Of course SV is ageist, but is the ageism reflective of reality, caricatures, misunderstandings, or just plain old bigotry. In my experience, being 50 and bein

Of course SV is ageist, but is the ageism reflective of reality, caricatures, misunderstandings, or just plain old bigotry. In my experience, being 50 and being a First-Wave Coder, I'd say little is based on reality and much on ignorance and misunderstanding of what experienced uber-coding looks like. The young coder who's spend the entire night and a case of Red Bull coding has in all likelihood produced a bunch of crap-code. In our industry, "Maintenance Kills" because lots of code may get the produce to the deadline, but be poorly written, poorly scalable, and in time die due to increasing maintainability. Yet, the young founders see the Geezer-Geek going home at 5:00 and think, "Slow Old Fart can't pull an all nighter ..." without realizing the Geezer Geek has completed rock solid scalable maintainable code and will come back refreshed in the morning to kick out another 6-8 hours of beauty.