> 60 year olds do do not perform like 20-30 year olds unless they have some extraordinary secondary characteristics that make up for it.

Wow. Well, that, right there, is the root of the evil of age discrimination.

This exclusionary thinking is no different from such horrible things as "blacks can't perform as well as whites" or "the disabled can't do what the fully abled can", etc. It is wrong and disgusting.

And, if we are talking about knowledge work, this view is very wrong, even dumb.

I'll give you an example based on the experience of a friend of mine. A TEAM of roughly thirty 25~ish year olds failed to deliver a product for two years. Graduates from top universities. No fucking experience. Seeking help, the company hired my friend (around 55 at the time). The project was a track within a couple of months and finally delivered a year later.

The "kids" had fucked things up beyond recognition. Wasted months running experiments and reinventing every single wheel. Nearly everything was done wrong due to lack of experience and knowledge. For example, the EE's where copying circuits from data sheets, without really understanding what the circuits did or how they worked. The folks with Masters in Mechanical engineering did not understand design topologies under load, which led to repeated failures costing $500K per "experiment". The EE's designed circuits with hundreds of components, when a properly designed circuit could do the job with less than a hundred. Software developers wrote code that performed so badly they had to start from scratch (typical for the Python generation). One of the ME's spent two years trying to design a button panel. Etc.

So yeah, you are right, 60 year olds don't perform like 20 to 30 year olds.

> On paper, yes, you shouldn't be excluded because of age. In practice, it doesn't work like it. 60 is basically retirement age for a reason, and it's been stretched to ever higher numbers due to demographics and strain on social spending pyramid schemes.

No, its being stretched mainly due to people living longer. People are able to stay active in the workforce until 70s now, so the capitalist governments are pushing the retirement age up to 74-75, calculating that the current generations will live well into their early 100s. Of course, the social security system's format and the desire on the capitalist elite to dump the tax load on the working class do play into this, but the main reason is people live longer and healthier.

In the middle of last century, you'd retire in your 50s because you'd already get some debilitating illnesses or get weakened too much, and you were expected to die sometime around your mid 60s. The retirement age in the countries that still did not push it up because of capital's pressure reflects this.

> Yes, everyone will step out of their way and bend backwards to accommodate 55yo John Carmacks and alikes with impressive track records and impressive resumes where their experience and skills

Actually, many countries are doing exactly that? From Europe to China? That's the norm, not the exception. The exception is the US and its 'lets fck everyone for the profit of shareholders' mentality that reflects in tech corps enshttifying everything and exploiting 20 to 30-year-olds as code monkeys. And from how China is kicking America's ass in almost every tech field, they seem to have got it right and not the US.