I'm 53, which makes me about twice median at my company. A lot of this rings true, but I'll add one more twist on the "hard to keep skills up to date" aspect. K

I'm 53, which makes me about twice median at my company. A lot of this rings true, but I'll add one more twist on the "hard to keep skills up to date" aspect. Keeping up with all the technological churn across the industry is damn near a full time job. When you come out of college, you might be pretty close to the state of the art because you've been doing nothing other than getting to that exact point. Then it suddenly gets harder, because most of your time is spent working on whatever technology you already have instead of ramping up on new ones (plus eventually family and such). Sure, you can try to weave as much learning as you can into your job, but it's almost never enough. Most people will end up getting further and further behind, or more and more specialized. The harmful effect of the first becomes apparent quickly; the second can actually be quite lucrative for a while until suddenly it isn't. Either way, at some point your knowledge becomes pretty severely devalued until you go back to spending near-full-time to catch up. It's hard to blame employers for favoring newer knowledge over older, but the effect on older workers is still pretty profound.