I hope they will be happy with older applicants given the "8-12+ years lisp/arc experience" requirement. Do you know anyone who has learned lisp (or any functional language) at a young age?
BTW, if you are looking for a superstar coder, it's probably more important to find someone who has been programming since the age of 12 than to find someone who is young.
I suspect that even older programmers who started young are much more productive than younger programmers who started years later.
Older programmers are more productive than younger programmers. I think the perception that goes the other way is based on teh confusion of measurements of productivity.
Zuckerman measurs productivity as lines of code generated, or worse, new classes generated. Kapor (I presume) would measure productivity as number and difficulty of new features correctly implemented.
It seems that in the late 1990s, and since, the number of "programmers" who are not hackers has risen dramatically. Hackers started programming at 12 because they were technophiles.
I have actually worked with a jock "programmer" who was proud of the facct that he didn't have a computer at home-- he left all his work at work. He was an extreme case (And he produced lots of lines of code, but not a lot of functionality)... but the trend seems clearly there.
Apparently programming has become a prestigous career- and this has led to the rise of defensive tecniques like unit tests, and otherwise organizing projects around the assumption that your "engineers" are idiots.
FWIW, all the job adverts that say "Rockstar" or "superstar" or "coder" in them - I immediately filter out because I assume they were written by someone who had no clue what a strong engineer looks like. No engineer worth their salt wants to be called a "Coder"- this is a derogatory term. Hacker is the word that they really should use, but the people who say "rockstart" are people who do not know that "hacker" means something other than one who breaks security on systems.
I see the word "rockstar" and I immediately know they are looking for someone with lower skill than I have. This is not arrogance-- its just experience with HR types.
