This is accurate. Age discrimination is rampant in tech because young people are essentially recruited as unwitting scabs against their older peers. Aside from depressing wages and increasing loyalty (via fear of precarity), it’s also a very effective way to fight unionization, which software desperately needs (not for compensation reasons, although that will change, but for professional and ethical reasons).
It’s easy to impress a 24 year-old with a decent salary, a stocked kitchen, and lots of dumb little perks they can brag about (never mind that they are being paid, sometimes literally, in peanuts). They don’t start thinking about job security and labor power until it’s too late.
Based on your description of your priorities one could argue that older workers are the ones depressing wages, not younger workers. Many older workers (including you, by your own admission) value job security and work life balance over raw compensation and are less willing to rock the boat. Younger workers are more likely to go “fuck you, pay me, and if you don’t I’m going to move across the country to take up this other job offer I have”. Older employees with a spouse and kids have much less geographic mobility.
I understand the point that you are trying to make, but it's off the mark. Older workers are almost always paid more than younger workers, all else being equal. Unless there is some seismic shift in the economy, this might as well be axiomatic. So, it's just not possible for older people to depress the wages of younger people, unless older people in their prime working years for compensation (35-55+) for most sectors of the economy (including IT) started volunteering to do the same work for less compensation. As others in this thread have already made clear, even when they do that (e.g., out of desperation due to age discrimination), they're still going to be considered more "expensive" than a younger worker.
Also, let's be realistic: the vast majority of entry-level software developers just are not good enough to pull off the kind of thing you describe. They would be laughed off.
I owe 100% of my salary growth to job-hopping, so your assumption is incorrect.
Look, you made a bad argument. It's not a big deal. The fact is that the situation you described is frankly ridiculous: the notion that, were it not for older workers depressing wages, entry-level workers would cause compensation to go up by being so good at what they do and geographically flexible that they can go from metro area to metro area telling employers to fuck off until somebody recognizes them for the genius that they are. (It's a nice fantasy, though.)
It’s easy to impress a 24 year-old with a decent salary, a stocked kitchen, and lots of dumb little perks they can brag about (never mind that they are being paid, sometimes literally, in peanuts). They don’t start thinking about job security and labor power until it’s too late.