Presumably the motivation for the most common form of ageism is that young people are easier to exploit and abuse under the pretext of "saving money", but why the fuck would anyone ever want to run their company on that basis? It makes very little sense.
There are two ways to get more from your developer team: quality and quantity.
Quality means you pay your people more and more as you grow. Grow from 10 to 20 over 10 years, while retaining most people and tripling their salaries.
For that to work:
- your revenue per employee must grow substantially
- you need managers who are flexible, because you have to adapt your workplace to your employees needs rather than just hiring new people when they turn over
Those are difficult things that not every owner can bring about in their company.
The other approach is quantity: grow your dev team from 10 to 100 to 1000. For that to work you need:
- Employees who can follow instruction without worrying too much about whether the tasks make sense
- Employees who just want a standard job and don’t need much customization over their career
- Efficient hiring processes, centered on a repeatable, consistent employee profile (not necessarily the most capable profiles)
- Caps on wages
The quantity strategy doesn’t require finesse. In fact it works better without it. You make coarse, aggregate decisions and let people turn over as needed. The turnover “cleans” the talent pool of people with special needs, which is crucial for the system to work.
The quality strategy requires really smart management which is very hard to hire.
And at the beginning, either you are keeping your plans of an eventual 3x salary secret from employees, in which case it can not motivate them, you are promising it to them which as an employee I would view with great suspicion, or you are writing some kind of agreement about it which seems like it has all kinds of problems.
Giving employees equity is a much better version of what you are trying to do and I'm puzzled as to why you didn't suggest it.
- Employees get it when it's cheap and it literally represents the value of the company that you were hoping to give them in the form of higher salaries
- It's not based on some kind of vague aspiration to be a good boss, it's a solid, well understood form of compensation
- No new employee is going to resent a lower-skilled old timer for their equity- they earned it.
Ironic that, in order to achieve a modicum of quality, many large companies must insulate anything potentially valuable from their true corporate environment.
Young people are an excellent fit for technology jobs. They are quick to pick up new tech, enthusiastic, energetic, open minded.
They're less likely to own a house and have a family to support, are hungrier for experience and learning curve, so can work for less money. More willing to settle for stock options that may or may not pan out some day. Can relocate at a moment's notice.
Cons: very few. I would just say, today's young people, at least here in the U.S., seem not to have been trained to write and speak proper English. Their knowledge of history is shallow and they are lacking in some of the skills that my generation grew up learning -- fixing cars, wiring a light fixture, fist fights, cooking and cleaning. But some of them are backfilling from youtube tutorials so it works out.
> Young people are an excellent fit for technology jobs. They
> are quick to pick up new tech, enthusiastic, energetic,
> open minded.
https://noageismintech.com/blend
rather than the front page:
I hope you meet someone compelling enough to trigger you to rethink your bias. Good luck.