[throwaway894345]

Seems like this could cut either way.

Yeah, older people are more likely to have other priorities, but they’re also more likely to be financially secure and thus able to trade money for time to study. Also, they’re more likely to have gained time management/prioritization skills and discipline that they could apply toward studying.

Ultimately it seems like arguing that older people lack time or inclination depends on ageist stereotypes.

[nosianu]

I think the argument is that more experienced people are less willing to do useless things just because somebody wants them to.

I could never go back to university for that reason - studying, fine, I did a ton of courses on edX and Coursera, but I pick what interests me and a lot of test problems you are given (at least in my experience, at university and later online) too often are more about understanding the intent of the person creating the problem rather than anything useful. I could also never go back to the army (Germany, mandatory service, battle tank mechanic) and take commands from some guy who just wants to posture.

I'm not any less willing to study than I was at university - but now I refuse to do what I think is useless or meaningless. Studying for tests is high on that anti-list. Not all tests, I had no issues with tests I took for things that needed certification, e.g. sailing or for the pilot license, but that stuff was useful in practice and not nearly as over the top because those tests were not designed to "weed out weaklings".

EDIT: An anecdote for that last phrase

After writing the comment I got curious and googled that exact phrase. I found this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smythe_(physicist)

> He authored a textbook on electromagnetism called Static and Dynamic Electricity, which was a widely used reference in the field during the 20th century. His electromagnetism course was modeled after the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos examinations and designed to "weed out weaklings." Smythe's course was so infamous that future Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Vernon Smith switched to electrical engineering from physics to avoid it.

[foldr]

Anecdotally, I am one of the older people in our dev team, and also once of the only people who cares even slightly about big O. I’m talking simple stuff, like knowing whether indexing a given list data type is constant time or O(n). To be fair, it’s not particularly relevant to what we do.

[ericbarrett]

I think asking a candidate some basic big-O notation questions in an interview is great. Asking a DevOps candidate if a search algorithm developed and published in 2018 is O(n log(n)) or O(n log(n) K^(log n)), and then dinging them for not getting a perfectly correct answer, is over the top the kind of stuff that's used for age discrimination. Not because the young candidate will know it, but rather they will be excused for "almost getting it" and "having a good attitude" etc. in the hiring committee.

[zerr]

It's more about the lack of desperation.