> If you're hiring 40-60 year
    > olds you cannot simply hire
    > a 25 year old and get an
    > "acceptable tradeoff of
    > competency"

I'm a much better developer than I was 10 years ago, and I was pretty damn good then, but even when I'm 50, there will be people whose talent and ways of thinking about programming at 25 will be much superior to mine.

And every year, my intuition about what constitutes bloat vs developer convenience, and when to just throw hardware (physical or cloud) at a problem that could be fixed via developer time, gets slight slightly more out of date.