I've been forgetting my car keys consistently for the last 20 years - but
now I'm in my mid 40s it's easy to blame it on ageing :-) I've been coding
for longer than I've been losing car keys, and I can't say I've noticed a
lot of decline.
As for the lack of grey beards at conferences (mentioned elsewhere) - some
of that is probably just demographics. When I studied computer science it
was an obscure niche subject, with quite a small intake - indeed, I
enrolled in a double degree of computer science + engineering, as my father
advised me that "computers might be a bit of a flash in the pan - it's
worth doing engineering as well to guarantee yourself a career" :)
- Korny
On 14 Apr 2013 03:58, "Softaddicts" <lprefonta...@softaddicts.ca> wrote:
> 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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> Softaddicts<lprefonta...@softaddicts.ca> sent by ibisMail from my ipad!
>
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