I worked as a manager of a group of 10-15 software engineers at a major semiconductor company for about ten years. I interviewed over a thousand candidates and

I worked as a manager of a group of 10-15 software engineers at a major semiconductor company for about ten years. I interviewed over a thousand candidates and gave out about 60 full-time job offers over that time. I hired engineers aged from 21 to about 60. Of course, I also worked with lots of engineers from other groups. My conclusion on this topic is that there is no problem with age itself. The problem is that some older people lose interest and just coast on their skill set which becomes stale over time. Not all older people are like that. I had engineers in their 40s and 50s who read programming blogs, learned new languages in their spare time, tinkered with their pet projects in the lab, etc. They were passionate about engineering. THOSE guys were never a problem. They were awesome. I mean, if Bob Pease [1] were still alive, I'd hire him in a minute. The mistake is to jump from "some fraction of older engineers are in the former group" to thinking all older engineers are like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease