Honestly, just evaluating a person's relevant experience vs salary requirements would end up looking like age discrimination. If all I care about is degree + ~

Honestly, just evaluating a person's relevant experience vs salary requirements would end up looking like age discrimination. If all I care about is degree + ~7 years experience in relevant technologies + generally solid head on the person's shoulders, and I have one person with those, asking X, and another person with those, as well as another 13 years unrelated experience asking tens of thousands more, why would I pick the latter? If I don't think the benefit of that extra unrelated experience (we do cloud based distributed systems, that experience is in windows desktop apps and drivers, say) offsets that cost, why would I hire him at his expected salary? Note that I'm not saying there isn't a bias in this industry, just that it may appear magnified due to such considerations. I know where I work we ignore age, but we often dismiss resumes with "that person is far too expensive for what this position entails" when it comes to junior - senior devs. Leads, architects, technical managers, it's all considered worthwhile, but below that you're an individual contributor in a very particular niche (albeit one that allows you to learn the other parts of the system, and other projects).