Why does an older person cost more? Either they produce more, or they’re overpaid. The first type is definitely worth finding and paying... I’ve seen companies built solely by 22-year old script kiddies and usually the stack can’t scale. At that point, you’re in a trickier spot because a 40-year-old who can inject some good sense at the beginning of a project is a lot more abundant than a 40-year-old who can lead a turnaround effort on a fucked up stack while keeping the company and stack operational for existing customers.

So this is a nuanced question and requires a detailed response. But the gist is that older folks don't necessarily cost more. I've seen many older folks continue to work as developers for most of their lives (albeit this is outside Silicon Valley). But for many older developers who continue on the technical track, they have accumulated a lot of experience building software and they do bring a lot to the table, in terms of design, or prescient thinking, or knowing the internals of certain stacks very very well. That kind of knowledge is certainly useful for firms that operate on scale, have systems that cannot tolerate downtime, and so on.

In other words, it depends on the individual.

More experienced developers are also more willing and able to take on a pre-existing production code base and clean it up and plan how to divide and conquer to improve, migrate and replace it, while younger developers often prefer to work on greenfield projects or want to throw out and replace existing work. Younger management doesn't always understand this difference, and more experienced developers might be contributing in avoiding a lot of costly mistakes but this benefit is mostly invisible.

This is really down to what side of the tech industry it's happening on and what that side needs. Working with new web and mobile technologies delivering novel applications for consumers are more suited to younger people as opposed to say developing, maintaining and evolving systems for aviation, transport and military automation and safety or certain parts of finance.

> Why does an older person cost more?

Let's take an example case where two engineers are working in a second tier city earning $85,000 per year in salary. One is 25 years old, one is 53 years old. The company covers the entire cost of the employee health insurance. The health insurance for the 53 year old will cost a minimum of 2x what it does for the 25 year old. The cost of health insurance begins to aggressively increase after roughly 38-40. By the time the 53 year old employee reaches 60-63 years old, the insurance cost is now 3x that of the 25 year old.

The 53 year old will solidly cost an extra $6,000 to $10,000 in health insurance on top of that $85,000 salary, versus the 25 year old. The 60 year old might cost $12,000 to $18,000 more in health insurance.

All of these figures are minimums, the numbers get much worse if you have a nice health plan.

If you're in a second tier city paying your engineers $85k, $15,000 per year in extra cost buys a ridiculous amount of training to improve the 20 something engineers.

If you have 20 engineers, over ten years the cost of employing all 55-63 year olds, versus all 20-30 year olds, could easily be a minimum extra of $3 million in just health insurance costs (with a total salary over ten years of $17 million). The more likely cost is far higher.

You make a great case for why health insurance shouldn't be a part of compensation. A single-payer healthcare system is long overdue in the US, and might actually make age discrimination less likely.

Are plans really priced liked that? 4 years ago, I secured a policy (PPO) for my small company (15 employees in NYC) and they did not ask the age of any employee, just the total number. All people were covered at the exact same cost. The cost to insure an employee with a family was obviously higher, which is something younger employees often to not have.

The catch is it's hard to measure & value the experience the older engineer brings to the table.

Because older people have lives, children and more - coming in over the weekend is not an option.

Spending extra time to "Show you love your work" is not something they care about.

On the other hand that is something most American Techies in SV firms or on HN already are part of.

Just sitting here on HN for so many years I know what it takes to look like an up and coming coder - and that is to breathe and live code.

Weekend projects on XYZ project. Work efficiency on ABC tasks.

Plus older people are not going to accept the usual promises of riches at the end of the rainbow, so may usually ask for better deals.

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I think people are too quick to run from here to blame -

Instead this is a systems/people problem.

Theres certain cultural expectations of work culture in tech. There are also unending flows of graduates to tech.

While this remains, this problem will continue. Firms are responding to the resources at their disposal and optimizing

Should some magic new industry arise, which absorbs all the smartest minds in the world - you will see tech change.

If you want to work fewer hours but don’t contribute more per hour, get used to working for less pay or being unemployed.

I have a better idea - why dont I hire people for Jobs instead.

Its your/their choice if you/they want to work on the weekends. I am not forcing them. Its just that promotions will go to the people who do.

And if you don't earn more, and get that promotion - well how are you going to stay relevant in this industry or pay for that rent?

I mean its totally your "choice", to effectively throw away your future if you don't play ball.

Thats why we employers prefer young guns. They have that "go get em" attitude. Great cannon fodder.

