Being only in a senior role that late in life itself is a red flag.
I had an older employee in his 60s work as a dev even as he was slowly dying of cancer and receiving treatment. He showed up every day, doing his work, proudly contributing code even at deaths door, until his last day. He had worked 30 years in IT and was a senior dev and there was nothing wrong with his productivity, attitude, etc.
I was blessed to know him. I hope you find strength to open your mind and realize there are wonderful people of all sorts and ages all around you.
I’ve worked with amazing devs and hardware engineers from every age, including 50 and up. I’m guessing your experience with older devs “having a complex” was part of their response once they realized that you are just an asshole. As competent and experienced professionals who have dealt with many assholes before you, they adjusted their dedication to your project to reflect how little they cared about it once you became part of their job. They did enough not to feel guilty, but not so much that they risked working with you for longer than it took to find a better job.
I also like your story about me, because there isn't a single person who works for me or with me that would describe me as an asshole. I'm just an asshole to morons in denial on this flaming turd of a "tech forum". If you don't plan for your expiration date in the programming trenches, then you won't see it coming when it hits you hard.
There's a reason the average age of a programmer is 39 just like there a reason why the average age of a construction worker is 38.
> I also like your story about me, because there isn't a single person who works for me or with me that would describe me as an asshole
If that's true, it's because you play a different character in person. Tell them about how you are "an asshole to morons" on a "flaming turd" of a tech forum, and how amused you were at the example of a terminally ill cancer patient continuing to work as evidence that old people can develop software.
Taking the industry as a whole is representative of a typical career path. If your narrow point is that people who have entry level positions are young, well, of course.
If you've got a better dataset than the BLS, I'm sure there are many people who'd be interested, and you should share it.
...to your face. But you have no idea what they privately think, or say to each other when you're not there.
(I'm with GP, I too guess what they think isn't what you think they think.)
Even if you are really good, you will not get promoted if you came for a non-wealthy background.
More seriously I think something that can happen with older folks is they might fall into working in a single place with a single set of tools for a very long time so when they transition to something different it may be hard to adjust. Not necessarily because “they are old” but because if they did one thing and only that thing for 15 years it’s hard to change.
Thus at BigCo, hiring senior devs of advanced age should make sense to do.
s/a staff engineer/architect.
sometimes it's just junior, regular and senior programmer