I have no problem interacting with younger ICs and even embrace my Dad-ness and Dad humor. I like mentoring and growing others, and I think it’s important to advocate for less experienced to get the lionsshare of the glory and attention.

For hiring, I just am not open about my age and mostly interact with people virtually. I don’t have my early irrelevant jobs and don’t show my graduation dates. So I haven’t seen it as a problem.

Not sure if there is a "solution" for that as a 35 yo hiring manager will probably have an easier time managing under-35 individual contributor comparing to a 50 yo one. Different perspectives, experiences, etc. So by hiring younger IC the manager makes a correct decision. Sucks for us older folks but that's life.

Places with older engineers means:

1. things are done properly

2. less to break

3. no need to be on call

4. excellent WLB (no grind n burnout culture)

5. excellent mentoring and learning opportunities

6. sniper / laser focus on business fundamentals / making money rather than making noise on the internet streets

This is not to dismiss LLMs entirely, but they always get touted as “they can do ABC, as long as an experienced dev reviews the output”. And with LLMs hindering the growth of juniors in one way or another, I can definitely see a market for “senior” developers down the road.

There's isn't a quick fix or easy solution.

- I've found junior engineers super resistant to new tech. Very rigid thinking, there is only way way to do something bc that's all they've ever learned, very religious about tech stacks, crazy strong opinions based on crazy limited experience - lack of work ethic, no call, no show, procrastinating right up until the deadline and then expecting code reviews, merges/releases to work on their schedule -tendency to fuck around and play games etc all day (see above) -limited experience with people from different backgrounds, culture etc.

I'm in my 50s and had no problems getting hired 3+ years ago at a FAANG as well as a handful of other companies. Granted it was a good hiring environment, but I also took 3 years off and I had to work hard to Leetcode back into shape.

I still have a lot of energy and it comes across in my interviews. I don't have an ego, I know that just because I have >30 years experience doesn't mean that I know more than my coworkers that are 30 years younger than me. I work hard and try to earn my paycheck every day and I'm not quibbling over lunch menus and complaining about the ingredients used at the cafeteria.

I think as long as you not only have the technical skills but can also sell yourself as a good teammate with matching energy, it shouldn't be a problem. I think younger folks respect people that can match their energy and motivation and don't want to be dragged down by know-it-alls or slow workers.

1) Your salary demands exceed the budgeted amount for the position

2) You probably aren't willing to work insane hours any more

Even if your skill set vastly exceeds that of a wet-behind-the-ears engineer and can work at a far higher level, be more productive, and produce higher quality work, it's almost impossible to make that apparent when interviewing, especially when those doing the interviews are much younger.

That is, the senior ICs start to resemble a strong product manager, or an effective director without a team. These are all good - until the company suddenly no longer needs them. Maybe their team has become a cost center. Maybe the project gets into maintenance mode. Or maybe the product has been so stable that the company does not even need more alignment. At that time, the ICs will find that all the institutional knowledge and so-called "leadership" is not that transferrable. And when they go out and interview for a new job, they find that they can't even sketch a solid design.

Sadly, I don't have a solution. There are exceptions. I guess it's natural that a senior engineer will gain breadth but also get distracted as they age. What they need is a different kind of depth. They can still be of value to a younger team if they are like a hard-science professor who depends on their PhD students to write papers, yet they can still advise the students as no one else. In industry, my role models are people like Michael Stonebreaker, who can still shape the architectures of modern databases in his 80s. Wernher von Braun of Saturn V rockets, who could come up with new rockets like no one else. Or Kelly Johnson of U-2, who could direct and unblock his engineers with ease. Or Marc Brooker of Amazon, who seems able to go deep into both database and distributed systems to keep coming up with amazing systems. But then, I'm not sure how many people can be talented as those engineers.

Or maybe another way is to get domain expertise, like how payment works, how insurance works, how accounting works, and etc?

If you're older, keep your skills up to date, be chill, be open minded, and keep hope alive.

