"Young people are just smarter." - Mark Zuckerberg
Spoken like a naive individual without much in the way of life experience. Keep taking the pills, Mark.
Onto more positive points, whilst I have no doubt that ageism exists in our industry, there are also companies with a more enlightened view of age and experience.
I tend to prefer hiring people with more experience, in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, when I can. I particularly like those who've worked for a variety of different companies during their careers (avoids institutionalisation).
Some of the benefits of more experienced staff:
- Tend to take a more rounded view of what they're working on, and find it easier to see different perspectives
- Related to this they seem better able to focus on delivering business and customer value
- Again, related: less interested in tech for tech's sake, and less prone to chasing fads
- Further, related: less idealistic, more pragmatic
- Better social skills; easier to get along with
- Less emotional: more mature and settled
- Better able to manage stress and work/life balance
- Lower sense of entitlement
- Have often picked up mentoring and coaching skills that can help develop others
Of course, there are always exceptions for both experienced and inexperienced staff (and we're very fortunate/have been very careful about our less experienced hires), but these are benefits I've often observed.
As I've already implied, we hire people at all levels of experience (with the exception, so far, of fresh grads), but having a good number of experienced staff is I think one of the great strengths of our team, and I view our senior staff as our greatest asset. They're very good, for example, at helping to develop less experienced team members, or wrangling difficult and sensitive issues.
(Note that I haven't talked much about technical skills here. Partly this is because we work with a deliberately boring stack - I want us to build great, cutting edge products with solid, reliable, boring tech, not be constantly hindered from building by the problems of the bleeding edge. Mostly it's because, having had to pick up different languages and technologies over the years, and having worked with plenty of developers who've done the same, I don't generally regard specific tech skills as that important. We use SQL Server, for example. But if you've worked with any relational database for any decent length of time during your career you'll get on fine with it, regardless of whether that's Postgres, Oracle, or even MySQL or SQLite. Likewise it's not that hard to learn to query MongoDB or ElasticSearch, although the latter is a bit nuts, even though the syntax is different to SQL. It's not different enough to get in a tizzy about, and I really wish recruiters would wise up to this. Some have, most haven't, in my experience.)