<story><title>Pervasive myths about older software developers</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/pervasive-myths-older-software-developers/</url><text>A topic near and dear to my heart. ;-)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>edw519</author><text>Another &quot;I have witnessed X&quot; so &quot;Y must be true&quot; post.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve been programming commercially for 32 years and in all that time, I have found very little correlation between age and ability to deliver quality software.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with younger, inexperienced, and uneducated programmers who were willing to learn, with minds like sponges and who were a pleasure to work with.  They often found or thought of things the rest of us overlooked.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with younger, inexperienced, and well educated programmers who thought they knew better and were obstacles to progress.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with older programmers with the same one year&apos;s experience 22 times.  Oy.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with older programmers with excellent domain knowledge and limited technical range.  Their personality and willingness to succeed were often the key to progress.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with older programmers with excellent technical range and limited domain knowledge.  Sometimes it&apos;s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but when you can, results can be golden.&lt;p&gt;I have worked with brilliant older programmers with extensive experience and open minds.  The best of all worlds.&lt;p&gt;(By the way, I have also worked with programmers of many ethnicities, female, handicapped, gay, Republican, religious, even left-handed, and have found little or no correlation between their &quot;description&quot; and their &quot;performance&quot;.  One of the beauties of programming is that the easiest way to evaluate your performance is through your work itself and not much else.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Pervasive myths about older software developers</title><url>http://www.lessonsoffailure.com/developers/pervasive-myths-older-software-developers/</url><text>A topic near and dear to my heart. ;-)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Isamu</author><text>Old developer here. Nice to affirm that these are &quot;myths&quot; in the sense that they are often not true, but given a random old guy these may be quite accurate. These are observations that people have made of real individuals that do not generalize to the whole group.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#62; Myth: Older software developers are more jaded and cynical and therefore, less desirable in the workplace than younger ones.  Younger developers are more enthusiastic than older ones.&lt;p&gt;I would have to say I have been both growing in enthusiasm and getting more jaded. The getting jaded part means you no longer want to hurl yourself at something that experience tells you is doomed from the start, but the enthusiasm means maybe this new twist will make it work.&lt;p&gt;One of the great powers of youth is ignorance - the kind of ignorance that enables you to take on projects that are too big and require you to push beyond your original capabilities until you conquer. This ignorance is the source of tales that start: &quot;if I had known what I was getting into....&quot;</text></comment>