True. We gain in experience, knowledge, and webs of relationships as we age. When somebody proposes a project, we sometimes know enough to say "we tried something like that on the frobozz contract. Here's what we learned about the pitfalls."
Productivity: Maybe older workers can't / won't pull lots of all-nighters. The same is true of working mothers. But we plan ahead and get our work done.
The anti-discrimination laws aren't supposed to shackle companies to pointless costs and dead-weight people. They're intended to promote company culture that values people for what they bring to the table.
What is a company to do when external forces throw it into relentless decline? It takes a lot of guts to exit entire businesses or markets and refocus. Closing an office or shutting down an entire department isn't age discrimination. It's still nasty.
Look, western culture allows companies to have limited liability (to be corporations). The culture grants them patents for their inventions (hi IBM!). We trust them to take lots of risks to build their businesses, and give good rewards for success.
In return it's reasonable to expect compliance with laws.
>It is correlated as aging also slows reaction. Slower reaction
Slower reaction in terms of milliseconds and for reflexes.
Not for thinking and programming -- which experience helps you improve, understand computer systems more holistically, know to recognize tons of patterns that emerge again and again, and deep thinking is what makes the difference.
So unless programmers in your company also have to juggle balls or avoid daggers, the "slower reaction" is irrelevant.
Realistically cognitive decline, especially that sort, isn't the reason developers in their 40's and 50's are more frequently worth laying off. I'd rather hire the me of my 40's and 50's than the me of my 20's. (I'm in my 30's.)
I wonder how much of it is that bad younger developers are more likely to attrition themselves, but older ones stay. So you get these old guys who, after five to ten years, it's really obvious they've got to go.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills as I read down these thread chains. Exactly what kind of jobs are you all doing? Is everyone on here a professional gamer? Nothing about my job requires me to have heightened reflexes or high APM.
This Handwavy denial of a biological process does not help the discussion or anyone on the long term.
Reaction time and reasoning skills are cognitive skills that declines with age, specially in relation to complex tasks.
The studies are worth reading or skimming thorough at least, more importantly, everyone should look into how they can manage aging tax on cognitive skills, you can't stop it, but you can slow it down, just like physical health.
Reaction time is irrelevant in programming -- at any specific rate of decline in one's 40s and 50s and even 60s.
Cognitive skills are not, but they're not declining in any significant rate to make any difference (some of the best programmers are old), and are balanced by experience.
Also, let's see what tune you will sing 10 or 20 years down in your career.
What the companies mostly want is to eliminate people who have personal lives, and don't care for constant death marches and bro-ing it away at the office.
Experience increases with age. That is also a concrete biological fact. If you want to claim that your argument is based on fact rather than opinion, you need to prove that the factors you mention outweigh experience. I don’t believe it’s true, and certainly isn’t proven.
If you base your argument on a sub-section of data then you are only trying to support an opinion.
Is 'reaction time' relevant? Is 'cognitive decline' relevant on an individual basis?
What are the other variables that prove relevant to performance you're ignoring? And what is performance?
The reason I ask if this is your opinion or intuition is because of your simplistic argument. It looks like you're trying to defend an opinion. So I ask.
If you agree that experience counts for something, how do you find the equilibrium between experience and cognitive decline? Do you purport to know this without evidence? How can you make these claims?
Productivity: Maybe older workers can't / won't pull lots of all-nighters. The same is true of working mothers. But we plan ahead and get our work done.
The anti-discrimination laws aren't supposed to shackle companies to pointless costs and dead-weight people. They're intended to promote company culture that values people for what they bring to the table.
What is a company to do when external forces throw it into relentless decline? It takes a lot of guts to exit entire businesses or markets and refocus. Closing an office or shutting down an entire department isn't age discrimination. It's still nasty.
Look, western culture allows companies to have limited liability (to be corporations). The culture grants them patents for their inventions (hi IBM!). We trust them to take lots of risks to build their businesses, and give good rewards for success.
In return it's reasonable to expect compliance with laws.