I’ve observed a company in London who followed a brilliant strategy with hiring old engineers and (very) junior ones.
This was a company in finance, doing not-very-interesting things. You’ve probably never heard of it. About half the devs were above 50, and the other half straight out of bootcamp, with a few people in-between.
It worked so great. The “old ones” brought a lot of maturity, practices (TDD, tests, even XP at times) and loved mentoring the super enthusiastic grads. The grads just finished bootcamps, many of them junior on paper, but had a different career in the past. They soaked it all in and grew fast. Sure, some left after a while, but a surprisingly large number stayed because of the environment and the people.
And the company did well. The pay for the expeirenced devs was probably a bit under the market, somewhere at £50-60K. The new grads were cheap. Still, attrition was low, morale high, output consistent and quality high.
I think of this example many times. Why do so few places not try something similar? Especially at places where you don’t need to use the latest and greatest, where business is stable, and where you can get a bunch of these benefits altogether.
The few who continues to grow after 10 years gets into extremely well paid positions and have no problems getting jobs. We aren't talking about them here, we are talking about the majority who never grow out of their senior engineer position. They aren't more valuable after 20 or 30 years than they were at 10 since they stopped growing, and this is the majority of people in every field.
You don't fix age discrimination by saying that old people are better, because in most cases they aren't, instead you fix it by saying that if you have 2 persons with similar skills then you shouldn't automatically pick the less experienced younger person. If you only hire old developers when they have all of the awesome skills people tout in these threads then you will mostly hire young developers since so few developers have those skills no matter what age they are.
This was a company in finance, doing not-very-interesting things. You’ve probably never heard of it. About half the devs were above 50, and the other half straight out of bootcamp, with a few people in-between.
It worked so great. The “old ones” brought a lot of maturity, practices (TDD, tests, even XP at times) and loved mentoring the super enthusiastic grads. The grads just finished bootcamps, many of them junior on paper, but had a different career in the past. They soaked it all in and grew fast. Sure, some left after a while, but a surprisingly large number stayed because of the environment and the people.
And the company did well. The pay for the expeirenced devs was probably a bit under the market, somewhere at £50-60K. The new grads were cheap. Still, attrition was low, morale high, output consistent and quality high.
I think of this example many times. Why do so few places not try something similar? Especially at places where you don’t need to use the latest and greatest, where business is stable, and where you can get a bunch of these benefits altogether.