I’m mid 40s, had mainframe on my resume from probably 15 years in financial services (not the exciting, high paying kind either). I moved into tech in my mid 30

I’m mid 40s, had mainframe on my resume from probably 15 years in financial services (not the exciting, high paying kind either). I moved into tech in my mid 30s and am now in a fairly senior leadership role. But that person that gave me a shot in tech, at a YC company that pretty much everyone here has heard of, was in their 20s! I tell you this to encourage you to do interesting things, whatever you think those are. You wouldn’t want to work with a founder or manager who dismisses you because your keywords don’t overlap theirs. You want to work with the founder or manager who asks questions and wants to understand what you learned and how that experience helps you now. Mainframes may not be what you’d work on at a startup today, but they’re complicated pieces of engineering, and writing software for them requires you to understand a lot about how they work. Updating or rewriting their software further requires you to understand how the people before you _thought_ they worked. That’s how I tell that story.