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Comment by weatherlite | Hacker News Reader

Most software devs won't make it to 67 unfortunately. Without a major (really major) cultural shift in the job market mid 50s seems to be about it for most software devs - by then ageism and burnout (which happens among others because of ageism) show most tech workers the door. When companies talk about diversity they don't mean age diversity...there's no virtue signaling in hiring a mid 50s white man.

This maybe less of an issue in Europe but its still an issue there for sure, this is a young industry that likes young people, tolerates middle aged (40-50) and hates anything above that.

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To be honest I barely tolerate young people! I am in my late 30s and every time I interview someone in their mid 20 I wonder what happened to the education system… give me a 40yo or 50yo instead of 10 20yo any time!

I do think some companies are starting to see this. I interviewed with two young (<25) people yesterday and she said they're /too young/ and all the "experienced" people have left so they're now slow and have issues with tech design and debt so they're trying to backfill experienced people now. It was pretty clear what she meant and why I was being interviewed.

I see this as well which is wonderful for us late 30, mid 40 people. But I don't think they mean 60 when they say experienced. This isn't unique to tech btw ...ageism is all over the place.

Things will change.

For the past 20 years there's been a massive influx of people into IT.

Which means that we're starting to reach a point where there are ALREADY a lot of people in IT.

Those people will start becoming older and older.

It's a slow phenomenon, but I expect that by 2040 or so the average age of the IT worker to have gone up by at least 10, but more likely by 15 years.

So no more this "28 year olds are the majority", but more "40 year olds are the majority".

I hope you're right. You would expect that societies that age so rapidly would take ageism more seriously. It's probably the worst discrimination of them all by magnitude yet no one talks about it much or does anything.

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