The problem with that work is that it’s “legacy.” Lower paying, less interesting technology, more subject to mass layoffs. It’s basically just like being “streamed” in school.

You can earn a living there, but most non-software industries are bad at software, so your skills will deteriorate and you will have a hard time finding another interesting job.

It seems this fixation on the shiny "interesting" jobs is another problem. I'm not getting any younger and I don't doubt there is some ageism in the industry but if we're biasing the search to only include FAANG and a handful of other darlin companies then that's not really a fair analysis of the situation.

Anecdotal but I've seen >40 year old engineers thriving at non tech-hub software companies. There's plenty of interesting B2B companies that lurk in the suburbs or tier-2 or tier-3 cities.

I did not say that it's either FAANG or not interesting. But the companies doing interesting software work tend to be software companies. There are many counterexamples both ways.

It only takes like a month or two to get your skills back.

What do you mean by off the record?

You can't explicitly base hiring policy on age. That's illegal.

No, it’s illegal to discriminate against someone over 40. You can blatantly put on your requirements that you are looking for someone over 40 and can’t be sued - not saying that’s a good idea.

If you couldn’t discriminate against someone younger, you couldn’t post that you wanted someone with a master degree and 10 years of experience.

That's accurate for federal law, but I think a log of states are more strict. At least New York is:

> The New York State Human Rights Law covers employers with four or more employees. It protects persons 18 and over from age discrimination in employment

> An employer may not refuse to hire or promote an employee, and may not terminate an individual because of age, and must provide the same terms and conditions of employment irrespective of age, including salary.

https://dhr.ny.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/age-discriminatio...

That goes back to my original example. If I can’t “discriminate” against an 18 year old, does that mean I can’t require someone to have a BS degree in Computer Science and 10+ years of experience?

No, I'm pretty sure the restriction here isn't based on a "disproportionate impact" judgement, but on intent. As long as you have a reason to claim you applied the college degree qualification, you're fine. The minute that a court subpoenas your emails and finds that you added the restriction with the explicit intent of preventing young people from getting the job, you are in for a world of legal hurt.

This is exactly how it works for most other hiring discrimination too. If a court finds an email titled "how we can use a college degree requirement to decrease the number of Hispanics at our company" you have a problem, but requiring a degree isn't itself illegal even though different races currently graduate from college at different rates in this country.