Is ageism really that bad at the companies where you all work? Dang. Can't imagine working someplace where turning 26 puts you at risk of sounding old and washed up.
If a place has 27 year old managers floating around in turtlenecks and preaching everyone how their eco-friendly-furniture-plant-sharing-tech-corp will change the world, you probably realise it's not a good place to work anyways..
I took a contract once at a mobile handset mfgr that had this. This sysadmin-cum-manager dude (with zero previous management exp) thought he was hot sh*t because of his title. Dude was robotic/patronizing fake, arrogant, useless, and just got in the way. He thought his role was to unsolicited "coach" mission statement BS and insult my intelligence.
Oddly enough, I was fired from that gig for witnessing a senior manager repeatedly mute the conference call to make racist remarks about overseas staff.
> for witnessing a senior manager repeatedly mute the conference call to make racist remarks about overseas staff.
This sounds like the perfect opportunity to have your phone in your shirt pocket such that the camera just barely peeks above the cuff of that pocket. As long as you are in a one-party-consent region (most states, all of Canada), you can have some pretty juicy stuff that HR can make “go away” with a golden parachute of sufficient size.
I think it's an attitude thing more than anything. Many people I meet think I'm 10 years younger and refuse to believe otherwise. It's fun to come in as the instructor and everyone thinks I'm the student.
But it's more that if you come in and say that MySQL and PHP is good enough for everything, you're going to sound washed up. It might be true, but it's not good team chemistry when everyone wants to do one thing and one person keeps pulling them back. You don't even have to be 40 for this; 26 is "old" enough.