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Comment by aiyodev | Hacker News Reader

> the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind

Why exclude the older and inexperienced?

Various reasons. They have families and might thus not be willing to work crazy hours, are more confident and won't put up with all the bullshit, etc

How is that not stereotyping? Not all older people are like that.

The correlation is very very strong though.

I end my day at 6pm, I don’t touch my laptop on most weekends, I say no to projects that I can easily solve but delays less user facing work, I get paid well into 6 figures.

Now if you asked me 20 years ago to do any of the above for a job that pays < $40k (about $65k today) I would have said yes in a heartbeat. Many late nights spent at work because they offered free pizza. Weekend work because without money what else can I do? I said yes to every project because of the fear of saying no and being replaced. And it wasn’t being replaced that bugged me out so much, it was having the find a new job.

Today I know my worth and I’ll leave a company in 30seconds if they treat me wrong. Amazing what 10+ years of experience (edit: and savings) does to your psyche. Still gotta play the game of dumb exploitable tech expert to get through interviews to negotiations, but once there get paid bruh

Yes exactly. Clearly a lot of companies will prefer 20 year old you, if they don’t need, or think they need, your extra 20 years of experience they won’t want to pay for it.

Also in my experience often tend to be more actually productive, partially by having the experience to avoid more bad ideas/approaches and dead ends. And by on average being much better at the non-typing parts of the job, which are just as important.

One difficulty is that real productivity is difficult to measure quantitatively, especially without putting actual effort into the measurement. Metrics like loc or hours-in-office are fairly meaningless but very easy to measure. Having weak middle/group management (very common in tech, for various reasons) relying on poor metric like this can easily lead you to a negative feedback cycle where you believe you are "better off" hiring a slew of young people, and your metrics "prove" it.

Young, inexperienced people tend to not know their worth and are easily manipulated into working longer for less.

Sometimes the hiring calculus maximizes quantity over quality.

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