After recruiting for 20 years on the US east coast and now a few years as a resume writer that also coaches hundreds of software engineers on career topics, I d

After recruiting for 20 years on the US east coast and now a few years as a resume writer that also coaches hundreds of software engineers on career topics, I don't think your future is nearly as grim as you seem to think. Ageism is definitely real, but in many cases it's simply relevancy or something else that is misdiagnosed as ageism. Let's look at an example. We have a developer in his early 40s who graduated college and went to work for an insurance company developing some accounting system in whatever language was popular at the time, and maybe in the 90s they converted that system to Java or .NET. This developer has been mostly maintaining this system and maybe building some other software for the company, but the job hasn't changed much. Also, this developer doesn't pay much attention to trends outside the industry - gets his entire tech 'diet' from work only. Insurance company lays him off and he needs to find a new job. Nobody will touch him - or at least not the companies he wants to work for - and he thinks it's because he's "old" when in fact it's something else. Some people judge him because he never left for more 'glamorous' work, or they wonder why he was never poached by another company. Today it's almost a given that devs move around much more frequently than they did 20 years ago. Not one of his former co-workers that left the company could lure him to join their firm? Some judge him because he never picked up any new languages and knows nothing of the newer trends in development. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but if your tech diet at work isn't marketable it's your responsibility to keep your skills in demand. Some judge him because he never got bored with his work, or at least never enough to leave. Anyone who was content doing the same thing for that long must not have much interest in learning. Maybe his tenure at big insurance means he got a lot of raises and earned tons of PTO, and other companies can't match his comp. He's paid above market for his skill set. Sometimes it is age itself that is probably at play, but I know plenty of 40-60 year old devs that never have a problem finding work. I can say none of them have stayed in one place for too long. That's the main trend I've noticed with successful older devs.