Hours and Stress
Part of the reason younger workers are putting more hours in comes more from the lack of experience than need. Read the Mythical Man Month. There are top notch folks who can do 10 times the work of their fellow IT professional. I'm 42. I've been a software engineer, architect, Director, (code monkey), etc for 18+ yeas ad have been writing code since I was 10. Most of the newer engineers I run into with 10 or less years of experience have not gone through enough to even remotely keep up as their experience is generally limited to the projects they work on. I work everything from embedded to Web to mobile across most platforms and am getting better everyday. you are right about one thing though. Many companies do not want to pay the fee for experience. I've had clients who have had to figure it out the hard way between trying to out source or trying to go with someone younger and most fail when it some to the whole SDLC stack and working with business, legal etc to build the products they really want. Experience trumps this everyday of the week.
