", partly because you are sharper, have more energy etc when young; but mostly because when everything is reinvented each decade, you are better off starting fresh, without being aware of other choices.

The exception is for higher-level tasks, such as marketing, managing people, strategic business decisions, and code architecture. Also, I would think, language/library/API/framework design. I hesitate a little, because many of these are based on the needs of current programmers, which the front-line troops know better because they are doing it (they are the users). However, for deeper insights, age has the benefit of seeing deeper patterns over decades, and over generations of usage. Most language designers seem to be older (but is that just because their languages are now old?)

If you've been something longer, you've had time to learn what works and what doesn't, and why.

Thus, you can do a better job at guiding people who are newer to the material.

As a 29-year-old I'm kind of freaked out by the fact that I'm on the older part of that distribution.

For me, that is about 4 programming languages ago :-)

And obviously, the fact that this only takes data from SO means whatever the conclusions, they only hold true for the kind of people that post there.

"So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality."

A lot of people here are focused on "being smarter" or "doing a better job" or "higher quality"

Excluding all of the self-taught developers, and limiting ourselves only to people who follow the standard "get a 4-year college degree then go out in the real world and work" crowd, as that's pretty sizable. Make extrapolations as necessary.

Remember your first year (or two?) of development? Looking back, you were probably way in over your head, had mentors looking after you, making tons of mistakes etc.

Fast forward 5 years. Can you write code faster? Probably not. Can you write better code? Sometimes. It's all about experiences and learning from them. When you take a new job, or a new project, or a new anything, you call upon past experiences to guide the efforts of this process. It might be something as vague as "I am going to write tests first because I found it helped me earlier", or (ignoring TDD), "I'm not going to write this function like this, because I know the code will be hard to test when I get around to writing a test for it later"

You learn this all from experience. Senior people who have been in the field longer have more experience. They aren't "better" in the sense that they are smarter or have more intelligence, they just know MORE because they've been exposed to more.

It's also why so many people (especially in hacker news) have been successful without degrees. It's not a degree that matters it's EXPERIENCE.

It might be a fine line differentiating between smartness gained from pure intelligence and "smartness" gained via experience, but I think it's an important distinction, and one that I think this post highlights well.

It's hard to say what this says about developers as a whole, including the ones not on SO, which I assume is a large number.

An alternative hypothesis might be this: Good developers get better over time, whatever that means.

I would suspect that people who form bad habits early on don't enjoy the same benefits of experience as those who built on solid foundations.

In addition this only represents SO programmers, which while a great bunch, is hardly representative of all programmers.

Stackoverflow is not representative of the overall developer population. As an example of an alternate view compare the relative number of items tagged on SO with C#, Java, and PHP. Then compare that to the number of listings of those tags on Dice.

The older someone is, the less chance they'll spend time on an internet community site, especially at work, which is when a lot of people access stackoverflow.

Old dudes work while they're at work, because they learned their work ethic in pre-internet times.

Is this an actual bell curve? It's not symmetrical. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_distribution)

Analogously, if I measured academic skills and availability by time spent in libraries and time spent teaching, I'm sure we'd see a similar peak in 20's because grad students spend so much time doing both these things and productive professors need this less.

Age doesn't necessarily have anything to do with knowing the right answers. (My first experience being a greybeard actually came within a few weeks of starting my first job.) Part of it is investing the effort to gain expertise, part of it is being smart and/or lucky about investing your effort in the right areas, and part of it is having the background and aptitude to absorb knowledge. Wherever it comes from, being able to answer questions that stump other developers provides a big gain in productivity, because you spend more time doing work and less time struggling with trivialities. If the ability to answer questions increases with age and quality of work doesn't decline otherwise, then the average value of developers increases with age.

So anyway, my first experience being the greybeard, even though you don't care. I was walking around in the office when someone flagged me down. There were three senior developers standing behind a junior developer, all huddled over staring at his screen. They were trying to figure out a snippet of Java code that looked something like this: set?foo:0

"It must be a valid identifier of some sort or it wouldn't compile." "If it is, where is it defined?" "Question marks and colons aren't allowed in variable names. We checked that three times in the book." "Maybe it invokes an implementation-specific feature in the compiler we're using. Whatever it is, it's some kind of deep magic." "Maybe there's a bug in the compiler and it's treating the question mark as a combination semicolon and comment character." Apparently they had been at this for quite a while and were repeating the same ideas they had had an hour ago. They were scared to just "fix" the code because it had been written by a "really smart guy" who had left the company, so it must be right.

"Sheesh, haven't any of you guys written any C?" I said. Two minutes later I had restored a junior developer and three senior developers back to productive work, saving them God knows how much more wasted time.

That's the value of knowing random things off the top of your head.

Is it your assumption that they are just more invested in educating others, or is it e.g. because they have a broader range of experience and can answer more/more difficult questions.

As it is, this data set is merely an interesting conversation starter. I hope somebody takes it and does some research on it, because it sure could be interesting