I'm 36+ so I consider myself old. I am a tech lead in a "startup that gone enterprise" and write Java, Scala, and web. Most of my friends are between 35-45, al

I'm 36+ so I consider myself old. I am a tech lead in a "startup that gone enterprise" and write Java, Scala, and web. Most of my friends are between 35-45, all fully employed with good salaries (mostly Java / Enterprise shops though, but also some cool startups / Googlers / Twitter / Amazon) My take on this, both as an older guy, and also as a hiring manager is that for me merit and skill matter more than anything else, I'm completely age, race, color and gender blind. (I recently hired a 50+ years old dev who didn't work for 5 years, he was simply that good) Good developers of any age will always find job, at least this is my theory. Yes, there are 10X 1 year of experience people, yes there are people who as they grow older they have less desire to work long hours / cut salary (due to having a Family, this is legitimate) but I don't really believe that anyone out there will say no to a 40 years old developer if she is an ace. If someone does, then they are missing the talent and hurting their own companies. I'm 100% unforgiving to skill issues, but in my experience, usually the older the candidate, the better they do, merely due to more experience. They might not all know the latest vagrant / docker / hadoop / scala / Haskell / scss / node.js trends, but they know how to write code. I'm shocked how many people with BSc or even MSc in CS, years of experience, simply don't know how to code. I mean some can't code their way out of a paper bag. But this has nothing to do with age, the last thing I care about is someone's manufacturing date. really. it just doesn't make any sense to do so.