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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>At 40, I've done some of the best work I've ever done [...] Its because at 40, I had a much deeper understanding of the tech,

The blog post isn't about self-reported cognitive ability getting stronger (or not declining). It's about the job marketplace.

Maybe it's instructive to compare/contrast different professional careers that depend on mental abilities and how age affects marketability:

- computer programming : oft-reported industry bias against age 40+ and active recruitment (especially by software companies) for 20-somethings.

- corporate executive manager (e.g. CEO, COO, CFO, etc) : age 40+ is typically the target hire age. Being a younger 20-something actually works against being hired for these roles. (To be CEO at age 20, you'd have to be the founder of a startup.)

- surgeon : age 40+ doesn't seem to bother patients. They may rather have a 55-year old do their heart bypass rather than a young 30-year old just out of residency.

Why is experience valued for outside hires of CEOs but not as much for programmers? In other words, a 55-year old programmer would have 35 more years of experience than a 20-year old but that "extra 35 years of programming" doesn't seem to be valued as much as the "extra 35 years of managing" that a 55-year CEO candidate has. Why?

I have pet theories on that but I'd rather hear what others think.

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I agree with your sentiment. I was 51 when I last applied for a job at a new company. Initially I was getting very little interest in my resume. Then I cut out the first 10 years of my career from my resume (and LinkedIn), and downgraded the oldest position listed from a Senior Lead to just a developer -- essentially making me appear 40 instead of 50. Within a couple of weeks I started getting responses.

And it is not like my work from 1990-2000 wasn't valuable. I worked on a complex large scale analytics system in the early 90's and migrated to large scale web-based applications in the later half of the decade. I'm proud of that work and have some interesting lessons and stories from that time period, but they are telltale of my age and were working against me.

From the perspective of someone who has been on the hiring side, I see this a bit differently.

Senior developer positions are more common now, in part from title inflation but also the rise of more complex online interactions and businesses. By cutting the senior bit out of your resume, you no longer look overqualified for the more numerous junior / "regular" developer positions.

While your work from the 90's is likely very interesting, for many companies the soft skills and lessons learned will be more applicable to whatever role they have available, best included as a summary.

I promise that most hiring managers aren't going to read a 10 page resume, or even a 4 page one. 9 times out of 10, they just want to answer a simple question: should the team take time to find out more about this candidate? If the first page of your resume doesn't answer that, it likely won't make the cut.

On a final note, "30 years experience" really isn't a great sign. I have indeed worked with the type of person who has basically had the same experience over and over for 30 years, not growing, learning new technical or leadership skills, etc. That is totally fine for many positions, but it is mark against them for many others.

I was told it's unusual to include more than ten years of work history on your resume in most fields. So I stop at ten years now and don't include dates on my degrees, and I haven't had any trouble. It helps that I've somewhat deliberately kept learning new things at every job (otherwise I get bored!).

And of course it's BS that this is necessary. But until the entire culture shifts I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and then telling people how old I am after I've signed the offer.

I've taken largely the same approach. Soon to be pushing 40, but my LinkedIn makes it look like I'm about 30 due to dropping off early career jobs.

I also strategically drop items from my resume that I no longer wish to touch. Cuts down on recruiter spam significantly in the process.

I put them under a Projects/Misc/Other heading without a date (though the tech may out you).

Ageism is real. It's not some sour grapes of under-performers who let their skills decline, or move or think at a dotard pace. It's essentially "We don't want anyone old because old = bad, new = good."

I think it is a lot about under-performers that want to hang onto their "years of experience" as a selling point and being angry that there is not much of a market for "years of experience" only.

Maybe they were not under-performers 10-15 or 20 years ago, but if someone gives 20 pages of resume and most of it happened in 90's I would not be interested. Because it is quite easy to see such person is hanging onto his past performance like Al Bundy to his 4 touchdowns in high school.

If someone would be 50yrs old or even 60 but his last couple of years are taking most of resume and they did interesting work at that age I would be curious to talk to such person.

It is not that they would need to have latest frameworks or libraries listed on the CV. It is more about if they did meaningful work in last year and not that they did meaningful work 20 years ago and now they are just hanging around doing whatever.

So my resume concentrates on the last five years, with the prior 30+ being mere bullet items, in the event you want to ask. You are correct that no one really cares about what you have done outside the last five years.

