[AdamN]

The age thing is more about our business culture than our tech culture. There is lots of room for older programmers if they can be buffered from short term goals and the switching of those goals every few weeks. In addition those older programmers need more comfort that they won't have the sword of Damocles hanging over their body as their job is constantly threatened (as well as the jobs of their coworkers).

If businesses can settle into a cadence with high psychological safety and multi-year runways, older programmers can do tremendous things for the business (or government/organization) and deliver high quality software and at the same time train up junior engineers.