Is Software Development a Young Person's Game?

"You have no idea what you are talking about!"

"Those words really ticked me off. I remember like it was yesterday, sitting there in a team meeting with the entire development team.

"The team was quite diverse, and I don't mean by ethnicity. I'm referring to diversity in age. There were shiny new developers and veteran, gray-haired developers.

"Guess which ones thought they knew more?

"Wrong! Both the oldies and newbies thought they were more brilliant than their counterparts.

"I happened to fall into the newbie category. We were arguing about the need to improve performance on an inventory management application written in COBOL. I was showing off some performance enhancement tricks I learned on a prior project (something to do with signed versus unsigned fields) and insisted we go back and modify all the fields to improve performance.

"The oldest developer in the room laughed at me. Literally."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Developer Layoffs Are Never Fair(Apr 12, 2010)
• Dealing with Unaccountable Developers(Feb 17, 2010)
• Are There Enough Smart Developers for Google?(Jan 19, 2010)
• When Developers Work Late, Should Manager Stay or Go?(Dec 21, 2009)
• Why Developers Get Fired(Sep 22, 2009)
• Does Quality Software Code Really Matter?(Sep 14, 2009)
• Too Old To Write Software? Or Just the 'Wrong Era'?(Jun 30, 2009)
• Finding The Coding Zone: Your Perfect Trifecta?(May 18, 2009)
• Where's Your Coding Happy Place?(Apr 22, 2009)