Developers eat their youth, and programming is a thing that can be done up to 35 years old, and every time we hear such statements, we feel speechless. Let's look at a paper Is Programming Knowledge Related to Age, which was written by two people from the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University who did some data mining on users of StackOverflow.com.

The full volume of data is 1694,981 users with an average age of 30.3 years.

The highest point in programmer age is around 25, and the midpoint is around 29.

Calculate the Reputation of each person per month, so that you can find the real active time of this user, which makes it easy to calculate the real ability of this programmer. (total reputation/active time), you can get his average Reputation per month.

Let's take a look at the graph of programmer's ability and the distribution of the age group:

According to the data we can see that the programmer's ability is an upward point from the age of 25 years old, and only decreases until the age of 50 years old.

The authors of the paper Tagged the more popular technologies over a five-year period and then used a more rigorous algorithm to see if so-called older programmers could keep up with new technologies.

Let's look at the table below:

As you can see above, age doesn't affect the learning of new technologies, and even outperforms younger developers in some cases.

The final conclusion of the paper is that programmers' technical skills can rise to the age of 50 to 60, and that older programmers are no worse than programmers at acquiring new technologies.

Although the data above shows that age is not a stumbling block for programmer skills, in reality, companies are looking for a more holistic approach to hiring. But in fact, the enterprise recruitment more need to be considered comprehensively, first of all, the general enterprise recruitment of senior, intermediate and junior programmers is that there is a percentage. The first thing is that there is a percentage of senior, intermediate, and junior programmers that are recruited.

In addition to the physical problems, we know that development is a job that requires frequent late nights, brainstorming and learning. Some programmers after the age of 35 will feel that the body and young people can not fight, they will find a consultant work to retire to the second line. What other effects can you think of? Welcome to comment.