My point is not about unproductive older programmers, it's more an indication
of what one should seek to maintain his programming ability over time.
BTWY, I am 51 and I do not consider myself unproductive, I cheated, I switched
to Clojure.... an adaptive move to keep having fun and free myself from a myriad
of worthless details.
I disagree with your first statement, when you look at a task requirement in
terms of
cognitive abilities, you can get a very good idea were aging may have an effect.
Forgetting where you left your car keys is directly related to working memory
failing
especially if you left the 2 mns ago on the kitchen table. This behavior is
very common
past a certain age.
Context switchings are purging your working memory partially or entirely and
it takes longer to get back in the original context as you age. This is also
commonly
seen as people age "what was I doing 10 mns ago ?"
All the other issues described by your reference also implies the impact of
aging
on working memory, difficulty of trimming details to ease decision making, ...
Frankly, using civil servants as a reference vs programmers is far fetched
except
if you restrict your population to people fulfilling equivalent duties.
We are not talking about pushing a pen on a piece of paper here or shuffling
through
paper files here. Dealing with code involves a myriad of details not supported
by not much than the thoughts running around in our working memory and
whatever it fetches from your acquired knowledge in long term memory.
Working memory is the main component being stressed when coding. This is
were you assemble these things to spit put code. Souvenirs or ideas do not
translate to
code by themselves.
Btwy, the reference you posted has been printed in 2007, it's a bit old
compared to what
I found online.
Luc P.
>
> On Apr 12, 2013, at 1:18 PM, Softaddicts <lprefonta...@softaddicts.ca> wrote:
>
> > The average career length of a programmer is 8 years in the US (2003
> > survey) and
> > the main reason invoked by those that left is their perceived lack of
> > productivity.
>
> TL;DR: Opinions about unproductive older programmers is ahead of the science.
>
> --
>
> I gave - or was supposed to give - a keynote on "Cheating Decline: How to
> program well for a really long time". I actually only had two slides on the
> topic because I concluded, after a fair amount of reading, that there's
> really no solid evidence that there is a meaningful decline over a normal
> working life. (Same goes for mathematicians, by the way, despite G. H. Hardy
> calling math a "young man's game".)
>
> Various cognitive abilities do decline, including the ones you mentioned, but
> the declines are small for younger old people. For example, the Whitehall II
> longitudinal study of British civil servants would lead a 45 year old to
> expect a bit less than 4% decline in "reasoning" (timed tests of pattern
> matching, induction, etc.) over the next decade. Somewhat less than that for
> the "memory" category. Then the next decade would show about 5% decline. It's
> not until 65-70 that a decade shows as much as a 10% decline.
>
> From this, I do *not* conclude the unproductive older programmer is a myth.
> The tests are simple, they disallow interactions between abilities that might
> matter for more complex tasks, etc. As a pessimist, and someone who thinks he
> has every neurological symptom he ever reads about, I'm inclined to think
> there is meaningful decline - that's why I chose the topic for my talk: to
> see if I could find something useful to me.
>
> (The second of two slides was my conclusion that the evidence for anything
> being able to slow down or reverse decline is too weak to suggest anything
> other than what you should already be doing to be healthy in general. That
> weakness applies to brain exercise web sites, unless your goal is to get
> better at the narrow tasks they have you practice. The thing you want, "far
> transfer" to complex tasks, hasn't been demonstrated.)
>
> For those who want to fret over symptoms, here are some:
>
> What gets better with age:
> * vocabulary (though recall may be slower)
> * narrative ability
>
> What stays the same:
> * sustained attention (vigilance over time)
> * knowledge of facts
> * knowledge of how to do something
>
> (Some of) What gets worse:
> * divided attention: ability to follow a TV program and a conversation at the
> same time.
> * task switching (including at fine granularity)
> * episodic memory ("Where did I park my car?" "Which tab has the test file?")
> * choice overload: older people are disproportionately hampered by having too
> many choices. (As a result, they may fail to seek out relevant information.
> Also: oldsters are more liable to defer making a choice.)
> * the tying of facts to their context. (So, for example, long-known facts may
> seem to be relevant when actually inappropriate in context. New facts are
> possibly stored more absolutely than you'd want, without the relevant context
> like "how did I learn this?")
>
> A decent summary that's not behind a paywall is "Changes in Cognitive
> Function in Human Aging" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3885/
>
> --------
> Looking for employment as a Clojure programmer
> Latest book: /Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer/
> https://leanpub.com/fp-oo
>
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