Another reason for age discrimination started in Silicon Valley where companies used to boast no developers over 30. That is valid when it means that the technology the company is developing is so new and different that experience is meaningless. When the internet was new and we setup our first web site, there wasn't any point in paying a large salary for developers with irrelevant IT experience. We raided a local university and hired students that pretty much lived for the project mostly just to get access to our bandwidth.

But this causes confusion. In fact if a project can benefit from skills that aren't new then it should be obvious that someone with experience is more valuable than someone without. Luckily it seems that smart managers tend to understand that. It's young developers who make themselves feel confident by believing that their age (or lack of) makes them magically gifted.

Another thing that comes into play is the deprecation of neurons - seriously. The idea that it becomes harder to learn with age is a major reason people believe the otherwise-counter-intuituve notion that less experience is better. But there's misconception there as well. This mental depreciation is non-linear, dropping very sharply in youth and is quite gradual by adulthood. Most older people who can't/won't learn are in my observation just locked-in to skills that are supporting them financially. They find it risky and exhausting to start over with a new technology.

I used to work on casino games, and gosh, with all that money at stake we never lost track of a penny in the field.

They all get through school by huddling around one or two "naturals" who show how to get their school projects working. Then they show up in the real world with a piece of paper that says they're qualified. Some companies know how to make use of them but it takes herds of them and lots of infrastructure and project management. It's very expensive.

Flight wasn't invented by developing flapping feathered wings - as many once seem to have envisioned. Flight was understood to be getting from point A to point B without negotiating the terrain. Better ways were found to do this mechanically. AI should no more duplicate human brain thinking than flight should duplicate bird flying.

Besides, if you succeeded in creating a human brain in a computer it would be as disturbed as a human raised in a dark basement. Our thinking requires a lifetime of delicate social interactions and lots of other experience moving about in a human body.

He figured out a way to contrive this smoking hot topic into something tech related so we could curse about it on Slashdot - brilliant! Next topic: Bill Cosby. I got nuthin...

Who uses the default search engine anyway?

Firstly I think "10X" was intended like when one says "a gazillion". Secondly I think we need to also profile people who don't believe some programmers are more productive than others.

That's like saying "woodworking is easy". It depends on whether you're making birdhouses or you're a luthier making Stradivarius. I work with embedded DSP code and it's not easy to find capable programmers.

As someone who often does the hiring, I agree with you (at least in our case). We consider what to pay a developer and if a recruiter is used then that fee is an entirely peripheral issue. I've never been witness to a person summing the two in order to fit a budget. Maybe that happens in some much larger companies that are trying to quantify everything, but it would be new to me.

It's been fairly day-to-day in embedded development if you count SIMD, but as to the future I'd agree it's more on the way out for common development than the way in.

Seriously, his long post crashed my RSS app (OSX NewsBar). I've seen this once before. It won't refresh Slashdot again until the article falls out of range.

Can we work systemd into the discussion?

Reminds me of a character in a Douglas Adams novel who contemplated suing the CIA until a lawyer friend of his advised him that would be like "attacking a lunatic asylum with a banana".

...or Ford patents the steering wheel.

I think it's laughable how many people believe their politics are based on scientific fact these days. Sure - on a specifically scientific issue like this you may take the side of scientists. But you can't even have a position on something as quantifiable as economics without first defining what the objectives should be. That requires your whole sense of what is morally/ethically right and wrong. That sense you pulled out of your ass or learned from someone who pulled it out of their ass. Your politics are ultimately no more or less "scientific" than someone who believes they got theirs from a mystical being.