But a new study from North Carolina State University indicates that the knowledge and skills of programmers actually improve over time \u2013 and that older programmers know as much (or more) than their younger peers when it comes to recent software platforms<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted to explore these perceptions of veteran programmers as being out of step with emerging technologies and see if we could determine whether older programmers are actually keeping up with changes in the field,\u201d says Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill, an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research. \u201cAnd we found that, in some cases, veteran programmers even have a slight edge.\u201d<\/p>\n The researchers looked at the profiles of more than 80,000 programmers on a site called StackOverflow, which is an online community that allows users to ask and answer programming questions<\/strong>. The site also allows users to rate the usefulness of other users\u2019 questions and answers. Users who are rated as asking good questions and providing good answers receive points that are reflected in their \u201creputation score.\u201d The higher an individual\u2019s reputation score, the more likely it is that the user has a robust understanding of programming issues.<\/p>\n For the first part of the study, the researchers compared the age of users with their reputation scores. They found that an individual\u2019s reputation increases with age, at least into a user\u2019s 40s<\/strong>. There wasn\u2019t enough data to draw meaningful conclusions for older programmers.<\/p>\n The researchers then looked at the number of different subjects that users asked and answered questions about, which reflects the breadth of their programming interests. The researchers found that there is a sharp decline in the number of subjects users weighed in on between the ages of 15 and 30 \u2013 but that the range of subjects increased steadily through the programmers\u2019 30s and into their early 50s<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Finally, the researchers evaluated the knowledge of older programmers (ages 37 and older) compared to younger programmers (younger than 37) in regard to relatively recent technologies \u2013 meaning technologies that have been around for less than 10 years.<\/p>\n For two smartphone operating systems, iOS and Windows Phone 7, the veteran programmers had a significant edge in knowledge over their younger counterparts<\/strong>. For every other technology, from Django to Silverlight, there was no statistically significant difference between older and younger programmers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe data doesn\u2019t support the bias against older programmers \u2013 if anything, just the opposite<\/strong>,\u201d Murphy-Hill says.<\/p>\n The paper, \u201cIs Programming Knowledge Related To Age?,\u201d will be presented May 18 at the 10th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, sponsored by IEEE and ACM in San Francisco, Calif. Lead author of the paper is Patrick Morrison, a Ph.D. student at NC State.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the NC State University press release via EurekAlert!: There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren\u2019t able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology, and… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[321,319],"tags":[12,235],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12625"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12827,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12625\/revisions\/12827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Computer\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Computer2.jpg\")
There is a perception in some tech circles that older programmers aren\u2019t able to keep pace with rapidly changing technology<\/strong>, and that they are discriminated against in the software field.<\/p>\n