[dusklight]

I am saying that the older programmers who are downvoting me are feeling nervous.

"I didn't see anything in the data that would support a conclusion that these folks are making value judgements about their younger peers or that they no longer wish to improve."

That's not from the report, just my personal unhappiness bubbling up. I entered the workforce expecting to learn how to be a better programmer from my more experienced co-workers. It was a bit traumatic to realize that they didn't even understand basic things like why using a hashmap is better than a nested for-loop or why one of the basic OOP principles is "favor composition over inheritance."

Since you mention data so much, I am curious, have you ever read "Fool of Randomness" by Nassim Taleb?

[ChuckMcM]

"I am saying that the older programmers who are downvoting me are feeling nervous."

That is an interesting conclusion.

"Since you mention data so much, I am curious, have you ever read "Fool of Randomness" by Nassim Taleb?"

No, however many folks have suggest that Gladwell's article on him [1] covered all the bases in the book. So I did take a moment to read that article.

I think he brought a fascinating perspective to stock trading and I found his discipline in removing confirmational bias from his observations seems to work for him. Since you brought it up, have you read the book?

It seemed from Gladwell's article, that Nassim would make the argument, in this context, that age and experience don't matter in the quality of the designs and implementations, rather some folks will simply arrive independently at a more optimum answer for any given problem than others.

Gladwell states that Nassim is/was a quant focused on the derivative system (the stock market) in which randomness appears to dominate. I have not read the book but Nathan Berg (UTexas) takes this a bit further by showing that 1/N diversification wins (see the article 'Simple Heresy', by Bruce Bower, Science News, 4-Jun-2011, pp 26-29). It read like a pretty solid endorsement of Nassim's take on the behavior of markets.

What I did not get out of Gladwell's article was that Nassim was promoting an 'ignore all data' philosophy. It sounds like you've come to a different conclusion than I did about what constitutes a useful experimental result.

If it helps I'm sorry you've had to deal with some less than helpful people in your career so far.

[1] http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_04_29_a_blowingup.htm

[dusklight]

I really urge you to read the book, the first half is a bit slow, but the second half I couldn't put down.

Here's a more succinct way to get (one of) his points across:

http://xkcd.com/605/

My emotional outburst is certainly non-scientific, and should not be taken seriously. But it is equally non-scientific to be blinded by data. A good example would be to reward your programmers based on how many lines of code they check in -- you will find yourself regretting that quite quickly.