[dba-Tech] Older is wiser

Salakhetdinov Shamil mcp2004 at mail.ru
Mon May 6 03:09:31 CDT 2013


 Hi Hans --

Could you please post code snippets? - it would be interesting and useful for our everyday business to discuss your/your candidate developers and others (including myself) coding style/guidelines preferences (and software (architecture) design patterns). If you'll post the code snippets here it would be a good idea IMO to change the subject line.

As for the subject: in my experience the older I'm getting the more *production* quality code I can produce per hour. *Production* means that this code works 24x7x365 with just a few incidents/issues, which are usually promptly fixed and which almost never harm anyhow my customers business. I can't call my coding perfect but comparing it with industry standards/guidelines (which are many, and which are often rather different coming from different experts/companies) and with other programmers I can say my coding is good enough and advanced (architectured) just enough to keep it up-to-date with constantly changing customers' requirements. I must also note I have happened to "inherit" other programmers code and to have my code "inherited" by others within last years - I have mainly inherited the code from younger programmers - it's good in general but they too often (more often then myself) use "hacking" and they rather often leave "small defects" in their code which result in big issues, and they don't use Unit Testing at all...

Is my real life coding experience subject's statistics relevant, especially in the light of your real life senior programmers hiring experience - you decide...

The more production quality code per hour I'm developing here nowadays comparing past times could be just the result of development technologies advancements...

Thank you.

-- Shamil


Понедельник,  6 мая 2013, 0:41 -07:00 от Hans-Christian Andersen <hans.andersen at phulse.com>:
>I'd like to amend that statement to be "good programmers become wiser programmers as they get older."
>
>Over the last 2 months, I've been reviewing code samples for candidates applying for a senior web developer position and, in many instances, these so called experienced senior developers who have been in this business for 10+ years have submitted some of the most horrendous code that left me so completely stupefied that my only reaction is to push my chair back and cover my face with both palms to protect my sanity from the evils that were printed across my screen (if you don't believe me, I'm happy to post code snippets).
>
>In fact, of all the code samples I've so far reviewed (30+ at this point), only 2 have been more than fairly decent. The rest were so laughably atrocious that it made me question how it is that the Internet has not yet collapsed in on itself at this point.
>
>Experience, apparently, does not make all programmers better. Some people really aren't cut out for this business. I'm not sure I'd even hire them as juniors and yet they somehow manage to thrive.
>
>- Hans
>
>
>On 2013-05-05, at 2:57 PM, "Jim Lawrence" < accessd at shaw.ca > wrote:
>
>> This may come as a total shocker to many but older programmer are wiser and
>> therefore better that youngsters. 
>> 
>> The following study discovered that people actually learn as they age. A
>> truly amazing revelations.
>> 
>>  http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-murphyhill-age-2013/
>> 
>> Now try and convince some company to hire a programmer older than thirty,
>> forty max...but will the old guys work day and night for next to nothing?
>> 
>> Jim
>> 
>



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