I prefer hiring people in their 30ies. It’s the perfect mix of being old enough to be practical and patient and young enough to still be cheap. The cheap bit comes from being in the Danish public sector where seniority gives automatic pay increases that you can’t legally turn down, so there is that.

I do wonder why people wouldn’t hire older programmers or engineers though. A lot of them are still extremely nerdy about their hobby, they have profound amounts of experience and they’ll typically both be able to follow orders and voice their opinions. Often they’ll have a good grip on work life balancing as well, making them less prone to stress.

I’m not sure ageism is really a big problem though. I haven’t seen any unemployment numbers on old programmers being huge, though I will admit that fear of abuse was one of the reasons I went into management.

That being said, I do think people should plan their staff to be without huge age gaps. It’s one of the few things that has an empirical proven negative effect on teams. But that goes both ways.