[smurph]

In my last job I had to lead a team of people and I had one developer in his 50s and one in his early 60s. They were fine, I loved working with them. The guy in his 50s was just a awesome engineer who could code circles around me and everyone else on the team and was still getting better every year. The guys in his 60s wasn't as good, but he was on his second career after going back to school for CS. So his technical knowledge level was about the same as a 26 year old.

Now I work with an engineer in his 50s who did not know what a VM was before working with me and still writes everything in procedural C. Our product still has a serial port on it because of this guy. So it goes both ways.

I would say hiring a bad older engineer is actually more harmful than hiring a bad younger engineer because your team might subconsciously give the older person more benefit of doubt, and go along with more of their bad decisions. The solution is to not hire bad engineers or to fire them quickly.