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Is 40 the New 60?

• patycake 5y ago
  I feel like I have an interesting outlook considering I'm 20. I actually very much enjoy working with older developers who are masters at what they do. As long as they keep learning new technology and don't punish me for using new ideas.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• draw_down 5y ago
  > If my generation hadn't made tech such a toxic work environment by ensuring that people had little or no recourse when treated unfairly by employers, I'd be tempted to feel sorry for us. What is this referring to? Anyway, the usual response to this topic on here is someone in their 60s talking about how they’re still going so you should suck it up and this problem isn’t real.
• giantg2 5y ago
  I'm 30s and feel old. The biggest thing is that I don't have the motivation to be fast and work extra hours. I look at the new college grads and remember those days when I didn't have a family and could put in extra hours, believing I had a career.
  • scotty79 5y ago
    You are not old, you are just burning out. Pace yourself and pick your battles. It has nothing to do with age. Child prodigies can burn out at 20 because they are suffocated with work.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      I'm already told I'm slow at work, so I don't think I can reduce the pace any further.
      • scotty79 5y ago
        Change employer if you can. When I moved from small webshops to a consulting corporation that served very rich clients pace dropped by an order of magnitude while salary increased. As a rule of thumb you should change employers every two years to avoid underselling yourself and stagnation. You'll rarely get your market worth if you remove yourself from the job market to stick with a single company for years.
  • taf2 5y ago
    Yeah at around 35 - pulling all nighters actually just kinda starts to hurt… like for more then a day. Also I think no matter the age you’ll always feel old but just remember your not actually old until literally no one else is older then you… think 90s then appreciate being 30s you have 60 years left at least!
    • giantg2 5y ago
      The stress and sedentary nature of the job makes it seem like 30 years remaining is a more realistic timeframe.
      • taf2 5y ago
        Knowing is half the battle- get up and walk around, you have at least 30 years to figure it out
  • mindvirus 5y ago
    Trust me you have plenty of time, and your family is more important. Kids grow up fast though, so don't blink - you don't want to miss a thing. Best skill is to manage your work time well and set boundaries. Working overtime is a sign of not having the right structures in place, and being disciplined about those boundaries is a force multiplier - it'll force you to be rigorous about what's valuable. You can make up for the lack of discipline by working overtime to an extent, but it's less effective.
    • giantg2 5y ago
      That sounds good, but my company measure your readiness for promotion by your dedication, and uses extra hours worked as a proxy for that.
      • xtracto 5y ago
        My 2c (im 40. Been IC dev for 10 years, CTO, VP, and now an 'aerchitect'): [Your current company] doesn't matter. Your family matters 10000 times more. Dont expect to grow in your company. As a 30 year old there are TONS of companies and startups looking for you. In fact now that you dont need a job is a good time to comb the market and apply to a couple of them. That way you get some experience in the current hiring process, you tune your "value" as a professional and you can ask for crazy money (knowing that if you ask for 2X your current salary plus WFH, if a company gives it to you, you score, otherwise you are cool on your job). My 30 to 40s were amazing professional years. I was in 3 startups and grew 2 of them from the ground up. That also helped me grow myself to where I'm now.
        • giantg2 5y ago
          Yeah, but I need the money to support my family and there aren't many options in my region. I did apply to one, but never heard back. It was about 2x salary. It even seemed interesting - Android dev for a medical device startup. I guess my Android skills weren't advanced enough (I just have a couple very simple apps).
  • kilroy123 5y ago
    I'm in the latter half of my 30s and I too feel old. Especially, when I talk about being in tech in the last 2000s. I sound like an old gray beard.
• robertlagrant 5y ago
  > If my generation hadn't made tech such a toxic work environment by ensuring that people had little or no recourse when treated unfairly by employers, I'd be tempted to feel sorry for us. Instead, all I can say is, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." This feels like a category error.
• jmfldn 5y ago
  I feel like this comes up a lot and it's something I think / worry about as a developer at the 'old' age of 40. I posted this comment below on a similar thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734 Essentially I think this is hopefully a temporary effect of the doubling of programmers every five years for the past twenty plus years. I expect this to level out and thus shift the ratio in favour of older developers.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
    I'm not so confident that's true. There's seemingly this prevailing attitude in IT that new is always better. The latest gadgets, the latest complicated tech stacks, and the latest languages. Rewrite everything again so it's all fresh and free of 'legacy cruft'. Don't fix bugs, prioritize slapping a new "modern" GUI on it so people don't think it's old. Why wouldn't that same mentality apply to people?
    • comeonseriously 5y ago
      > There's seemingly this prevailing attitude in IT that new is always better. See this all the time on HN. Something hasn't had a PR in 2 months, must be dead! That uses React, why not switch to Vue!? Blah, blah.
    • jmfldn 5y ago
      True, but it might not be a zero-sum argument. I think the point I'm making might not explain ageism in it's entirity but I feel it's a factor. Time will tell I guess.
    • cbm-vic-20 5y ago
      Even here on HN we see plenty of articles that are "Like X, but written in Go!", which seems to have been replaced with "Like X, but written in Rust!".
  • runnr_az 5y ago
    Yeah… I mean. I’m in my mid-40s and I feel like I’ve got a lot of productive / happy peers. Numbers-wise, sure, there are Devs older than me, but in raw numbers, not that many.
• PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > which made [Baltes2020] a particularly interesting read. Its subtitle is, "How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers," and the first blow is what the tech press considers old Do we have any better sources than a small survey of tech press articles? I always feel like ageism in tech articles are borderline clickbait: They aim to induce outrage by implying that ageism is rampant in the tech industry but the best we can do for evidence is a few anecdotes and, in this case, a survey of other tech press articles. Ageism is a thing in the software industry. However, every company I’ve worked for that has had an ageism problem has, not coincidentally, been a terrible place to work with long hours, unreasonable demands, and bad management. Ageism is the perfect tool to select for hires who are too inexperienced to recognize that the situation is bad. Most of the good companies I’ve worked for have had a broad distribution of ages. Again, not by coincidence, but because experienced developers settle in to roles at companies that are reasonable and treat people well.
• freetinker 5y ago
  Not a fan of the way the author has framed this. The title reads as if it’s condoning that such discrimination is acceptable or understandable if age 60+.
  • another-dave 5y ago
    I read it more than ageism towards 60+ is a well documented problen
    • freetinker 5y ago
      Yeah, fair. But framing it that way further entrenches the problem, imo.
