Age makes employees less flexible in some senses like not being willing to put up with some of the crap that younger people will (60 hour weeks, endless crunches, etc.) I once did, but will no longer tolerate that crap from an employer.

But being older doesn't mean you stop learning, adapting to change, or lose the ability to deal with moving targets. I'm hopping rapidly between roles and widely varied tasks at my current gig better than I would have in my 20s or 30s since I've got more perspective and experience.

A more mature person might point out that if your plans change weekly you likely have a systemic problem, though, and would be more likely to point out the breakage.

>Age makes employees less flexible in some senses like not being willing to put up with some of the crap that younger people will (60 hour weeks, endless crunches, etc.)

This stuff is a false economy anyhow since it inevitably leads to a massive ramp up in technical debt even with the very best programmers.

I am not a young developer, yet I recognise what it is about youth that is attractive to employers. This is reality and I don't think there is anything to gained by pretending otherwise.

I am not suggesting that you don't have a problem if your plans change weekly, but unfortunately this is the way many businesses are run. When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive.

> When you have a very fluid workflow youth is very attractive.

i.e. you don't bother to spend an hour to plan a project. I don't think anyone wants to work at those kinds of places, young or old.

It is not a matter of planning, but of adapting to change. I have worked in environments where change occurred regularly (outside forces at work) and I saw it was the young who coped with this change best.

I would need a concrete example but I'm not buying your assertion. Some of the most flexible people I know are all developers, irrespective of age. If you told me that older developers were more likely to ask questions and seek evidence before making a change I'd believe that. I find that most people confuse easy adaptation to change with pliability due to lack of experience.

I've seen the exact opposite. Startup, pivoted 3x in 3 years. The younger devs have a much harder time accepting he pivot and figuring out how to adapt. So without any more substantive evidence, my experience definitely refutes this silly argument that youth is more flexible.

Inflexibility is in my experience more often associated with a person than with their age. I've seen 30 year old devs that were absolutely incapable of changing over to new tech as it became available and I've seen 55+ people dig in with gusto. It's a mentality thing. Sure, mentality can change over time, maybe someone that's older is going to give something new a little while longer before hopping on the bandwagon or maybe they've already seen something similar fail in the past which is why they might be reluctant.

But flexibility is a hard-to-measure parameter to begin with and you need to know the people and their reasons before you can make call about it rather than simply their age.

I'd say more generally, as someone in their early 30s, that my experience says that if you're changing the plan weekly, the problem isn't with the employee, flexible or not.

In general, if the plan is changing every week, that probably means that the work I did last week was mostly pointless. That's a great way to burn someone out.

Good news though! I do contract work, and if you insist on changing the plan every week, you won't need to worry about whether I'm flexible or inflexible. I'll happily fire a client who can't make up their mind and thinks that the best path is to change direction every week.

This is all true. It seems to have been missed in my comment this is not my view, but those of many employers.

Define "less flexible", someone doing consulting has flexibility to pick and choose clients. Someone who continually learns is capable of picking and choosing technologies. I would think even someone in their twenties would have issues with "plans changing weekly".

Less "flexible" with salary and benefits, presumably.

I've known people with nest eggs happy to take cuts for something interesting.

But I also know with experience comes a skeptical eye for being asked to carry extra load for less upside (yet same or more risk).

A story from some time back told to me. Founders had a UI, an algorithm, and an idea. It had merit. They sought someone out to build and run the actual service. The funding was angel, the role was senior to C-level, but the salary offered was 40-60k cut for a senior engineer at the usual suspects, equity capped at 4% assuming a trade off in salary.

Risk and reward to build out infrastructure and productize someone's idea? I could certainly get a couple of people to build it out in a "get us to a-round funding" in those guidelines, maybe even beyond. But as expectations on a non-founding senior/early member, one would assume way too much risk for the potential upside.

It isn't non-technical founder seeking technical co-founder waters, but damn close.

> The problem with age is you become less flexible.

For those who use their minds, which should be common in this field, those effects become noticeable much later in life. For most of the working lifespan the dominant effect will be an increase in experience.

Once you're old enough, you'll realise that if your plans change weekly you're in serious trouble.