I dont know about you but I really enjoyed this policy as a 22 year old with 10 years experience vs a 30 year old bootcamper. "They have a family they need to support and you're more of a risk" I'm glad we have really innovative policies that allow businesses to grow like this.

>22 year old with 10 years experience

Hmmm.

My early experience (ages 13-19), which consists of a mix of projects in Game Maker, PHP and JavaScript is at least as important as my later professional experience.

It's not equivalent: when I got my first job at 19 I was incredibly naive, I'd barely used source control, and I had a bad case of NIH syndrome. BUT, it's given me a depth of experience that is rarely matched by my people in age group.

Actual professional experience is often quite routine, and time pressured. You don't get the same opportunity to experiment and learn things in depth that one has as a teenager. It might not be the most efficient way to learn, but it's certainly effective.

Do I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud putting "12 years of experience" on my CV? Yes. But I also know I can hold my own in a room of people who have 12 years of "real" professional experience, and that it was this early experience that enables me to do that. So it seems equally disingenuous to not put it on my CV.

Do you not believe someone can begin to gain coding experience at age 12?

Not in a way that's relevant for your employer 10 years later. It can be a nice anecdote to mention, but don't put it on your CV.

By the way, I started coding at the age of 13.

Maybe you're just not as good as OP. I started writing code at 10 and being properly employed (contract, office hours every day, etc etc) at 14. I'm 28.

The extra years of experience in Delphi, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, Ruby (before Rails even :-) that I had before the age of 18 are certainly a significant part of why I'm ahead both in seniority and pay of many people who work side-by-side to me, or for me.

The unpaid screwing-around-with-computers I did from ~13 through college is very relevant for my employers. I'd be a way shittier developer if you took out especially the Linux admin and networking stuff I picked up then, most of which I would not have picked up at any of my employers since, nor in college—I'd have just been among the other developers without a clue why X is happening or Y is broken—though it's consistently been extremely useful.

For the record, I did paid screwing-around-with-computers from 15 on, but the unpaid stuff added at least as much value to me as an employee.

Ditto my abandoned humanities degree, which I also don't put on my résumé. More valuable to my work as a software developer than the CS degree I eventually got. I wouldn't present it that way for obvious reasons, but that doesn't change the reality of it.

Prohibiting employers from discriminating against workers under 40 would be not unlike prohibiting the NFL from refusing to employ fast 40-yard runners, or disallowing Hooters from refusing to hire buxom servers. If you'll please forgive the swell of double/triple negatives.

IANAL You find yourself in BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) territory here — sometimes stated as "blind people can't be bus drivers".

For an NFL player, running speed is clearly a BFOQ. For Hooters the case is more complicated (IIRC there is case law)

Yes, but--the gist of my post was that there is no utility (and maybe some negative utility) in trying to pass laws to prevent the NFL, or Hooters, or whoever, from hiring the people they really, really do prefer to hire, all other things equal.