In my experience the only bias against hiring ICs over 40 (at least in the UK) is

* They tend to get stuck on old technologies that nobody uses any more. I don't really care about your Perl skills, sorry.

* They expect higher salaries.

If you keep up to date with your skills (Rust, Typescript, Nix, etc.) and aren't precious about your salary increasing forever then I don't think there's an issue. I've worked with plenty of very skilled ICs into their 60s.

It's not just the UK. As someone who is themselves in the same age range, as a hiring manager it's been eye opening to see the clusters of resumes from older candidates.

It continues to boggle my mind how many resumes out there are people who have spent the last 20+ years working on the same set of problems, using the same tech. The reason a lot of these people aren't getting jobs is not that they're old. It's that they've stagnated to a degree I would not have thought possible. Meanwhile there are people out there who are staying relevant *and* bringing extra wisdom to the table. Those people get hired.

What would you look for to see if somebody is 'staying relevant'? Side projects? Personally, I would like to explore new technologies, and am still excited to learn, but feel limited by what is actually needed/required in my day-to-day which is unlikely to change.

It's more just that your day to day *should* change over the course of 15-20 years. What I'm referring to are situations like people who have current day to days that read exactly the same as it did in the early aughts. For instance poking at pre-generics Java to parse XML files, populating some enterprise beans, and pushing to a web page using whatever the heck framework was in vogue back then.

There's nothing wrong with someone turning their brain off and working in that role for 20 years. But they shouldn't be surprised if their experience is completely irrelevant in the modern job market. If one wants to develop new experiences and their job won't provide that over a long period of time (say 5-10 years of employment, not every 6 months!) then it's time to consider the tradeoffs you're making.

In my experience technologies that were popular in the past but are basically dead now are a red flag. Perl, Pascal, Smalltalk, maybe even Java and C at this point, if they don't know anything newer.

Java is an "it depends". Are they writing early aughts style enterprise Java, following early aughts patterns, and using early aughts frameworks? Or are they using fairly modern Java, doing things in a fairly modern way?

I've hired for Java roles in the last handful of years and this was a very bimodal group.

On the other hand, a lot of big tech is solving the same sorts of problems over and over.

Someone could be working on instant messaging or a/v conferencing for the past 30 years. Or anything in sales and advertising. Etc.

There's nothing wrong with that per se, especially for a company.

I'm only referring to hireability in new roles. If someone is staying in such a role that entire time, especially if their niche hasn't evolved such that it indicates refreshing tech skills from time to time, they shouldn't be surprised if the rest of the world has moved on from where they've stayed.

Because you can't decide to just change stack at work. At most people won't hire someone based on side projects.

Probably depends on the company. I think it's not in those big tech companies where everything is quite standardized. In my case, besides my manager, most of the guys discussing my promotion wouldn't even know me personally. Evaluation is very factual. It's more about picking the right projects so you can check all the boxes, also not pissing off colleagues.

Same goes for interviewing. I passed several FAANG interviews when I was 45. I just practiced Leetcode like anybody else. Leetcode has its flows, but solving leetcode problems isn't out of reach for an older candidate. Could be harder to find the time to practice, but solving problems in interview situation is a matter of practice. The problems are pretty much known in advance.

Edit: Now that I'm an interviewer, I really just ask my questions, and check boxes based on the candidate performance. We're also trained to avoid biases and so on...

That being said, I very rarely see "older" candidates despite the constant reminder we're an inclusive place.

There is probably bias in that social skills tend to be better as you get older, which makes you a better leader and manager in many cases.

I would like to think so, but (speaking from experience) a hiring manager in his 30s or 20s may not recognize or value that.

I don't know if by promotions you mean into ic tree also, but it's definitely there for management.

My boss who is probably a decade older than me is very much hinting I'm making a mistake if I don't move into management at my age. I think there is probably some bias against promoting a young manager over an older one.

I'm currently a team lead and I've resisted a management role. I just don't like managing (or being a team lead), but I'm aware lots of people do jobs they don't like. So we'll see.

Do you think you might like management if you knew it didn’t have to be permanent? Highly recommend Charity Majors’ blog about this if you haven’t already https://charity.wtf/2017/05/11/the-engineer-manager-pendulum...

interesting that in the US age 40 is precisely when protections for age discrimination kick in