I'm mid 50s, I keep learning. If you are a programmer who can't find work, well first let me say that would be horrible. It's unacceptable, it should never happ

I'm mid 50s, I keep learning. If you are a programmer who can't find work, well first let me say that would be horrible. It's unacceptable, it should never happen, yet reports keep happening. I haven't seen it in my career, I'm sure I'm fortunate in many ways. I'm guessing that for people this happens to, it's a combination of being in a place with not many tech jobs and also not keeping up with technology. Can you do cloud tech (aws, google cloud, azure?), c++, java, js, protobuffers? None of these technologies were invented when I got my BS in CS many many years ago and I've been learning continuously. Sure there were similar things or building blocks toward this kind of stuff. My last job search was a couple of years ago, I had 3 offers and stopped interviewing and I'm not unusual in my experience (going back to the above comment about negative employment in software engineering). I'm in the Seattle area. At the company I joined a few months ago half our small team of engineers are 45+. We just hired someone past 60 as a dev. If you find yourself in this situation, all these technologies are available to try for free on the internet, you can teach yourself. Companies that won't hire older people are just stupid, on top of being illegal.