[rm_-rf_slash]

The gist I'm seeing here tends to view apprentice opportunities for skilled manual labor. What about software? I work with a developer in his 60s who only came into programming late in the game because after years of self-employment he realized he'd need to pay more into social security to get any benefits.

Old dogs might not learn new tricks, but people can.

[hardwaresofton]

From what I've heard (to be fair, mostly on HN/reddit), age discrimination is a thing, and it can be very hard for older developers to find jobs

[darryl42]

Sounds like he was a new developer, hence no wage premium. Old but junior.

[hardwaresofton]

Yeah but wage premiums aren't the only reasons for age discrimination -- there's also a perceived lack of current technical expertise, or lack of malleability/flexibility, right?

[lsc]

if he was a full-time employee getting paid-for health insurance, an older person costs the employer dramatically more, like 300% more than a young person, for health insurance at least.

Of course, even then you are only talking a grand or two pre-tax, which isn't the world, when it comes to programmer sallary, unless the old person has a bunch of dependents and the employer is paying for dependents.

I think it's pretty common for the employer to pick up most or all of the bill for the employee, and then have the employee contribute for their dependents, but it varies from company to company.

[wyclif]

Not only is ageism a real thing, but in order for software development apprenticeship to work you have to have a supply of skilled engineers with the time to mentor. And as I've found out the hard way, the people that are the most qualified to effectively mentor engineers are the same people who don't have time for mentorship because they are founding startups.

Y Combinator and, to a lesser extent, the better coding bootcamps, are trying to solve this problem and I feel we should be supportive of that and encourage more of those initiatives (and I'm not looking to start another subthread about the effectiveness of coding bootcamps, but merely pointing out that they are an attempt to solve the problem of mentorship at scale).

[rm_-rf_slash]

We work in higher education, where we invest in people, not throw them away like yesterday's pizza.

[chillwaves]

Cold pizza is the best pizza.