> Are these companies paying older workers more for no reason? If so, there's the problem right there. Exactly. An example, an older worker in my company can s

> Are these companies paying older workers more for no reason? If so, there's the problem right there. Exactly. An example, an older worker in my company can solve a complex, domain specific problem and have reasonable confidence it will work in months to come in a matter of days to weeks. A younger college grad would take weeks of on-boarding, weeks of mentorship, and then finally a couple weeks with some hand-holding and extra code reviews to boot, draining resources all around. After all of that, you STILL aren't guaranteed the problem will be solved for months to come. And if your solution is to have the older developer work with the younger to solve it, congrats you are paying 1.5x salary to do the job slower. That's not to say any of this bad you need to train new workers. But the idea that older workers expect more pay, therefore younger workers are cheaper is absurd, and it is ageism 101. There is usually a reason older workers expect more pay and that is because they have become (ideally) good and experienced at their craft, and know the systems they are working on. They can ideally do the job of your 2-3 younger developers. Otherwise the company has given increases to the wrong people and needs to adjust their promotion criteria. I don't see ageism being chosen as the tech industry's next social justice fight du jour. Oppression because our enslaving workers won't let us bring our dogs or cats to work is probably in the queue ahead of ageism, followed by the fight against plastic straws, so who knows when we will get around to tackling this issue.