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> If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average)

That's a really big "if", and seems to have no supporting evidence.

Let me turn this around into an only slightly less unsupported statement:

Youngsters in programming are desirable because most programming has become a shitty job where you need obedient people just slightly smarter than average but no smarter. Genuinely smart people are actually unwelcome in most programming jobs.

Programming now is mostly plumbing garbage data between crappy APIs that change every 6 months according to whim and fashion and you don't need smart people for that. In that environment, any knowledge you learn has a half-life of 3 months and you are solving the same problems over and over in different languages and APIs.

Or, alternatively, most VC money is chasing scalable "fad" social businesses, and having youngsters is useful because they are willing to expend enormous amount of money following fads while attempting to get laid. Again, knowledge half-life is under 3 months.

People making actual money and solving business problems seem to have no problems with hiring older people.

> is that really discrimination?

Along similar lines, we have a decent amount of senior (read "older") people at our company that are well paid. But, most of the work we do can be done by less experienced people who are much cheaper. That almost always means they are young. We don't discriminate based on age, but if you just looked at the ages of people that we mostly hire then that data would look like we're discriminating based on age when age is not part of the decision at all.

This is what I observe as well. If you have job that really just boils down to hooking up event listeners in java-script and fiddling with html and css until it looks they way the designers want it then experience beyond competency isn't really all that important. On principle, a company should hire an older dev with decades of experience if they're willing to work at rates that reflect the job they're doing. But devs with decades of experience are probably looking for work that is more complex and pays better.

"(eg I’ll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I’ll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility)"

You seem to be contradicting yourself there, why you would you think an older surgeon lacks cognitive flexibility?

Because "developers get dumb by 30" is an HN meme that just won't go away. So every new batch of impressionable 20 year-olds hears it, at the same time VCs and big corps are telling them "you're so smart, now just submit to this series of hazing rituals."

This is accurate. Age discrimination is rampant in tech because young people are essentially recruited as unwitting scabs against their older peers. Aside from depressing wages and increasing loyalty (via fear of precarity), it’s also a very effective way to fight unionization, which software desperately needs (not for compensation reasons, although that will change, but for professional and ethical reasons).

It’s easy to impress a 24 year-old with a decent salary, a stocked kitchen, and lots of dumb little perks they can brag about (never mind that they are being paid, sometimes literally, in peanuts). They don’t start thinking about job security and labor power until it’s too late.

Based on your description of your priorities one could argue that older workers are the ones depressing wages, not younger workers. Many older workers (including you, by your own admission) value job security and work life balance over raw compensation and are less willing to rock the boat. Younger workers are more likely to go “fuck you, pay me, and if you don’t I’m going to move across the country to take up this other job offer I have”. Older employees with a spouse and kids have much less geographic mobility.

I understand the point that you are trying to make, but it's off the mark. Older workers are almost always paid more than younger workers, all else being equal. Unless there is some seismic shift in the economy, this might as well be axiomatic. So, it's just not possible for older people to depress the wages of younger people, unless older people in their prime working years for compensation (35-55+) for most sectors of the economy (including IT) started volunteering to do the same work for less compensation. As others in this thread have already made clear, even when they do that (e.g., out of desperation due to age discrimination), they're still going to be considered more "expensive" than a younger worker.

Also, let's be realistic: the vast majority of entry-level software developers just are not good enough to pull off the kind of thing you describe. They would be laughed off.

People job hop and use competing offers as leverage for pay raises all the time. It’s not as rare an occurrence as you seem to think it is.

I owe 100% of my salary growth to job-hopping, so your assumption is incorrect.

Look, you made a bad argument. It's not a big deal. The fact is that the situation you described is frankly ridiculous: the notion that, were it not for older workers depressing wages, entry-level workers would cause compensation to go up by being so good at what they do and geographically flexible that they can go from metro area to metro area telling employers to fuck off until somebody recognizes them for the genius that they are. (It's a nice fantasy, though.)

Not a contradiction. Surgery is a skill honed by repetition and experience over many years. A cognitive task like mathematical theorem proving can be mastered by a bright teenager in much, much less time.

I suspect as you age your Bayesian priors become stronger and stronger so all new data only mildly updates your priors. Young people have very weak priors, so new data can easily affect their thinking.

Anecdotally, my mom has had a smart phone for more than 5 years but she still has just memorized certain functions she knows how to do like texting and placing a call. Ask her to do anything else and she throws up her hands. My 2 year old daughter, while not able to text or place calls, has a much more intuitive grasp of how the phone works and has been able to learn a lot of functionality on her own.

Or another example is that I've noticed from my (albeit limited) experience that all the surgeons I've worked with who used robotic surgical systems were younger (30s-40s). Anecdotally but I think there's a pattern there. Younger people tend to be more open to learning something radically new.

So while virtually all skills benefit from repetition and experience, some skills require more cognitive flexibility (ability to forget what you already know and start fresh) and demand frequent learning and re-learning.

this has to be viewed in the overall context of employment law and its purpose in society. we have anti discrimination laws not because the government is trying to give each and every corporation all the fuel it needs to become devilishly efficient. we have anti discrimination laws to increase equality and create a more even distribution of wealth and opportunity despite disadvantages imposed upon applicants by circumstance.

also, the government can be viewed as having an interest in keeping people employed in general so that they do not become dependent upon government for sustenance.