I've come to the conclusion that tech is one of the least meritocratic industries in our economy. As a result of this, many older workers who "didn't make it" a

I've come to the conclusion that tech is one of the least meritocratic industries in our economy. As a result of this, many older workers who "didn't make it" are deeply frustrated by the increasing gap between their ever improving skills and their ever decreasing remuneration. This frustration with the system is also what makes them undesirable to hire. They don't believe in the meritocratic fiction so if you hire them, they may cause cultural problems and dissonance inside the company (and they may come across as apathetic). To make matters worse, those who succeeded have an incentive to strongly believe that the tech industry is a perfect meritocracy, so they feel like something must be wrong with these older people and this is why they still have to work as developers and didn't progress in their careers. The affront which reality may pose to their egos, causes employers to hire inexperienced, starry-eyed developers on huge salaries who create chaos and busy-work for themselves whilst yielding diminishing returns and barely getting things done. But the monopolistic, winner-takes-it-all, easy money situation of this industry allows employers in many sub-sectors to make these terrible decisions whilst continuing to thrive and this allows them to maintain and even reinforce their false ideologies about youth and productivity in a vicious cycle of increasing mediocrity.