Seems to coincide with when 28 year-olds with beards took over every tech company, haha. Cheaper no doubt, and that is more important to most companies, more than quality.

They first tried outsourcing to the other side of the world, but found too many timezones grinds productivity to a halt and so plan B, younger and cheaper became an explicit goal.

Not just a tech thing either, focus on appearance is bordering on the extreme nowadays. Watched the "Willy Wonka…" movie from the early 70's with my daughter last night and was struck that most of the newscasters were silver haired and in their 60s, reminding me of Jerry Dunphy. Several of the stars had messy hair that needed combing, not necessarily in character.

Many things were higher quality back when they let experienced folks work, and "allowed ugly people to make music," as it were.

Software developers aren't considered in the same league as doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, or architects. Software developers are viewed as construction workers by most people and businesses.

This is going to upset a lot of developers who expect the boom to last forever. A ton of people think they’re on the same side as senior management because they get paid better than average and have been able to get better working conditions; very few people in management share this view.

The brilliant thing was getting so many to buy into libertarian propaganda and actively fight against things like unionization or labor laws which would reduce the power imbalance.

I would assume the compensation for a software engineer with 20 years of experience vs one with 5 years considering the output each of them can do. I would assume the younger software engineer can do as much 'typical' programming work as the older one for less pay.

However, I feel the older software engineers shouldn't be writing as much as the younger guy but should be utilized for architecture purposes, handling requirements with clients or internal product people, and even mentoring while having some programming tasks. I think that is where they really earn their significant compensation and bring much more value to the company.

Outside of some of the mentioned reasons (20-somethings are cheaper, ageism, etc.), I think there's a lot of emphasis on staying up-to-date. In order to be "desirable" you need to consistently be learning about new technologies, languages, frameworks, etc. ON YOUR OWN TIME. As you get into age 30+, many people are married, have kids, have enough money to travel, etc. thus you probably aren't going to be as interested in reading programming blogs and watching tutorials.

We reinvent wheels more than any other profession.