[luka-birsa]

Such articles perpetrate the myth that developers die after X. It's obvious that the majority of devs will sit in the 20-30 bracket just due to popularity and increased opportunity over time. Industry is growing and the only way to get new people in is to train young people.

Stop asking yourself this stupid question. Only bad developer careers die at 35. If you're good and keep developing your skills, you enter the gray-beard mode right around 35-40. We have our share of 40+ engineers and we've just hired a 50+. We also hire 20 somethings, and they are great, but totally different.

I laugh at the idea of a 24 year old senior engineer. Unless you've been hacking from 10, there is no way you've seen enough shit to prevent shit from happening. The really senior engineers really know their shit and are less prone to making wrong choices.

The only challenge you have with 40+ is culture fit. You can mold young engineers according to your culture, while 40+ is take it as it is.

So we search for 20+ that are open minded and are willing to grow and we're looking for 40+ that have not stopped growing and will fit in our culture. I've seen people at 60+ that can replace full teams of people in terms of quality and quantity of output.

The "age" problem exists only in your head.

[tabtab]

As an older developer, I can say you are facing an increasing headwind from the industry as you age. Yes, you can bust your gonads ever more to both keep up with changes and compensate for the negative stereotypes of "oldbies" to socially fit in (or fake it well), but a headwind is a headwind. The industry simply is not friendly to the aged, relative speaking. The "geezer monkey" on your back grows ever heavier, real or perceived.

A lot of it is caused by change for the sake of change. Fads are quickly jumped into without stopping to think, creating unnecessary change. If possible, let somebody else be the guinea pig. However, developers are afraid of "buzzword rot" on their resumes, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of change-or-die: you have to throw out old stuff to keep up, and keeping up results in throwing out old stuff because people stop using it, making support dry up.

IT is really a fashion industry, and less a technology industry. Let's face it: fashion and sex are mostly for the young. I'm just the messenger.

Some more advice: stay away from the UI industry: it changes the fastest and is most subject to fads. Try to focus on the back-end if possible.