I was senior level but unable to shave yet when the movie War Games came out. That movie changed things socially and eventually at work. Young Bill Gates rise in celebrity also changed things. Quite a bit later, the dot-com boom started and we were hiring anything with a warm pulse to script HTML and Cold Fusion. Some of those kids were pulling $150K/yr in 1996 money! When the Crash happened, the kids moved home and laughed it off, eventually to reemerge as $7-$17/hr contractors while almost everyone over 40 was permanently retired (exceptions abound, but not enough). It happened because the older workers had more serious bills to pay and that involved changing careers and/or cracking open retirement nest eggs. The kids lacked any tenure with the grey beards and snow caps to guide them, but they had Google Search and the remotely connected Europeans (who were not as badly affected by the Crash due to socialism). Those kids of that era are fundamentally screwed because of lack of formal training and learning from those with decades of experience (and, of course, CS majors started graduating again ..about 17 years ago now.. and while initially outnumbered by the idiot kid masses, did manage to replicate to the point where things like PHP and Node are being slowly killed off and the applied science is coming back —along with renewed efforts to put training wheels on everything like was tried a generation ago with Pascal/Modula/Ada). However, one thing all those workers ALL shared was peer age group camaraderie! The older people were not seen as credible because the kids came to believe the entire industry had suddenly appeared out of thin are along with the advent of the WWW. Jeff Bezos took care of their heavy lifting for them (as long as they worked somewhere with a credit card lol) and is now the richest man in the world. Of course, I’m speaking very general here, but, for example, I doubt FB could have ever taken on Google because of this issue. I realized I was in trouble one day when I interviewed at Qualcomm wearing a suit and the kid who showed up late in casual attire accused me of being a fraud —not to my face, but to the recruiter. I notified their Legal and the response was like “Do we have a problem here?” Things are a bit better now, some of those kids look older than they are. Still, it’s not wise to let the young know what decade you were born in now, just as it once was with the old, before the War Games movie and Billy Gates.
Well done. I really don’t understand it either. I have close to 30 years experience, and have always stayed relevant in terms of approach, skills, and knowledge.
According to the folks I’ve worked with in the past, I’ve done great work, and I’m still in regular contact with many of them.
But ... there is a lot of ageism out there. Which I've never understood.