Not saying this is the case for you, but a lot of being older and more experienced is also the fact that you are usually more expensive. The young up-and-comer

Not saying this is the case for you, but a lot of being older and more experienced is also the fact that you are usually more expensive. The young up-and-comers are cheaper, often come with more bluster but are also less jaded... for lack of a better word. People like to feel like they are coming up with something new. They don't like the old guy in the corner saying, "Oh, that's just like X, I was doing that 30 years ago". Also, many smaller companies, especially startups, bias toward action. They like seeing people produce code. Experienced developers usually like to make smaller changes that don't produce a lot of code and sometimes end up deleting more code than you add. I finish just as many tasks/cards as anyone else, but my LoC is not even close to my younger peers. So when I have a big number + I don't have a large, quantifiable amount of code being produced + I tend to sound "pessimistic" even though I say something isn't going to work based upon experience... I can understand why that would be hard to justify. Even though the experience can prevent them from making very costly mistakes that other people have already failed at.