I was shocked by this question. I'm 56 and I've worked at a variety of SF Bay Area companies since 1984 as a software engineer. It's been my experience that if

I was shocked by this question. I'm 56 and I've worked at a variety of SF Bay Area companies since 1984 as a software engineer. It's been my experience that if you love coding and you keep learning new languages and technologies, then you can keep on coding. The other software engineers I work with are in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Over the years, I've participated in probably more than a hundred discussions about job candidates I've helped interview for software engineering positions at places I've worked. I have never seen age discrimination. It is true that someone who has, say, been a manager for the past 10 years and now wants to "return" to programming may be regarded as a dubious candidate - but the same doubt would also apply to a candidate who is 26 and has not done much programming since the age of 16. It is also true that if you have learned nothing but FORTRAN or COBOL, we aren't going to be interested in hiring you for our Ruby-on-Rails / JavaScript / C++ project. But it's not hard to tell who is a real software developer, no matter what their age - it's someone who just _has_ to write code, like a writer has to write or an artist has to make art. One thing I've always prized about technical work and hacker culture in general, is that outer appearances matter much less than in other fields. We don't need to judge what someone looks like, what clothes they wear, where they come from, how old they are; we just need to see what they do and how they act. If you are working someplace where that's not the case, I encourage you to look elsewhere. Otherwise, keep learning and continue to enjoy coding.