Presumably the assumption is that some good people will be banned and leave, and some other good people will just leave out of sympathy, but it's better to have good people leave than have bad people enter the community. It's an interesting hypothesis, and HN has been going strong for 5+ years now with minimal moderation effort, though I have to admit that it seems to violate basic rules of fairness and empathy. Then again, a lot of businesses are built on being unfair to people.
The result? They don't hire anybody despite a looooooooooong line of overqualified greybeards.
(I am young myself, too!)
1) Some people with a mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation think that just because some programmers have let their skillsets atrophy implies that one should stay away from older programmers.
2) Older people by virtue of experience, skillsets are pricing themselves out of the job market. I have an older friend who is a phenomenal hacker but doesn't like going into management. He found himself either being offered VP of Engg type roles which required way more management than he was willing to do or being given Engineering roles with way less money than he was prepared to accept. Also, once you get a family, the amount of leeway you have in accepting a tiny fraction of what you are worth in exchange for money and stocks becomes quite limited.
- 25 years of HBase experience
- candidate must be 22 year old or younger"