[amiune]

I'm 37 I thought I was too old but I decided to start all over again. Took some courses from Coursera about Deep Learning and last month started competing in kaggle and similar competitions sites. I earned 7k dollars but the most important is that I'm learning a lot like if I was in the university again, I think I'm learning even faster.

[swozey]

I'm 36 and have not once experienced blatant ageism. I keep my skills current and have pivoted my career many times when things got less interesting or I could tell the market was falling off. I went sysadmin>neteng>syseng>SRE and will have to pivot in 4-5 years again, probably, once some other culture-breaker has hit distributed systems for the 3rd time in my career.

Now, I don't have kids so you might go "hey you've got so much free time" - I'm also a 36yo engineer with 10+ years of experience. Most of the positions I take nowadays allow me AMPLE time (as in months) to do research and learn new systems before deploying them to production. I almost never study or work at home these days. A LOT less than in my 20s when I worked in startups.

I just went through a few months of interviewing, what did every company want out of me at this "age" (experience)? They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams. I've worked with a lot of older engineers who aren't happy to do this, and that's a huge problem and something majorly wrong and undesirable in tech.

FWIW I will not ever consider the 30s or 40s old. I am working with a lot more 23-25yo developers now and feel like half of my skillset is bridging communication between zoomers and gen-x bosses. They love learning and its incredibly rewarding helping them grow their careers - something that I never got help with when I started in the toxic tech world of ~2008.

I'm a lead/staff IC, not a manager, fwiw.

[user5994461]

Had the opposite experience in London and I am not even 36 yet.

Could quote almost 10 companies that cancelled the interview in early stage or didn't interview at all, saying too much experience and worry I'd leave after 6 months for a better company (higher pay).

Gave up on interviewing for startups and medium companies. Get a job in a top tier company or starve to death. (Top tier is mostly finance in London because FAANG don't have big offices here).

[amiune]

Thanks for sharing your experience! I think this “They wanted a strong desire to mentor and cultivate teams” is a fantastic insight!

[m00dy]

31 here. I almost did the same. I was working as fullstack developer + infrastructure engineer on AWS and I have recently pivoted to deep learning field and now working for a nlp product at this moment.

[danielscrubs]

I don’t want to be a downer but don’t you think it’s just way easier to learn now because we have so many great resources available to us?

[vsareto]

We do, but there's more surface area to cover because job requirements have also gone up and technology is more complex. Interviewing for tech has also branched off into its own skill with an industry that promotes its own existence.

[amiune]

Of course and even more for me that I’m in Latin America and now I can easily access to resources from US and Europe