There's legitimate worry about ageism: too often employers don't offer a non-management ladder. The answer for that is to work at a company that offers such a l

There's legitimate worry about ageism: too often employers don't offer a non-management ladder. The answer for that is to work at a company that offers such a ladder (there are many) or work in a start-up (where they can't afford to have "pure managers"). There is also shops which are driven by buzzwords rather than actual technology, who are just looking for bunch of kids who match a keyword list. I wouldn't want to work there anyway (whether at my present age, or in ten-fifteen years). There's also the illegitimate worry: "some 22 year-old will replace me"; this is of the same genre as "my job will get outsourced to India". The answer to that is don't do simple, trivial work. Be something besides a byte pusher (incidentally, great deal of "web development" is indeed simply pushing bytes). Anyone can make a CRUD app with PHP and MySQL: learn something which isn't immediately listed in the craigslist jobs section, perhaps? I'd argue that, for example, no place that is hiring Haskell developers or developers with understanding of machine learning practices age discrimination.