Why You Should Hire an Old Programmer

Older programmers can do just fine in those algorithm tests, if they have been programming recently at their day jobs, and not PM/managerial work. Years of 8 hours of programming per day is actually good practice. They might have to brush up on Big O notation. :)

Yup. I've seen 55+ year old programmers write what was essentially a message queue persisted in a database table, processed by a cron job. We frequently had problems with duplicate processing of messages, due to multiple cron jobs running at once.

I've personally argued against a key-value store schema in SQL Server and was in favor of a flat-table design. In our case, there were records of different 'types', and each type may have a number of fields always be null. Looking back, I'd probably do something like this:

   Entity
       common attribute 1
       common attribute 2
       etc

   Entity_Type1
       entity_id fk references Entity,
       type1_attribute 1,
       etc

He was certain that the flat-table design would take up more space since it would 'have to store every attribute every time'. Most of these were varchars, so (looking back) that was straight up false. Not only that, but in a key-value schema you have to store the name of the 'column' (key)... every time. I was unable to articulate the harms of key-value schemas when it comes to queryability...even though our existing system was filled to the brim with 'unions' due to a key-value schema. I lost this argument.

Each of these developers refused to use git, in favor of visual source safe. I know.

All of the business logic was in stored procedures. I've seen a stored procedure with triple nested cursors spanning 2000 lines. Our 'senior' developer would take weeks to make changes to this thing.

I've lost count of the times I've been steamrolled in discussions. I'm not sure if it's my age or if I'm just lacking that much socially. When you lose an argument over key-value schemas of all things it makes you really question if you know what you're doing...

programmers actually need to think sometimes. the jobs mentioned are more routine and rely on soft skills and experience a lot. I do not mean any disrespect by that. mathematicians are also best when they are young, but unlike programmers work in academia and get to teach until retirement, whereas programmers get replaced.

Well I'm not sure if you're young or just playing devil's advocate, but a young person often feels that way.

The whole knowledge * intellect idea that someone else here mentioned is far too reductive. You can be a ridiculously smart person who has read white papers and coding books, learned all about discrete math and project management, worked on as many projects as you could, and still not touch the maturity of an older software developer. Why?

Experience doesn't begin and end with topics directly surrounding your vocation; your whole life contributes to it.

As you age, you get to know yourself better. Old people have made far more decisions in their life than a young person has: lots of good ones, and lots of bad ones. You know your decision making process and its flaws. You remember what it feels like to reap the rewards of a good decision, and even more intensely, you remember the sting of a bad decision. You know, from experience, what decisions you should make, what ones you shouldn't make, and any confounding variables.

You also start to understand those same patterns in the human and organizational behavior of people you live and work with. You start to get an intuitive understanding of the kinds of mistakes various kinds of people make in various kinds of situations. There's a reason that older people– often ones without a ton of domain knowledge– are generally the ones making big decisions in a mature company, while the younger people are working out the details.

For example, the couple decades that I spent as a bouncer in clubs might not help me see if I'm making a bad coding choice per se, but it vastly increased my understanding of group dynamics, ego, negotiation, how to mitigate the damage of having to make snap decisions with a whole lot of consequences, how to respond when someone tries to intimidate me or make me feel uncomfortable, deescalating pointless arguments, and even starting a fight when one really needs to be started. (the worn-smooth restraint and fighting techniques have much less utility in the office... so far) Before I gained that experience, I'd have no way to have known it would proved useful in a software development career. I'm sure many parents, people who have coached sports teams, people who have experienced the death of an industry, or even people that have gone through messy divorces can all point to things they've taken away from those experiences which have vastly improved their judgement and maturity.

And it's not just the soft skills which are improved by this understanding. Being more mature means you write more mature code. I look at code I wrote 15 years ago and shudder. It's not that I have a better understanding of the mechanics of Perl or C now than I did then, but my sense of logic has been refined, I'm more patient, and I have a better sense of where to put in extra effort and where to cut corners.

When you're young, you're still mostly figuring out what you're capable of, but you don't have a very good sense of what your limitations are. When you get older, you've got a pretty good sense of what you can do, and a much better sense of how to keep yourself and everybody else out of trouble by avoiding what you can't do. The problem is, lack of experience is generally pretty opaque to the people who lack it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

As others have stated, "age discrimination" is a bit of a misnomer. It's completely legal to say that you're not hiring someone (under 40) because they're too young. A more accurate description would be "discrimination based on age of a candidate over the age of 40" but that doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.