Hacker News Reader

Tech like sports favors young people and discriminates against old folks.

In athletics, people reach a physical peak when they're young. Athletics doesn't care about age. It just happens that no one is at his physical peak at 65.

Tech is different because the abilities involved peak, for most people, between 40 and 65. (There are outliers who peak as early as 20 or as late as 70+.) In fact, the bizarre cruelty of tech's age discrimination is that people get pushed out of this game as soon as they're any good at it.

That isn't even completely true for athletics. In some sports the peak is reached at a point older than you'd think, and the decline is much slower as well. For example:

http://www.arrs.net/SA_Mara.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com