• underdeserver 5y ago
  What is the Python set module he's talking about?
  • dagw 5y ago
    https://docs.python.org/3.9/library/stdtypes.html#set https://docs.python.org/3.9/library/stdtypes.html#set
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • xolox 5y ago
    I think he's referring to the datatype (class) and associated operations (so not a literal Python module that you import, which may be where your confusing is coming from).
    • dagw 5y ago
      so not a literal Python module that you import That's new in Python 3 (or maybe 2.7). When sets where first added to Python it was a module you imported. That's a another downside of being an old programmer. Changes that happened 'very recently' also happened before many of your colleagues started programming :)
• mindvirus 5y ago
  I don't doubt this, and I'm truly sympathetic to the author's experience. However it doesn't match my experiences. At this age I find I'm getting better and better job offers. Too senior has never been a problem, these offers have been at principal or senior staff levels. I don't think I've been managing my career particularly well (15 years in and 5 jobs), and I've avoided management as best I can, but it doesn't seem to be slowing down. Looking at my peers, there are plenty of people 10+ years older than me in IC positions. I'm curious what the difference is. Is it 40 and only one job? Industry or programming language focus? Location?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    Why is one job a problem, as long as that job keeps you up-to-date with the current state of the art?
    • dagw 5y ago
      as long as that job keeps you up-to-date with the current state of the art? That is of course the crux. If you're the person that knows how the old stuff works (because you where there when it was the new hotness), you risk being responsible for the old stuff, while the new guy they just hired gets to work on the greenfield Rust project they just started. Had a friend of the family who spent his entire career at a Fortune 500 company. Started programming their back office mainframe systems in the 80s and spent the rest of his career working on those same systems. He knew those systems back to front and was revered as the local mainframe guru. 2002 he lost his job when the company decided to retire that old system and move on to something else. He could not get hired anywhere and ended up having to take a job a petrol station for while.
    • m0llusk 5y ago
      But what is state of the art? My interviews since 2013 have let me know that Perl is not any good as a language. Perl is bad and programmers who use Perl are bad. If I describe my experience in the industry from 1993 to 2003 which involved lots of Perl in the abstract then it often sounds good in interviews, but if I describe that experience as having been steeped in Perl then it is a huge, useless turn off. The problem is that the state of the art in programming is whatever is shiny and new and often unnecessary. Lots of employers are hiring for Kubernetes experience when they absolutely do not have enough demand for their services to justify messing around with Kubernetes, but it doesn't matter. They also don't have the patience and depth to bother listening to some old person explain in detail why Kubernetes is the wrong tool for them and a waste of resources. Corporate programming has become all about idols and mystery such that Perl has been cast out and Kubernetes is pure awesome no matter how irrelevant. As long as some old person can suck up to confused young people about what counts as cool code and frameworks then they might count as up to date with the current state of the art. And with this the unfortunate reality emerges that for older and experienced contributors starting a company is becoming as easy or easier than actually getting a job.
• myspy 5y ago
  Employees need to tell employers to f** off with all the overtime, extra work, working on weekends, etc. The video game industry is loosing its creative people for years, the film industry is milking their 3d artists dry, and the normal software companies have unrealistic expectations how long someone should work. On top of that we have weak seniority ranks. Products and tools are not developed as good as they could be. Topics like security still show that honing products and skills are needed, but this is not happening when we don't build a layer of experts that still want to program and dig into these problems. Excellence comes with experience and that is only developing over time with making the mistakes and fixing them.
• MontyCarloHall 5y ago
  I wonder how much ageism is due to the fact that basic coding skills can really atrophy in senior developers who quit writing code years ago and are full-time architects/managers. I’ve interviewed more than a handful of highly accomplished people with decades of experience as developers and then engineering managers who couldn’t answer extremely basic coding questions (I’m not talking about Leetcode-esque BS, I mean stuff closer to FizzBuzz). Places that are looking to hire senior developers who are actually still proficient coders will of course pass on those people, which can lead to a self-perpetuating cycle of ageism. I have no doubt that when these people were actually still coding, they could have answered my questions in their sleep. Quitting coding for engineering management really does one a disservice IMO. I’ve also had the pleasure of working with people with decades of experience who never quit coding even as senior managers and their level of competence and productivity is astounding.
  • jollybean 5y ago
    The 'I can't code architects' is definitely a common thing, but I suggest it's kind of a different problem. But for dudes that are coding though, it's cool to see how 'I have solved this problem 100 times already' comes through in solving a problem sometimes.
  • robin_reala 5y ago
    Charity Majors wrote a couple of blog posts on the subject that I’ve tried to bring in to my workplace with varying levels of success. But still I’ve had colleagues express surprise that as an engineering manager I still wanted to get my hands dirty with the code of the systems I own. https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum/ https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum... https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pendulum-or-the-ladder/ https://charity.wtf/2019/01/04/engineering-management-the-pe...
    • secondcoming 5y ago
      Do EM's own systems? Or do they own the teams that own the systems? It's a pretty vague role. We had an EM for about a year, but when he left we didn't replace him. Nothing much changed.
• keyle 5y ago
  I went to a few interviews during covid. The only companies hiring during lockdowns were startups. I went to 6 interviews. Every time, I was the oldest at the table, sometimes by 10 years. The music always went the same... "We need experience, you have a lot of it", 2 weeks later "You don't know React like we do". Best one was "you didn't use an env variable here in the front end". I've been building the web since 1999. I'm 40. I got a job in a large company, much better pay, WFH most days, predictable timelines.
• stefanve 5y ago
  Yeah this sounds familiar. A manager at a company I worked for didn't want to hire a 45+ SE because she might be looking for a job to hibernate till pension. she was highly qualified and a great SE/person. (after some discussion she was hired and everyone was happy)
• sodapopcan 5y ago
  Hey, I’m 40! And I’ve personally seen very little of this in my little bubble. I’m usually applying for rails jobs which, in these terms, is an “old person’s framework” at this point. While being proficient in what would be considered an “old person’s framework” under the terms of this article has actually made things quite easy in my case (there are _tons_ of rails positions out there) I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to be expected to learn at least _some_ of those durned new technologies that keep popping up—-I feel like we should have known that’s what we signed up for when getting into this industry. Of course, I’m well aware I’m speaking purely im the context of a web app developer.
