Side note: paid vacations seem like pretty low exceptions, maybe you are taking advantage of inexperienced developers, maybe you meant amount they expect too much time off.
I am curious why you wouldn't offer market-rate salary with paid vacation and benefits to all employees. What does age have to do with it?
> What does age have to do with it?
I'll translate: "Age correlates with an unwillingness to be exploited and the experience to recognize when that's about to happen."
And I would call it entitlement vs. “not wanting to be exploited”.
You don’t bring your needs to the market, you bring skills. The market pays you appropriately for those skills.
If a candidate and the employer can’t reach an agreement, so be it. If that is because the candidate inflates their expectations because of their age [or wisdom], well, see previous sentence.
I turn 40 this December; 20 years ago I got bought with just being able to get into a programming job (in the small town in La Paz, BCS Mexico), the fact that I was paid OK was good Vacations and all that extra stuff was just icing on the cake. I didn't care about the "retirement" things (in Mexico by law everyone gets "poor mans" version of 401k). 20 years later, darn I am sure I am WAY more picky than then.
But when you are in a position to hire and there is no apparent benefit to hiring someone who wants more money vs someone with the same skills and relevant experience, why would you hire the person who wants more money?
I responded to someone who literally said older guys ask for too much and that's why they don't hire them
That is not at all what I said. In my experience, older people almost always ask for above market compensation regardless of experience. We don’t hire people that ask for too much money regardless of age.
Who you pick is entirely up to your company. If you don't super expensive people, that's fine. Maybe you already have those?
We get much more “value” when we choose a less experienced candidate who wants much less money, but it is a gamble. Are they trainable? Will they stick around?
But I prefer that gamble to the one where we pay someone more money who has no discernible skill edge over other candidates. Actually, I don’t understand the upside to that gamble at all, which is why I never take it. Should I just assume that they will be more successful simply because they are asking for more money?
A small % of new hires (in their 20s and 30s) will stick around for >10 years, and the value you get then from years of incremental pay raises is huge. Those people are comfortable and don't know their market value or are too afraid to go and get it.
I am simply providing examples from my own experience to explain why I believe older people can have a difficult time finding work.
Put simply, I’ve found that when correcting for experience, older people ask for above market compensation.
If I can hire someone to do the same work at the same quality level for less money, why wouldn’t I do this?
Would you say a new culinary grad delivered the same quality pizza as Jeff Varasano, who’s been honing a craft for multiple decades?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28296260
Now if you’re in a field that doesn’t require high quality, then cheaper makes sense. Let the market decide. Unfortunately it is inefficient due to biases. Oldies know their cv has a good chance of hitting the bin without a further look, if they have the grey hairs of experience.
That makes sense. But what if the older developer has more experience and can demonstrate greater skill? People tend to become more skilled with more experience, and having been exposed to different technologies gives one a larger perspective to base decisions on. Also helps with challenging bugs, and knowing what sort of leaky abstractions the tower of modern software is built on top of.
The comments above tend to be about refusing to even consider hiring developers over a certain age despite whatever experience and skills they have, or treating them poorly because they are older.