[scarface74]

I’m 45 and I share your experience - no age discrimination.

But, I did hear my manager (50+), who is very technical and often gets so sick of the process to get things done, he will pull up an IDE and do a POC himself, bemoan the fact that older developers are good for backend development and architecture but not as good at modern front end development.

I’m not taking any chances. I’m moving more into cloud architecture but hopefully I can stay more in the professional services/development/consulting than the Visio creating/Project Management/Solutions Architect role.

But, I’m definitely not spending the energy keeping up with the latest $cool_kids front end stack.

[marcoseliziario]

Funnily enough, I love React. Maybe because I am old enough to have worked with Borland's Delphi in the past. The feeling I have is that React and UI frameworks put programmers with no design background back in the User Interface game. Because, for the love of God, I hate CSS with a passion. I enjoy doing side projects not only for the money, but also because of the good feeling of owning the whole stack of the product.

[scarface74]

I know everyone has different priorities and lives, but I have a strict rule against side projects. Between spending time with my family and friends, exercise, keeping up with technology, etc. I don’t have time. If I can’t keep abreast of technology at work, it’s time to change jobs. I will stay late and work on side low priority work related projects to learn new to me technologies.

Also, I purposefully work for small companies that are in alignment with the technologies I want to learn or be in. Another benefit to working for small companies after you have the reputation, you can really make a lot of choices when it comes to the how and you get to do as much of the stack as you want.