> One's outlook and productivity changes with time and age
On what data do you make this statement? A quick cursory search shows its completely false and based on not much more than ignorance or prejudice.
On what data do you make this statement? A quick cursory search shows its completely false and based on not much more than ignorance or prejudice.
Productivity: Maybe older workers can't / won't pull lots of all-nighters. The same is true of working mothers. But we plan ahead and get our work done.
The anti-discrimination laws aren't supposed to shackle companies to pointless costs and dead-weight people. They're intended to promote company culture that values people for what they bring to the table.
What is a company to do when external forces throw it into relentless decline? It takes a lot of guts to exit entire businesses or markets and refocus. Closing an office or shutting down an entire department isn't age discrimination. It's still nasty.
Look, western culture allows companies to have limited liability (to be corporations). The culture grants them patents for their inventions (hi IBM!). We trust them to take lots of risks to build their businesses, and give good rewards for success.
In return it's reasonable to expect compliance with laws.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4767530/
Slower reaction in terms of milliseconds and for reflexes.
Not for thinking and programming -- which experience helps you improve, understand computer systems more holistically, know to recognize tons of patterns that emerge again and again, and deep thinking is what makes the difference.
So unless programmers in your company also have to juggle balls or avoid daggers, the "slower reaction" is irrelevant.
Because anything beyond pushing a button N times per hour is going to benefit from experience, and it gets more important with task complexity.
I would much rather have someone with 30 years of experience writing code I depend on than a 20-something who can type 10 times as fast.
I wonder how much of it is that bad younger developers are more likely to attrition themselves, but older ones stay. So you get these old guys who, after five to ten years, it's really obvious they've got to go.
Reaction time and reasoning skills are cognitive skills that declines with age, specially in relation to complex tasks.
The studies are worth reading or skimming thorough at least, more importantly, everyone should look into how they can manage aging tax on cognitive skills, you can't stop it, but you can slow it down, just like physical health.
Cognitive skills are not, but they're not declining in any significant rate to make any difference (some of the best programmers are old), and are balanced by experience.
Also, let's see what tune you will sing 10 or 20 years down in your career.
What the companies mostly want is to eliminate people who have personal lives, and don't care for constant death marches and bro-ing it away at the office.
More importantly, I am yet to get my hands on any research that shows there is conclusive correlation between age and wisdom or experience. I would be keen to read up some!
If you’re going to argue that experience and age may be uncorrwlated then I have to conclude that you’re not making a sincere argument.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/016502599383739...
Consider a more obvious example. It is possible, even easy, to find a pair of people such that the older person has spent less time living in France than the younger person. Despite this, time spent living in France is highly correlated with age.
Is 'reaction time' relevant? Is 'cognitive decline' relevant on an individual basis?
What are the other variables that prove relevant to performance you're ignoring? And what is performance?
The reason I ask if this is your opinion or intuition is because of your simplistic argument. It looks like you're trying to defend an opinion. So I ask.
If you agree that experience counts for something, how do you find the equilibrium between experience and cognitive decline? Do you purport to know this without evidence? How can you make these claims?
You’re assuming that rate of production and reaction time are the relevant factors under consideration.