> 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.