I'm going through this right now, with 26 years of professional experience and an undergrad degree in CompSci. There are many problems with hiring. Many. And

I'm going through this right now, with 26 years of professional experience and an undergrad degree in CompSci. There are many problems with hiring. Many. And as with standardized testing in public schools, one problem is how to judge the capability of many people (applicants, in this case) in a reasonable time, ESPECIALLY when the judges may not be experts in all relevant topics. The popular answer is to test against standards that are easy to measure. In the end, the companies may end up with fewer false positives (hiring an idiot), but will accept the likelihood of having more false negatives (missing out on a good employee). I don't agree with this approach, but mainly because of more a fundamental reason. The #1 reason that most hiring is broken nowadays is that it focuses on specific skills (often an unlikely/unrealistic laundry-list of technologies) rather than focusing on the candidate's ability to learn, think, and communicate. Regarding filtering out older candidates, this is more a side effect of testing on topics that would be more familiar to more recent grads. Likewise, if interviews included demonstrating how a candidate would choose between C#, Python, Ruby, Go, C++, Java, or Javascript for a given fantasy scenario, or when to choose between bare metal servers onsite or virtualized hardware onsite or managed or unmanaged cloud resources, younger and less experienced candidates would fail more than older ones. They just don't have enough experiences in different situations to know how to make these decisions (with an reasoning to back them up). The practical reality that I see is that older developers just may not be worth the extra cost compared to younger, less experienced ones. This will be especially true in many corporate environments where the more experienced, more senior dev will have higher expectations, want more authority and autonomy, and otherwise feel stymied by corporate drag. If the older worker hasn't ascended into management, they have little road left to travel. What many of us older devs didn't realize is the situation we would now be in. At this point, we must forge our own paths - by starting a consulting business, forming a startup, building a SaaS or other income-generating product, etc. It does little good to be angry at the system (since our complaints will absolutely not change anything).