Technology And Age

The problem with being over 65 is that no company wants to hire anyone that old. No, this is not age bias. This happens simply because younger people can act and speak more excitedly about the company and its goals. More that is, than someone who a has worked through so may companies and seen so many of them fold.

They say that age brings wisdom. Alas but wisdom is not something that fast paced agile companies want. They want young agile minds willing to try anything, even to take chances with software design that may have failed for earlier companies.

Today's technology companies believe one software language is like another and that if you are expert at one, you should be able to pick up another with ease and quickly become expert at it too. But those same companies are very aware that a salesman who is expert at English cannot quickly pick up Chinese and become expert at it in just a couple months. Sadly, today's companies, are by and large clueless.

Young programmers write in Ruby or Python or Java or PHP despite the fact that those languages run 10 to 75 times slower than identical programs written in C. People that hire into web severs want specific slow languages, because they appear popular, but seldom think that C would be faster and more reliable. They seldom realize that those other languages are written in C. They seldom realize that the bulk of open-source software they use is written in C. But when it comes to modern website backend processes, the simplest approach --matching the web language to the backend language-- is perceived as better.

Being well-seasoned is good for many things, but for finding work in today's software market, being old is a disadvantage.