I want more companies to follow this. Age is a good thing in most industries, maybe all. I think silicon valley’s stock market drove it towards a “younger is cheaper and will work for free lunch” and that pushed our elders out.
Or that programmers who'd rather focus on things like "minimum viable products" and "just get something down" rather than "designing maintainable systems" and "avoiding sources of tech debt" skew young/inexperienced.
I’m just as capable of adding tech debt as a younger engineer is!
I always thought engineers' job was to make designs in line with best practices, which should hopefully reduce tech debt (in contrast with technicians, whose job is to execute and worry less about the overall project). But that was a lonely and pointless hill to die on...
Best practices are a great source of shared tech debt.