[airbreather]

"I'm in my late 30s btw, so already at the point in my life where I need to do whatever I can to keep a competitive edge against 20-somethings in the industry"

I am interested to explore this recurring theme, in that how does 10 years difference at that age make such a big difference?

When you think a world class sprinter is not regarded to coming into their own until their 30's at best, it can't be physical condition.

Then you think, is it mental condition, the ability to absorb and adapt to new things, and sharpness of memory? But I wonder if not, when I think back to my 20's and of my friends and collegues, any sharpness was well overwhelmed in a wholistic sense by inexperience and often excessive hubris.

I would have said 30's is about when an individual may have accumulated enough balance and skills to really start considering to eb able to deliver, unless being managed exceptionally well earlier in life.

So that leaves possible other factors

1) Many manegers are quite young these days and don't like to manage people older than them, for a wide variety of reasons.

2) Tech is cashing in on a bunch of unpaid work when they acquire fresh young talent who have worked hard in their own time for many years previous, to be up to date with the latest languagse/stacks etc. After ten years unless they have really kept up, they are stale.

3) Once you hit 30, you might be a little sick of living to work and want to spend more spare time with family and friends, so therefore maybe not doing the extra (unpaid) work to do more and/or keep up.

4) Once you hit 30, tried your guts out, been unlucky with hitting the fuck off money and still really need to work, maybe the hunger is gone. (or that is the perception)

5) It's a cult and there is no reason, but once the club has formed that's how it runs.

By now I am getting more and more out there, but all of the above have some premise of plausability, but I am interested to know what everyone's experiences/thoughts are from SV/tech.

Note of Context:

I work in another country, in a tech based field being industrial engineering of electrical and control systems, but any ageisim doesn't seem to really kick in until after 50, if at all.

But it is a bit more conservative, and uptake of new tech is much slower compared to SV because the risks are far more tangible (long lead very big money projects, possible harm to human life) and the conservative position is to do what is known to work. Breaking things is not in the normal acceptable range of outcomes.

The slower rate of new tech adoption is especially because Final Investment Decision (FID) may not occur until 10-20% of potential budget has been expended doing front end studies and tightly defining the path forward to completion.

[pcthrowaway]

I thought it was pretty clear from my post... my memory is much worse than it was in my 20s (and I have <10 years of professional experience). A 20-something with 10 years of experience is going to remember the things they solved in those 10 years (or they are much more likely to anyway). I might remember that I solved it once, but the details of how are entirely elusive.

[airbreather]

OK, I just don't remember anything like that at 30, if anything I was just coming into my own

Is it actual capacity of memory, or amount of information required on tap so much higher?

At age 35 there was not quite mobile phones as common items, and I could rememebr 200+ landline numbers off the top of my head, people used to call out to me for them across the room.

[pcthrowaway]

I have to document the shit out of everything I work on so that if I come back to it 3 days later I can remember what the hell this component/module/api is supposed to do.

In my mid-to-late 20s when I started programming professionally I didn't have the experience to know how important thorough documentation was, but it didn't cause problems for me because I could generally just remember all the things I had worked on.