>>First, longer hours. Younger people have fewer social commitments.
>>They are more likely to work insane hours when needed to be, and
>>they're unlikely to have families who will put up a fuss.
>>
>
> This is exactly opposite from my experience. Younger people have more
> emotional attachment to their social commitments, and whine like
> children when asked to work a little harder. Usually they are being
> asked to work a little harder because they blew off coming in at a
> normal time or aren't serious enough about their work product in the
> first place (so they estimated wrong how long it would take or how much
> trouble they'd run into while trying to do something they don't know
> how to do).
>
> That's okay with me: hey, you're young, why give a shit about your work?
>
> Regardless, the best software development teams in the world are not
> full of hyperactive goatee'd kids in SOMA: it's middle aged boring
> people who live in places like Houston.
>
i think this tends to generalize erroneously on the opposite end. lot of young people are doing great work, whether its in the open source community (linux, mozilla, etc) or within established corporations. the folks who wrote the fairly rock-solid code for the at&t switches werent all middle aged and most of them lived in urban NJ or illinois. the developers behind unix and the internet were again a diverse bunch. i can match your personal experience with equally valid instances of the preference of hiring managers for younger workers because of exactly the reason outlined by the original poster (lesser social commitment, longer hours, etc), which i do not find contradictory with your point about the quality of the output - that these traits do not guarantee good or even timely product. it does seem inevitable to me (and i admit this is just an impression) that most programming (not the nasa rocket launching stuff) is becoming more and more of an unskilled activity as the complexity is handled and hidden by back end technologies (jvm's, x* parsers and family, etc), and faster and faster processors. if this were the case, then it would explain why younger workers are more desirable...
--ravi