Like other "isms" ageism rarely announces itself as such. Instead it cloaks itself in other forms of bias that "just happen" to be correlated with age. For exam

Like other "isms" ageism rarely announces itself as such. Instead it cloaks itself in other forms of bias that "just happen" to be correlated with age. For example, oncall requirements and late meetings/offsites are primarily burdensome to those with families, but that's disproportionately older workers. Open offices are less endurable for older workers because of otherwise-neutral changes in hearing and concentration. And so on. An even more subtle form of ageism is discrimination against certain technical/process habits that are correlated with when one entered the industry and therefore with age. For example, older engineers are more likely to believe in thinking through problems before starting to code, but in a "move fast" culture that's considered outdated. Older developers are likely to be more conservative when estimating technical difficulty or time to completion, which gets interpreted as unwillingness to commit (especially compared to younger developers who often wildly overcommit and suffer no consequence). Older workers are more likely to push back against corporate happy-talk because they've heard it all before and it never amounted to anything, but that can be interpreted as disloyalty or a "culture fit" problem. Ageism is not one big obvious thing; it's a collection of small subtle things. Bit by bit by bit, these things nibble away at older workers' individual productivity and collaborative opportunities. Many overcome it. I did OK for myself in three years when I was 20+ years older than the median for the two groups I was in at a FAANG. But just because a problem is overcome doesn't mean it's not a problem.