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.”

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