Molly, you are so right. And this is why internships are a bunch of hooey too. ("hooey" only in the supposedly merit-based on-ramp sense- of course they're valuable for teaching and learning and building a great team) The entire process toward getting tech job is ageist if all we have to offer "junior devs" is the internship role. (all the ads say that interns must be recent graduates or currently enrolled in an undergrad CS program) Nevermind if that's even legal. We know legality doesn't come into it until a whole movement and hashtag gets going. The ageism is sickening. It does seem that those who are the most ageist may suffer the consequences of their culture later. For example, it's interesting that Facebook is now officially the "old(er) person's social media" according to The Guardian and many other sources this week. Do note that "old" had to be changed in rewrite to "old(er)" in the paper, so as not to appear as fully insulting and ageist as the statement to address the data actually is.
I'm a little older but I'm only 6 years in the industry. I worked at a job where they were using technologies from 10 years ago, i.e. tons of custom PHP5 and MySQL on top of Wordpress, while I took the time to learn Angular, Node.js, MongoDB, Postgres, React, and modern tooling like Grunt and Webpack -- this list can go on and on. Now I have a situation where I had to go back in time and learn how to do things 4 years before I started hacking and everyone in any position of power is treating me like I'm a threat. I open my mouth at a meeting and someone will immediately shut me down. At every corner, I'm being mansplained to and I'm a man.