[fsk]

Law of Headlines says "no".

My experience also says no. The two issues I'm facing are:

1. Due to technology churn, after a couple years of experience, your experience loses its market value faster than you can get new experience.

2. At 40, I'm starting to feel age discrimination. When you go on an interview and everyone else is <25, you see that you "aren't a good cultural fit". Younger programmers have started talking down to me like my experience is irrelevant. Then they ask me to debug their code for them.

As a programmer, you can make good money from 25-35. After that, it's starting to look like it's over.

[gizi]

Technology churn. I have been sailing on the concepts of http://www.tcl.tk/doc/scripting.html for the last 10 years. It is true that not all IT employers or clients reason at that level of thinking. But then again, that is good thing (tm). It means that we do not need to waste time discussing and that we can all save time. To cut a long story short, I do not experience any technology churn at all.

age discrimination. In online recruitment, nobody asks anybody else's age. What for, anyway? Nobody ever asks me for a resume either. A github account is more than enough. I am also over 40 and I have never made more money than today. I certainly did not make more money when I was 35.

You see, I have always instinctively felt that I needed to stay away from certain corporate situations and practices. I have always found them absolutely imbecile, annoying, constraining, and ultimately useless. What you are complaining about are issues that only occur in a corporate cocktail of idiocies, of which the ones you have mentioned, are just two. If you have always evolved in that soup of stupidity, you should not be surprised that you now suddenly get hit by that kind of things. It was just an accident waiting to happen.

[tjradcliffe]

I see a lot of companies with websites that say they "value diversity" and yet have no one person in any team photo over the age of 40, which suggests their definition of "diversity" covers a singularly narrow range of characteristics.

This may contribute to the lack of women in software development: women tend not to be quite as stupid as men with regard to probability, and recognize that a profession where they are obsolete at 40 is not a good bet. Most of us won't make enough to retire on before 40, so only an idiot would go into the business if that really is what we face as we age.

"Software development: it's not a career, it's a lottery ticket!"

[bayesianhorse]

I think this will change when there are so many programmers above 40 that companies can't afford to turn them down. Due to age pyramids I can't really imagine total age discrimination to persist in the future.

[okaram]

It heavily depends on the company; Facebook may be all 20-somethings, but Microsoft is much more balanced. As one data point, I'm 43, joined Microsoft 2 years ago, have an offer from another big tech company.

[FallDead]

In Canada here, you have this opposite issue I was just fired because a couple of 35+ said I was not a culture fit LOL, despite bringing a project out of development hell and giving the product a doable realistic feature.

[wlievens]

This scares me. I'm thirty-two and therefore not very far from peaking, including salary unless you get a management function.

[marmot1101]

I'm the youngest senior where I work at 36. Our leads are approaching or past 50. This may be a localized problem.

[kls]

It is localized, the work force is aging and the population is not growing at a rate to replace those aging out. For the most part I have seen the ration of young faces to old ones lessen. It seems my generation 40 is really the generation that grew up coding and therefore the age bounds are being pushed with us. I know in certain markets that is not true, but in others it is.