All the best software engineers I know are over 50, and yet the young'uns who dominate the tech zeitgeist assume these same people are incompetent dinosaurs.
With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways.
It's not really paradoxical, it just depends on what tradeoffs you're willing to make as the person responsible for hiring, which depends on your line of business. There are few things more tiresome than someone making mistakes you already made two decades ago and tried to warn about, and the same applies to someone ignoring the new and improved ways to get things done just because they've always done it that way and know it the best.
With age comes experience and also comes a strengthening of biases. Older people, so the stereotype goes, are inflexible and set in their ways, if very experienced in those ways.
It's not really paradoxical, it just depends on what tradeoffs you're willing to make as the person responsible for hiring, which depends on your line of business. There are few things more tiresome than someone making mistakes you already made two decades ago and tried to warn about, and the same applies to someone ignoring the new and improved ways to get things done just because they've always done it that way and know it the best.