There are fundamentally two kinds of experienced people: Those with n years of experience, and those with m years of experience n/m times (where n >> m). Part of the only-somewhat-mythical recently-lost middle class compact was that you you train to do something, then work the rest of your life doing that. The former kind, the people who trained as electrical engineers in the 70s (because computer science wasn't invented then), then kept their skills up to date, will have very little trouble finding interesting and well-paid things to work on. The people who still think in terms of mainframes and consider tab-completion uncomfortable magic[1] won't. When, on top of that, they subscribe to the other part of said middle class compact, that your salary is supposed to keep going up (above inflation), then you have a recipe for disappointment.
Is there embarrassing ageism in tech? Undoubtedly. Does ageism explain all of why elder techies on average have trouble finding employment in 'new tech'? I strongly doubt it.
1: The number of ostensibly highly experienced Unix (retrained on Linux) system admins that I have personally, not even exaggerating, promise, taught to use tab completion in Bash in this decade is depressing.
Is there embarrassing ageism in tech? Undoubtedly. Does ageism explain all of why elder techies on average have trouble finding employment in 'new tech'? I strongly doubt it.
1: The number of ostensibly highly experienced Unix (retrained on Linux) system admins that I have personally, not even exaggerating, promise, taught to use tab completion in Bash in this decade is depressing.