Some of them are senior individual contributors, some of them are in engineering management, and some have transitioned from engineering to project management. Many of them could afford to retire today but want to keep working. And very few of them are still in the building after 5:30pm, because they have lives to go home to and refuse to work crazy startup hours.
Ageism is real in the industry. But the outlook for engineers over 40 is not a terrifying or bleak as you make it seem.
I’m not a wizard, my work/life/exercise balance is pretty good and I’m in my mid 40s.
I would hate to be “just a senior developer” competing with younger people who could do just as well for less money.
I feel my value add is architecture. I’m a hands on developer by choice, but I can also step in and lead projects, do Devops, speak to CxOs, I know AWS from a development, Devops, and netops perspective pretty well.
That does mean that only certain types of companies will pay me for that skillset - mostly smaller companies without dedicated people for all those areas.
The guy who decompiles third party code at 4 am to see why their update caused an error in our system (real recent story).
The other (very competent) older people get actively harassed. Some little *es from my company tried to get an older guy fired for being "too slow", when he is anything but. And I think the company I work for now is one of the friendlier environments for older devs.
Dunno, it's a genuinely scary prospect. Not trying to put anyone down, just what I see around me.
I hear its even worse on the coasts. I am in a flyover and have never worked in San Fran.