The manifest justifications put forth here for overt age discrimination as well as Vivek Wadhwa's attitude toward older workers from the article (come on - a person making $150k and only knowing C or COBOL is a caricature, not something based on an actual tend in IT - and he had to trot out the much despised COBOL to make it stick, playing to people's ageism) are reminiscent of episode 21, season 2, in Sliders, "The Young and Relentless":

Yeah - that's IMHO the true face of the "land of equal opportunity" (disclosure: I wasn't born here and thoughout my lifetime Americans have invariably snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of equality - we finally got rid of segregation (at least legally) in 1964, and now LGBT people have been deemed to be human so there has been some progress but legalized age discrimination based is just as abhorrent [and de facto age discrimination is virtually a legalization]) .

And when the old guys who have walked develop revolutionary productivity software and restrict it's usage to the second and third world - what then? No more need to import labour at all - the capitalist exploiters will be able to farm literally everything out. The people who walked will have what they need to survive. This can be a race to the bottom and people on the losing end of what is in effect an economic can still have a few cards to play legally (cards that the bosses currently don't expect). And that will be the end of the software industry as an industry in the post-industrialized world.

I mentioned the same thing when I was in my 20's-30's.

Nope - it's actually quite easy esp. since the EEOC isn't doing their job.

Well that's not capitalism that's exploitation. Then American capitalism isn't the only economic system on the planet and people have feet to vote with. Keep that attitude and you won't be able to import enough workers from impoverished places.

However even massively underemployed now I work 80 hrs a week (just not getting paid for many of them). When I was employed and highly paid I almost always worked about 80 hrs a week so I really don't understand the statement. We work to solve interesting problems. Sometimes it takes less than 80 hrs and then we move on to another problem. Time doesn't really matter per se but people need time for their families for sure and to relax to invent new and noivel solutions to interesting problems.

That's excellent, except for the no sleep part. We need to manage the complexity, maintenance and reliability better so that you can get some more sleep.

I have picked them up (Python - Ruby I haven't done much with and Go - has it actually been released from the Google labs yet?). I teach Python (and Java and Perl and C++ and C, etc.) to graduate, undergraduate and industrial students/clients (often IFSM people who help on projects and have never produced an application or taken part in application development) - it's how I've managed in the current underemployment situation. But interviewers tend to inflexibly rattle off 5, 10, 15, 20 yrs experience in this language and in environment X and that's it.

The inflexibility IMHO is with the interviewers and HR people. That's my experience. I was tutoring an industrial student in Spring and he said "Hey all you need is 60-75% of the list depending on the interviewer and they take you." I responded that that was not my experience at all (and it wasn't before I approached 45 either - my interview experience has always sucked but still it used to be that jobs came to me anyway).

I have a couple of things to show but it's not for prime time today. The main thing is a reworking of software I did for a Fortune 100 company that another Fortune 100 company (more like Fortune 5) failed at. However I still have to rework the application. I was stunned when I noticed that the latest version of the major business OS still doesn't have this capability. So more than ideas to kick around. I did this before and made a little money but never released applications commercially (which is also NOT my strategy, BTW). So three months of intense work and an alpha release on 24 December 2011. I don't eat much and will only need a few part-time workers for some testing (and I know that the general approach works because of the work for the Fortune 100 company - with the reworking and added functionality I'm not stealing their idea and anyway it was a toy when I got to it - I made it go and that made their project go).

Okay - suspend H1-B.

Well he's an idiot who is cutting his own throat. I have seen some people like that but not many. The case is more that people gang up on another and project their views in order to justify terminating the person. But if those are really his attitudes then the manager or another developer need to confront him and work with him. If he's really unwilling to change then there's the door.

We have to make accommodations for people's family life. We are not just utilitarian widgets to be used at corporate whim.

That's not true at all. Many older software engineers would be happy to take lower pay even if the project weren't interesting (although interesting projects help of course).

Look - in the Second Great Depression $60k is better than $20k unemployment or even nothing.

Most managers are idiots. Sorry but thats the reality.

So you lied. What's next, murder? Oh I forgot, many people lie to each other as a matter of getting through the day. And no one sees a problem with this? I'm happy for you - but management? Couldn't you find something honest to do?

And it seems that you have turned management into something fruitful as you are still solving problems (as long as those are real problems and not the rash of fake problems I've seen most managers address).

I'm selling my condo and doing exactly that.

So after imitating the Soviet Union and creating a bifurcated consumer-military industry after 9/11 we are now almost down to the Soviet/Eastern Block admonition of mathematicians to their sons/daughters/students: "Find the most arcane branch of mathematics. specialize in it and you'll have some freedom" - which in our case is translated to "job security". Does anyone else see a problem with this? If your son's passion is CS then do CS. And do great things, solve great problems. If his passion is mathematics, there is much more available than being a data analyst. Data mining (which might be what you meant) is of course not arcane and is being tapped more worldwide. Data mining will provide a nice background in statistics and that will be a useful tool for problem solving going forward since even now most people are math phobic.

Take another look at that statement - you have assumed flat out that if you are older you aren't studying or keeping up with "modern languages" (by which you mean what is currently popular - the concepts behind Python, Ruby and Go aren't new). So the assumption is discriminatory. BTW - problem solving abilities and techniques and fundamental technologies are far more important than the intimate details of the framework of the week (the framework of the week can be picked up in short order).

News at 11:05 - technology doesn't really move that fast, details on the next or latest version of Oracle or any relational database for example can be picked up on demand. However if a person had never developed a complex database application to begin with then there could be a problem.

Yeah but you sir are an idiot (don't worry - most managers born and raised in the US are and to some extent you are forced into being idiots because you report to technical idiots and as a culture tend to be extremely conservative and risk adverse). You are apparently only looking at a very narrow skillset and perhaps not looking at transferability of skills from one environment to another and are not looking at the problem solving ability of a candidate nor their ability to rapidly learn and adapt to the technical environment. So you are costing your company in those terms. This sort of extremely narrow dinosaurish hiring practice may result in your company rapidly becoming non-competitive.