Changing a culture's norms is incredibly difficult. The only way I've heard about it happening is through massive pressure, from either a large social group vocally pushing against an issue (with consequences), or a large industry spending millions of dollars to advertise something (diamonds, washing machines) and exploiting some other cultural bias to do so. Cultural norms can also change temporarily (we all worked remote during a pandemic and productivity went up, but after that it would seem our productivity went down? and women became industrial workers during WW2, but after that apparently they weren't good enough?).

So even if the norm did change temporarily, you need continued pressure to make it stick. I have not heard of any massive cultural pressure to end ageism, so I would not expect it to end.

I do not think most people think of themselves as being "ageist", but it manifests in their actions. Usually a department will be filled with a group of young people, and in the interview process, someone will say, "I do not think this person would be a good culture fit". But they do not realize that they just do not want an old person because they seem different then what is already in the team.

I also have a hunch, that "leet code tests", in the hiring process has a hidden agenda of weeding out "older people". Those kind of tests are usually on knowledge one might have learned in a college course and subsequently forgot about. Or, if you are juggling a family, you may not have time to go do all day knowledge crunch study to get the algorithms into your head.

Companies do not want to come right out and say "we do not want to hire old people", but they selfishly want the most value for their buck. They want to drive down wages and extract value. What is more valuable to a company? A middle aged programmer who has to go home at 5pm to help take care of the kids? Or do they get more value out of a young person just out of college who has something to prove?

I have seen perfectly reasonable people pass over hiring older people because they do not want to hire someone who might know more than they do, or someone who might push back on decisions. They want someone young who will just do what they say.

As a society, I do not think we address such issues well.

But overall many companies seem to value and attract more of the same culture they already have in place. So to a degree, I’d say yes ageism exists in certain companies that don’t value experience as highly as other qualities.

How can a 20 something with very little experience actually consult? Based on what experience?

Though I don't completely agree but won't completely ignore.

I see this applies to tech as well.

When you start as junior you tinker with boilerplate code. everything seems magical. As you grow learn and becomes wiser, things what seemed magical before become logical

After 10 years, surface level saturates. You will start to dig deeper. Things will again start to become magical and then slowly fades into logical.

Then you go deeper and again process repeats.

More deeper you go, you will find the luxury to shake the surface level toys. Some innovation happens at surface level, but you are deep down still going.

There is not end line. You retire when you want to stop. Your choice!

But much more still to be explored! Humanity continues!

In short, As you grow, go deeper, become wiser, shake the status quo, innovate, repeat. Surface level people will Go gaga. But you don't react because you are still going deeper...

Go into companies and industries where this culture isn't the norm, however, and you'll find teams full of 40-50+ year old software engineers. Defense, aerospace, government, construction, medical tech, research labs, education.

If I had the money I could go hire a half dozen solid software engineers and at least 2 solid DevOps/SRE types today. I'm betting people in other fields could do the same.

And yet, good people remain unemployed and scared.

In other words, it’s not ageism when one can’t even get an interview in the first place. Assuming you’ve kept your resume concise and removed education dates, etc. Which I have for the last twenty years or so, since the turn of the century! cough

But the vibe I'm hearing lately is that junior engineers can't get jobs, because AI. I don't know if that reflects the reality (I haven't been trying to find a job as a junior in quite a while), but people are complaining about that these days.

Not only that, young engineers will be build whatever without questioning the value, business people prefer this. They dont want an engineer raising product questions

also, it is true that technology moves quickly, startups dont need experts in tech thats no longer bleeding edge. large old school companies still do, so the number of companies that are viable employers decreases

   * will they be on-call?
   * can they work long hours?
   * how do I delegate to them?
   * are they going to resist new tech?

I suspect before ageism disappears it will first swing the other way where older tech workers snub young people entering the industry writing them off as vibecoders who don’t know anything and are easily replaced with an AI.

You can easily find an older person ranting against the idea of using full stack javascript, unaware of the V8 changes while still having some valid criticisms

But then wonder if their rejection is ageism, instead of the rant

just one example

Weird, it says there your wife did.