The job description states "Please send your CV, together with your Github account to hello at count.ly and we’ll reply in 1 business day". I sent mine last Thursday so almost 3 business days and haven't had a reply.
I work daily with javascript and enjoy it but it frustrates me that people treat aforementioned tech as cutting edge but these ideas were already around a long time ago. The counter to this is that javascript is finally maturing and starting to use these patterns which is a positive thing, I just wish the people promoting these "new" technologies would give recognition to what came before.
I think the cheap work, long hours thing is critical because companies will see an older person and think more expensive which is true and the added cost is justified. I've seen companies turn down more expensive and experienced people in favour of less experience and cheaper, only to go back to the older and more experienced person once they realised the management overhead of dealing with less experienced staff.
I also think startups have less experience running a company so assume if a developer knows x language and some experience with dbs will be able to build anything but then wonder why they have so many bugs / made so many bad design decisions.
Hasn't Microsoft done the right thing here though as a company for the long-term: visionary CEO leaves meaning potential for great risk to the company > put someone in place who shores up the finances > once finances are in a great position bring a visionary in and change things around again. It reads to me like Microsoft's long-term strategy as a company is actually really good. They must have known they could not continue their dominance but they could continue to be relevant if they had the finances to back it up. Swapping one visionary CEO for another could is a risk because big ideas don't always work (if executed poorly).
For any company, a charismatic dominant CEO leaving causes instability a board would be foolish not to try and stabilise things at the company before moving on again. A CEO does not act in isolation even though this article paints it like that and takes guidance from their board.
Hold on what the hell - I just skimmed through the 'decline of...' article referenced by the above article to look for the one of the reason for those 2013 stats being that there are users that can find the answers to the questions they need without asking and without answering. I am within the 8% that have answered more than 5 questions but I don't have time to actively contribute but do use it everyday and am voting on questions and answers everyday. If there are more like me then how is it in decline?
That the referenced article doesn't cover this then undermines the other arguments about its attitude to users (arguments I largely disagree with).
So really age doesn't matter - experience and aptitude does. Here's your quote minus references to age.
"I've found there are either people who believe they know better at everything whose skills have not improved much, and then people who stay up to date on technologies, trends, and realize that programming is a field you never really ever master with time"
My 94 year old grandfather flew a spitfire in WW2 and voted in he said precisely because he remembers the mess the UK was in before joining the union - the British economy and infrastructure was in a sorry state in the 70s.
Design patterns can definitely be abused and pragmatism is important when deciding whether or not to use them. I would say though that implementing SOLID is certainly achievable if writing from scratch but harder when refactoring code that breaks those principles (usually badly with no tests or poor tests).
Avoiding all that "fancy unicorn stuff" might not slow you down but it will slow down the next person who picks up your code but who cares that's their problem.
You must come from the same school as "who needs tests they're a waste of time".
The articles on modern agile seemed very prescriptive. Where I am right now the team does do scrum (yes it has its problems) but the team has figured out how to get it to work for them and so can get on with delivering and over time cutting out the parts of the process that doesn't work. Common sense should prevail when it comes to any software development methodology.
I could be wrong and the practices described in the articles come out of a team working together over a prolonged period of time (based on obie's comment above it looks like these come out of good experience but they should still adapt to the team).
So is your problem that senior developers just do not apply or that the ones that do apply (from a smaller pool of applicants) get screened out at some point in the process?