[ageoldlie]

I don't interview anyone over 40. Period. Reason is very simple. By that time they're bitter from some past work experiences and have figured out now a bunch of ways to look busy at work. They also likely have more demands coming from family if they were brave enough to try marriage in the "gig economy" we all live in now. It's great that there is a service out there for those who were never able to save enough to retire before they got replaced with younger more energetic and cheaper labor. At 52, I feel lucky every day that I now have a job in management. Not nearly as interesting work as what I did technically ten years ago, but I'm also making almost three times as much money, and who knows how much more than than one of my former colleagues who is in his 70's with a PhD from a top 10 university and is working at Starbucks to help pay his daughter's $45,000/yr. tuition!

[sh87]

I've seen bitter, demanding and unpleasant 20, 30 and 40 somethings. Also some of the most brilliant minds I've met are grey haired. Age does not matter.

I hope you meet someone compelling enough to trigger you to rethink your bias. Good luck.

[ageoldlie]

Could not agree more. Experience is hugely valuable. Unfortunately, the way a lot of smaller less-funded companies like ours work is that we take the "brilliant ideas" from someone else (often university research but also sometimes insights gleaned through in-house interview process) and implement them for our customers. The vast bulk of our contribution is what you might call "scut work" (often the kind of thing that gets farmed out to grad students and post-docs on the academia side when they want to build a working prototype) and faster rather than smarter is what enables us to compete most effectively with the rest of our market. I wish it weren't this way. I'd still like to be doing technical work myself, in a more carefree and supportive environment, with all the protections that union members in other trades (like law enforcement and primary education) appear to enjoy. But it seems that the technology sector the world over is moving more and more in the direction of "at will" employment where everyone (except when it comes to affirmative action for certain protected classes) has to fight for their own survival until they get too old to put up much of a fight anymore. "Capitalism is cannibalism" is what one of my first supervisors told me right before I got laid off in 2002, and from where I sit today, I feel like truer words could not have been spoken.