I'm now in my 50s. I tried management but prefer working as an IC. I think I'm good but I know most companies would never hire me. One thing I do now is try to look after all the youngest grads and new joiners. Its so cutthroat now it seems no one has time to help anyone else, so I like helping people get up and running and encouraging them to enjoy their work while being productive and getting their skills up. No one else seems to care.

Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.

They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.

I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.

My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.

In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.

One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"

Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:

"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."

I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:

"Isn't that what you hired me for?"

I can add to this as well. I am 59 next month. I got my current position when I was 55. I was convinced that it was over for me. I was coming off a 28 month, yes, month, self-imposed sabbatical. Somehow the stars aligned and the interviews went my way.

I, too, teach a lot in my position and mentor ~half-dozen younger people at a time. I do not work for a "cutthroat culture" company, thankfully! All of my protégés have moved from Production Support roles into SRE roles in the past 3 years.

My 36 years of experience allows me to see things someone with far less will not, or cannot yet see. My XP is valued.

I hold monthly SRE Learning sessions where I demonstrate SRE-centric solutions using Python and other tooling. I teach brand new developers what it is to be on a development team and how to function more efficiently on a day-to-day basis. I also got invited to sit in on our company's AI Dev Assist working group after they saw the prompts I was writing and using to implement new and maintain existing systems.

I must also mention that, early on, I won a company trivia contest at my company that included 1,400 participants, and 15 questions where speed mattered. After that, I got a lot of respect from the younger crowd. ;)

If you are practicing ageism in your hiring practices, then maybe you are interviewing the wrong older persons.

We mature (<-key word!) folks have a lot to offer back - you just need to be capable of seeing that in the one you are interviewing. Beware the Grousing Grey Beards!

There are places that care. My organization has a management-backed, engineer-led mentorship program. I'm among the most senior engineers in the org, and a significant portion of my time is spent on mentoring, with general acknowledgement that despite my own abilities my support of other engineers is the highest-impact thing that I can be doing with much of my time.

Teams that don't care about engineer growth will come to regret it.

I had someone like you in my early life as a soft-eng and they made a huge impact on me personally and professionally. You will be remembered beautifully.

The most wasteful thing about corporate working life now is the way its incentives push everyone into leadership roles as "progress", when they're many people who do not want it or, worse, are clearly not suitable for it. Less so a problem in tech but still there.

Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.

I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.

Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.

not just not care, a lot of companies actively hate what you are doing :-(

as you say, cutthroat

Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!

What a noble cause good sir. It's inspiring and I shall steal this idea and do whatever I can to move it forward!

thank you & to people like you --

places with older people & people with families i.e dads | mothers etc are a pleasure to work with

less bullshit, less time wasting, less chasing non productive hype

however the industry has been decimated lately, so now those places are rare

however I have discovered -- low-key cities tend to have places staffed with experienced colleagues

(continue to) be the change you want to see in the world.