Are you saying experience counts for nothing? Besides for the muscle memory of being able to knock out a script quickly, there's also the advantage of having se

Are you saying experience counts for nothing? Besides for the muscle memory of being able to knock out a script quickly, there's also the advantage of having seen weird one-off problems before. To give a simple advantage, not really a one-off problem, but a dev was wondering why a function in his cron script wasn't working when the same function was working fine elsewhere in the application. I told him to check that cron was using the same config file as the webserver, but I only knew that because I'd seen the same thing before. No amounts of energy will give you that 'seen this before' experience. I remember the first time a server ran out of disk space really confused me - non of the logging/error messages seemed to make sense and the behaviour of the application seemed weird. It takes experience to pick up these patterns. Age isn't the best heuristic here, because a 25 year old might have 15 years experience, and a 40 year old might have picked up programming only 5 years ago, but experience counts. > I have 5 side projects gathering dust at home because after work, commute and kids, I'm exhausted. It's easy to keep up when your only commitments are work and relationship. That's just you. I've known young people with the same commitments of relationships and kids, and old people who could fully commit themselves to work so I don't think your point about time constraints hold. And outside of Silicon Valley, I don't see this same enthusiasm for young people. Maybe it's the bias of the field I'm in (business software) but with age also comes industry experience independent of programming knowledge (I used to naively think automating all processes was the end goal - there are some processes that shouldn't be automated for good customer relationships). Bear in mind most successful startups are started between the ages 35-45 - source here - http://www.forbes.com/sites/krisztinaholly/2014/01/15/why-great-entrepreneurs-are-older-than-you-think/#53692d457d6a http://www.forbes.com/sites/krisztinaholly/2014/01/15/why-gr... - and the people who did the study attributed it to industry experience. At the end of the day, the best filters/heuristics aren't visibly external ones like age (or race) but practical ones like discussions on theory, conversations about commitment - actual data about the subject matter. > No one hires 60 year old coal miners either when there are 20 year olds available. I'd definitely prefer a 60 year old doctor (I don't mean a surgeon, but a consultant), lawyer or accountant. Do you think coal mining is more similar to those or to coal mining?