Nobody is assuming you should pay an older person more because they are older, but because they are more experienced. Paying someone with 30 years experience more than someone fresh out of school isn't age discrimination.
Find me a fresh out of school 20 year old with 30 years experience and I'll pay them more too.
Paying someone with 30 years experience more than someone fresh out of school isn't age discrimination.
Just because someone has worked 30 years, doesn't mean they have 30 years of experience. They may have 5 years of experience 6 times or even worse stopped learning anything new 15 years ago.
I'm in my mid 40s and I've hired developers who are older than I am and had 10+ years of C# but have never done a unit test, didn't understand the concepts of continuous integration/continuous deployment, didn't know Linq (introduced in 2008), Web API (introduced in 2011), and didn't even know WCF.
I needed developers and thought with their experience with different technologies they would be able to adapt. I was hiring based on Joel's "smart and gets stuff done".
Was I wrong. Older developers who haven't kept up with the trends for the last decade and haven't kept up with the changes in technology are worse than young developers who don't know.
As far as the pay ceiling, yes I've reached a ceiling as a developer. But not as an architect who both keeps up the latest shiney frameworks and has a deep understanding of the fundamentals.
The discrimination is disqualifying someone from jobs just because they are older. Maybe they understand that they're retraining in a new industry or tech stack and will have to take a salary decrease, at least initially. In that case, they're not given a (fair!) interview because people assume they'll want too much money.
It's likely that pay has gone up because tech workers are providing more value.
Consider an employee working at an investment bank 15 years ago versus today. 15 years ago, most value was generated by hoards of sales people and traders who cultured deep personal relationships with deep-pocketed customers. Today, tech people command a greater share of the wallet, and banks are making deep cuts to the ranks of sales people and traders.
If it were true, new companies would emerge that paid good employees more -- closer to their fair value.
These companies are emerging, though, right? 37Signals? I'm sure there are other small well-paid companies, if only from the evidence of a job ad I once saw. Now, "Compensation: Competitive" and "Compensation: Market" have been batted around for years, even around here, but this ad was for a programmer at a financial technology company and in the space for "Compensation" they put "Extremely high." Then again, those places are probably actually using the Big-O concepts they ask about in interviews.
You never see anything like that in Internet companies.
Find me a fresh out of school 20 year old with 30 years experience and I'll pay them more too.