> In my opinion, ageism is currently a passing fad.

ageism (in our field) is not about age, ageism is about having a family with all that entails - an higher asked wage, stable working conditions, stick to the contracted hours

no amount of engineering skill gap can cover for that

I don’t think today’s ageism is the same as previous generations. Young folks have been railing against their parents for all of human history, but we have, nevertheless, always been able to come together, and form an amalgam of experience and enthusiasm. I suspect that older people, having the money and power, while younger folks have had the drive and creativity, have forced the generations to cooperate.

These days, you have billionaires in their twenties. They don’t need anything from older folks, so there are no constraints on them.

Also, and I won’t go into the reasons, there’s now a lot of actual hatred between the generations. This time, it’s personal. I feel that.

In my job search, I was struck by the fact that the people interacting with me seemed to have a need to dominate and humiliate me. It wasn’t just a negotiation tactic. They hated me, and I had no idea why.

Me and a friend of mine keep being surprised how often people seem to miss fundamentals. Sure, they might know the latest incarnation of the parallel for loop in Rust. But ask them about communication overhead -- a basic concepts in parallel computing -- and they're blank.

Similarly, people are happy to see that networking in Kubernetes "just works". Once you ask them to run it on a provider without a Kubernetes-native load-balancer, say just use some BGP anycast magic, they are lost.

Age should be irrelevant, however it has some cultural aspect to it too. At my previous work we wrote software for self-driving cars and worked with super young people who sometimes didn't even graduate college. We had serious issues selling to Asian customers who would not take us seriously just because of the average age of the devs being low. (P.s. we had multiple respectable big-name car companies as clients already, was not early stage startup or so)

I worked for a fairly “classic” Japanese corporation.

One of the things about their HR policy (I’m not sure if it was written, but it may have been), is that certain levels of seniority required that you be a certain age. No matter how much of a hot shot you were, you weren’t going to get your own team until your thirty-fifth birthday.

I hope it is a passing fad. I dabble in tech and accountancy, and accountancy is completely different. I can tell you that being older gets you better jobs with higher pay, where younger people have to work long hours to break out.