• fsloth 5y ago
  What a weird concept. I am 41 and feel I am constantly learning new stuff and better ways to do things. I am working in a fairly deep field though (CAD). I presume the ageism present in a position depends on how much deep expertise is required in said position. OTOH I've been at my current employer for a decade so have no understanding of my actual market position within relevant market.
• lordnacho 5y ago
  I sympathize, but I'm also starting to think there's a fountain of jobs that some devs have discovered and others haven't. There seem to be two camps of devs, one them is constantly harassed by recruiters and swimming in potential jobs, the other hardly ever comes across a job they'd want.
  • simias 5y ago
    >one them is constantly harassed by recruiters and swimming in potential jobs, the other hardly ever comes across a job they'd want. Both can be true at the same time, and in my experience often are.
  • Igelau 5y ago
    You have a notification from LinkedIn: (Cute blonde recruiter / bearded hipster recruiter) with another opportunity to (get crucified at Amazon / work in the shady industry of sports betting / feed the cancer that we call IoT / drop fire on people in the name of defending America)
• yanis_t 5y ago
  We all know that good developers retire in 35 to live the life of their dreams. If you're still in the field after 35, maybe you're not so good after all.
• joezydeco 5y ago
  "while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech." Is the experience generic (e.g. I'm a Python guru and Guido knows me on a first-name basis), or specific (e.g. I've spent 25 years writing Python and web interfaces for high speed factory sorting machines)? The latter makes you highly employable. The former means you're just going to be an expensive pain in the ass.
• secondcoming 5y ago
  When I turned 40, ageism in software definitely became something worth worrying about. Save your money while the times are good.
• jollybean 5y ago
  With startups writing software that is more akin to 'whipping together code which integrates components where the API's change every 4 months' ... I can understand the need for dynamic, youthful energy. But doing anything else more historically understood as 'normal software' requires experience. I consider anyone with < 2 years experience as an 'apprentice', who, without guidance will probably only cause damage. After 5 years, you have someone who can competently do something in a specific area, but may not be particularly well rounded. Looking back at my own career, writing embedded C++ fresh out of school, I can barely believe they let me do it. I don't think I would have hired me. I'm grateful. There's enough thinking and experience required for most kinds of software the that the intense dynamism is probably overplayed. What you want is a team that consistently moves the ball forward, day by day, i.e. it's a marathon not a sprint. It strains me to understand how Senior Devs would be undervalued on this context. I can see 22 year old founders having no intuition for this, but beyond that it's odd. My biggest worry with older Engineers would be that they'd be too expensive.
• FrankyHollywood 5y ago
  I'm in my 40s, and I build software at a scale-up. They explicitly searched more mature developers, because of several failed projects with large over spending the past years. Management had enough of it, and now wants a more experienced dev team. And it works quit well I must say, code quality is very high and we make our deadlines. Our product is stable and atmosphere in the office is great actually. Not much stress here, because we don't spend months building some never to be used generic-multipurpose-framework and we don't jump into every new technology which comes around.. Not hiring experienced developers is a big mistake! :)
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    I work in a senior-only consulting S-Corp (most devs hold equity). I'm 43 and everyone is nearly 10 years older than me. No one has ever been laid off, companies fired FTEs and kept all our guys during covid panic, and every one of our clients will take everyone from our group that they can afford or we will let them have (the consultants get to choose clients). The amount of money they happily pay for us is crazy. We work along FTEs in all these companies for years who make a fraction of what we do. Companies take a diverse approach, stringing along FTEs under the auspices of being a special FTE with a career ahead of them at the company, and they hire a drove of contractors (permenantly) that cost twice as much and who are already wise to the FTE/career half-truth. We get paid for every hour worked and are restricted to 40hours...at twice the rate of an FTE.
    • emerged 5y ago
      How would a high performing 40 year old software developer find a company like this?
      • FrankyHollywood 5y ago
        Search for a specialized software company helps. Don't go for the standard web bureau building webshops. I used to work in finance, with complicated calculation software, and at the moment I work at a bio-informatics scale-up. Very interesting field, and no average developers here.
• kiklion 5y ago
  I’m only 33 but I had 0 difficulty in finding employment, even a few months into Covid. However I’m also a ‘senior developer’ already, so there isn’t much room title wise to go in 7 years that isn’t management. But that’s also kind of expected. As a senior developer, I can code faster and better than our junior devs but more importantly I can teach them to be better by reviewing their code. As I get older I am spending less time coding myself and more time reviewing others code. A 40 year old developer is going to be telling stories of their first gig going through code printed out on paper reviewing it for a y2k bug… when I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of this years college graduates never heard of y2k.
  • aetherson 5y ago
    Do you local companies not have a staff/principal set of titles? They were once uncommon, but now I feel like most companies provide at least two or three levels beyond senior.
• biddit 5y ago
  My anecdotal experience: I'm ~40 with ~15 years of dev experience and 4 of management experience. I last year I decided to return to IC dev work and started applying for full-stack dev roles. After two months and not getting few responses to applications, I put my resume in front of my tech recruiter friend: "You sound ancient. Delete the first 10 years of your work history and take the date off your CS degree." Whaaaat? I was incredulous at first, but eventually did as he said. It would seem he was right though. I started getting significantly more responses to applications and inquiries from recruiters on LinkedIn.
  • cbm-vic-20 5y ago
    Of course, taking the date of the CS degree is now a signal you're "old".
    • biddit 5y ago
      Haha, after having the same train of thought, I debated just taking the degree off entirely...
      • dagmx 5y ago
        I'm about ten years younger and I already start stripping my education off my resume. It's superfluous. Honestly, when I'm interviewing candidates, the only time I'm interested in their education section is: - when they are fairly green (interns, juniors) because they don't have much experience yet - when they keep bringing up "I did this in college" and I need to see how long ago that was to frame the rest of my questions Anyone with a few years and an accomplished resume should strip their education out unless it's meaningful in some way.
• SkipperCat 5y ago
  40 is not the new 60. Not even close. At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done and my pay has been better than ever. I'm 52 now and the trend has only gotten better. Why? Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech, I understood of the whole business process and I had the maturity to deal with people in a productive way. You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer. The only way that age becomes a detriment is if you do not grow. I worked with someone my age who only strong skills are a large enterprise storage system. He is a dinosaur and his future is limited. That's not his age, its the way he chose to build is CV. I focused on learning new tech; Python, Go, Kubernetes, Cloud, etc. I've also spend a lot of time learning the business aspects of my industry and I've learned to be less of a jerk to people and how to communicate. At 52, I have recruiters contact me all the time. Age is just number guys. Stay current, keep learning and stay strong.
