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A lifelong learner with decades of experience will outperform a 5-year "senior" many times over, not just in output but also in the headaches and mess that they save you from having to experience.

What we need is better titling. There's nothing shameful about being a junior or a mid-level for multiple years each. Until we get that, one can usually tease out the "seniorness" of the position by discussing salary.

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So, that's an orthogonal problem. I was pointing to the direct advice and suggesting that people will look at this advice and their prejudices will lead them to hire a younger person over an older person because the older person will be mispercieved as having a "lower slope."

Yep. I think we run into a different problem, which is the diminishing return to the employer.

Even if a person's growth is linear, most companies' ability to realize a return on that growth probably isn't.

It's not that the companies couldn't benefit from experience if they knew how to realize that benefit. It's more that their processes are set up in a way that prevents the benefit from being realized. I'm thinking about heavy-handed architectural diktats and constantly changing priorities when I write this.

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