Are you sure? I hired these seasoned pros you talk about. I have a team of 12 developers and 3 of these seasoned pros that are about 60+ yrs old. C/C++ devs. They are the worst performing on the team. The 22/23yrs old are running circles around them. They are slow, taking 2-5x times as long to finish their task. It's no better in quality. They are seriously struggling to pick up new technologies. I'm a minority so I'm pretty open minded and built a diverse team race, gender, age, sexuality, whatever. Oh yeah, they are also very well paid due to the past experience! Sometimes as much as twice as the new grads. The one quality that scares the crap out of me for the future is ... Please do note that I'm not talking about 10hr shifts, work on weekends kinda environment. Just the typical come in at 9ish leave at 6 environment. I'm getting older myself too so I understand.
What are your quality metrics and over what timescale are you measuring?
Are you treating everyone in your organization as equivalent resources or are you allocating people based on strengths/specialties?
Having a heterogeneous team with breadth of experience across the stack helps to isolate you from the real business risks of group-think and "not knowing what you don't know". It's a hedge and a pillar of a resilient, long-term-oriented organization.
If you just want to have a get-shit-done culture, move fast and pivot/abort when things get bad, you probably want all 20 year olds. However, if you look at the organizational structure of banks, who are literally in the business of managing business risk, you will see diversity and redundancy in hiring.
Side note: Every single time I've seen a complaint about X group doesn't work as effectively as Y group, it's almost always a management misallocation of (human) resource. Not calling you out specifically, just wondering how much thought was put into team/work structure.