  • AdrianB1 5y ago
    There are many companies that don't want to hire people over 40. I applied to the same company with 2 identical profiles, in one I gave my real age and in one 10 years less, I got invited to an interview on one profile and rejected immediately on the other. Even my company rejects experienced hires if the job description is not specifically mandating senior-level experience. I just hired one such person that is a bit over 50 years old, I had to fight HR on this.
  • chrisseaton 5y ago
    > You won't find all of those in a 25 year old developer. What makes you think that? It's absolutely possible for a 25-year-old to be a more experienced, more technically competent, and more mature than a 40-year-old. Some 40-year-olds have 20x 1 year of experience, compared to some 25-year-old's 5 years of experience. If you think you're inherently better as a 40-year-old developer than all 25-year-old developers then I think you're deeply mistaken.
    • Veen 5y ago
      > It's absolutely possible for a 25-year-old to be a more experienced, more technically competent, and more mature than a 40-year-old. It's also absolutely possible for a pig in a jetpack to fly past your window. Many unusual things are possible, but that doesn't make them any less unusual. In the vast majority of cases, older developers will have more experience and be more mature than younger developers.
• fer 5y ago
  Obligatory quote: >Do not send me email like this: >>Hi Guido, >>I came across your resume in a Google web search. You seem to have an awesome expertise on Python. I would be glad if you can reply my email and let me know your interest and availability. Our client immediately needs a PYTHON Developers at its location in ***, NJ. Below are the job details. If interested and available, kindly fwd me your updated resume along with the expected rate and the availability. >I might reply like this: >>I'm not interested and not available. Guido van Rossum 2013-09-18T20:32:32.876Z He was well over 50 at the time.
  • Igelau 5y ago
    I'd think that just once it would be fun to troll those people. "So tell me about the kind of work you've done with Python..."
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Don't even get me started (just take a shufti through my posting history on this very site. You'll see this is a subject that has my attention). > while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech. Yup. The Jurassic-scale disasters that are becoming increasingly common, these days, are evidence of unsteady hands at the wheel. I'm not saying that older folks are better. In many cases, we can be overconservative and overcautious, but that isn't such a bad thing, when the stakes for a blowout are so high. I have always felt that tech needs to follow the same model as every other damn industry since the start of history, which is to have experience work with youth. They balance each other out. I feel that when one of them gets too much power, Bad Things Happen. In my case, I was finally laid off, after a 27-year run at one of the world's marquee imaging companies (which I think was overbalanced by experience). I started looking around for more work, as I wasn't really up for retirement (which I was quite capable of doing). I was absolutely shocked at how shabbily I was treated, and fairly quickly gave up the search. I find it offensive, that companies are so self-destructive; especially smaller companies, where a top-shelf employee could "make or break" the company. I have a fairly unique confluence of skills that would have made a startup very happy (I've been ARCHITECTING and SHIPPING software, since my very first engineering project, in 1987. I am quite used to production engineering. I've been doing it my entire adult life. I've heard that could be useful, to some companies). I was also quite willing to work for a lot less money than most, as my retirement was set, and I was looking for work that interested me. Instead, I was rather quickly told -in no uncertain terms- "Go away, old man. No one wants you." I took the hint, and found some non-profit folks that were doing work I find interesting, and started working with them, for free. They are quite happy with my work.
  • Icathian 5y ago
    You post this all the time. You did 27 years at one single company, as you point out so proudly and often. After a stint like that, anyone would be unhireable. It isn't your age, as so many others on this chain have pointed out. You didn't build your CV to be attractive to new employers at all, and when eventually that became relevant again, you were out of luck. I read your posts whenever I see them, it's obvious you're quite bright. I really don't understand how you don't see this.
• stayfrosty420 5y ago
  This stereotype felt a lot more relvant when cloud tech was still in its infancy. After having worked with 20 somethings for 5+ years and moving into a job where everyone is 30+ I can safely say that this article is nonsense. Sure some older devs get stuck in their ways but the ones that are keeping up to date on new tech are incredibly valuable to have around
• lifeisstillgood 5y ago
  I still bang on about software as a form of literacy - and although we still like (cheap, pliable) young gun authors, we need old grumpy editors. Although I do agree about workplace "environment" - the sooner being in a union is like having https, the better. It would have to look a bit like: https://www.tuc.org.uk/unions/nuj https://www.tuc.org.uk/unions/nuj
• WriterGuy2021 5y ago
  I've seen a few people fall off the career ladder to their doom in different fields. I once was a member of a local hackerspace and the place was like the Island of Misfit Toys. So many interesting and talented people biding there time there in between jobs and struggling to get back on the ladder. Lots of horror stories -- a homeless mechanical engineer, a couch surfing old programmer, etc. I think most of us are quite insulated from what really goes on around us, and the people that fall down hard often aren't heard from ever again. As Bukowski wrote: "... our educational system tells us that we can all be big-ass winners. it hasn't told us about the gutters or the suicides. or the terror of one person aching in one place alone untouched unspoken to watering a plant."
  • adnmcq999 5y ago
    I’m basically one of those people. I appreciate the post because it’s good to at least acknowledge this.
  • WastingMyTime89 5y ago
    I don't know. At some point, it's also a question of perception and attitude. Falling off the career ladder is in itself a strange idea. As I get older, it seems to me that the concept has little actual reality. Few people have linear career nowadays. At some point, things tend to take a turn for the unexpected. It can be failing to reach the position you were aiming for or suddenly finding yourself unemployed. It can also be becoming in charge of something you weren't expecting and finding you like that more than you thought. You have to find an equilibrium between playing the card you are given and stiring your life in the direction you want. It's not always easy but you can find interesting things to do from many positions. I can't stop thinking that to you they were horror stories but that might not entierely be the case from their point of view: hanging out at an hacker space, meeting people, working on new things, that's not the worst place to be if you want to rebound.