Of course my comment is not about anyone personally and I expect there is a lot of people who are doing just fine and are reasonable.

But then under performers are interviewing more so they cast bad impression on others that are their age/ethnicity whatever.

Just like the saying good developers are not on the market for long and one that make good impression are hired quickly.

This is also true. Definitely can't slack off on the couch with a hand in their pants. Even someone with little experience can become perpetually stuck starting at the beginning of their career in low performance if they don't push themselves towards excellence. Slacking off at any point leads to a downward spiral of decay.

> Why is experience valued for outside hires of CEOs but not as much for programmers? In other words, a 55-year old programmer would have 35 more years of experience than a 20-year old but that "extra 35 years of programming" doesn't seem to be valued as much as the "extra 35 years of managing" that a 55-year CEO candidate has. Why?

I'll bite – I think it is because instead of licensing and regulating our profession like surgeons, we have opened it up to creativity and inclusion like artists or fashion designers.

As a result, programming job trends are far more similar to fashion or art than medicine. You always want the clothes from the hip new designer, but a few stalwarts (Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, etc.) are evergreen and always in demand. They even end up influencing the larger trends of fashion. If you ask Ralph Lauren how things are going, he'll say "I'm 81 and I have no problems finding work!". You might even have individual designers who are discovered at 81 and become a hit. But that is not the condition for the average fashion designer who is 81.

Similarly, you'll hear from plenty of older programmers for whom things have worked out as they get older. My hypothesis is that they are also the ones who have kept up with changing fashions and paradigms.

Indeed, one of the things you'll hear from "older" developers is "you gotta keep learning new stuff" and "learn how to learn". You might find yourself with some extended contract for maintaining a legacy codebase that is too big or important or risky to migrate... then you may be "set" for some years, but that's certainly not a majority of cases I see. And... if you're early 50s and have some in-demand niche skills that might be out of fashion in say, 5-10 years, but you have work lined up right now, that may be enough to just double down and stay put, vs trying to learn a bunch of new tools. You'll still be 'behind' on the new tools, and you'll still be competing against some degree of implicit ageism.

The problem I've witnessed is this creates a perverse incentive to keep the organization using old tech even when its against the organizations best interest. I've seen developers essentially lie to non-software-minded managers as a means of not being forced to learn a new platform.

There's a lot of factors at play. Yes, there's incentives to 'lie' and say "this can't be upgraded". There's also incentives to say "this is old and is bad and we have to rewrite!" - I've seen a lot of resume-driven-development. There are people who will lie to avoid having to learn an old platform as well.

Very true. In my experience the rationale to lie to upgrade has a higher burden because it has to overcome the inertia of a status quo that has at least worked for some time.

It tends to be easier to advocate for a past solution than an unproven one.

if/when the aforementioned 'non-software-minded managers' are the audience that needs to approve requests... all bets are off, ime.

To be fair, most of my experience is where software is an enabling function, not viewed as the end deliverable. E.g., control software for hardware. In most instances, the project managers were hardware folks and that tends to cause the problems you might be alluding towards.

This falls inline with what I was going to respond with, but your response puts a better angle on it.

I was going to suggest that the nature of software moves much faster than many other disciplines, even other STEM ones. At least in industry*, a mechanical engineer isn't as likely to have to un-learn and re-learn like a software engineer. This tends to make those industries a bit more slow moving which, in turn, makes experience in the traditional ways of doing things a bit more valuable.

I know NCEES toyed with the idea of a software engineer professional license, but it died on the vine because so few people took it up. I suspect the outcome would have been different if industry or regulation made it a priority, like it is for civil engineers.

>My hypothesis is that they are also the ones who have kept up with changing fashions and paradigms.*

This is my thought as well, but I think a lot of bias comes because of other life events. The SWEs I knew who felt left out just didn't have enough bandwidth to spend extra hours each week learning when they had many of the other commitments that generally start creeping in in one's 30s onward.

*(In academia, there's a bit more emphasis on 'state-of-the-art', I presume).

