[combatentropy]

The industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one?

Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience.

A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve Jobs, they don't have any taste. Their surplus physical energy could be a liability, as they'll just write more code that's hard to maintain. Of course there are exceptions. Don't discriminate by age in either direction. Ask for experience, and make your final judgment after examining their portfolio (just as you would an architect or photographer), looking for signs of good taste.

Further reading: "Taste for Makers", by Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html

[randcraw]

I think a large part of the problem is that the software industry still doesn't know how to measure someone's value systematically and reliably. Metrics like LOC/day or bug minimization or speed of project delivery differ widely across problem domains and the technical level of contributor.

Does wisdom count in software? Practically and generally, I'd say no. When setting hiring priorities, cost trumps wisdom in all but the most senior roles.

(BTW, at 62, I've been coding professionally for 34 years. I wish I were valued more by my employers with each passing year. But if it's so, they hide it well.)

[pojzon]

I think current gigs want younger people not for their performance but their „price”. They work overtime without payment, are relatively cheap and you need alot of them. For every architect you have in the company there are like 20-30 developers of lower grade. So the demand for „design making” people is just not there.

[jodrellblank]

The industry has been very biased; from 1940 there weren't many programmers, very quickly the number of programmers doubled, most had little experience. Through the 1970s there weren't many programmers with more than 5 years experience. As the number grew so fast, through the 1980s most programmers still had less than 5 years experience. Same through the 1990s. Probably still the same through the 2000s and 2010s and with how many people are learning to code, probably still the same now, most programmers have <5 years experience.

That means most employers have only ever seen developers with <5 years experience, working in teams of same, using languages and tools designed by and for same. How could such employers properly value 30 or 50 years of experience?