    • WriterGuy2021 5y ago
      Here's a concrete example. There was a guy that had a PhD and worked for big pharma as a researcher all his life. The company he was working for downsized and he was left unemployed at 54. He looked for another position somewhere else, but he could not find a position at his pervious level of seniority: he had fallen off the career ladder. He was thus stuck in a strange limbo: he was capable of doing things below his level of experience, but companies were looking for someone at the right level of the progression system to fit the slot. The worst thing about this case is that his wife had multiple sclerosis, and so his health insurance was of the utmost importance to him. This caused him incredible stress as he continued to look for work to no avail. The problem with the modern workplace is specialization. Some people are extraordinarily specialized. The man I spoke of was highly talented, but also highly specialized. It's hard for someone to adapt at 54 to another specialization. I actually helped him pick up python, and he learned quickly, but it was clear that the man was not in his spry years. Any college kid could beat him in productivity in some code monkey role -- which is what he eventually started trying to hunt for. I could also tell you about a guy that had a masters degree in chemical engineering working at Best Buy alongside me when I was in college. I've met so many people in my life that have not been privy to the dynamically lateral career system you seem to be aware of. I know from direct experience that some people do indeed fall off the ladder. To me it isn't a concept: it's the reality I've observed.
• zz865 5y ago
  I'm pushing 50 and its definitely harder to even get interviews compared to 30. As much as I dont like ageism, I get it because lots of the stuff I did 20-30 years ago is irrelevant. Coding now is completely different and I have to learn so much to keep up with industry trends I realistically have 5-10 years experience. Of course on the client relationship and project management side I have a lot of tricks that I think are valuable.
• h2odragon 5y ago
  You can hide your age online for a while, but when the kiddies find out you're an old fart they suddenly begin telling you how you think and feel about things, and will not listen if you attempt to correct them. The "Old dude" image in their head is so strong it blocks out the reality. Its not just tech that has this problem; the rest of the world is getting there. I've seen hardware stores firing older people that know how to use what they sell; in exchange for young employees who'll work 4hr shifts at short notice.
• elevenoh 5y ago
  With the anti senescence race kicking off, it could be in 10-20 yrs.
• bsenftner 5y ago
  The tech industry wants young developers because they don't know all the employment exploitation tricks the older developers are too wise to fall for. Plus, the management class has no idea what we really do; we're just warm bodies to be worked hard and put down when no longer profitable. It is literally as simple as that.
  • sul_tasto 5y ago
    Does that mean the best move is to eventually become a manager?
    • bsenftner 5y ago
      Of course, to each with their talents, but entrepreneurialism looks to be the better strategy. Short of that, many technologists, including myself, could use enhanced communications at both personal and public speaking levels. Many a successful manager appears to have communication skills as their keystones.
• durnygbur 5y ago
  Late 30's here with an experience in half dozen countries in EU... being interviewed by directors and architects with maybe few years of total experience in one, rarely two countries is just awkward. Perhaps the problem is companies naively give away top roles to those cunning with best selling skills? To those sticking around the longest? I really don't care - call me programmer but pay me well and treat me even better.
• sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  What I'm sure about is that competence is a timeless asset. If you have mastery in the computing universal concepts the tech stack is a detail.
• nbzso 5y ago
  I am 47. Contemplating to close my office and go to work full-time as a design->frontend person for big corporation. Ageism is real, but I see it as a use-case experience. If a company cannot utilize my professional experience as ex owner of business, PM or design specialist in general, it means that they prioritize "cultural fit" criteria over real performance evaluation. This is not a problem for me. I don't have expectations every business to be "mature enough" to know the value of effective professional work over "power of the young mind". The idea that after "40" you are having "cognitive difficulties" or you are "out of fashion" comes from companies who exploit trough "overtime" or extreme performance prerequisite. Working in this kind of environments is a suicide. Burnout is real and avoiding it is the only effective countermeasure.
• nickdothutton 5y ago
  The greatest software engineer I ever hired was 60 and I kept him from retirement for 5 years before finally having to let him go when his wife became ill and needed his help more. The guy never under-delivered in 20 years. No drama, no exaggeration, no personality quirks, just experience and solid delivery.
• thiago_fm 5y ago
  This is a very American centrist point of view. In Europe everywhere I worked there were a bunch of 40+ year olds writing code, it's just yet another profession. No big deal. I've found even a good amount of people at that age that were career switching(to development) and haven't had big issues entering the job market. But of course, you have to be flexible. Move elsewhere, or where the jobs are. Your white hair doesn't matter as much as your attitude. If you feel entitled for good job positions just for the fact you wrote a library, I don't believe this can be positive. It isn't about your age. How long have you been looking for a job? Which city? Are you easy going? I've moved to another country and city for a better job market and I'm willing to do over and over again. Can't make big commitments to where I live, me and my wife move, find new jobs and learn new languages and culture, that's just life. We can't buy a property and never feel at home really, but it isn't a hard life, to be honest. Of course, we don't ever expect to make these american salaries, but we do have jobs. In America, it makes me think that a lot of management and business typey people who make decisions about hiring are very individualist folks that believe that one great person that works like a slave is better than a few average well-lived people, which is completely wrong.
  • atemerev 5y ago
    "it's just yet another profession. No big deal". Exactly, in Europe software engineering is just another profession, with pretty average compensation. Which is not exactly motivating.
    • kristaps 5y ago
      I'm from EU, finance and IT are neck to neck for highest paid professions. Absoute pay numbers are lower than US, but under no circumstances could they be called average.
      • atemerev 5y ago
        Finance is usually much higher paid (unless you work at US companies, e.g. European offices of Google or Facebook). It's not "average average", like the salary of a truck driver or a researcher in the academia, but still nothing to write home about. Regular engineers or senior people in the trades (e.g. HVAC installers) often earn comparable salaries.
• hoolahoopty 5y ago
  When you see a 50 year old developer, it's possible that he's amazing, and it's possible that he's an old putz, banking on his authoritativeness instead of actual work. You need to tell the difference. One way to tell the difference, is that a great developer who spent 20 years in the industry will have lots of contacts. There are probably a line of people who'd like to hire him the moment he'll quit his current job. This also correlates with how pleasant he is to work with. If you're getting a resume of a 50 year old that you don't know, it's already substantial evidence that he's not that great.