I always tell people that software development, as a career, is like being in college forever. You have to be in the learning mindset your whole career. Part of that learning, is learning technology, and part of that learning, is learning people and organizations. Organizations are very different, today, than they were in 1990. Less change than the underlying technology, but changed none the less.

hmm there are a lot of old brands and designs out there in clothing, and I dont think I have ever owned anything from a "hot new" fashion brand

My clothes are either no name, or old old companies like Carhartt, levis, Wrangler, Dickies, etc...

> My clothes are either no name, or old old companies like Carhartt, levis, Wangler, Dickies, etc...

You are wearing designer clothes! Just by a designer from 1873 [1]. The equivalent programmer would be John von Neumann, maybe.

--------------------

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss

Exactly my point. the Comment I responded to was "No one wants old designers they want the Hot New young designers"

Also from the comment:

> ...but a few stalwarts (Yves Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, etc.) are evergreen and always in demand. They even end up influencing the larger trends of fashion.

The "old" brands you are wearing are all the result of stalwart designers from the past.

Something tells me you're not in the fashion industry.

The average customer doesn't give a shit about the hot new thing, be it fashion or web framework, but the customers aren't the ones hiring talent and shaping the industry.

Carhartt produces clothes designed by others. If you look at their wikipedia page, all the designers mentioned are either old and famous, or the young "hot new thing".

The implicit assumption powering this is that programming experience from 35 years ago is not only irrelevant to today’s challenges, but undesirable due to having the wrong habits and patterns of thinking; this stands in contrast to surgery or management skills which are widely perceived to be more timeless with candidate value compounding with experience.

It’s plainly false for all sorts of reasons, but that’s the source of the disparity.

> The implicit assumption powering this is that programming experience from 35 years ago is not only irrelevant to today’s challenges, but undesirable

I think the implicit assumption has it the wrong way around. It seems like the industry takes about 30 years to catch up with the mathematicians who had discovered the solution to our problems.

We create this problem for ourselves. Some hot new web framework rediscovers the continuation monad and treats it as a novel invention. Giving it a slapping new name, a slick logo, and talks at the hottest industry events. A whole generation of developers learn to talk the talk, walk the walk, and hit a wall. The next framework comes along and suddenly they're, "too out of fashion."

Computing hasn't changed radically in a long time and certainly not programming.

> Computing hasn't changed radically in a long time and certainly not programming.

This might depend on what you consider radical.

Web forms vs MVC vs react + restful API are fairly different coding paradigms.

Trying to create a windows service in net framework 2.0 is totally different than net core 5.

Or using SQLDataReader to read executed sql strings vs entity framework?

Even just dependency injection and scope definitions (transient, singleton, scoped) is very basic yet is something I’ve seen older developers tripping over. At least it’s an easy to identify run time error as it validates the container when running in development.

I’m not saying older developers are bad, but developers with the mindset that coding now is the same as coding 20 years ago are either using a language that never developed itself or are going to stumble over the changes that did occur.

This is actually the attitude that I find highly undesirable in "experienced" programmers. They recognize that Y is just X with some fancy dressing, but fail to appreciate the immense value added by that fancy dressing and thus treat Y as if it were X and never take advantage of any of the improvements, or expect Y to do things that X could be made to do but really is best done by Z nowadays.

You're still trying to accomplish the same goals, and there are only so many building blocks, so yes the big picture stays roughly the same and its only the details that change, but the devil is in those details. I find working with people who are not only ignorant of the details, but proud to recognize that they are "just" details, to be a nightmare.

I've met plenty of older developers that refused to adapt and keep learning. On the other hand, the best developers I've known have all been older. It's not about the skills you acquired at age X. It's about you attitude towards continual learning and improving, regardless of your age.

A lot of companies are run with the Taylorism hierarchy. The people at the bottom are making the widgets. The layer above them are the managers, who are good at managing workers. A layer above them are executives who are good at making strategic management decisions that the managers will implement.

That system worked well during WW2 and postwar America. Someone who was a manager at an airplane factory could move to another company and be a manager at a washing machine factory.

While it is true that some management and people skills can transfer between industries, the big problem with Taylorism in tech is that the skillset needed to make the right management decision is orthogonal to the skillset required to get into a traditional executive role. Andy Grove, from Intel, was very successful at adopting a new management framework for this scenario as described in his book "High Output Management"

Not everyone is as a good of a manager as Grove, so you still see a lot of managers following Taylorism hierarchy. And that requires that engineers assume the lowest level of the system and accept that their "managers" are qualified to make decisions. Young people without much exposure to the business side of things are much more likely to accept these positions. Managers are afraid of hiring someone 40+, who may know both the tech side and business side of things and be aware of management mistakes due to the manager's lack of technical expertise.

