[omeid2]

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.

[coldtea]

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.

[mikeash]

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.

[omeid2]

Experience is not a biological aspect, it is "knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone".

More importantly, I am yet to get my hands on any research that shows there is conclusive correlation between age and wisdom or experience. I would be keen to read up some!

[mikeash]

Experience is just what happens to your brain with more exposure to things. Time is a fundamental part of it, so it clearly must correlate with age.

If you’re going to argue that experience and age may be uncorrwlated then I have to conclude that you’re not making a sincere argument.

[omeid2]

You need time to experience things but time alone is not enough. Not only it is possible to have an older person with less experience at any given task or job, there is also no correlation between wisdom and age either[0].

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/016502599383739...

[mikeash]

Of course you can find counterexamples. “Correlated” does not mean “every single instance follows this relation.”

Consider a more obvious example. It is possible, even easy, to find a pair of people such that the older person has spent less time living in France than the younger person. Despite this, time spent living in France is highly correlated with age.

[tertius]

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.