• joelbluminator 5y ago
  I think the concept of "too senior" exists. E.g I would imagine Linus wouldn't thrive on some boring driver maintenance job or full stack developer somewhere if he ever applied. Of course it doesn't say there is no ageism, but it could be that this specific case was indeed too senior for certain roles.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• austincheney 5y ago
  My professional experience has taught me two opposite things on this subject. 1) Toys. If you want to be employable you have to learn to play with all the trendy toys. You need to demonstrate the ability to build a tech stack with these toys and solve some problem. Beyond that old people skills are largely irrelevant. By old people skills I mean the ability to communicate with precision in writing and a mastery of skills (not toys). Nobody cares if you can solve business problems using code. Toys are the new inverted binary tree. 2) When things go bad and layoffs come around the only things that matter are old people skills and critical needs positions. Prior performance won’t save you and neither will titles or seniority. If you are solid with the cool kid toys but never really mastered your craft you aren’t worth retaining under a shrinking budget because they know they can easily replace you when the economy/business recovers.
• iros 5y ago
  The thing is, senior programmers really aren't always that useful. We want leadership, we want big meaty projects and problems, we know so much and can do so much... Except that sometimes what needs doing is boring. It's grunt work. It's some infrastructure migration or a real simple API addition. A lot of coding is actually not that hard depending on where you are. That work we consider grunt work is a great way for a junior engineer to learn and they don't complain as much as we would. I've worked with a lot of other senior folks and (like myself) and we have entire abandoned features because no one wants to own them. It's a gift when someone junior shows up and jumps in.
• marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I just got a new job in my 50's. Everyone assumed I was a senior, despite me telling them "I don't have experience in the technologies you're using, so I'm probably not a senior in your organisation despite my decades of experience in the industry". Only one organisation actually listened to that and recruited me at the right level. The rest (that interviewed me) tended to recruit me at a senior level and then fail me for not knowing the technology well enough. Which got annoying. Apart from that, I found the experience remarkably straightforward. But then, I haven't seen a tech recruitment market this hot since Y2K (in Berlin at least). It's a good time to switch jobs.
• gedy 5y ago
  (I'm late 40s) I think the simplest explanation is if you look and act "old", people are less excited to be around you and you have a harder time getting or passing interviews. Out of shape, unkempt, or unpersonable older folks have a lot of bias to overcome. I've seen the reactions myself as I've been one or more of these at times. It's not fair, but it's like dating and complaining women/men don't look at what a nice person you are, etc.
• marban 5y ago
  Keep your body in shape and 60 will definitely be the new 40.
• mberning 5y ago
  I’m sure many people dungeon grinding the tech industry feel completely used up and ready for retirement or a career change by 40. As I get older I certainly understand the sentiment more each day.
• allochthon 5y ago
  I can relate. When I lived in the Bay area, I started getting nervous in my late 30s that it would become harder and harder to find my next job in software development. I've since discovered that this seems to be a regional thing. I have not had trouble finding remote work in other parts of the US. Now that I'm 45, I still don't worry too much, because I'm seeing businesses with a good mix of people, including a lot of people in my age group.
• Dumblydorr 5y ago
  It's also hard at 22 to get a good job. You fight for entry level wage work, no benefits, no options, vested to 3 years or 5 years. You have to fight hard at any age, though humans will obviously implicitly favor those of their own age and background, if given a choice.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  Yep, better keep those legacy Java, C and C++ skills up to date, regardless of the opinion on them. They might come handy.
• alisonkisk 5y ago
  Note: OP is 57 years old, despite the title and content that suggests he is 40.
• Overtimegoal 5y ago
  62 here. Just got hired into principal role at public software company doing Vue & c#. First month has been lots of hands on... Just like I like it.
• bjarneh 5y ago
  People who only hire young developers - don't know what they are doing. Experience is very valuable in this field. Choosing the wrong techology in the early stages of a project can be a huge mistake. You may not even notice what a mistake it was until years have gone by, and you'll be completely entrenched in it; with a painful backtracking ahead.
• darkerside 5y ago
  Is snarkiness the new toxicity? For all people complain today about the toxic cultures of old, maybe they say least had the advantage of people saying what they thought in plain terms, instead of dressing over them with sarcasm and hiding them in vagueness. In a more relevant vein, I wonder how often too senior means too opinionated.
• EToS 5y ago
  Being 40 shouldn't be an issue, however there are a few things to keep asking yourself to stay relevant on the way: -- What is your goal? If you don't know where you're going, the chances are your career trajectory could be plateauing, or even going backwards. -- Are you progressing? Pick a metric aligned with your goal and then measure yourself against it (e.g what you can measure, you can manage). Whether its specializing technically or moving vertically into management, its really important to keep moving in that direction, and to ensure that you are "compounding" your skills and successes along the way. -- Are your skills transferable? At all costs, ensure your skills are transferable. This will give you endless options and freedom to take breaks and move companies at will. NEVER allow yourself be the highly paid person on an obsolete project/system, not even for a year.
• gjvc 5y ago
  This willingness to ignore the experience of older computerists is a symptom of the wider problem that Alan Kay has referred to when he says that computing is a "pop culture" -- one that ignores much of the historic work gone before it, and only gives value to that in recent / living memory. On the other hand, few (younger) people have got the sensibility/ability to befriend an older person in the workplace and learn from their experience. I have, and it's been valuable in getting the perspective. If you're lucky, you too will get old in life, and be subject to the ills that you now see around you perpetrated on older people.
• gwbas1c 5y ago
  TLDR: I'm a 40-year-old developer. It took me a little longer to find a job at 40 than 30 because I demand a higher salary, and most companies prefer cheap over experienced. There are a lot of mediocre developers who I suspect "age out" of tech because they can't grow into industry expectations of a highly-experienced software developer. --- I searched for a developer job just before I turned 30, stayed with it for 10 years, and then searched for another when I turned 40. My experience of ageism is that most companies hiring just don't have the budget to hire an experienced software developer. They'd rather hire a few more cheap (and inexperienced) developers than hire a few highly experienced, and expensive, software developers. To me, this translated in a longer job search. Not unreasonably longer, as it took me about a month to find a job when I was almost 30, and three months right before I turned 40. (Worth noting, when I was 30 I lived in Silicon Valley, and it's much easier to find a developer job there compared to where I live now.) But, I do want to point out something that most articles of ageism don't point out: Expectations of a 40+ year old developer are quite different compared to a 20-30 year old developer. The kind of handholding that a junior developer has, and mentorship that a junior developer has, is gone. It's also much harder to change stacks than when I was a junior developer, because no one wants to pay me big bucks to learn like a novice. Thus, it's hard to change stacks. (Not impossible, but I really like the job I have now.) Another thing to point out: There are a lot of mediocre developers who get very comfortable with handholding in the early part of their career. I suspect these are the developers who really struggle in their 40s, because they can't meet the expectations of a senior developer.
