If you want a culture where people retire at 40, go for it. But please don't pretend that programmers are "special" in that the decline in their skills is worse than decline in skills of anybody else.
I wish the author would have tried to dispel this and another myth associated with age, inflexibility. I'm still learning new things. And sometimes, choosing what I know and am strong and familiar with is a choice to expedite. It has little to do with a lack of willingness to change or learn new stuff. In fact, I'm much more flexible than I was in my 20's. Mostly because time has tempered my arrogant self-righteous self with a healthy dose of humility.
^ (all the arguments that don't boil down to "you have to pay them more")
No one would complain about a 63yo brain surgeon, who according to some IT HR people would have cognitive decline, but has somehow picked up skills to be a master surgeon.
There are skill sets that have a longer shelf-life, but developing those skills (and finding jobs that actually need those skills) is a challenge.
Sure it takes time to become fluent in new systems. That's no different than the first system that I learned. I think if one lacks the willingness to stretch and learn the new, whether one is 25 or one is 70, that is when one becomes unsuitable for this line of work.
That is what I aspire to. I think I'm doing well in this regard for how far I am into my career, but any advice you have in this regard would be appreciated by me (and others presumably).
I kind of expected that argument to come up. It's funny that the reaction of the industry itself to that is to give up on the experience and ride with the fashion, rather than fight those trends.
It's almost as if immaturity is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If anything, these careers (aside from doctor maybe) hit their peak in their 40s or early 50s. I would say our culture thinks programmers peak in their late 20s/early 30s.
For HN users in their 30s - what are you doing to not get ageism'd?
For example, I couldn't learn other languages so well as a teenager (I wasn't such a great grammarist with English either). As an adult I've picked up French rather quickly and grown fascinated by linguistics; hard to understate the positive effects this has had on my career and even social life. Take all of that and the real-world job experience, add it to the calc and CS coursework from university and I'm 100x the developer I was 5 years ago.
This guy springs to mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laszlo_Babai
Because, yeah, programmers and mathematicians don't actually need any experience, they can just think everything up on the spot!
I also wonder how you imagine that other professions gain their experience, if they don't need to think.
Maybe people in their 60s were not at the center of research, but I would say that the field was dominated by people in their 40s (certainly not by 20-something).
I cited the Fields medal, because their artificial limitation on age is one of the first things that comes to mind when talking about the subject
Same goes, ideally, for politicians and lawyers and engineers.
I've found that once you throw humans into the mix, nothing is routine. I think CS schools do their grads a huge disservice by creating the expectation that the coding is the hard part.
There are a lot of people who can reverse a linked list who can't coordinate a huge project, or build a product from the ground up that people care about. If those are soft skills (implying they're less challenging to pick up), why do most engineers only develop them after they're pretty skilled technically?
In my experience, it's not because they're forced to in order to make up for declining mental horsepower. It's because what you're calling the "hard skills" have become routine to them, and they want to do harder things than they can accomplish as an individual contributor. They want to do work that's less routine.
Why label soft skills as "not thinking"? Humans are way more complex than computers.
Perhaps English is not your first language because you sound like me at 19 explaining to my dad why I haven't finished his website lol