The whole ageism thing is overblown.
I’m in my mid 40s and I have a circle of six friends who are still developers and hands on architects. The youngest is 40 and the oldest is in his late 50s. The oldest one is our former manager who hired all of us and self demoted to a developer after his kids graduated.
All of us are able to change jobs like we change shoes depending on how picky we are being.
We don’t live in SV or on the west coast. We live in a major metropolitan area. We all aggressively keep our skills up and are careful to not get left behind the current trends:
- all of us (except for me) are using the latest cool kids front end frameworks.
- we are all developing on top of either AWS or Azure and are actually using the technologies they provide and not just hosting a bunch of VMs.
- we can all do Devops in a pinch.
- all of us are using the latest .Net Core features or Node and most of us are using Docker.
- We are all using a combination of SQL and NoSQL databases.
Etc.
We all have corporate jobs and won’t go near any of the cool kids work 80 hours a week at below market wages with the promise of equity startups. We have grown people bills to pay and want to get home to our families.
I’m in my mid 40s and I have a circle of six friends who are still developers and hands on architects. The youngest is 40 and the oldest is in his late 50s. The oldest one is our former manager who hired all of us and self demoted to a developer after his kids graduated.
All of us are able to change jobs like we change shoes depending on how picky we are being.
We don’t live in SV or on the west coast. We live in a major metropolitan area. We all aggressively keep our skills up and are careful to not get left behind the current trends:
- all of us (except for me) are using the latest cool kids front end frameworks.
- we are all developing on top of either AWS or Azure and are actually using the technologies they provide and not just hosting a bunch of VMs.
- we can all do Devops in a pinch.
- all of us are using the latest .Net Core features or Node and most of us are using Docker.
- We are all using a combination of SQL and NoSQL databases.
Etc.
We all have corporate jobs and won’t go near any of the cool kids work 80 hours a week at below market wages with the promise of equity startups. We have grown people bills to pay and want to get home to our families.