>Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech?

Yep, especially culturally rather than financially. Almost everywhere I've worked there was the implicit assumption that engineers graduate out of coding jobs into management roles. In a lot of places there's the idea that focusing on writing software is some sort of career dead-end for older people which is a shame for anyone who just likes coding. I think it's widely perceived as a young person's job for no good reason.

And on the business side it's also pretty blatant. IIRC founders in their 40s are statistically most successful. Yet prominent people in the industry still openly fetishize youth.

Really? I see 40+ people as diversity hires for the most part. They're there so no one can say the company is ageist. The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see.

That, to me, says there's plenty of ageism.

If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older devs at software companies. Maybe less than younger devs, but plenty anyway.

Honestly, I'd prefer if there were more older engineers to show the younger ones how dumb they are. Maybe better at building dynamic frontends, but dumber. That kind of seniority is sorely missing in software engineering, and it would drive standards upwards rather than downwards as they currently are.

I'm currently in between, and wish I had more mentorship.

> The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see.

I agree with you here - the question is why? I don't think it's because we're discriminated against for being old, I think it's because in 99% of cases (we can't all be donald knuth), our cost grows faster than our skills. So we either move to management/business (where experience matters more and it's much harder to quantify productivity), or we become "the overpaid one".

> If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older devs at software companies

But they wouldn't snap out of it. (a) in most countries you can't demote people, (b) it's very hard psychologically to accept being paid less for the same job

> more older engineers to show the younger ones how dumb they are.

I'm talking about 45+ vs 30 years olds here, not 30 vs 23.

I think the dominant effect is because the whole field is rapidly growing, so newly trained and younger is a disproportionately high amount relative to if it was at a steady state.

I don't know if we're just exceptionally lucky, but my friend group - the vast majority of which are still doing coding/sysadmin/devopsy stuff - are in our 40s and we have all had no problem finding employment.

I think a major factor is that the field just exploded so much over the past 20 years. Statistically, people over 40 are going to be in the minority.

I also do think a lot of startups maybe aren't the best place for older people. My brain wastes a lot of cycles on edge cases I've learned to identify from experience, that don't matter if you just need to slop some shit out the door ASAP.

I thought it connected well to the staff-vs-line article from the other day— that the later you are in your career, the more it makes sense to be in a "staff"-type role, since a staff person is likely to have a lot of autonomy, long term ownership, more access to senior management, less dependence on mentorship, etc.

Following from that, it's easy to imagine that a bunch of the older engineers that you don't see at software/tech companies have in fact graduated into extremely well-paid, long-term roles working on software for banks, insurers, utilities, resource companies, whatever.

I tried to mentor in the last few years of my career. The young'ns didn't seem to want to be mentored though.

If the 45-year old developer has been with the firm for 15 years, they may have roughly equal competence in writing code, but unless they spent the past decade with their eyes and ears closed, the 45-year old should have vastly more institutional knowledge.

Seniority bumps, x-weeks-vacation-after-y-years-of-service reward that intangible.

Tho institutional knowledge can cut both ways - being indignant rather than resigned about the problems, and trying to fix things without knowing why all the prior attempts failed, and even being friendly to people that are politically outcast, are all great. Even just bringing novel solutions from outside industries or organizations to bear on problems is useful (tho experience is also a common cause for having a variety of solutions in ones tool box).