I enjoyed the article and it reminded me of many experiences in my career. However, this sentence bothers me:
“I felt like by 40 I needed to move on from engineering because if I didn’t, I’d be like the few older workers I’d dealt with in my career. I felt like they moved too slow, were stuck in their ways, and unable to change - even when faced with evidence to the contrary.”
I’m in my forties and none of those things are true about me. Nor are they true about any of the other older developers I know. There isn’t this magic switch that goes off when we turn forty.
When I extrapolate from there, it makes me genuinely wonder how many of the writer’s problems stem from the position versus how many stem from a serious lack of empathy and the communication difficulties that creates.
The best management advice that I ever received was to always consider if a management problem is actually the sign of a personal problem. If it is, it’s my job to manage to fix that before I make my workplace more toxic.
For what it’s worth, I am a relatively young engineer who has recently been working very closely with other engineers over the age of 55 on a daily basis. It has been one of the more enriching periods in my career so far. I often wonder if the ageism that I see so often referred to on Hackernews is more projection than reality because I consistently find it pleasant to work with individuals who have a very large body of experience to draw from. Ageism in general baffles me as one could very well ask the question: “would you rather have a carpenter with 2 years of experience working on your house, or one with 30 years of experience?” The answer seems obvious to me, and the question could easily be applied to software engineering.
Being on the receiving end of ageism I can assure you it's not the victim doing the projecting. Management, that's the problem.
I don't feel that way either. But the 40+ year old devs when I was a fresh faced kid where from a whole different world. One guy wouldn't let go of Novell running on DOS. There are hard paradigm switches sometimes in tech, but many fewer today than back then. Every big switch loses some people that decide, "nope don't like it" and don't keep up.
I really, really think that most ageism in tech is driven by similar memories of the old crowd when we were coming up. I mean, I fought for years (years!) to get Linux accepted by the older devs and had to sneak Postgres past the Oracle greybeards. Yet I am not that person blocking progress now, nor do I see the same with my peers. If a new tech has merit, we learn it. We grew up with tech and are plenty used to making those switches.
If anything, I'm way better at handling change than when I was younger and headstrong. And 25 years in industry has given me lots of practice.
Having decades of experience gives me a certain degree of skepticism about promises that some shiny new widget will solve all my problems. From the outside, this might look like I'm stuck in my ways.