It is the one minority that we all inevitably become. "Respect your elders" has all kinds of reason behind it.

Petty big minority of about a quarter of the population nowadays and that is only if we're counting retirement age. If you go above 40 then it is somewhere around half of population which does not compute as minority. This means companies are effectively excluding huge swaths of potential workers.

Its a minority in the tech workplace.

The alternative is less appealing.

I am 34 and have worked at various fortune 500s in the Midwest and there seems to be no issues here at all with regards to ageism.

My dad is a 64 year old programmer who has never put any effort outside of paid working hours to keep his skills up and he has never been without work for more than a couple months in 30 years.

I get slammed with LinkedIn recruiters every day. Most of the jobs aren't glamorous, but they are almost all 6 figure jobs and you can get a nice house in the city for 300k on up. Take your extra cash and go on a vacation or 2 in the dead of winter (maybe to sf even)

34, cloud security architect, also getting 2-3 cold calls from recruiters daily from LinkedIn. Salaries ranging from ~$160-200k/year to act as a subject matter expert/consultant to the rest of the org (from my experience).

Maybe some startup is going to throw a fit about age because they can't work you to death (or larger established SV orgs like Google, Facebook, or Amazon), but proper compensation and work/life balance is alive and well in the rest of larger US enterprises.

I live in an Eastern European country and most software companies, web development agencies etc. assume that because I'm "old" (32 years old), I can only use Spring, non-object-oriented PHP and other old technologies and that I don't know what React, Angular, Rails etc. are. I have a GitHub account with some projects but nobody looks at it, my date of birth is more important for everyone.

> At 32 yo, terrified I'll be in this situation soon.

I think people begin to become less tolerant of the indignities of the modern corporate atmosphere as one matures. Fortunately, one can distinguish oneself by building up IP, consulting, remote work, building assets, etc.

Exactly. Current plan in motion is to keep my full-time remote gig while consulting on the side.

I'm 43. In my late 30s, I was worried, too. But, what surprised me was just how much impact turning 40 had. At 38, I was averaging maybe 10-15 software employers contacting me a week. Now, it's dropped to maybe 3 a week. And, the quality of recruiters has dropped, too. Just a few years ago, recruiters from well-known companies would contact me directly. Now, I only get recruiters from no-name recruitment firms.

Of course, a lot of other factors may be in play. Maybe recruitment just isn't as strong as it was a few years ago.

I'm currently interviewing currently in SF. It's a painful process. I can't tell if half of the companies are even serious.

The way you started out I expected that it somehow all worked out.

Good luck.