Seriously, the degree to which age discrimination is an accepted reality in tech today is a great failing, and one that has enormous hidden costs over time.
Sadly I know a number of extremely talented older engineers who have been discarded like trash only to be constantly rejected in their search for new employment, until some of them just give up. It's remarkably ignorant and short-sighted of employers who practice this kind of discrimination.
It's laziness mixed with incompetence mixed with the simple reality that too many companies consider it a competitive advantage that they're completely fucked up in their process and procedure but manage to somehow churn out something anyway.
And if you're not hitting your targets, why, move the target! Imagine how much easier NASA's job would be if they could say the moon shot was a success even though they only got something into orbit because we redefined what a moon shot was.
That's a 'reasonable' cause for being short sighted, but it still means they are short sighted.
This is the way in biomed:
>'When scientists finished the first draft of the human genome, in 2001, and again when they had the final version in 2003, no one lied, exactly. FAQs from the National Institutes of Health refer to the sequence’s “essential completion,” and to the question, “Is the human genome completely sequenced?” they answer, “Yes,” with the caveat — that it’s “as complete as it can be” given available technology.'
https://www.statnews.com/2017/06/20/human-genome-not-fully-s...