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Comment by Caprinicus | Hacker News Reader

If the 50 year old has the same amount of experience that the 25 year old has, they have been doing something seriously wrong. That is reality, if people want to keep working at a given position they need to constantly develop and improve to remain competitive, all else should not be equal when the older candidate has been working for 25 extra years.

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Real skills transcend whatever language is trendy today. A 50 year old with 25 years experience including 5 years Node.js trumps a 25 year old with 5 years Node.js and nothing else. In a sane world, anyway.

Job ads ask for experience in whatever is "hot" just now though.

I worked with an older engineer (late 40s) when I was 21 (and with a bunch of young SDEs) and he was proficient, intelligent. His downfall was his ego and inability to make trade offs. He beat every decision, design, code review to death and couldn't see the forest for the trees. Writing in Java, he would use byte arrays or unfold loops for unnecessary performance gains. He sabotaged meetings because he would derail for such a long time on minor issues. He was only there for 6 months and jumped ship to Google.

Are you saying all older engineers are raging egomaniacs? Because that sounds pretty ageist to me.

> If the 50 year old has the same amount of experience that the 25 year old has, they have been doing something seriously wrong.

I think this is the crux of it. When most people hire someone straight out of college they're looking for someone with the potential to do great things. Whereas when they hire someone who's 50, they're looking for someone who has done great things. But since a lot of people reach 50 without having done anything especially impressive, applying what hiring managers perceive as being the same set of standards to both age groups leaves older folks less likely to get hired even without any conscious discrimination.

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