That's partly because by somewhere in their 30s, a lot of the good programmers aren't working for someone else on salary any more. They're working freelance and picking their gigs, or they've founded their own business(es), or they've specialised and now do contract work with a combination of programming and industry-specific knowledge and skills.

In each case, they are probably earning at rates much higher than almost any salaried employee at almost any employer. Notice that in all of these scenarios the rates you can charge are based on real value generated, which doesn't have a glass ceiling the way wages usually do.

Good programmers who are still working for someone else as a full-time software developer at 40 probably have their own reasons for choosing that career path. Those reasons will often mean they aren't particularly looking to move either, and if they are, they're not going to do it by sending out numerous CVs to different employers the way a new grad does.

Who do you think is creating those modern programming languages, kid? :-)

Have you considered applying Occam's razor here? Maybe your hiring process sucks. Maybe the compensation and conditions you're offering simply aren't good enough to attract older developers who are any good. Are these theories more or less likely than entire generations of developers who presumably once had that enthusiasm and aptitude you seem to see in new grads mysteriously becoming incompetent and unmotivated a decade or three later?

You continue to make the same assumption but apparently still without any hard data to support it.

You asked how sites are able to choose not to use Google. I gave you several significant alternative sources of traffic, any one of which might generate more traffic for some sites than search engines.

Whether or not you choose to believe that some sites do in fact generate most of their traffic in those other ways and would continue to do so if Google disappeared tomorrow is obviously up to you. However, whatever assumptions you choose to make won't change the real situation for those sites or make them any more reliant on Google's preferences for their effectiveness.

You implicitly assume that sites get most of their traffic from any search engine. Plenty of sites don't. Sites get traffic from paid advertising (on ad-supported sites, social networks, physical media, and so on). Sites get traffic because people already know what they need (public services with widely known addresses, for example). Intranet sites obviously don't rely on public search engines. And of course there's old-fashioned word of mouth advertising, and its new high-tech counterparts like hyperlinks on related sites and social media.

Of the commercial projects I currently work on -- and there are several, because I do freelance/consultancy work -- I don't think any gets the majority of its visitors from search engines, and in some cases if Google disappeared tomorrow you'd hardly notice on the bottom line.

Your search engine might be. Apparently the most successful search engine in the world thinks its users want content with good/appropriate presentation more than content that isn't as well/appropriately presented. And they're probably right.

I'd be the first to agree that Google shouldn't get to dictate how the Web works and that sometimes Google or at least some its employees appear to be extremely arrogant in assuming they are every webmaster's #1 priority. The reality is that if you're running a site that doesn't depend primarily on Google for traffic, you can and should implement whatever works best for you and your visitors, regardless of what Google wants or says.

However, if you're relying on Google's service for most/all of your visitors to find your site at all, you have to play by their rules if you want the best treatment from them. This is the basic principle of SEO, and it's as old as search engines themselves.

A copy of what, exactly? No-one has a physical copy at that stage, so there's nothing to borrow.

Nope.

I know, but charging me X for the box set just after it finished wouldn't cost them anything compared to charging me X nearly a year later. In fact, it would benefit them a little in terms of cash flow and probably very slightly due to inflation. And obviously it would benefit them compared to me being fed up with the spoilers and consequently not bothering to buy the next season on disc at all. I enjoy the show, but I enjoy plenty of other shows too, and I could just as easily spend similar money on 20+ episodes of one of them instead of 10 episodes of GoT next time I'm on Amazon.

Reportedly, but as far as I know I don't have any way to use any of them without spending many times the cost of the box set just on one kind of equipment or another and then another significant multiple of the box set cost on the subscription/streaming/whatever for the show itself. So as long as I don't mind a 1000-2000% mark-up, sure, I can probably avoid being spoiled (unless you count the other inferior aspects I mentioned as spoiling the show in another sense, of course).

I know, but as I'm in the UK, my complaint remains perfectly valid.

Here your legal options are basically limited to either getting Sky or relying on one of the very limited number of on-line options. All of these require dedicated equipment and/or work out absurdly expensive if GoT is the only exclusive show on the service that you're interested in watching. As I understand it, you're also still likely to get interrupted by ad breaks and logos/banners spammed all over the screen -- an insultingly inferior experience to just playing a disc and enjoying the show, and you're paying a premium for the "privilege".

Personally, all I'd need to avoid the disappointment is a simple and reasonably priced pay-per-view option to watch in sync with everyone else. With no real effort at all they could at least release the box set of discs as soon as the season has finished like every other show ever. In practice that would probably still avoid the worst of the spoilers, because usually people are pretty good about not assuming everyone saw this show live. The biggest spoilers I had for season 4, which I just finished watching, were all the trailers and promos for season 5, which obviously only start happening nearly a year after season 4 finished its first run.

Funnily enough, I think this is one of the things that gives GoT its edge over a lot of on-screen sword and sorcery fantasy. You get women wearing realistic clothes, like expensive formal outfits at court or actually useful armour for combat. You get women wearing effectively no clothes at all. However, you rarely get much in between, and in particular you don't get women going into situations with random skimpy clothing for no apparent reason beyond the ratings. Also, while there has been (with some justification) criticism of the gratuitous nudity on the show, the same basic all-or-nothing-but-plausible divide has been true of the male characters as well.

I can see this for some shows, but GoT is one I almost always watch at least twice. It's such a huge cast that if I don't review key parts of the last season before the next one starts, I forget minor details, like who got married and brought 17 new characters from their family into House Evilempire, or who arrived/left locations X and Y, or who died in a spectacular betrayal by their formerly loyal henchman/sibling/dog.

Until next year. Given that GRRM's shown no interest in accelerating his writing and it must have been 5+ years since the last book, it's likely that the TV show will overtake the paper version within the next season or so. Reportedly, their general strategy is that since the TV show only follows the general storyline rather than being 1:1 with the books in recent seasons anyway, they will get an advance outline of the future of the story and work from that instead.

I've bought legal copies of the previous seasons on Blu-Ray, lacking better options for seeing them. HBO's insistence on not releasing each season on disc until just before the next one (with the inevitable resulting spoilers in between) really annoys me.

When I've paid full price -- and it's an expensive price for a show with only 10 episodes per season -- for something that from my point of view was only just released, I don't appreciate seeing trailers and promos for the new season that show the person in supposedly mortal jeopardy at the end of the episode I just watched is going to make it/not make it/turn into an angel and fly away. This has been happening even in between old shows I'm rewatching on second-rate freeview TV channels for more than a month (advertising the new GoT season coming up on an expensive premium channel not conveniently available where I am). They even had two principal characters on the front cover of TV magazines at the store last week.

I'm generally anti-piracy, but this is a show that depends on the big plot twists and no-one-is-safe surprises, and I'm far more likely to give up and just rip it on-line as so many others do because of the spoilers than for any other reason. Or just give up watching at all, because why bother when the story has already been ruined anyway?