On Wed, 09 Dec 2015 07:12:06 +0000, Tony wrote: > If we were to list the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the > past - like calculus and theory of relativity, etc. - how many would > have been done by someone at the age of 50 or older? How many milestones > in computing history were achieved by someone 50 or older? How many were > done by someone over 40? And I think most of the aging process isn't > even quality (what would most impact notable discovery) - it's quantity > (that is, slower clock cycle). And companies probably have more concerns > about quantity of thought than quality.
Cole 1976 showed that there was scant difference in productivity for natural scientists at the age of 30 and at the age of 50 (measured in terms of the rate of citations of published papers). It looks like the younger ones produced more work and the older ones produced better work. Specifically for mathematics, Stern 1978 observes that the number of papers produced peaks before the age of 40, but citations per paper grow significantly, so that a mathematician at the age of 55 is likely to be cited as much as one at the age of 40 and significantly more than one below 35. So unless aging suddenly got much scarier in the past four decades -- but no, you're talking about people in history, which goes back a lot more than four decades. The availability heuristic is unreliable, but JPass is available for just $20 per month. http://www.jstor.org/stable/284859?seq=1 Of course, this does reinforce the decision to hire younger software engineers. The metrics are about lines of code per day or time to implement something with not a care about software defects, which favors younger developers over older ones.