Heard this before?

Old programmers are out-dated and outmoded.  All they want to do is program in Cobol and they don’t know anything about modern technologies, as in, ones from this decade.  It takes them half a day to write an email, the other half is spent checking stocks.  And yet, they get more money and higher positions just because they are older.

Or this?

Young programmers are immature and think they know everything, but they don’t know anything.  They think that just because they wrote little programs in college, that they know how to build complex business software better than me.  They’re always telling me what to do, as if I wasn’t once bright-eyed and bushy tailed myself, but now I use my experience to work smarter.

Yes, I went there.

The Self-Esteem Police would say that’s not nice and we shouldn’t talk about that and gee gosh, can’t we all just get along?  Here at Code Anthem, we’re pro reality so we’re talking about it.

The reality is that there are crappy developers of all ages.  And good ones of all ages, too.

We know that and that’s why “education” is not a solution.  We can’t teach people “all old programmers aren’t outdated” and “all young programmers aren’t ignorant” because we know that already.  We’re jaded, not stupid.

These generalizations are clearly not true all of the time, but it’s true often and that’s why the generalization sticks around.

People my age often don’t ask the fundamental questions. When people say things to me, I actually check every one of them. I would encourage you to challenge every assumption. – Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google on TechCrunch

For every one older programmer talking about Ruby and Git there’s several more spouting incomprehensible business-babble or hacking together some monstrosity with a billion LOC.  For every bright and productive young programmer, there’s several more yammering away about the latest acronyms and Web 2.0 and have no idea how to make useful software.  The generalization is there because it’s often true.

The solution is not to cower from the reality of the situation but to face it head-on.

You can become a student and explorer at any age. If you count us older folks out this time, I think you’ll be disappointed to find out that some of us really do get it and have the energy and ambition to create great software. – Dave Winer, Scripting News from Java is a Brand

At whatever age you are, what can you do to provide more value to your business with better technology and better ideas?

Innovation + Usefulness

Inspiration + Experience

Creativity + Application

That is how programmers can come together.