Average age of StackExchange users for each tag | Hacker News Reader

Average age of StackExchange users for each tag

brianbondy.com

98 pointstimothybone48 comments

Excuse me for not being objective, but a bit more interesting statistics of tags from Stack Overflow is here https://www.kaggle.com/c/predict-closed-questions-on-stack-o... (average and median reputation of persons posting questions, % of non-closed questions, average number of additional tags, median body length, freshness of the topic).

And my full project, Tag Graph Maps of Stack Exchange: https://github.com/stared/tag-graph-map-of-stackexchange/wik...

It's cool, although you could have easily done without saying that yours is more interesting.

You are right, I shouldn't have said that. Sorry.

Each list includes only the users who have social networking links in their profile

Well, that's going to skew the results beyond usefulness.

Yes, the top four tags on the TeX list have a reported average age of 15 years. It doesn't seem right.

Silly hacker, TeX is for kids!

That comment is for a totally different study. The study only includes users with an age in their stack exchange profile. It is not related in any way to if they have a social media account.

To save some scrolling, the last tag listed for stackoverflow is war-stories at 35.91 years old.

And perceptions match up with reality, the oldest users are the ones with the COBOL, Delphi, ADO and Legacy Code tags :)

The young guys are working on Chrome extensions, JQuery animations, HTML5 and CSS3. There are also several young users of PHP so beware :) .

Under "Statistical Analysis" the "Weighted-Mean" tag expected age is 72. Under "Mathematics" the "Non-Standard Analysis" tag expected age is 19. I suspect samples of 1 for each of these tags.

This is fun to look at but I wouldn't base any conclusions on these averages. Providing histograms for each tag along with some summary statistics such as sample size, min, max, and median would give a lot more transparency into the dataset.

The absense of detailed methodology makes me doubt the worth of this number dump. As a start it would be good to know the number of users that led to the average numbers. And anything about the representative quality.

Yeah I too would be curious to see how the age is distributed among ALL the SO users and tags rather than the "top users" and their social media profiles.

Actually you are seeing what you want. The social media stuff is about a related study for mining the social media links for top users and not for the expected age study. The expected age study was for all users that have an age in their StackExchange profile.

I would be interested in seeing an age profile. I, for one, removed my birth date after being flamed about my age. I've been programming since 1962 :)

Does anybody know how he actually knows the age of the SO members? He wrote "I call the statistic the Expectd Age because it is calculated using Expected Value from statistics" but that doesn't mean much to me.

It's explained higher up on the page:

"I mined the Stack Overflow (and related sites) data dumps to extract the social networking accounts of the top users. Each list includes only the users who have social networking links in their profile ..."

Would be interesting to know how he did it in detail.

Twitter does not contain age, neither does LinkedIn (or at least not show it) And in facebook you need to jump through loops like user_birthday and friends_birthday[1]. I don't know how to get the birthday of 3rd parties.

[1] https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer?method=GET...

You can input your age on a Stack Exchange profile.

ok that was too easy.

Hm. I would guess younger people are more likely to have their age on their fb profile - to make this more than just a random collection of data, you'd need to check that as well. Also, is there a correlation between age and whether you include your social networking profile on your stack overflow profile in the first place?

I think that's an issue in his study. It means that the age is restricted to the age range of Facebook users (and maybe to the younger FB users, who are more likely to give their date of birth).

Site is down for me(over quota), here's the google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.bri...

To go to any page in google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:<UR...;

So by the looks of it as a 28 year old I'm pretty much the exact mean for stack overflow.

I love the fact that "war stories" has the highest average age (of 35).

I noticed that. I wonder if it's nudged a bit higher by younger generations not being as fond of the war analogy.

Well, I guess it's more to do with older people having more experience and seniority thus having more stories to share.

I agree and maybe young people are who are in college are the lurkers.

I'm the owner of the site, here is the associated blog post that summarizes some of that data: http://www.brianbondy.com/blog/id/117/

would be a good indicator for some future estimates, but lisp, ruby, python etc are all around 30yrs.

- as are c and c++. What gives?

That mostly younger generation uses Stack Overflow and thus age-over-languages cannot be extracted from the data analysis. We are just learning statistics and probability and i think this happens if the sample data is incorrect or not diverse enough.

A fair number of schools still use C and C++ as the language of instruction.

That was what I was looking for - php and node.js seem most popular with younger people, but not by much. What is surprising is that game development is much more popular with younger people than web development.

I would freain' love a "Wikipedia: age of people rapidly using automatic tools (such as rollback; twinkle; etc)", and then extend that to "How many of those were good changes vs how many of those were poor changes vs how many of those are discussable changes".

The average age for COBOL doesn't seem right. I would expect it to be higher.

I wonder if that's because there are lots of younger folks who have to maintain old COBOL projects, and are looking for help on SO.

Note that this is not just a statistic of people using COBOL, it is a statistic of people having questions about COBOL and asking them on SO.

That feeling when you discover you're older than the COBOL tag.

It only counts users who have linked their profiles to social networking sites, and have their age listed.

Average age? So who's the oldest user on SE, dragging all the numbers up?

I only considered acceptable ranges.

Nice job.

It's interesting as a list... and I think there's scope to do a visualization that is even more interesting (and also easier to read).

Does anyone know which service he is running this on? There is no logo on the overload page. Ty

Headers say:

Server Google Frontend

Thanks, didn't show on my android with opera mobile

Looks like Google App Engine.

yeah, I confirmed with him, he's using App Engine. And...the site's back up. :)

LaTeX -> thesis ~= 29. sounds about right.

StackOverflow is almost a kindergarten.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com