As mentioned elsewhere in the this chat, I'm a 45 yo principal engineer at my current company who has seen nothing but an increase in attention from recruiters since turning 40.

I'm also directly involved in hiring for my team, having helped add 15 members over the last year, working directly w/ the director to review all resumes, handling maybe 30% of the screens, and usually the veto vote. We've interviewed a number of engineers in their 40s and 50s.

Experience is great and we're always welcoming of older devs... but there is a caveat. If that experience is tempered by a somewhat pessimistic attitude, which is often the case, there is rarely a chance to move forward. It's not being old - it's being worn out.

AFA the resumes of older devs, we often cut them out because they're an objectively terrible, wall of text mess that goes on for 4+ pages. Like 2/3 of the time this is the case.

I'm a 50+ staff eng, and I agree that I'm getting as much interest as ever from recruiters. Just gotta stay current and never take on the attitude I see from older engineers of "this new crap is just what we used to do back in the day". New stuff is different and has value, just accept it and stop whining.

As for resumes, I personally don't get the page limit, since I love long resumes with detail when I'm evaluating engineers, but understand the marketplace absolutely hates them. I don't know if it is HR or auto pre-filters or the hiring managers, but it doesn't matter. All I know is that when looking for a job most recently, I had a 3+ page resume and was getting some, but not many, hits. Then, as an experiment, I trimmed it down to a single page, making it ridiculously thin in my judgement, ran it through the various sites that judge the resume based on keywords, and came up with a custom resume (lightly so) for each posting. I suddenly jumped up to a 75%+ call back rate.

Keep your resume to 1 page, cut out the details on the old jobs unless it is really interesting, and basically just list the tech you know.

For me it’s all about communication style. I see those wall of text resumes and I see a person that is going to be a poor communicator and possibly a sloppy coder - not knowing when to self-edit and separate the wheat from the chaff on what actually brought value to the roles they took.

Detail is great but concision is greater. The resume is a marketing vehicle and it should be well honed. We can dig into what someone knows during the half dozen hours we spend interviewing them.

I understand the need to fake overwhelming optimism to get by interviewers with mindsets similar to yours. Too much honesty can be bad in this industry, especially at higher levels, where diplomacy and soft skills are very important.

I have that optimism and it certainly is not fake. I love what I do. Yes, I bring experience to the table but not bad energy.

WTF would you want to hire someone who poisons the well? It doesn't matter what the job/industry is, in what situation would that be remotely desirable?

If you say so. But just as you doubt the vigor of the “somewhat pessimistic” candidate (in your words, you didn’t say they were toxic), others will doubt the sincerity of your overwhelming optimism. So is life.

When we discuss these types of candidates, that is always the tone of the discussion.

It's good to discuss the pluses and minuses of an approach, we encourage this in our architecture section of the interview loop and during the initial screen when discussing line items in the resumes.

It's having a general negative attitude... bad mouthing past employers, being negative to a tech stack (and literally not couching it with any reasoning what-soever when we try to dig in), being negative to past arch decisions by co-workers without providing what are better solutions, things like that. Sometimes it's implied, sometimes it's more direct, but it there is a distinct lack of social intelligence that seems to happen more w/ older candidates that just suggests someone is burnt out. Wisdom should bring skill, not attitude.

Forest from the trees here. You pay someone to bring value to the team. That is not valuable to anyone. We're not running charities.

You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range, but younger candidates seem to get more of a pass than older ones (or perhaps because the senior candidates have more rope to hang themselves with). Over negativity about past employers is indeed a warning sign (though some negativity is fine, like if you ask the question “what did you dislike about your past employer? “), but pessimism in small quantities shouldn’t be taken as an automatic negative. I would definitely be suspicious if all the opinions a senior candidate had were positive. If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it.

"You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range"

But this is specifically an issue more prevalent in older candidates, and is in large part the reason for a pass. We pass on younger candidates as well for this reason, but most prevalently for skill.

"If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it."

I literally just said we consider this a positive and that we specifically dig in for this. It seems like you're willfully misinterpreting the message here, which is underscoring the point I'm actually making.

