[sologoub]

It's very unfortunate, but the main character also an interesting study in skill set relevance and retirement planning (or lack thereof).

He's a software engineer in SV... By all the common stereotypes, he should be in the winner circle and living the life. Agism is definitely an issue in tech, but it's likely that he is not up to date with some of the more modern languages or techniques, resulting in lack of employment.

If he lived there since the 70's, he could have had a paid off place. (Typical mortgage is 30 years term.) If not save by paying off the mortgage, he could have also saved via 401k or something similar. It probably never really occurred to him that employment might be so hard to come by or that things would get so pricey. Coming from an eastern european background, I was conditioned that if you have a paid off place, you can withstand a lot of up and down swings in the economy and the world.

As a society, we should really be focusing on helping people properly market themselves and acquire/update skills needed AND re-enforcing the need to plan for the future. Not really sure how we'd go about implementing the latter without annoying people though...

[muzz]

> Agism is definitely an issue in tech, but it's likely that he is not up to date with some of the more modern languages or techniques

Why do you suspect that he is likely not up date? The first part of your sentence mentions ageism, although the second part sounds a lot like it.