I'm not sure the professional sports analogies carry over very well.

With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.

I'm not sure this carries over well to engineering unless you mean that the young people are willing to grind for a lot more hours on nights and weekends.

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andriy_koval an hour ago | parent [-]

> With very rare exceptions, professional athletes are just not as good athletically at 40/50 as they were at 20. They may be smarter in some ways--which maybe means they'd be better as coaches.

not sure if focus should be on athletic sports. Chess is better analogy to software I think.

	▲	jrumbut an hour ago \| parent [-]
		To part of it, but chess is generally played one against one, there are well understood rules and a clearly defined goal, and every win is someone else's loss. When building software, if you can state an unambiguous goal and what rules apply you are more than halfway done. It's not uncommon to work on something for a year and discover you have been building the wrong thing. Navigating that ambiguity is where all the value in software engineering is.