On the expert thing - we're also at kind of a weird time. The Internet (used in the most general way possible) has revolutionized how most things can be learned. It makes the acquisition of knowledge significantly easier and in many ways allows someone to learn what use to be a lifetime of knowledge on a subject incredibly quickly.

Improved communication means that it's easier than ever for people to share experiences/thoughts/knowledge.

And computers even make the accumulation of experience faster in many disciplines.

Take poker for example. The 'child prodigies' of the Internet age had incredible access to poker knowledge and also the ability to play more poker in a year than most pros played in a lifetime a few decades ago.

I think it is exaggerated. Despite the liberties certain movies make about him, Mozart was very poor and not highly respected during his early years.

Despite these artistic successes, Mozart grew increasingly discontented with Salzburg and redoubled his efforts to find a position elsewhere. One reason was his low salary, 150 florins a year

Fresh from the adulation he had earned in Munich, Mozart was offended when Colloredo treated him as a mere servant and particularly when the archbishop forbade him to perform before the Emperor at Countess Thun's for a fee equal to half of his yearly Salzburg salary. The resulting quarrel came to a head in May: Mozart attempted to resign and was refused. The following month, permission was granted but in a grossly insulting way: the composer was dismissed literally "with a kick in the arse", administered by the archbishop's steward,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Amadeus_Mozart

And to be fair, the goal posts of prodigy has shifted considerably since Mozart. This is before Beethoven, Chopin, and even the piano.

A "prodigy" today is someone like Martha Argerich, who...

In 1957, at sixteen, she won both the Geneva International Music Competition and the Ferruccio Busoni International Competition, within three weeks of each other.

But she started playing at 3 years old, which means the prodigious talent was developed over 13 years of very intense training.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Argerich

Did you take the test?

There are good young players but no real experts that I'm aware of. Experience playing the game is pretty crucial.

Bridge is a lot more complex than poker and relies a lot less on intuition.

You could be right, I have only a limited knowledge of bridge. But related to what candy at said I would guess that if bridge had the financial rewards of poker and a more 'hip' image new young players would have no problem rising to the top.

Candybars post also got me to thinking about pitchers in baseball and goaltenders in hockey. I think the cream of the crop in both positions usually have quite a bit of experience and aren't dominated by really young players.

Edit: looked up data on goaltenders and I'm totally wrong. Goalies peak mid twenties in general.

it's surprisingly hard to find examples.

my first thought was MMA fighters, who in general are strongest in their thirties, and even up to early forties, but it's not a hard rule: there have been early twenties champions.

then there's medical jobs like brain surgeons, but i feel that's skewed artificially because of the sheer amount of schooling and training required to start practicing, but maybe it's still a decent example.

even though i don't know much about them, i want to say something like a zen monk probably works (political exceptions like the dali lama aside), but "expertise" in something like that is difficult to measure.

it's interesting to ponder.

growing a big bushy gray beard

What is the career lifetime of a professional hockey player? Plus, so many of them start when they are kids. Definitely not something you can do well at within a few years. Hell, it takes most people two years to learn to stop on ice skates.

Mid to late 30s is doable with a little luck and decent talent.

I'm taking the question to mean experience starting from like mid to late teens. Not sure what was actually meant.

http://hfboards.hockeysfuture.com/sh....php?t=1318105

If this thread, and others like it, indicate anything, professionals start pretty early. Starting at teenage is pretty unusual for NHL players.

Whoa there, you touched a nerve

None of this has anything to do with how talented Mozart was, and everything to do with how musicians were treated in that time. Essentially a musician was a servant to his lord which reflected in his social standing and his salary. Mozart became popular with the crowds and that irritated the elite so they took it out on him. He was also very irreverant and counter-culture for the time.

Mozart is quite possibly the greatest musical talent the world has ever seen and diminishing that because his contemporaries treated him poorly is misguided.

So as software developers we probably peak in our mid twenties? I would guess that is probably true.

The age at which we find some of the youngest world-class practitioners probably doesn't have much to do with the age at which average practitioners peak. That some people are able to cram in years and years of intensive practice by their mid-20's doesn't mean most people do that.

Also, while I'm sure you can probably be a world-class coder and a technical genius at 20, productivity in a software development context depends on a lot of non-technical abilities, including domain knowledge, social/organizational/leadership skills and general wisdom.

+1 to candybar's analysis.

it's pretty ridiculous to think most, or even more than a minuscule fraction, of software developers are better in their twenties than their forties or beyond, assuming they continue working.

the refrain that mathematicians and poets do their best work in their twenties is a) not even close to universally true (a recent example is wiles proving fermat at the age of 42) and b) applies to the work of geniuses, people who are doing truly groundbreaking, historical, creative work.

the lesson is not meant to be applied to your own life. the obvious "more experience makes you better" holds for the vast majority of life's pursuits, certainly software development.

Yeah, I get that. A better statement would be that his known works are from his later years.

Personally, I find his later works much better than his early stuff, but touching a nerve, I'm not a huge fan of Mozart.

All sorts of (old world) engineering, architecture and probably some sub fields of biology and chemistry.

I think medicine is a decent candidate as well. As are things like philosophy and most teaching jobs (especially if they require practical experience first).

Also...mathematics, programming, chess...those young folks have usually put in a lot of practice fairly early so they might have done more deliberate learning than older people in other fields.
Same goes for online poker I guess since you can really get in a ton of hardcore learning/repetition in shortish time spans.

I don't think medicine in the modern age is a good candidate.

In my experience older doctors are too tied to their personal experience / past approaches and not in touch enough with modern research and data-driven decision making.*

I'm a pretty big believer that medicine is a field that should be changing significantly now that memorization of knowledge is much less valuable than it was even 20 years ago.


* Yes, I get the irony in making a statement like this based off of just my personal experiences.

i was wondering about architecture too, and i believe louis kahn didn't become great until much later in his life, but wasn't FL wright doing brilliant work in his twenties?

looks like you are on to something with philosophers:
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com...-do-their.html

wittgenstein produced the investigations in his fifties, according to that author's estimate, and 40-50 seems the norm:

So, I got asked an interesting question today:

What kind of company culture are you looking for?

My answer: not toxic.

Then I said what I liked about the place I'm currently at, which incidentally, is not toxic.

Quick update:

Signed up at 5:45
Created first droplet by 6:00
Site running and a porkchop by 7:00

That went significantly smoother than expected. Thanks again for the recommendations.

awesome.

Makes me want to try DO and see what the fuss is about.

I've seen cases where logic like that actually is needed to trigger events where other things happen and tried to remove such code and ended up breaking things.

(Not saying that is the case here)

Yeah maybe on the browser. But this is in node. Nothing is watching these variables.

Atlassian IPO today: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/team

Still no sales people.

Has anyone ever billed a client on a price-per-sprint basis?

If the team has 2 developers and Sprints last 11 days, what would you expect for the cost of a sprint?

Just trying to figure out if the numbers I am coming up with are going to seem really high, or average.