• stripline 5y ago
  I don't think this is due to a perception of older developers not being as good as younger developers. I think most people would agree that a more experienced dev would have better skills and be more efficient. I believe it all comes down to pay. The experienced developer commands a higher salary than a 20 year old, rightfully so. But employers fail to see the added value they bring, just as they have trouble identifying the 10x programmers out there.
• torginus 5y ago
  This is weird considering that modern wisdom states that practical milestones tend to shift to later points in one's lifetime, not earlier - there are many reasons for this, like more people attending college, wages not keeping up with housing prices, etc., as well as the general perception that it's OK to have kids later in life.
• mikelevins 5y ago
  There are gobs of anecdotes from experienced tech workers about employers discriminating against older folks. I Googled around looking for more rigorous data, and found that there seem to be a decent number of studies of various kinds that detect ageism in the tech job market. One report (https://www.visier.com/clarity/four-common-tech-ageism-myths-debunked/ https://www.visier.com/clarity/four-common-tech-ageism-myths...) says it debunks four myths about ageism in the tech job market, but even that one affirms that hiring practices in the tech sector discriminate unwisely against older workers. So I guess we can tentatively conclude that, yeah, there's probably some ageism in the tech job market, and it will probably tend to affect most tech workers as they age. My own experience tends to agree. I was in high demand through my thirties. That demand began to dry up in my forties. I'm 61 now. I remain happliy employed as a consultant, but the people who employ me have shifted over time from mostly strangers to mostly people who already know me, or who know someone who has employed me before. To put it another way, as I've aged, my employers are less and less likely to be strangers who hired me in a typical tech-industry hiring process, and more and more likely to be someone who has seen my work before, or who knows someone who has. Maybe that suggests a workable strategy: take care to cultivate lasting constructive working relationships as you go. Look for people you work with well, and consciously choose to work with them, and to maintain friendly relations after each of you has moved on. Those relationships may become increasingly important to your work, especially if you begin to experience the ageism that many are reporting.
• kangax 5y ago
  In my experience, it depends on the company. At Facebook, 90% of my peers were younger than me (I was 30). At LinkedIn, right now, many of my peers are around the same age or older than me (I'm 35). I imagine in places like Microsoft or Oracle there are plenty of 40/50+ engineers who aren't worried about being kicked out.
• genepope 5y ago
  Having lived in the tech software world from the late 1970s through 2012 I can say that age discrimination has always been a part of the software world but it is survivable. See other comments in this thread. I remember chats with my older co-workers about where are all the older programmers? I think part is discrimination but another part is that people burn out and go do something else. I have seen this in even the very best programmers I have worked with. By the way, this is not new to software. A common practice in the aerospace industry was to bid low for a contract and when you got it fire all the old guys and replace them with cheaper young guys.
• comeonseriously 5y ago
  Agism isn't about cognitive ability. Agism isn't about younger developers somehow being better than older ones. Agism is about taking advantage of younger workers. Agism is about discrimination. Agism is about money.
• Tarucho 5y ago
  The author case is somewhat special because he is more accomplished that the average senior dev. But in the general case the problem occurs because software development is seen by those in power as factory/production work. For most companies we are expensive factory workers. And factory workers rarely get hired past 35 and rarely survive past that age unless there is an union involved. My experience is in an offshore market in South America. I guess in other countries the situation is different.
• twirlock 5y ago
  It's because they know you won't be as gullible. It's that simple.
• dcchambers 5y ago
  Personal anecdote: I'm 29, and while I've spent most of my 20s striving to look older (via style, haircut, facial hair, etc)...something flipped this year and I can't help but want to look younger. Could be because my first kid was born this year, could be because I'm approaching that mythical "30" so many young folks dread, or it could be unspoken age-related pressures about the industry we work in. I'm not sure, but it's funny how obvious and suddenly it happened.
• wonderwonder 5y ago
  I think its important to look younger / in shape on a zoom call these days. Noticed I have gained a little weight and my face is looking tired in a few recent zoom calls (I am on zoom everyday now). Zoom is just your face right there taking up the screen and with so much of hiring done via the web now it takes on more importance. Going to start working out again this weekend, and see if I can get that youthful employable look back. In person interviews make it easier to minimize this, zoom makes it a necessity.
• SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
  As someone who started their career in their 30's and who works in an area of the world were 6 figures requires a fair bit of seniority I really hope not.
• taffronaut 5y ago
  > while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music That's a very rosy view of a cutthroat industry. The only exceptions I can think of are well-established stars with a back catalogue of hits. If you're a singer looking for work, good luck if you look much over 35.
• gumby 5y ago
  Ageism seems penny wise and pound foolish. I do think a lot of people overfit for “culture” and shoot themselves in the foot. (Looks around furtively in case HR is within earshot) I prefer people who’ve already made mistakes on somebody else’s dime. Though a mix is good. I’ve been hiring people for decades (yes, I’m an OF too) and this approach has worked out well whether I was 25 or 55 myself. There is a problem with “we did it this way at company X so we really have to do it that way here too”. Better is “we did this at company X and i think what we learned that would make sense here is YY”. Newbies can’t say either; the older ones are more likely to say the second rather than the first, thanks to perspective.
• everdrive 5y ago
  It's not as if the tech careers you get when you're 35 are generally that amazing, they just pay better. Assume that you will not continue to make more money as you age in tech, and plan your finances accordingly.
• yodsanklai 5y ago
  Ageism is very depressing. My company seems to be obsessed with discrimination against minorities (which is great) but nobody seems concerned that average age is less than 30. On the company recruiting ads, you can see people from every possible background, but certainly no grey hair. I'm 45 and I'm getting more and more concerned about my age. I love my job but I'll try to move to a manager position in a couple of years.
• deleted 5y ago
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• sys_64738 5y ago
  Is it agism? I don't know for sure even though I'm old (>30). There are various scenarios I've seen. Startups want people with little to no experience so they can work ungodly hours as they don't have families. These in my experience tend to have a young CEO who doesn't like being contradicted or challenged from more experienced folk. Things like web development is such a copy & paste factory that I equate that like working fast food. You get years of experience so become too expensive. They only want to hire more folk with limited experience cheaply. There's no call for too much experience as that is aged quickly when new techs come along. Some larger companies have older folk there and it's easier to get into those type roles. In my experience their non-web related mostly where specialization is needed. I think there are roles for older folks when they move from the web centric factory roles. All just my experience.
