Chess is a primarily mental competition, but players at the top of the world tend to hit their peak at around 35 years old. Players can continue playing at an exceptionally high level until the end of their life, but on average there is a gradual downward slide from that peak. Magnus Carlsen, the current world champ and arguably strongest player of all time, has decided to simply stop defending his title (held since 2013) at the age of 31.
I think something that tech and chess may have in common as well is the ever-shifting grounds. Electrical engineering of today is not dramatically different than electrical engineering of yesterday. But programming (depending on the domain) is quite different today than yesterday. This is going to result in an age bias because at some point you start to simply become jaded learning 'Incremental, overhyped, and not strictly necessary new trendy framework/language [that nobody will be using in 10 years] #2,743.'
The reason Magnus is not defending his title has nothing to do with some decline in ability. Last game versus Nepomniachtchi he won quite convincingly 7.5 to 3.5.
>“I feel I don’t have a lot to gain, I don’t particularly like [the championship matches], and although I’m sure a match would be interesting for historical reasons and all of that, I don’t have any inclination to play and I will simply not play the match,” he said on his sponsor’s podcast. [https://www.npr.org/2022/07/20/1112479750/magnus-carlsen-wor...]
For a man that loves winning and competing as much as Magnus I find it difficult to imagine he wouldn't be playing if he felt himself a significant favorite. His last opponent is a character with a well deserved reputation for implosion. He was playing no less worse than Magnus for 6 games, in a 12 game match. He then lost a single hard fought game and did his thing, blowing up and losing 3 of the next 5 games with abysmal (by his standards) play. That could happen again, but I think it unlikely and I'd say Magnus does as well. Nepo seems to have improved his mental game, and has been in great form as well - having just dominated a very strong field in the candidates with the highest score in modern times.
Carlsen is very strong, but his title defenses have never really reflected that - ironically with the most recent exception. In the two defenses prior, he only managed to draw the classical section and relied on tiebreaks. His defeat is all but inevitable, and I think he wanted to go out undefeated. I think the one opponent he was hoping to be able to play against was Alireza Firouzja. Alireza is young and will probably become a world champion contender at some point. But Magnus would have been able to count on Alireza collapsing under the unique pressures of a world championship match and let Magnus then go out on top having undefeated having defeated champions from 3 generations. Instead Alireza collapsed at the candidates, scoring less than 50% in spite of being the (at the time) 2nd highest rated player in the world.
I don't think programming today is that different. I've been programming since 1982 or so and I don't think it's fundamentally that different. You have to keep learning new stuff. That's the way it's always been. That's what it means to be a programmer. But the new stuff is just the old stuff and the basics are the same.
By the way, electric engineering of today is also quite different from electric engineering of the 80's. You have to learn new tools. Maybe if you work for an electric utility it's still the same though I tend to doubt that as well.
Keep in mind that we've seen an interesting phenomenon over the past few decades where the average peak age of professional players has been going up. This includes physical sports like baseball, football as well as things like chess, fighting games and various esports.
I think the peak age thing ends up being less due to actual aging and more due to the responsibilities of life taking time away from practice.
Chess is not programming. We have software that can beat any human chess player. We don’t have software that can beat even a mediocre software developer.
These sort of comparisons are rarely meaningful, of the way you seek to imply: We have software that can beat any human at calculating partial differential equations. We don't have software that can beat even a mediocre cat-picture-identifier at identifying cats.
I think something that tech and chess may have in common as well is the ever-shifting grounds. Electrical engineering of today is not dramatically different than electrical engineering of yesterday. But programming (depending on the domain) is quite different today than yesterday. This is going to result in an age bias because at some point you start to simply become jaded learning 'Incremental, overhyped, and not strictly necessary new trendy framework/language [that nobody will be using in 10 years] #2,743.'