Seriously, don't be that person.

Really, what you are saying is 100% spot on, but seems to be misunderstood for some reason.

If presented with a difficult problem, there are people that go "nah, that can't be done, here's a long list of reasons why".

There are also people that go "That's going to be difficult, but maybe we can try A, B or C and I recall reading about this cool new tech that could perhaps help"

Be open to change and open to accepting that new things could be good and interesting.

I'm 43. Hiring engineers. Working with some 50+ engineers that are the absolute best I've ever worked with.

This is 100% correct. As a hiring manager, the attitude of candidates was probably equally important as their skills when it comes to the decision of whether to hire. The baseline of is this someone I would enjoy working with every day? Is this someone my team would enjoy working with every day? If it's not a solid yes I'm going to pass on you.

This must be some kind of cultural difference in the purpose of jobs. Where I come from, the purpose of work is get things done, put food on the table, and hopefully not make the world a worse place in the process. Enjoying the company of everyone you work with is not a significant consideration.

You might be missing out on a lot of great people because of your high first impression bar. And I don’t mean good workers but bad social skills, but people who are actually really chill to work with even if they don’t show it so quickly. This is why most culture fit filters really don’t work well, people have a wrong or too narrow impression of who they would enjoy working with everyday.

> The baseline of is this someone I would enjoy working with every day?

And a problem is that hiring managers, but especially recruiters are often relatively young, and thus biased towards people closer to their own age.

I can't stand the jaded senior engineer archetype. They're absolutely toxic to the junior and mid-level engineers who look up to them.

Years ago i was at a coffee shop and overheard a conversation between a college student and what had to have been an assigned mentor. This guy was going on and on about the very worst of his experiences in his career yet, in a weird way, bragging about them at the same. This poor kid was writing every word down in a notebook she had. He got up to the restroom and i walked over and politely told her this guy is only filling her head with poison and to run as far and as fast away from them as possible. She got up and left.

As long as you're not gonna be ageist that's fine to hate a certain type of engineer. Remember you will get old one day too and you'll be surprised how fast time flies.

I understand what you mean but I’m 45 and have been around the block a few times. I’m not sure if this analogy works completely but teaching someone how to climb a mountain safely is good.

Beating into the head of an aspiring climber the details of every injury/death disillusioning them of even an attempt is full stop unacceptable.

I get you buddy seems like you had a bad experience with some old dude. But you're no spring chicken yourself, you will get to that age eventually. Let's just all be humane to each other and judge each other according to merit as much as possible. I'm 37 and wanna keep working 15 years from now...

Some pessimism is good. We're older, we've seen it fail already. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again just in a different programming language. That's why you hire older programmers.

From one older dev to another - you’re misinterpreting the message.

Why do you think they have a pessimistic attitude?

I´ll use myself as an example.

I started coding professionally at 23 (I´m 43). For years I pushed myself to be the best coder I could. At 35 I got laid-off. After that I just got sucky jobs were I´m treated like they have me there as a favor (and I work with the latest, and I´m, even with the pessimism, a top performer).

A coworker of mine that thought that coding was a losers job, coded for some months and went to work as a B.A and later as a PM, nowadays is an engineering manager which earns way more than me and is treated way way better. His whole programming experience is an 8-month part time stint with Winforms. And sadly he is not the exception...

In most places devs are being had.

With all due respect, there is no reason to have had sucky jobs over the last 8 years. The market has only gotten increasingly hotter... if you're in a tight spot career-wise, do the work to get into a better company working w/ better people.

If it's an issue w/ passing interviews at better companies, interviewing unto itself is a skill that should be regularly honed.

When I was a younger engineer I was stuck in a job that was unsatisfying for about 5 years... every 1.5 years or so I would interview w/ 3-5 positions, usually one or two would be close to an offer but I ended up empty-handed, would get deflated and give up.

Over the last decade I've taken the job search much more seriously, usually interviewing at 15-20 companies so I can end up w/ 3-5 offers to choose from. Yes, it's very time consuming (probably some 60-70 hours of my time over 5-6 weeks), but the quality of the companies I've worked at has been consequently more satisfying.

I've met plenty of toxic/ego maniacs/pessimistic people who were in there 20s or 30s. Sure age might correlate a bit with the pessimistic side of things but not terribly so imo.

