I believe that age is a factor (how could it not be?), but outweighed in most cases by that precious experience. “Most cases”: an experienced idiot is still an idiot.

But it surprises me that people who’ve been in the game for a fair length of time don’t realise that all the above is just a bunch of pimples on what really matters. For developers, Pareto’s Law applies, but “squared”: not so much an 80:20 rule, as a 95:5 rule (and even that is probably an underestimate). First-rate developers are vastly, VASTLY better at their jobs than the rest. They are far more productive, far better at grasping requirements, produce zero-defect code as easily and unselfconsciously as they <>, and test their own code rigorously and without possessiveness. And of course this difference lasts over the decades, and hugely outweighs the effects of ageing or anything else. I’ve seen it many times, and it explains people like my illustrious namesake, or Martin Fowler, or even Old Father Time himself (are you ever going to finish that book, Donald?).

So that’s a factor complicating this comparison as well. If you’re naturally gifted at the art of programming you’re very likely to stick with it over the years; if not, then in most cases not.

PS: Greg, you’re darned right about NetBeans; why use anything else? Personally, I can never comprehend all those Eclipse-worshippers: what a noxious heap of doggy-doo…

Their energy based on red bull is a total false economy, their health is not good and it seems in a lot of cases the older guys have more energy and last the days better just because of the diet the young guys exist on today. Throw in lack of sleep they deprive themselves on and half of them look like zombies at work.

Reminds me of a small math-like puzzle:
If one worker can dig a hole in 10 days, how many workers does it take to dig the same hole in 1 day?

answer by junior manager: 10

answer by experienced worker: 1, 2 at max (try to put 10 men around the same hole)

answer thinking out-of-the-box: 0 (someone already spent 10 days digging that bloody hole

cheers

I currently work for a company with about 15 developers and where I would say the developer profile ranges from perhaps 25 through to 50+, with a fair spread of ages and experiences rather than top or bottom heavy. The site I work at (partner company) has maybe 4 developers, ranging from 24 to 32.

I can’t honestly say that any of the above is a problem as I’m lucky to work with people who know their trade. In the past I’ve come across the opposite at all ages and imho it seems to stem from having a true interest, as opposed to a careerist “it’s a job” approach to the chosen profession of software development.

I think because it is a creative profession (in spite of the engineering disciplines I’ve seen applied to at over the 28 years I’ve been in it, including CS at university) it is quite vocational in a sense and therefore going at it half heartedly, or treating it as something to be endured before getting promoted to management, is not going to do anyone any good.

The older staff don’t work any less hard than the younger ones though it’s true to say that it becomes more of a grind more quickly the older you are, and especially when you have family commitments which are as full on as any at work.

I can’t speak for others but for me, it’s learning new stuff that keeps me interested and that never stops – I would be unemployable in a few years if I stopped learning, both because my skills would degenerate into legacy support only, and because my motivation would die away too.

Apart from that, if anything I’m more able to learn as I get older as I can apply a filter of experience to new technologies and see how they fit together underneath and compare them to what has gone before – which is quite revealing, usually. Not much is truly new under the sun, just the uses to which those things are put, if that makes sense.

I have to wonder about people who use old tools. There are still people who cling to csh, even after they are shown that bash will do TAB completion.

At my last job I was in with a group of “older” guys. Our development environment was on Sun Solaris and we all used emacs. A younger group of guys wrote windows drivers and were based on winXP and Visual Studio. I think they laughed at us emacs users.

When I switched jobs, I was stunned to find a young sys admin and a middle aged, extremely bright programmer, both using vi and xterms.

The amount of typing and shifting of windows involved working in that environment is mind boggling.

I wanted to try something new after 20 years of emacs, so I learned both Visual Studio and Netbeans. Netbeans is now my favorite editor. I raved about Netbeans so much, that the young sys admin picked it up. However, I couldn’t budge the other programmer. He was convinced that vi + xterms was far superior. In fact sometimes when he was looking over my shoulder and feeding me instructions, he would tell me to leave Netbeans and grep for a pattern. I would tell him that could be done easier from within the IDE.

I do believe that Linus uses vi + xterms. And probably Larry Wall too. I was amazed to discover another kernel hacker had used Linux for years and never tried X-Windows until recently. I don’t think that Richard Stallman uses a web browser.

There are lots of people who don’t have any preference for tools, because programming is just a job for them.

Then there’s always the oddball, a guy started at our company and requested the “Ultimate Editor”, a windows only edito. This is in a company whose projects span Suns and Windows.

Thanks for all the lively commentary, everyone.