I know lots of developers over 40 who are great. I also know folks who were good once but now are not. There is a strong correlation between continuing education and continuing competence.
A lot of young developers re-create the wheel, they don't know they are because they haven't been around the block that many times but they are. Then along comes an older developer who has to use their code/api/design and recognizes it for what it is, another wheel designed by someone who didn't realize this was old hat. How someone responds to this situation (which occurs again and again) seems to be key.
You can note the particular vagaries of this particular implementation of the wheel concept and work with it to get done what you want to get done, you can throw it out and replace it with a more up to date implementation of a wheel, or you can get disgusted at how little this developer knew when they tried to do this particular implementation of wheelness. I got to meet the guy who invented the insertion sort this way, not. (well he thought he had invented it)
Seeing wheel re-implementations gets old fast, trust me.
So if you let it get to you, you lose your sense of wonder. That thing where every new technique you saw was thought provoking and, well, new. It gets replaced with "gee IBM did it that way in the 60's and it didn't work for them either." If you let it get under your skin you will burn out and become one of those developers that just stops looking at new stuff because you know you will have seen it all before and it will be wrong for the same reasons the other six versions were wrong. And you will miss out on the stuff that really is new, and your currency in the art will degrade.
How many developers under 30 do you know who can tell you the second order effects of their new network protocol? How many even care? How many have found themselves intersecting the same bad design decisions that were bad back in the last century and are still bad today?
And finally, technologists are often like classmates from college, at first nobody you know is married then it seems like everyone you know is, or no one has kids and then suddenly everyone is busy with their kids. Your social circle ages like you do, if you know a lot of really great developers when you are 25 I can guarantee you that you will know several when you are 45.
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Interesting post, does Davy read HN?
I know lots of developers over 40 who are great. I also know folks who were good once but now are not. There is a strong correlation between continuing education and continuing competence.
A lot of young developers re-create the wheel, they don't know they are because they haven't been around the block that many times but they are. Then along comes an older developer who has to use their code/api/design and recognizes it for what it is, another wheel designed by someone who didn't realize this was old hat. How someone responds to this situation (which occurs again and again) seems to be key.
You can note the particular vagaries of this particular implementation of the wheel concept and work with it to get done what you want to get done, you can throw it out and replace it with a more up to date implementation of a wheel, or you can get disgusted at how little this developer knew when they tried to do this particular implementation of wheelness. I got to meet the guy who invented the insertion sort this way, not. (well he thought he had invented it)
Seeing wheel re-implementations gets old fast, trust me.
So if you let it get to you, you lose your sense of wonder. That thing where every new technique you saw was thought provoking and, well, new. It gets replaced with "gee IBM did it that way in the 60's and it didn't work for them either." If you let it get under your skin you will burn out and become one of those developers that just stops looking at new stuff because you know you will have seen it all before and it will be wrong for the same reasons the other six versions were wrong. And you will miss out on the stuff that really is new, and your currency in the art will degrade.
How many developers under 30 do you know who can tell you the second order effects of their new network protocol? How many even care? How many have found themselves intersecting the same bad design decisions that were bad back in the last century and are still bad today?
And finally, technologists are often like classmates from college, at first nobody you know is married then it seems like everyone you know is, or no one has kids and then suddenly everyone is busy with their kids. Your social circle ages like you do, if you know a lot of really great developers when you are 25 I can guarantee you that you will know several when you are 45.