No one is worried about a bias against "bad" developers. The problem is that the same companies that are crying the most about a lack of available developers are (potentially) explicitly not hiring older developers. The cynical amongst us assume this is another tactic to keep employee costs down.

That may be a way to respond to discrimination, but it's not a way to avoid it.

Discrimination, by its definition, refers to what happens after one's skills and qualifications are sufficient and comparable to other candidates, and yet other candidates are systematically shown preference.

Day by day, all-nighter by all-nighter.

The more hours you put in, the faster you will burn.

But that's ok, your company will not mind. There's a sucker born every minute.

It is amusing that after observing that older folk employed at the same company seem to be taking it easier compared to the average, ashwinaj uses this observation to partially justify age discrimination on the basis that the older people look like they are putting in less effort, when these are the same set of people who have been successful at staying with the company.

Perhaps the company actually values more relaxed people and doesn't encourage the perpetually rushed to stick around.

edit - Something that did occur to me after reading this -

there are a lot of slackers and you guessed it, they're usually (emphasis on "usually", stop trolling) older, paper pushers, "Let's have a meeting to talk about changing a line of code" people

- was to think about how much money could have been saved globally by someone like that being in the loop on the openSSL source code. It has to be in the billions by now.

The statement - "there are a lot of slackers and you guessed it, they're usually (emphasis on "usually", stop trolling) older, paper pushers" - clearly, in the plain meaning of the words, supports age discrimination without requiring any further clarification on your part, and does so even if you did not mean it to.