I feel like this comes up a lot and it's something I think / worry about as a developer at the 'old' age of 40. I posted this comment below on a similar thread
Essentially I think this is hopefully a temporary effect of the doubling of programmers every five years for the past twenty plus years. I expect this to level out and thus shift the ratio in favour of older developers.
I'm not so confident that's true. There's seemingly this prevailing attitude in IT that new is always better. The latest gadgets, the latest complicated tech stacks, and the latest languages. Rewrite everything again so it's all fresh and free of 'legacy cruft'. Don't fix bugs, prioritize slapping a new "modern" GUI on it so people don't think it's old. Why wouldn't that same mentality apply to people?
Even here on HN we see plenty of articles that are "Like X, but written in Go!", which seems to have been replaced with "Like X, but written in Rust!".
True, but it might not be a zero-sum argument. I think the point I'm making might not explain ageism in it's entirity but I feel it's a factor. Time will tell I guess.
Yeah… I mean. I’m in my mid-40s and I feel like I’ve got a lot of productive / happy peers. Numbers-wise, sure, there are Devs older than me, but in raw numbers, not that many.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28294734
Essentially I think this is hopefully a temporary effect of the doubling of programmers every five years for the past twenty plus years. I expect this to level out and thus shift the ratio in favour of older developers.