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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