> Pretending that just because you're old you hold some magical advantage doesn't fly

Experience is not magic, it is not directly a function of age but of duration in the industry. I'm not even tyat old yet, but my experience (aka larger training set) so far allows me to pattern-match/foresee potential disasters way before they appear on radars of more junior devs: and this goes for technology, people and processes.

> No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available

That's because mining coal is physically exerting. I would hire a 60 year old boilermaker before any 20 year old since I don't want things to go boom.

Edit:

> just because they are young, it doesn't mean they can't get shit done.

With experience, you know which shit not to do

You're comparing great old people with shitty young people. I know plenty of very shitty old people and a lot of great young people that would invalidate what you said above. And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc. most just want to keep doing what they're doing and earn a paycheck which is fine but then they shouldn't complain when they get replaced by younger faster models.

You might have misunderstood me. My point is experience is a great asset to any developer, young or old.

> And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology, that can code quickly, etc.

That might mean that the great old people are either not great at these things despite their efforts (which I believe is your opinion), OR it could mean the old people optimize for the things you did not list, and don't place too a lot of value on "coding quickly", for example.

> And in my experience there aren't very many great old people that are current with technology

There older I get, the more I realize there is more to life than work. I mean, I love technology, web development particularly (because the web is awesome for humanity), I really do enjoy it. However, I can make better, more fulfilling use of (some of) my weekends and evenings than staring at my laptop, rewriting an app in LatestHypeJS. Is there any other industry that requires much running just to stay in one place?

Bear in mind the "younger faster models" won't stay young forever.

I think an interesting question is - more desirable to what end? To what end are these youths toiling? How, after millenia of evidence to the contrary indicating that experience is valuable, are we to believe that somehow magically it is not valuable? What if the end to which the young are applying themselves (or being applied) is not in fact of any value? Historically young inexperienced men have been considered entirely disposable. Perhaps now they are being disposed of in a different way?

Are you saying experience counts for nothing? Besides for the muscle memory of being able to knock out a script quickly, there's also the advantage of having seen weird one-off problems before.

To give a simple advantage, not really a one-off problem, but a dev was wondering why a function in his cron script wasn't working when the same function was working fine elsewhere in the application. I told him to check that cron was using the same config file as the webserver, but I only knew that because I'd seen the same thing before. No amounts of energy will give you that 'seen this before' experience. I remember the first time a server ran out of disk space really confused me - non of the logging/error messages seemed to make sense and the behaviour of the application seemed weird. It takes experience to pick up these patterns. Age isn't the best heuristic here, because a 25 year old might have 15 years experience, and a 40 year old might have picked up programming only 5 years ago, but experience counts.

> I have 5 side projects gathering dust at home because after work, commute and kids, I'm exhausted. It's easy to keep up when your only commitments are work and relationship.

That's just you. I've known young people with the same commitments of relationships and kids, and old people who could fully commit themselves to work so I don't think your point about time constraints hold.

And outside of Silicon Valley, I don't see this same enthusiasm for young people. Maybe it's the bias of the field I'm in (business software) but with age also comes industry experience independent of programming knowledge (I used to naively think automating all processes was the end goal - there are some processes that shouldn't be automated for good customer relationships). Bear in mind most successful startups are started between the ages 35-45 - source here - http://www.forbes.com/sites/krisztinaholly/2014/01/15/why-gr... - and the people who did the study attributed it to industry experience.

At the end of the day, the best filters/heuristics aren't visibly external ones like age (or race) but practical ones like discussions on theory, conversations about commitment - actual data about the subject matter.

> No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available.

I'd definitely prefer a 60 year old doctor (I don't mean a surgeon, but a consultant), lawyer or accountant. Do you think coal mining is more similar to those or to coal mining?