Older programmers are judged more on their experience, a 55 year old candidate is expected to have 35 or so years of experience, but interviewing for that is tough. Instead, reputation is more important (having a bunch of people vouch for you so you be hired in as a staff/principal IC), but not everyone will have that, actually a lot of people won’t. So the 20 year old is an unknown quantity, they are all potential, a 55 year old candidate has to be the exact opposite (known quantity, not much accommodation for potential), and so…well, I’m sure we can see the problem with that.

And if you change your career late in life, you are even more screwed by these kinds of standards. A 40 or 45 year old can’t just get into the industry via an entry level position. Even if they would have a 20 year career ahead of them.

People don't look at a surgeon aged 55 asking themselves why that surgeon failed to move on to the next level. Unfortunately the same isn't true at all for programmers, for some reason it's assumed to be an entry position. If the path to surgery would be through nursing experience, aging nurses would have a much lower standing amongst all their future surgeon peers than they have now.

Seen from this angle, the ageism seems to be an unsurprising outcome of the relatively informal qualification structure in software tech: apparently opportunity for all cannot come without a bit of stigmatization for those who refuse to strive for it.

It's as if the industry doesn't want competency to have a career and a retirement.

Is it because large swaths of the industry use non experienced people to do the hiring? Experience values experience. Lack of experience values perceived longevity, ability to pay less, and zeal.

Also, age is not experience. Age is usually an ingredient to experience (though some make use of less age than others to gain experience). But in and of itself, it does not create useful experience (maybe wisdom is the word we’re looking for here). I’ve worked with many older engineers who hadn’t gained useful experience. They’re still making the same mistakes they did years ago. And I’ve worked with younger engineers who I can tell are going to be old dinosaurs from the get go. They like the high paying career and the problem solving aspect, but the desire to evolve and improve their game play just isn’t there.

Because let's face it: writing code is seen as digging trenches.

I hear all the time from fellow developers how important we are. We get a lot inside jokes how non-devs don't understand things and all the self importance of devs that comes with it.

I have a friend that is hanging a lot out with musicians/artists where they do the same thing as devs - thinking they are important.

While developers earn more than musicians - a lot of musicians are just menial workers performing what they are told - coding is still menial work to be performed. So it is implementing other people ideas or they can just get another violinist.

Surgeon while is quite physical and menial, everyone agrees it is occupation that deals with life and death - most developers are nowhere close to such responsibility.

Ok, but dev managers are also managing people digging trenches, not people in life and death situations, and they don´t face the same problems devs face. And they tend to be more "self important" than devs.

> Why is experience valued for outside hires of CEOs but not as much for programmers?

In my experience, it’s that younger devs are cheaper, much cheaper, than older devs. Most software development is easy enough that you don’t need someone with 20 years experience. I can hire 2 or 3 people for the same price. There’s always a budget for resources, and that budget is usually as small as it needs to be. Web dev, CRUD apps, mobile apps are the norm, not Facebook scale. The tools are mature enough that a 20-25 year old can do the development, and their salary expectations are much lower.

> The blog post isn't about self-reported cognitive ability getting stronger (or not declining). It's about the job marketplace.

C'mon! You don't expect someone here to have actually read the story.

He didn't even get the irony of the title (Usually the expression goes the other way, i.e., "50 is the new 40") which means he didn't even read the title too well, either.

- computer programming : oft-reported industry bias against age 40+ and active recruitment (especially by software companies) for 20-somethings.

I think this is rational. 20-somethings have the least to unlearn, so you can get them to do things your way instead of the unique independent ways an experienced person would.

Secondly, 20-somethings are much more easily abused with long hours and intangible or possible future rewards.

20-somethings are also really fun to work with. Sponges for knowledge and so much energy.

I think the (sometimes justified) fear is that an older programmer may have stopped learning X years prior, and gotten stuck in old practices. It's probably really easy to fall into a groove and say "it worked back then, and it still does". This attitude may be detrimental in a workplace that strives to innovate and wishes to test new technologies.

Experience at that level is expensive and companies are less inclined to pay that much. They also are less likely to believe you'll be comfortable with taking a lower rate for a long duration. This is true for both CEO and high end programmer with decades of experience.

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