* People Skills - This is critical in almost every programming job, understanding what and why to do is more important is more important than how. Good communication is the path to that and many programmers get this wrong.

* Writing - Being able to take a ton of ideas and organize them into coherent, modular sections.

* Discipline - One thing that I have far more of at 35 than I did at 22. It is a critical component to learning as well as working through problems correctly (not half-assing it)

But I'm way better at knowing what to do, and recognising how not to approach things.

My belief is that as you age, more and more of your brain is turned over from processing to pattern recognition.

If only my communication skills had advanced apace, so that I could convince others with less effort )

I'm still just as productive as I was in my 20's, but now I've got decades more experience than my peers and can see things that the hubris and arrogance of youth never let me see before - like, how important it is to be able to work with others, not hold onto projects selfishly .. how important it is to check oneself before one wrecks oneself, and so on.

If I had a way, there'd be so much advice I'd give to my younger self...

What surprises me is I learn much faster now than I used to. But I guess it makes sense. I never stopped learning new things (coding or otherwise) so I've learned to learn. I also have more data points to compare new stuff to.

In my experience, it's not so much about age, hence I'm not sure if that is relevant in there. (For example, I'm not sure if using VIM is something younger programmers tend to learn, and I'd guess more of the 'older generation' will know it).

In my personal experience (I'm 36) I get better with every line of code I write. I'm a far better programmer now than I was 10 years ago.

Actually, I'm more worried about ageism than about the decline of my abilities. I work in academia, but I wonder if I could get a software engineer position if I wanted to.

At around 30 I started to clue in and I can recall some designs which were actually not too bad in retrospect. Of course, a lot of the stuff that is taken for granted now (design patterns, TDD, etc) was not well known at that time and so I was exploring and learning things that few other people had experience with.

As another person posted, I'm also nearing 50. I would say that my code has improved a fair amount and I have learned a lot of other techniques which I didn't really know in my 30s (like FP). Rather than technique, though, I think the biggest thing I've learned is patience. I code very slowly compared to how I coded 20 years ago, but I think a lot more about every line. Kent Beck once said that when he wrote Smalltalk Best Practices that he started to evaluate every keystroke and to think why he was pressing that key. I find that I am doing that a lot now and it is very beneficial. The advice I give the young guys on the team the most is, "Stop typing so fast! You need to think about what you are typing" :-)

As I said, the biggest revelations for me are less about pure technique and more about how everything fits together. For example, my less experienced colleagues are often distraught over the perceived sins of the other people on the team. They worry endlessly about how to stop the "crappy programmers" (in their eyes) from "ruining" the code base. Nearly 50 year old me weighs the options and realizes that complaining/campaigning/scheming/negotiating/etc will take an order of magnitude more time than refactoring and will suck the fun out of the room. I like refactoring code and I hate arguing, and besides young people tend to be crap at cleaning (in general). So I clean things and eventually most of the others catch on -- not everybody, but it's enough.

I still get stressed out a lot and I'm hoping by the time I hit 60 I will have resolved those issues :-)

Also, I don't know about you, but I'm still learning important new things even at my age (and experience level). I don't see an end in sight, so either I'm a very slow learner, or there is more than 10 years worth of things to learn/experience.

Programming is fun. I enjoy it now, more than I ever have. Three times I've created software that has built a business and livelihood for others. That is super satisfying, and at the same time, usually the source of things that are not as fun as programming (taxes, accounting, lawyers, nasty people).

When I run across other programmers my age, I see a lot of unhappy people, and that is kind of sad. A lot of the unhappiness comes from one of three places:

* Not leaning new things and discovering that the isn't demand for what you did in the 90s and 00s. Career prospects are dim, and bitterness sets in. It's easily solved by picking up something new - but be careful, new doesn't mean things 15-20 years old. So many people jump out of one old tech into another one that is about to be old.

* A lack of interest in leading, and being hypercritical of leaders. Here's the deal: if you leading the team, you pick what you want to work on, and you pick how you build. If you are just on the team, you'll always be on the wrong side of decisions. It's easy to lead a small team, and experience is really the backbone of really, really great small "l" leadership.

* Pathological drive to be correct at all times. You know, they person that can't let the smallest mistake go un-punished, every bad decision second-guessed and being willing to die on the hill of correctness over the smallest mistake. This drive makes you good a programming, but it makes relationships with others terrible, and leads to being isolated, alone, passed over and unhappy. It's really hard, but learning to pick your battles and understand that battles can be won and jobs lost really goes a long way.

That said, there's an awful lot of aging, talented, experienced developers out there that are doing great things, and having fun doing it. Find a way to keep it fun.

> Do people lose interest in programming as they age?

No.

> Is it accurate to expect that older programmers are slower,

I do think a lot more about code before writing it. I don't just starting typing in random crap hoping to feel my way towards a solution. Quick reflexes and high WPM typing is not useful for programming.

> make more mistakes,

Far, far fewer. In fact, one gets pretty good at zooming in on where the bug is in other peoples' code. It's a pattern recognition thing.

> and would rather be doing something else such as managing programmers?

No. Well, I would prefer to race cars.

I do want to add one more thing to the list:

* Find a well-managed team of really nice people that know more than you do.

Every part of this requirement is important, especially for generalists like me!

If you find this, life becomes lemonade.

There are two points I'd like to add:

My brain isn't as elastic as a younger programmer's. My brother, a software developer close to my age, once said, "It's as if I used to have 20 registers, and now I'm down to 12". I can't keep as much in my head as once. My twenty-something co-worker, Belinda, once remarked, "It takes you a while to read code & understand what it's doing". She was right. Using solely that metric (elasticity), I'd have to say that the forty-year-old version of myself was faster than the fifty-eight-year-old version.

The other point I'd like to make is that there's a certain class of developer who has grown tired of developing & learning new skills, but doesn't want to retire. I remember my co-worker Larry would spend far too much time reminiscing about 640k computers and showing pictures of his grand kids. He didn't seem to want to work much. They let him go, and though I liked him personally, I think management made the right decision.

I think my advantage (I'm over 40) is that I produce the _right_ working code. Listen to the client, think about the problem, suggest short cuts or alternatives (including COTS if needed). I am much more focused on solving problems now than I was when I was younger.

I’m not the greatest, but I get the job done and produce results. That’s what businesses want.still, I wonder how sustainable that is.

I've met older programmers that were exceptional (passionate programmers that keep up with the craft, eg. at least enough to be able to explain exactly why they dislike JavaScript but love Go and Python even if they use none of these languages in their "day job") and older programmers that were mediocre (these are usually the ones still using only the language they started with, programming specific types of apps in the niche industry they started in).

I don't think you can pigeonhole this demographic any more than any other, but there is at least one thing to keep in mind -- the exceptional "old farts" are really exceptional, because they have the same passion as any other passionate programmer, plus a boatload of experience. When you really want to ship something, no amount of youth-fueled semi-experienced 16 hour workdays makes up for a solid 8 hours from someone with decades of experience who still loves writing software.