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When people talk about agism and finding it hard to find a job as an older person, they're generally comparing against someone with the same capabilities and salary expectation going for the same job. (Edit:) And they're not complaining about companies not matching their salary, they're complaining about not getting an offer at all.

It isn't in comparison with the job available to new grads.

(Of course, there's the question of whether a senior industry hire is actually only worth some factor of a new grad hire.)

I'm not sure what you're comparing but it sounds like you're comparing experienced vs. inexperienced and not necessarily older vs. younger. I'm 57 and I don't think I am that much more expensive than younger experienced backend engineers and SREs. We're all as a group a lot more expensive than people who are just starting out but that's hardly surprising. Between those of us who would be considered senior in terms of experience I might be $10k or $20k more expensive just due to salary history and growth over time but I doubt that amount is a deal breaker for the average tech company.

Agreed, it's actually kind of awful that it takes about ten years to hit the pay ceiling. 2-5x, if only!

Which just goes to show:

Software development isn't "knowledge work", if the additional knowledge of experience isn't valued. It's more like "typing work".

If you don’t factor quality of code/architecture in there, then yes.

But that would be folly long term.

From being on HN for years, folly is ok for a lot of VC backed startups. "We know Ruby! Let's do everything in that!", said the team at Twitter. Then performance took a nose dive since the language was known at the time to not scale. Now it's Java or Scala.

Twitter is arguably successful so why would you consider their decision to be folly? It worked for them.

Startups have limited resources. If you devote them to solving tomorrow's problems then you'll be beaten by someone who devotes their resources to solving today's problems.

I wouldn't use Ruby/Python for web development given their know issues. I'd use Java/C#/Go/Closure; two of these existed at the time Twitter was made. While those two are more verbose, the IDEs make most of that easy (I use Eclipse and AOP to generate almost all of that bulk). So picking something that's good at the start will save you in the end.

People tend to think, "We'll architect it later" means "We don't have to think now". You need to think at every step. You don't need to know how you'll deal with everything, but there is a lot of rooming for being rational. You should think about fault tolerance when you start. It could be that you think you don't need much since everything will deploy to one box (and you're okay with loosing the whole thing). You need to be rational. You need to know why you did what you did and what the impacts would be.

I'm going to stop picking on Twitter since they are the case study in what not to do. They learned from themselves and taught us all much in the process.

Many startups don't think all this through (even if they only need to think 2 moves ahead). They over-hire. They under design. They make lots of poor choices because they think they have the runway and want to be cool with the latest frameworks. All of these actions I'd place squarely in the folly camp since Uncle Bob and other resources have been free since at least 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nsjsiz2A9mg).

Wow I don’t even know where to begin with this. Perhaps the biggest flaw is confusing language with architecture. Twitters scaling issues had to do with non-trivial architecture issues that are much more widely understood now than they were a decade ago. It’s very easy to sit in your armchair now with your pipe and claim how bad their approach was, but the fact that you think it has to do with choice of language shows you aren’t as smart as you think you are. If Twitter has used 2006-era Java they likely would have moved too slow to even get traction and we’d never have heard of them. It’s a pleasant fantasy land to think you could survive early Twitter hypergrowth, but actually dealing with it is not simply a matter of correct up front planning.

I've seen the "move to slow" argument bandied about here all the time. The all modern 3GL languages support fast development (they might need some help with code gen). Twitter suffered language level scaling issues. Period. They suffered architectural issues. When I see someone wanting to go to prod with Python/Ruby project, I know they will have to rewrite.

I do want to nuance this a bit. If you're doing AI or stats, Python makes sense. There are ways to scale that too. Use the right tool. My general argument is that Python is seldom the right tool for any at-scale web system.

Do you think any system goes from 1 to a billion users without being re-written? It never happens, if you go if into that architecture astronaut mindset from the beginning you will not ship the features necessary to get traction. Saying that Twitter faced language-level issues is absolute nonsense. Any stateless web front-end scales trivially whether it's Rails or anything else, it's the data flow and caching that needs to be designed properly to solve Twitter-type scaling issues.

Absolutely! Short term a startup will make a lot of fuckups - that’s a good thing, it’s learning!

But once the product is set having sane architecture and good code quality often become a deciding factor in being successful - because they allow you to iterate faster & outmaneuver your competition.

Sometimes you can get away with it for longer, but eventually you’ll grind to a place where you need to fix these things and it’s easier to do earlier.