[dormento]

To offer another perspective:

I feel like companies do not discriminate. People do. And thats only natural. Part of the reflex to keep away from the "diseased animal", the "weird" and the different. That same useful reflex that in hindsight manifests in things we consider heinous, like prejudice and tribal mentality.

Unfortunately, most (all?) companies are still staffed by people.

I'm barely 40 and I've been on the position of being the "token old guy" in a few places. I feel that it sometimes affords me with something akin to an interested audience, if only so that people/HR/management can tick a few boxes while entertaining their own brand of inclusiveness.

They shake their mostly empty heads, listening to terribly radical ideas like "keep external dependencies to a minimum" and "stop bleeding that much money on unproven concepts". Your experience does not matter to them, just the ammount of framework swag you wear and the stickers on your backpack. They look you up and down, and they judge you, those with nothing concrete to show but a resume full of bootcamps and hackathons. You eventually feel like you need to adjust to the status quo, if nothing else, as a means to staying competitive, of not showing the disease, the weirdness and the differences.

That's people for you.