given the numerous posts about age discrimination on hn, i'm delighted to hear your story and wish you many more years of happy programming. as a whipper-snapper 40-something developer, it gives me hope and motivation.
The industry is backwards. Would you rather have a 25-year-old plumber, architect, photographer, chef, or a 50-year-old one?
Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience.
A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve Jobs, they don't have any taste. Their surplus physical energy could be a liability, as they'll just write more code that's hard to maintain. Of course there are exceptions. Don't discriminate by age in either direction. Ask for experience, and make your final judgment after examining their portfolio (just as you would an architect or photographer), looking for signs of good taste.
I think a large part of the problem is that the software industry still doesn't know how to measure someone's value systematically and reliably. Metrics like LOC/day or bug minimization or speed of project delivery differ widely across problem domains and the technical level of contributor.
Does wisdom count in software? Practically and generally, I'd say no. When setting hiring priorities, cost trumps wisdom in all but the most senior roles.
(BTW, at 62, I've been coding professionally for 34 years. I wish I were valued more by my employers with each passing year. But if it's so, they hide it well.)
I think current gigs want younger people not for their performance but their „price”. They work overtime without payment, are relatively cheap and you need alot of them. For every architect you have in the company there are like 20-30 developers of lower grade. So the demand for „design making” people is just not there.
The industry has been very biased; from 1940 there weren't many programmers, very quickly the number of programmers doubled, most had little experience. Through the 1970s there weren't many programmers with more than 5 years experience. As the number grew so fast, through the 1980s most programmers still had less than 5 years experience. Same through the 1990s. Probably still the same through the 2000s and 2010s and with how many people are learning to code, probably still the same now, most programmers have <5 years experience.
That means most employers have only ever seen developers with <5 years experience, working in teams of same, using languages and tools designed by and for same. How could such employers properly value 30 or 50 years of experience?
while not as old as OP, I personally know several programmers in their 50s and 60s and all said they had no problem finding work.
I think if you're a top-tier developer (which OP seems to be!) age discrimination may not be as much of a factor? If you're decent but not amazing (most of us honestly) you may find it easier to find work at 35 than at 55.
I'm 52 and am just starting to look around. Given that I primarily want world-wide remote (I live in Japan), it may be a tad difficult. However, I had no trouble at all attracting interest in my mid 40's when I went to London for a couple of years. It took me less than a month to land a job and I had a couple of options.
My biggest piece of advice to anyone who wants a long technical career is to keep learning new things. Don't rely on your day job to train you in what you need. Follow up on stuff that interests you and invest some of your "me" time on staying current in areas that interest you. I've seen a lot of people drop out of the industry because they were over specialised. I know APL experts, Cobol and DB2 experts, C++ with MFC experts, etc, etc. None of them are working as programmers any more. It's tempting to thing that Java enterprise and C# and Ruby on Rails and Python and whatever you think is the best paycheck will last forever. It won't and over time you will slowly become obsolete. A 40 something (or 50 something) with no relevant technology experience will be seen as less valuable than a 30 something because people will be imagining you are simply going through the motions. The fact that you aren't getting sucked into the new (and horrible) programming fads makes you even less attractive because the people hiring you have been pulled into those fads. So it's important to be able to speak the speak and walk the walk.
Maybe I'm unusually fortunate that a lot of day jobs I've had at one point or another gave me an opportunity to learn new tech (that wasn't the one that got me hired there). In the past 5 years I've mostly been alternating between c# & javascript/typescript.
There would be new projects & not many people in the company experienced in the tech required (due to hiring staff that has experience in their bread & butter current projects) and it was often pretty easy to jump on those ships - it does require the confidence that you'll be able to ramp up quickly!
Also when a technology is new there is a shortage of people with experience using it & companies relax experience expectations when hiring.
Learn just enough about the fads so you can hold a conversation about them, but don't invest heavily in every one of them. You don't need to tech hop every year - give things at least a couple years to shake out. This will let you skip a lot of the time wasting BS that comes with fad driven development.
This is great advice. The other thing about learning a little bit about all the new fads is that you can fairly quickly figure out bits where going a bit more deeply will help you out in general. For example, I would not recommend using React for every front end project (or even most ;-) ), but playing with React and understanding what it was trying to accomplish legitimately made me a better programmer.
This. This is how I treat customer fads as a consultant, so far to good effect. Consulting isn’t too different than interviewing for jobs, especially the part where you have to convince new customers that you know what you’re doing and are worth your rate.
you're right, not all of us can be super star devs (i certainly am not) but we can apply their techniques, mainly stay healthy and never stop learning.
Artists get better with age. Programming is an art. All tedious tasks get automated away. All that's left are design decisions. Making good design decisions is what people mean by "taste". Taste gets better with experience.
A young person may have more physical energy, but to paraphrase Steve Jobs, they don't have any taste. Their surplus physical energy could be a liability, as they'll just write more code that's hard to maintain. Of course there are exceptions. Don't discriminate by age in either direction. Ask for experience, and make your final judgment after examining their portfolio (just as you would an architect or photographer), looking for signs of good taste.
Further reading: "Taste for Makers", by Paul Graham, http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html