Respectfully, I have to disagree with your assessment that age is the contributing factor here. I'd argue that pragmatism is what you're seeing.
Pragmatism might correlate with experience, and experience is only gained with time (thus age), but I'd be careful about jumping to that conclusion. There's nothing beyond assumption (this article included) that says younger people are always, or even usually, less pragmatic.
[Edit: That said your tech lead is an idiot if he thinks he should be paid more for a better understanding of technologies tangential to his core goal while he has a weaker understanding of the goal itself.]
Respectfully I submit that we might not be in a big disagreement here.
Pragmatism is a very high contributing facts. My personal experience has not show me IF pragmatism is better. Instead experience has show me WHAT is worth to be pragmatic about.
My observation is that experience leads to emotional maturity, which leads to better pragmatic choices. It is the fear to make mistakes, hence the industry coined "Fail fast". It is the ego boost of "I just learned this cool technology", as opposed to "If this is so cool, hasn't been invented before? How did it look like?" (Another post showed an example with MVC). It is the "I own the world" feeling that we all have as young adults. And there are some "bad" apples in the VC culture that can exploit that.
[And I don't think the tech lead is an idiot, he is where I was 18 years ago]
> Respectfully I submit that we might not be in a big disagreement here.
I like it when that happens. :-)
> And I don't think the tech lead is an idiot, he is where I was 18 years ago
I shouldn't have phrased it that way. The idea that you're more valuable than someone who can solve a core business problem when you can't is idiotic. He himself is probably not an idiot - we've all let our emotions get the better of us.
Pragmatism might correlate with experience, and experience is only gained with time (thus age), but I'd be careful about jumping to that conclusion. There's nothing beyond assumption (this article included) that says younger people are always, or even usually, less pragmatic.
[Edit: That said your tech lead is an idiot if he thinks he should be paid more for a better understanding of technologies tangential to his core goal while he has a weaker understanding of the goal itself.]