This is something that suddenly hit home during the pandemic when I read an article about people over 50 finding it easer to get jobs because interviews were remote.

I’m in my early 40s now but I’m forcing myself to think about what type of company and team I’d fit into in 10 years. I enjoy working at startups/scale ups. I’m the oldest person in the engineering team now (by over 10 years).

My concern is that even with the best of intentions by an interviewer not to discriminate on age, I worry that I’m going to have to end up at a multinational or consultancy in the future because hiring someone 50+ in a startup filled with 20-somethings would be chalked up as a “culture fit” issue.

Most new job opportunities as you grow senior come from your network, so if you have that the recruiter gate is automatically bypassed. People who know you, have worked with you - won't care about your age, only your contribution.

I work at a very young company, both by age of the company and average age of employee, and I'm super happy that we also have 2 developers with more experience, their perspective on tech, business and life is different and just really valuable.

It is a deficit of some younger people that they don't value other perspectives, and I think points to a bad work environment.

As someone stuck in an unconventional career arc into sysadmin and dev work at 31 this is massively anxiety inducing

I'm the same age and being a late bloomer professionally I had some anxiety as well. In the end I mostly benefitted from not being treated as a junior, even if my CV is clearly light in the field.