Gary Varga (6/14/2013)
jay-h (6/14/2013)
Richard Warr (6/14/2013)
In the UK age discrimination in the workplace is now illegal and rightly so. Whilst there are clearly people who still believe that younger people are better able to adapt to new technologies or make better development team members I'm not sure there is any evidence to back this up. Some might even think that a developer with 30 years experience might be quite good.I enjoy my job and still hope to be working as a developer well into my 60s. I've managed to adapt from the world before PCs though to SQL Server 2012 without too many problems and don't see why SQL Server 2024 (sic) should be any more difficult.
Age is just as irrelevant as gender, race or what football team you support.
There are two different things here. Discrimination, as in the sense of pre-emptive judgements based purely on age is rightly unfair.
However (and speaking as someone who is nearly 64, I've been on both sides of the fence), to think that there is NO statistical difference based on age, is to be living in an ideological fantasy. People's approach to jobs and problems varies as they age. Us older ones tend to rely much more on our experiece (for good or bad) and judgement calls, our mindsets were quite different when we were younger (there is an interesting and well established statistic on great mathematicians: almost all great discoveries occurred before the mathematician was 30 years old). I surely don't want to be shut out of a job just because of my age, but then again I can bring a degree or personal experience (including critical social and management skills) that too many younger people lack.
Age is just as irrelevant as gender, race or what football team you support.
hmmmm, a team of 25 year olds vs a team of 60 year olds.... where would your money go?
Actually, a recent study (by the OU? - that's Open University non-UK bods) analysed StackOverflow.com users and illustrated that on average older IT practitioners were learning more new things.
More importantly, we don't get paid to play football. Even if we did, I have close to no athletic ability, but can still whip the pants off the average athlete due to superior brain power. If we based it on age only, people younger than me should be able to beat me at pretty much any sport, yet they typically can't because I am able to out think them with little to no effort. There is a reason age discrimination is illegal, just as there are reasons why discrimination of any kind should be illegal.
It might be appropriate to judge someone engaged in physical labor based on age, weight and other factors, but judging an office worker that way is just plain stupid.
Dave