Title: This week alone I had 2 interviews with 2 different companies where in the first one of the interviewers asked me my age, directly followed by &quot;why hire you over a younger graduate?&quot; (which isn&#x27;t the same as &quot;why hire you over someone smarter than you?&quot; because why even ask this). In the second one I was also asked for my age, followed by whether I plan to get married anytime soon.<p>I&#x27;m under the impression that the industry needs to learn to treat amateurs as amateurs regardless of their age. It feels like I&#x27;m not allowed to be an amateur professional simply because I&#x27;m over 30 years old. Instead of seeing people as &quot;a guy with 2 years of experience&quot; or &quot;a woman with 4 years of experience&quot; we see &quot;a 40 year old guy with 2 years of experience&quot; or &quot;a 34 year old woman with 4 years of experience&quot;.<p>It feels like there&#x27;s an implicit expectation of expertise in doing something that comes with my age. It&#x27;s almost as if I&#x27;m not allowed to learn and get good in something that I want, simply because I was late into &quot;the party&quot;, where party can be whatever but since I&#x27;m a web developer that&#x27;s what &quot;the party&quot; is.<p>I&#x27;ve had multiple people telling me that &quot;we saw people with fewer and less polished projects get jobs&quot;. I&#x27;ve been seeking for 8 months, I&#x27;m almost at the point where I might as well freelance to bypass the discrimination. I get barely any calls back, and the one interview that felt somewhat fair was because I had my former manager from a completely unrelated field introduce me to someone looking for web developers, and that didn&#x27;t worked out because they wanted me to learn their stack and build an assignment within a week, which failed gloriously.<p>Is there something that we can do so that people can just be amateurs regardless of age? I&#x27;m sure since we&#x27;re making SOME progress against sexism and racism we could somehow do something for ageism too, because I can&#x27;t blame Zuckerberg&#x27;s opinion anymore.
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