I've always been awful at finding my keys, and rarely remembered if
yesterday's events were really three days ago. :) Being told to accomplish
rote tasks is gloomy, and I have to figure out how to internally motivate
myself. I've met many like me. Who knows the interpretation? Maybe a
charitable one is that we live with our heads in the clouds.
(Why enjoy things like Clojure? Because puzzle-solving mostly-pointless
incidental complexity is a glum way to spend time.)
Only when I become old, will this become anecdotal evidence for my whole
age category. :) Sorry fellows, I'll poison the well for you!
On Saturday, April 13, 2013 3:31:53 PM UTC+2, Brian Marick wrote:
> TL;DR: Opinions about unproductive older programmers is ahead of the
science.
Yes, when testing the cognitive effects of aging, it may even be better to
mentally replace "tests" with "microbenchmarks", which are typically not
used to explore deeper but make a naive point as-is.
And "age" with "ageism" (drawing the parallel to gender and race, which
offers a host of other interpretations of such microbenchmarks, like test
scores going down if you're self-conscious that yours will be used to
represent your entire classification, or the unfortunate phenomenon of
"internalized oppression").
Take the "young man's game" quote; many would not only find "young"
questionable, but "man's". Even if there were cognitive differences between
the genders, where females outperform males on verbal ability, that did not
keep Shakespeare and Gabriel García Márquez from being great authors.
Perhaps the same goes for age; if there are indeed cognitive differences,
those may be much slighter than commonly supposed.
All the best,
Tj
PS: Sometimes when I mention my thoughts on these subjects, accidental
controversy erupts and pollutes the conversation. So I will be conservative
and bow out. Thanks for listening.
On Saturday, April 13, 2013 3:31:53 PM UTC+2, Brian Marick wrote:
>
>
> On Apr 12, 2013, at 1:18 PM, Softaddicts
> <lprefo...@softaddicts.ca<javascript:>>
> 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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