Disclaimer time: no one staffer or editor speaks for TechRepublic, and as a rule, the organization takes no formal position on debate topics. TechRepublic is an impartial referee here, serving only to enforce our terms of service.
That said, I, as an individual, do have an opinion, which does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the staff, management, or shareholders of TechRepublic or CNet networks.
(You can see why we rarely weigh in.)
As to ageism, I don't agree with it, but I'm sure it occurs. However, what I'm unclear on is how often ageism is an intended tactic, or merely a side effect. In most of my conversations with IT pros and hiring managers, the bottom-line issue is return on investment. Hiring "experienced" IT pros is more expensive, plain and simple, and in most shops, the additional cost doesn't return equivalent value.
That isn't to say that older IT pros with years of time in the industry are less valuable. But very often, the situation comes down to this: an IT pro with twenty years experience will limit your network downtime to, let's say, one hour a month. An IT pro with three years experience will limit your downtime to five hours per month. The twenty year pro will cost you twice what the three-year pro will. Are the four fewer hours of downtime worth double the cost. You can fiddle with the numbers, but the equation is essentially the same.
Experience costs money. Instances where experience is worth the extra cost are less common than the contrary. This is true in any idustry.
The opposite side of this argument, however, is continuity. Experience is more valuable within the same organization. In most cases, it's more worthwhile to keep your existing people and increase their pay than to hire someone newer and cheaper. A netadmin that knows every nook and cranny of your system, every balky desktop and touchy router, every legacy naming convention and jury-rigged storage solution, IS worth more. Unfortunately, this is not an advantage when being hired, it is merely an advantage when negotiating a raise. Moreover, business managers who don't know IT (or business, for that matter) often fail to grasp this value--or realize it too late.
Of course, that starts us down the outsourcing road again, which has been beaten to death.
As an aside, I tend to think publicly traded companies are especially vulnerable to this kind of self-destructive shortterm thinking. I and a buddy of mine who's working on his PhD in economics (far smarter than I am) have talked about this at length: the constant pressure to produce a positive earnings report every three months creates a culture of shortterm gains versus longterm losses. It doesn't matter if they're destroying their longterm prospects, so long as they "hit their number" this quarter. That kind of thinking tends to value price over quality, to think tactically instead of strategically, to treat every twitter of a daily trend line as a reason to panic, all of which leads to a bipolar management style of wild exuberance over insignificant success and desperate paranoia over every mild setback.
One of the many impacts of this "quarterly crush" is to undervalue experience, and replace it (or not hire it) based on cost. So, in summary, blame stupid stock-option-hostage corporati for the unemployed aged (which is ironic, as so many of them are aged themselves).
