> 60 year olds do do not perform like 20-30 year olds unless they have some extraordinary secondary characteristics that make up for it.
Wow. Well, that, right there, is the root of the evil of age discrimination.
This exclusionary thinking is no different from such horrible things as "blacks can't perform as well as whites" or "the disabled can't do what the fully abled can", etc. It is wrong and disgusting.
And, if we are talking about knowledge work, this view is very wrong, even dumb.
I'll give you an example based on the experience of a friend of mine. A TEAM of roughly thirty 25~ish year olds failed to deliver a product for two years. Graduates from top universities. No fucking experience. Seeking help, the company hired my friend (around 55 at the time). The project was a track within a couple of months and finally delivered a year later.
The "kids" had fucked things up beyond recognition. Wasted months running experiments and reinventing every single wheel. Nearly everything was done wrong due to lack of experience and knowledge. For example, the EE's where copying circuits from data sheets, without really understanding what the circuits did or how they worked. The folks with Masters in Mechanical engineering did not understand design topologies under load, which led to repeated failures costing $500K per "experiment". The EE's designed circuits with hundreds of components, when a properly designed circuit could do the job with less than a hundred. Software developers wrote code that performed so badly they had to start from scratch (typical for the Python generation). One of the ME's spent two years trying to design a button panel. Etc.
So yeah, you are right, 60 year olds don't perform like 20 to 30 year olds.
It's of no coincidence that your anecdote, anecdotally is completely outside of software development field.
While I agree that 20 year old kid highly unlikely to be a good replacement for an experienced 55yo machinist or a 55yo electrical engineer. The same is absolutely not true in software.
John Carmack shipped Doom when he was 23, and had shipped multiple games by then (Wolfenstein, Keen, etc). Many pivotal software projects are made and created by young guys (Ken Silverman, etc), and not set in their ways 60yo Fortran devs or enterprise java devs with baggage and old habits who will use any excuse not to write any code, learn anything new or better themselves - because they simply don't have that energy and drive anymore. Now this quality is useful ... sometimes, but more often than not it is not if you're doing anything new.
I'd have a Carmack at any age, but given the option I'd always rather have him at 20 than 55.
Back in those days it was rare and unusual if a person started programming when they were 7, 10, or 13. Nowadays it is extremely common that kids start programming when they are 6 or 7. By the age of 20-30, most competent software developers have been programming for solid 7-17 or more years.
Wow. Well, that, right there, is the root of the evil of age discrimination.
This exclusionary thinking is no different from such horrible things as "blacks can't perform as well as whites" or "the disabled can't do what the fully abled can", etc. It is wrong and disgusting.
And, if we are talking about knowledge work, this view is very wrong, even dumb.
I'll give you an example based on the experience of a friend of mine. A TEAM of roughly thirty 25~ish year olds failed to deliver a product for two years. Graduates from top universities. No fucking experience. Seeking help, the company hired my friend (around 55 at the time). The project was a track within a couple of months and finally delivered a year later.
The "kids" had fucked things up beyond recognition. Wasted months running experiments and reinventing every single wheel. Nearly everything was done wrong due to lack of experience and knowledge. For example, the EE's where copying circuits from data sheets, without really understanding what the circuits did or how they worked. The folks with Masters in Mechanical engineering did not understand design topologies under load, which led to repeated failures costing $500K per "experiment". The EE's designed circuits with hundreds of components, when a properly designed circuit could do the job with less than a hundred. Software developers wrote code that performed so badly they had to start from scratch (typical for the Python generation). One of the ME's spent two years trying to design a button panel. Etc.
So yeah, you are right, 60 year olds don't perform like 20 to 30 year olds.