[alanh]

Aaargh! The data doesn’t say this, all the data says is “Older StackOverflow users have disproportionately high SO reputation.”

An alternate explanation is that for some reason older developers are more likely to be addicted to Stack Overflow.

A big problem here is the unproven assertion that high SO reputation means you are a “better developer.” Does it really? (After all, with few exceptions, the more active you are on SO, the higher your reputation, period, regardless of your answer quality, partly because downvoting is strongly disincentivized. And the article itself notes that older programmers don’t receive significantly more upvotes per post!) Until that’s shown, the article’s conclusion is highly suspect.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed so few people seem to be calling out the terrible reasoning behind this post. It may well be that older programmers are “better,” but what we have here is nothing more than a colossal failure to understand science, reasoning, and evidence.

[seldo]

Yeah, my conclusion from the data was "senior developers know more things and have more time on their hands to tell others about those things", which is exactly what you'd expect. The more senior you get, the more your role is as guide and mentor than immediate implementor.

[brown9-2]

One of alan's points is that it is incorrect to assign behaviors of "older Stackoverflow users" to the universe of "older developers".

The population of "older Stackoverflow users" is not randomly drawn from the population of "older developers", and nothing is put forward to claim that the former is representative of the latter, so you cannot make this assumption.

[jwhite]

Exactly. The graph showing that older coders' answers are not significantly better than those of younger coders is a case in point: maybe the good older coders are too busy actually coding to spend time answering questions on StackOverflow.

[pyrhho]

The data could also be used to infer that Stack Overflow users are much "better" programmers than non-SO users. Non-SO Users have 0 reputation and are therefore, terrible programmers. While SO users have > 0 reputation, and are therefore, awesome programmers.

[skeeterbug]

If you have a higher reputation and give correct answers, couldn't we then assume that the older developers have a wider range of knowledge to be able to participate in more responses? Also, it is not really clear how "better" is defined in this case. Maybe it is "better" == I know more technologies than you?

[jt2190]

I also wonder: Do developers who spend a lot of time on Stack Overflow get "better" than those who actually write code? I've met more than one "Aristotelian Programmer" who could quote you every design pattern from heart and draw UML diagrams on a white board all day, but who actually couldn't write code.

[nutjob123]

Thank you. I'm not against speculating but we all should know that correlation does not imply causation.