I recently had a conversation with one of my team leaders about some of our newest additions to the WooTeam (whom we'd not met, since they're based remotely) and realized that we didn't know how old these individuals are. We soon concluded that we don't know their age, because we don't care about that.

This reminded me of a sports-related cliché that I was brought up with:

"If you're good enough, you're old enough."

This specific cliché related to how some sports coaches question the merits of including a youngster into their teams, fearing that their lack of experience will be exposed by their opponents. Time & time again though, other coaches have shown that by including an individual based purely on merit (of their abilities) mostly leads to success. If you're good enough, nobody seems to care how old or experienced you are.

This seemed very apt in explaining our (obviously subconscious) considerations when hiring new team members. We've been successful in establishing such a great team, because the only determining factors have been their personality (how will they fit into the team?) and ability (can they get the job done?). Age has just never been something we've even checked (possibly because we tend to ignore formal, traditional CV's when hiring).

And neither do we plan on doing so in future.