> Ageism is just a dick move in general.

It's also self-defeating. Yes, there are greybeards who are stuck in their ways and refuse to learn anything new. But more often than not, the greybeards are super good team members in ways that the younger employees can't hope to compete with, because all that experience has taught them a ton about what works and what doesn't. But rather than trying to harness that valuable knowledge, companies shoot themselves in the foot by ignoring it. It's ridiculous.

This only works assuming somebody cares what works and what doesn't. Often nobody does. Most organizations do not tend to reward the good decision that made everything easy. They reward things that look hard and projects that take forever as long as they can somehow be spun as successes.

I've been pretty successful but my advice is almost always ignored. Where it matters is the stuff I do or the stuff I have control over (e.g. teams I lead).

A company I worked at years ago had a devious and exploitative approach to market domination: hiring older super experienced workers and plugging them into teams with young over-eager programmers…

People with deep industry knowledge who were trained up to be decent programmers (middling, but serious, consistent, and quality focused), setting the direction. Those domain experts were working with young dumbasses who would burn 60+ hour weeks to make sales deadlines and keep current with ever shifting platform tech that breaks all the time. SMEs baked into the core development loop, DDD-made-flesh essentially, with cheaper more junior devs supporting scale for less money and maximizing the SMEs vision/contributions.

It’s an obvious and effective strategy. I’d speculate the management skills it takes to setup are what keep it as a rarity.

Try telling this to the baby faced MBAs that run the org.