Youth is not a skill. I don't hire green college grads. And I look at anyone with less than 10 years of experience with suspicion. Knowing Ruby or Scala or what

Youth is not a skill. I don't hire green college grads. And I look at anyone with less than 10 years of experience with suspicion. Knowing Ruby or Scala or whatever syntax is fine, but it's far less important than the underlying skills: OO design, distributed systems, threading... Specific languages and frameworks come and go. Many of the twenty somethings don't really understand that. As for working 80 hour weeks, you're fooling yourself if you think people of any age can do that productively for an extended period of time. Plenty of research exists on that topic. The key to hiring is to hire only A players who will be highly productive and produce quality code. In my experience A players are not twenty somethings. Do you think Delta Force recruits green beans fresh out of boot camp? Absolutely not. They recruit from the Rangers and Special Forces. Of course we can't all hire A players. But I can.