> much better programmer now than I was when I was young,

I don't think that's the angle the author was talking about.

He's actually saying this:

"By and large, programming (in terms in jobs/careers/economics) is a young man’s game"

The qualification I added in parentheses would be a fair reading based on his previous sentence: "...take a job as a software engineer."

Likewise, his 3 bullet points after the "young man's game" is about "jobs", not skill or intellect. Basically, it's about ageism in context of job slots.

Despite all the employment verbiage surrounding "young man", people are still misinterpreting it as:

"By and large, programming (in terms in intellectual ability) is a young man’s game"

Perhaps readers are too conditioned by the mathematician G.H. Hardy quote, "math is a young man's game"[1] in which he was talking about about intellectual output.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy#Hardy.27s_aphorisms

>> Perhaps readers are too conditioned by the mathematician G.H. Hardy quote, "math is a young man's game"[1] in which he was talking about about intellectual output.

Readers might just be conditioned to taking things at face value.

The author's next blog post is titled Attracting Millennial Engineers - http://www.evanmiller.org/attracting-millennial-engineers.ht...

I can't tell if it's satire.

If that's the case, then most Nobel prize winning work is done before 29, or so goes the anecdote.

Agreed.

It assumes that years of experience mean you shouldn't be programming. Which seems...odd to me.

Maybe the author understands programming as "writing lines of code", and not as "architecting software".

Architecture requires experience. Writing the fastest quick sort in a given language is an exercise for fresh young brains.

"Writing the fastest quick sort in a given language is an exercise for fresh young brains."

I can't see the reasoning here. Surely it's a job for someone who has written previous sorting algorithms, understands the trade-offs between speed and memory, and understand the pitfalls that can be fallen into when sorting different kinds of data?

An experienced brain would look up the pre-written libraries, and use the best of those rather than writing his own buggy implementation.

>>As a middle-aged programmer

What do your younger colleagues think?

Stupid programming is a young man's game.

Stupid, business-driven programming involves Scrum tickets and story points and production support rotations and 15-hour days. It's quixotic, obedient, and culturally charismatic (to non-technical people who think greatness is produced by renegade geniuses in garages) but vapid.

So, a certain type of programming is a young man's game-- insofar as anyone else would stick out as not belonging in an arena defined by quixotry-- but that's a stupid type of programming that involves (a) total subordination to the business, (b) extremely long hours and high stress despite mathematically insignificant incentive compensation (e.g. 0.01% equity slices), and (c) not very interesting projects, rendered intellectually challenging only because of the obscene deadlines, limited resources, and political roadblocks that sometimes lead to invention by necessity (but, more often, create kludges and frustration).