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Comment by acutesoftware | Hacker News Reader

Good article, it is obvious that as we get older we (statistically) have a lesser chance of success in winning an Olympic medal or out twitching the best FPS gamers - but for writing and IT work - age doesn't come into it.

What does come into it (and why this bias continues) is that perhaps a highly percent of older IT workers are behind the times or irrelevant - some people simply stop wanting to learn and grow.

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I think a bigger part of it is that older IT and developer types are less likely to live at the workplace and allow themselves to be taken advantage of.

They are more likely to have one of those pesky families that get in the way of absolute, total devotion to the company.

They might even be so "uncommitted" to the work that they go home by 6pm.

Also, when some of the "growth" comes from learning the new, but not actually better way of doing something, it's understandable that older workers might be less enthused than people who haven't been around the block a few times already.

Define learning and growth. Do you mean being proficient with the flavour of the month shiny new language or framework; applying the latest syntax in a specific language, adding an additional domain of knowledge you can write code for or being up to date with any of the multitude of skills around writing code?

Often older IT people will recognise a dead-end idea that they have tried before which failed and are hesitant for good reason.

Haven’t met any that stops growing, what many do though is focus more on the business side and less on the coding, because it’s easier to get money that way. Starting freelancing with their own tax schemes, becoming a power point knight, short IT architect stints.

When you are young you want to dazzle people with your own projects, when you get old you want to have money enough that you get time to dazzle people.

But in the end we never really dazzle people like we did when coding young, because we want to make younglings to feel encouragement, especially before college.

I think it's also because of family. When you're young, you might be single or childless - fresh out of college. At 35 you might have a kid or two and you want to save enough money to put them into a good school and retire early.

For writing breakthrough papers, age is not a major factor:

https://news.northeastern.edu/2016/11/03/new-study-success-c...

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