Sometimes having your mortgage paid and getting to eat trumps self actualization.

You pay me, I'll do what the job calls for and we're square. Motivation is a weasel word. I'm either meeting your (hopefully reasonable) performance requirements or I'm not.

That's right. Isn't the young energetic person who is eager to learn and grow at least as likely to leave after they've learned-and-grown as a person who is more skilled and gets bored.

I'm 36 now, with a mortgage, and have stayed in the job I am in now longer than any job I've had before.

A friend of mine pretty much only hires ex cons (ok, not for programming jobs). Because he says they're the most loyal and hard working employees he can find, and they usually don't ask for more money.

You can always use other peoples prejudice to get market rate discounts.

Yea but that is a high risk to take. Imagine you are the manager, and you have been given just one head count. Who would you choose? Would you risk your head count on an over-qualified person?

Having been a hiring manager previously, I will usually take the person with more experience.

The odds are lower that they'll leave than someone with less experience needing more time to become senior. There is no substitute for experience.

EDIT: To expound on this, as a manager, I will look out for the company, but also for you. If you have limited experience and want to climb the ladder, I will help find you a path internally and if one is unavailable (happens all the time), I will introduce you to opportunities outside the org to get you into higher roles and pay grades. Same deal if you're a senior person with "too much skill" for the role: tell me your goals, and I will help you get there. No one sticks around forever, and its unrealistic to ask people to do so.

This is, in my opinion, what a good manager is. Not someone who can code well, not someone who is a technical wizard, but someone who manages away problems outside of the team while helping individual contributors maximize their potential.

Not quite. If your hiring for a certain level depending on the scope of work, an overly experienced person may not be satisfied with the scope of work. So a good manager would try to find the right level person for the scope of work.

You're entitled to your opinion. I know lots of overskilled folks who are happy to put in their 40 and leave.

You're under the impression (it seems, correct me if I'm wrong) that labor is entirely fungible in an org and you can just shuffle people around to match skills to tasks; rarely is that the case, whether you're a company of 80 or 8000.

Managing people is super hard, and technical skill overlap with management skills is almost non-existent.

Well that's why I am saying you want to hire the right level for the role.... It impacts things like promo and peer comparisons etc..

If I were a manager, and I were to optimize my bottom line, I'd discriminate by hiring young, single men.

Of course, this would be incredibly illegal and unethical.

But the point is that the pay is the same for the younger person and the older person.

You can ride the young person harder, make them work unpaid overtime, and force them to obey your wishes. The old people will get uppity, they may still remember the times when there were standards and ethics, you see.

I didn't mean that entirely seriously but it does seem that the labor market still hasn't recovered from the recession when it very suddenly became a buyers market. In theory, it could have by now but it feels as if the job market is still being kept at an artificial scarcity, maybe because companies are still afraid to spend on people, or because they're trying to eke out every last cent of profit regardless of future.

Where does this meme come from? As a young person man, I have no debt, no kids, no elderly parents to support, and so on. Since I'm in software development and didn't try to make it in SV, I had enough cash to cover multiple years of living expenses after about a year of working. Hell, even just collecting unemployment would cover my living expenses. Entry level jobs are plentiful, while my understanding is that senior dev and management jobs are harder to find.

I've only been at one job so far, but my opinion was that I would suffer literally zero short-term effects for getting fired/laid off. I probably would just end up at a better job since I've got a bigger network and time to spend grinding out interviews if that happened.

So in the end my employers would act the way you described, but I would be confused about how to respond to them as they had zero objective leverage over me. As a result I could pretty much just work a regular 40 hours and my boss could just blow smoke out his ears if he didn't like it.

As an aside I actually don't have an issue working extra hours sometimes, but 100% of the time I'd been asked to, I thought it management was responsible via poor planning or making shitty technical choices. I'm fine helping out to cover someone else's bad work, but people would just become more rude/demanding. So I would just stop since I was only working extra out of kindness in the first place.

No, it's not - at least, not if the older person has more experience.

If you insist on paying more experienced people the same as less experienced people, then all you're going to hire are less experienced people. That has nothing to do with either age discrimination or over-qualification, though. It has to do with you, the employer, being penny wise and pound foolish.

How is it a higher risk than hiring an entry-level person who has not proven their ability?

Which is why you have to have that discussion with them and ask them to consider whether or not their work satisfaction comes from being challenged at work or not.

And while they may not be honest with you about that, in general there are many things that interviewing people are often not quite as honest with the interviewer as you might expect. A good example was a guy who said he was ok with commuting from Los Gatos to Redwood City and took the job, and then called up the Thursday before the Monday when he would have started to say he had taken a job for lower pay but was closer to home.

> than a fresh person with a strong desire to learn and grow

...who is also going to leave as soon as they get a nice offer.

If they're that good, give them a better offer (a promotion, more equity, a raise) first. There are worse things than finding someone ambitious who can back it up. Most companies spend piles of money trying to identify and recruit that kind of talent.

You're suggesting that someone should buy into a counter-offer. This is terrible advice. Accepting a counter-offer is a sure-fire way to get yourself shortlisted for the next round of layoffs. It also shows how wanting your company is that they can't even meet someone's market rate without them threatening to leave.

I've taken a counter-offer, and it worked out very well. So have several other people I know.

It turns out that sometimes, a manager wants to pay an employee more but is blocked by corporate policy or HR. Threatening to leave clears up some of that blockage.

If you are only going to leave because of money, there is little downside to taking a counter-offer. After all, if you were able to get another job now, you should be able to get another one if you happen to be laid off in the future.

I've seen advice like yours many times, but I've never seen any evidence that workers who accept counter-offers are more likely to be laid off or fired.

No. I'm saying we should identify people with potential for advancement. People overqualified for their current position are almost certainly ready for advancement. It's not a counter offer because you've already identified them before they felt a need to shop around.

...just like everyone else.

> People want to feel respected and appreciated for what they bring to the table.

Yeah, because if someone wants to be respected or appreciated for what they bring to the table, that's unreasonable.

If you (royal you) buy into this thinking, the problem is you, not the employees.