Our society hasn't adapted to the fact that people get less competent and unjustifiably more expensive with age because it isn't true.
People who get less competent get less competent; people who demand unjustifiable compensation demand unjustifiable compensation. Some of those people are 50+. Some of them are 25. Some 20-somethings code for 2 years, write an O'Reilly book, and then reposition themselves as "architects". So many young people did this with the title "CTO" that the term "CTO" got tainted.
This is something I was taught in 3rd grade, but apparently hasn't percolated into the public school system, so we're having to teach it to adults at great expense: one needs to be vigilant about prejudice.
Or, in some cases not, because one of the subtexts behind ageism is that talent is getting more and more expensive, and firms want to avoid engaging with that reality. At least 21 year olds come bundled with the pretense of inexperience, so you can pay them 40% of scale.
If I sound self-righteous about this, I apologize; I'm really not upset by it, because it is one of the more easily exploitable market inefficiencies our industry cultivates. You guys pay for the "Rails programmer" who foreaches through N+1 queries because they don't grok SQL joins; I'll pick up the 50 year olds who've shipped Lisp and written RISC assembly.
People who get less competent get less competent; people who demand unjustifiable compensation demand unjustifiable compensation. Some of those people are 50+. Some of them are 25. Some 20-somethings code for 2 years, write an O'Reilly book, and then reposition themselves as "architects". So many young people did this with the title "CTO" that the term "CTO" got tainted.
This is something I was taught in 3rd grade, but apparently hasn't percolated into the public school system, so we're having to teach it to adults at great expense: one needs to be vigilant about prejudice.
Or, in some cases not, because one of the subtexts behind ageism is that talent is getting more and more expensive, and firms want to avoid engaging with that reality. At least 21 year olds come bundled with the pretense of inexperience, so you can pay them 40% of scale.
If I sound self-righteous about this, I apologize; I'm really not upset by it, because it is one of the more easily exploitable market inefficiencies our industry cultivates. You guys pay for the "Rails programmer" who foreaches through N+1 queries because they don't grok SQL joins; I'll pick up the 50 year olds who've shipped Lisp and written RISC assembly.