Of course, if you simply rebranded to talk about "experience" rather than "age" then solvelem probbed.
Also, age != experience != skill.
"Company X isn't looking for anyone seasoned"
"Company Y is open to seasoned individuals"
Companies would also look for people who were a certain number of years of out school. Like, "5 to 10 years experience post-degree." Sure, that could technically mean a 45 year old who went back to school at 35 is qualified for the position, but there is a 0% chance the company would hire that person.
The other recruiters would talk about these things pretty explicitly outside of emails. There were a lot of interesting justifications:
Older people are harder to train
Older people are difficult employees because they are stuck in their ways/used to getting their way
Older people expect more benefits/vacation/pay
Older people use more sick time
Older people don't keep up with developments in the field
Discrimination wasn't limited to age. The recruiters were just as happy to help their clients discriminate on race, or gender, or familial status. Really anything.
In my experience, age was the only protected class that recruiters would try to suss out how the hiring managers felt about while they were trying to determine the ideal candidate. It seemed to me that the other prejudices would only come to light after the recruiter had a relationship with the hiring manager and had sent them a number of candidates in the past. There were still a lot of euphemisms though.
This was just my experience though, and I was working for a small firm. I have no idea what the rest of the field is like at all.
They were just working within the system, they don't have any ability to affect the system
Hiring managers aren't going to work with us if we send them candidates they are prejudiced against. They'll just work with someone else, or run their own ads, and they'll still be prejudiced.
Interviewing with that person would be a a waste of the candidate's time, and they wouldn't want to work for someone like that anyway.
Some of the recruiters didn't have justifications, since they didn't feel it was wrong. They just felt they were getting their. Their attitude was pretty much that's the way the cookie crumbles / them's the breaks.
Or, as a former boss of mine put it: "He has one year of experience ten times."
Some older coders I work with might not have obsessively learned the latest framework, but they can identify issues like "that's the kind of subsystem that one person ends up maintaining, and then they leave and it's awful", or "We did something similar in the 1990s, and it didn't go so well because it is overly complex. Is there a simpler way to do this?".
That's a good take on it, and the application of it vary with companies and industries.
A waterfall EE project at a old school company could hardly deliver any stage in 6 months.
A software project at a fast executing startup could have gone through 2 major delivered projects in that time.
Never understood this thing.
One learns the most when he changes company and learnt about a new industry, with new problems, new tech, new people.
You don't see the results of that year that you were there. You don't see the results of of long term maintenance. What worked, what didn't, where you wasted time, what was used, etc.
Even the tools you used, you only used that to get it into production at some level, but you don't fully understand the full long-term impact.
So when someone looks at that, they don't see production level experience. They see that you've done the first years worth of work 10 times, and that you don't have experience with the results. That your experience doesn't mean you can build something that works in the long term. That you can even be counted on to work on something in the long term.
That's just one of the ways it can be looked at.
It means the person isn't learning from their mistakes and is still making the same types of errors a first year programmer/engineer/nurse makes.
To put it another, my age is not coupled to my value. It's up to me, at any age, to focus on what it takes to make my employer more successful.
Employer: "I need a developer who can do A, B, and C."
Me: "That's me!"
Employer: " I can't ask you how old you are, but maybe sometime you can tell me what it was like to start your career at a time when computers read your code off punchcards and ran it on vacuum tubes."
Me: "Nah, I started when computers ran on steam and looked like a building sized abacus. All kidding aside, why do you need A, B, and C? Let's talk about how I can help you make mad stacks of greenbacks."
Employer: "I like making money! OK, I here's what we're working on..."
State laws may vary, check your local jurisdiction to see if they add more.
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states do have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.
If your state or local jurisdiction doesn't protect young(er) workers against discrimination and only the federal law applies, then an employer can discriminate against the young but not the old.
However, aside from that, they do seem to toe the line with phrases like "veteran," "Experience never gets old" and "senior advertising professionals" without explicitly referencing age anywhere. And, at least arguably, an "Oldster" is any experienced professional who uses their site, regardless of age.
But really, I mean I don't feel even slightly threatened by the technical ability of 20-something coders. I was warned throughout much of my career that I'd eventually have to head off to management to keep afloat, but, nope, that was bogus advice.
I can go into more detail here but I'm derailing things slightly already. It is not my contention that ageism isn't a thing. I'm sure it is --- I mean, I'm confident it's a real problem.
I'm just pushing back on the "40 is 1000 in tech years" snark. No, it isn't.
Perhaps the problems are more at the margins (junior level devs, choosing between people of similar ability), but unless the market changes drastically, I can't see a competent engineer having too much trouble regardless of age, at least in locations with a big enough tech scene.