[akhmatova]

Know that the odds are stacked against you - but be persistent and press on anyway.

The minority who are willing to look past your age (who will also be the better ones to work for) will pick up on your persistence and see it as a positive trait and hire signal.

As to the resume - there's lots of advice out there on resume advice for older workers. Truncating / condensing lists of older gigs is one of the standard techniques.

The rest of what you do is a variation of the same advice as applies to younger candidates - just that in your case it will have even more protective benefit,

For example - even though it may bore you a bit, be sure to both read (or carefully skim) as many modern books as you can that are relative to your field, as well as to stay up on the "shiny" stuff (cloud, containers, CI/CD) even though your gut instinct will (rightly) tell you they may be overhyped or less important than knowing the core principles.

That is - at least know what they are, what problems they attempt to solve and what they are basically made of. This will make is substantially less easy to dismiss you as a dinosaur (inflexible / crusty / less nimble than younger candidates).

Finally: wear your age with pride. You've lived through times, and have seen things these people can only read about (for those who even read these days). You have a rare perspective to offer, and the better folks out there will see that and dig that aspect of you. And will be proud to have you in their corner and on their team.

[gregjor]

The "shiny stuff" is almost all retreads and new clothes on old ideas. Containers and VMs? Around for decades in various forms. Cloud? That was mainframe computing years ago. CI/CD? Had it back in the '70s. Same with TDD. A hallmark of the software industry: almost nothing truly new gets introduced, but old ideas and technologies get a new coat of paint, a buzzword, and make more sense today because the hardware and networking have improved by orders of magnitude.

Anyone who learned C back in the '70s or '80s can pick up most newer languages quickly. Relational databases, the core of every non-trivial business application, date from the '80s.

My advice: don't worry about or focus on your age, don't make excuses, don't try to persuade people you haven't turned into a dinosaur. Focus on business needs and how you can solve problems and add value. Ageism in tech certainly exists but you mainly run into it when a team of younger people interview someone their dad's age and don't see a good fit with the team. And they're right about that -- I won't work 18 hrs/day for free pizza and beer anymore, and I don't play foosball or need a nap room.