> Yet in software you have these weekly "I'm 40, is my life over" posts. I'm not sure, I feel like on average there's a decrease of openness/neuroplasticity or

> Yet in software you have these weekly "I'm 40, is my life over" posts. I'm not sure, I feel like on average there's a decrease of openness/neuroplasticity or call it whatever you want with age: people sometimes get set in their ways, choose approaches that worked for them in the past and will be less likely to jump into new technologies as often - having families and other life responsibilities (and having a better ability to balance life and work) will lead to a bit less exploration. This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, and even then the premise isn't set in stone, but I'd say that you sometimes exchange the desire to jump into bleeding edge technology and innovative solutions for picking approaches that have minimized risks and are more likely to work out long term, a bit like: https://boringtechnology.club/ https://boringtechnology.club/ Not to say that either is better than the other, there is definitely a lot of merit in having experience and having worked on lots of systems in the past. I just wish that the industry itself didn't move ahead so fast and we focused more on the quality of what we have: e.g. more like PostgreSQL, rather than the new seasonal NoSQL database, or looking at React after a few months and finding it pretty different already. Biases in hiring, of course, are likely to just make the conditions worse for everyone. Ideally, you'd have a mix of engineers of different seniority, that could successfully collaborate and learn from each other. Disclaimer: the biases in my own post might be construed as ageism in of itself, though I'm also kind of speaking of my own experience - as I gradually age, my focus shifts towards building rather than exploring.