• Nbox9 5y ago
  I’ll retire when I age out of coding. Maybe I’ll find something small to provide some income, but I’ve been saving a very large sum of money every year for my entire career and I am finically independent. I’m in my early 30s, and I’m seeing people one or two rungs ahead of me in the ladder begin to age out of coding despite very strong attempts to stay at it. I just can’t imagine enjoying any other career nearly as much as coding. I don’t expect I’ll be able to stay a coder past 45, and 40 might be more realistic. I’m optimizing my career for time spend in an IDE.
• codemonkeysh 5y ago
  The real topic at hand isn't age, but behavior. The complexity, in my dumb ass opinion, is that humans tend to look for patterns and correlations when trying to understand things at scale. e.g., experienced engineers view inexperienced engineers as being in a rush and inversely, inexperienced engineers view seasoned engineers as being slow or reluctant to change. Regardless of why the above is generally true, it's not true for everyone. Here's some simple rules of growing old: 1. Don't forget you were once that person. Given them a chance to have the same experiences 2. Remember, most likely you'll grow old one day so grow old mindfully 3. This industry has a cycle. New people come in, make mistakes, experienced people correct it. Repeat forever. 4. As you grow older, some people take on new responsibilities like family. This has a profound impact on your work and social life. 5. Stop being a dick to people young and old, inexperienced and experienced. Try to relate to the past and present the best you can. Lastly, every old person you see, including the greats, were once happy, highly motivated, inexperienced and passionate people ready to prove themselves! Now they're just older and still have a lot of those traits within them, but it's not often shown to the world.
• stooliepidgin 5y ago
  I started in tech at 17 with my own consulting company so an exhaustive, over-sharing resume would make me appear nearing retirement. What I do is conceal my true age (early 40's, M) and experience through creative resume sculpting. It helps that I look 10 years younger so I will experience delayed-but-inevitable discrimination until the marketing wank that is a resume can no longer maintain a too much plastic surgery, Botox facade. Coincidentally, it may help that I am involved in an age gap relationship with a gorgeous, lovely woman in her early 20's. My Machiavellian plan is to drag her to any and all work and coworker gatherings to reinforce that I'm not a ye olde farten just yet. You can get more social currency by demonstrating you're in a relationship with someone and more so if they're attractive.
• Meph504 5y ago
  For fuck sake can we please stop with this childish generational blame? So many articles speak as if any generation had the ability to set the standards of employment in the industry. Management, and what our government allowed them to get away with plays a far larger role than individuals do in a decentralized economy that is tech. It isn't like there is a plant we could picket, or even an assurance that our jobs would stay within our own country. Many people who have entered tech today, never saw the massive waves of outsourcing, this seemingly has normalized now, they weren't around for the dot com bubble that burst. Arguable the worlds strongest unions (automotive) got their asses handed to them, because it became much easier to move manufacture than ever before. It wasn't developers that had any control or recourse when we got placed in the exempt bracket, and workloads sky rocketed. I remember lots of people quitting because of it, but I also remember a flood of people on work visas coming into replace them (to be clear I don't fault those that came in on visas, but did prevent labor from having any sort of strength in numbers or ability to force policy change.) We had a toxic environment forced on us, through the same vehicle that almost every shitty thing has, greed, our government had no idea how to handle when labor stopped having physical bounds, and they opened up the flood gates to let companies do what they want as long as they didn't leave.
• gojomo 5y ago
  On the remote-work internet, no one needs to know you’re an old dog.
• PeterWhittaker 5y ago
  My anecdata is returning to full time work at 54, after ~20 years consulting. To keep a long story short, my development years were 25-30 years ago, I knew the owner from consulting, and was working through his company on another gig. He knew I had some spare time and asked if I could fill a gap on contract. That led to converting to “wage slavery” with an excellent base salary, profit sharing, and an equity share in the two products I’m working on. So after 20 years of writing governance documents, doing threat risk assessments and privacy impact assessments, occasionally writing SELinux policy, and some product management like work, I’m doing full stack development on the software product (node, React, ONgdb) and writing C, bash, and SELinux on the hardware product. I also do customer needs analysis, custom development for them, and train them. And I do all of the demos. Perhaps it’s my field, perhaps it’s a unique skill set (we ICAM/CDS people are rare), perhaps it’s personality (curious, enthusiastic, measured). I dunno. Now 56, I foresee doing this for a few years more. The pace can be insane (hey, startup, or at least small consulting firm turning itself into a product company) but the work extraordinarily rewarding (when you ship a CDS product that has the experts asking “how did you do that?” it feels really good; when you show your clients an IRM that does things no one else does, ditto), and I work with really good friends (friends I’d never worked with before but knew from weekend activities (off-roading)). It can happen. I just don’t know how rare it is. (Hey! I may be a unicorn!!! :-})
• nickd2001 5y ago
  Seems to me, one advantage of getting older, is that then, mean people are easier to spot because they'll be ageist to you. When you're young, unless you're a member of some other group they're prejudiced against, it might take longer to find out they're mean. When you're over 40, if your c.v / resume doesn't make it through to interview, you don't have the misfortune to meet these mean people in the first place. So, result! ;) In my 20s, I preferred working with older, wiser , mellower colleagues, than some of my sometimes aggressive or arrogant peers especially new grads. The ones that were cocky, would of course be horrible to a 40-something-yr-old, but they were also horrible to fellow 20-somethings. Thankfully some people like that do learn to be nicer as they get older, also there are a lot of very cool nice people in their 20s who are great to work with whether you're 20-something too or 40 or 60-something.. In summary I'd say that if you do indeed get less job interviews or offers in your 40s and above (which isn't true for everyone), the offers you do get might be of better quality, with nicer more open-minded colleagues hopefully....
• greyhair 5y ago
  In my mid sixties and I am getting as many head hunter hits as I have ever had. Everybody knows my age, I don't hide it. Thirty seven years as an active engineer, consciously avoided moving into management because I know I would not be a good manager, though I have had an excellent time mentoring over the duration of my career. Mentoring an individual is very different from managing a project and a team. My LinkedIn post shows my entire technical career back to 1984. If anything, my experience is that 60 is the new 40.