In other words, it depends on the individual.
This is really down to what side of the tech industry it's happening on and what that side needs. Working with new web and mobile technologies delivering novel applications for consumers are more suited to younger people as opposed to say developing, maintaining and evolving systems for aviation, transport and military automation and safety or certain parts of finance.
Let's take an example case where two engineers are working in a second tier city earning $85,000 per year in salary. One is 25 years old, one is 53 years old. The company covers the entire cost of the employee health insurance. The health insurance for the 53 year old will cost a minimum of 2x what it does for the 25 year old. The cost of health insurance begins to aggressively increase after roughly 38-40. By the time the 53 year old employee reaches 60-63 years old, the insurance cost is now 3x that of the 25 year old.
The 53 year old will solidly cost an extra $6,000 to $10,000 in health insurance on top of that $85,000 salary, versus the 25 year old. The 60 year old might cost $12,000 to $18,000 more in health insurance.
All of these figures are minimums, the numbers get much worse if you have a nice health plan.
If you're in a second tier city paying your engineers $85k, $15,000 per year in extra cost buys a ridiculous amount of training to improve the 20 something engineers.
If you have 20 engineers, over ten years the cost of employing all 55-63 year olds, versus all 20-30 year olds, could easily be a minimum extra of $3 million in just health insurance costs (with a total salary over ten years of $17 million). The more likely cost is far higher.
Spending extra time to "Show you love your work" is not something they care about.
On the other hand that is something most American Techies in SV firms or on HN already are part of.
Just sitting here on HN for so many years I know what it takes to look like an up and coming coder - and that is to breathe and live code.
Weekend projects on XYZ project. Work efficiency on ABC tasks.
Plus older people are not going to accept the usual promises of riches at the end of the rainbow, so may usually ask for better deals.
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I think people are too quick to run from here to blame -
Instead this is a systems/people problem.
Theres certain cultural expectations of work culture in tech. There are also unending flows of graduates to tech.
While this remains, this problem will continue. Firms are responding to the resources at their disposal and optimizing
Should some magic new industry arise, which absorbs all the smartest minds in the world - you will see tech change.
Its your/their choice if you/they want to work on the weekends. I am not forcing them. Its just that promotions will go to the people who do.
And if you don't earn more, and get that promotion - well how are you going to stay relevant in this industry or pay for that rent?
I mean its totally your "choice", to effectively throw away your future if you don't play ball.
Thats why we employers prefer young guns. They have that "go get em" attitude. Great cannon fodder.
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It isn't in comparison with the job available to new grads.
(Of course, there's the question of whether a senior industry hire is actually only worth some factor of a new grad hire.)
Software development isn't "knowledge work", if the additional knowledge of experience isn't valued. It's more like "typing work".
But that would be folly long term.
But once the product is set having sane architecture and good code quality often become a deciding factor in being successful - because they allow you to iterate faster & outmaneuver your competition.
Sometimes you can get away with it for longer, but eventually you’ll grind to a place where you need to fix these things and it’s easier to do earlier.
Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.
People tend to think, "We'll architect it later" means "We don't have to think now". You need to think at every step. You don't need to know how you'll deal with everything, but there is a lot of rooming for being rational. You should think about fault tolerance when you start. It could be that you think you don't need much since everything will deploy to one box (and you're okay with loosing the whole thing). You need to be rational. You need to know why you did what you did and what the impacts would be.
I'm going to stop picking on Twitter since they are the case study in what not to do. They learned from themselves and taught us all much in the process.
Many startups don't think all this through (even if they only need to think 2 moves ahead). They over-hire. They under design. They make lots of poor choices because they think they have the runway and want to be cool with the latest frameworks. All of these actions I'd place squarely in the folly camp since Uncle Bob and other resources have been free since at least 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsjsiz2A9mg).
I do want to nuance this a bit. If you're doing AI or stats, Python makes sense. There are ways to scale that too. Use the right tool. My general argument is that Python is seldom the right tool for any at-scale web system.