Is 40 the New 60?
Don&#x27;t even get me started <i>(just take a shufti through my posting history on this very site. You&#x27;ll see this is a subject that has my attention)</i>.<p><i>&gt; while the experience that comes with age is valued in fields like music, it counts against you in tech.</i><p>Yup. The Jurassic-scale disasters that are becoming increasingly common, these days, are evidence of unsteady hands at the wheel.<p>I&#x27;m not saying that older folks are better. In many cases, we can be overconservative and overcautious, but that isn&#x27;t such a bad thing, when the stakes for a blowout are so high.<p>I have always felt that tech needs to follow the same model as <i>every other damn industry since the start of history</i>, which is to have experience work with youth. They balance each other out.<p>I feel that when one of them gets too much power, Bad Things Happen.<p>In my case, I was finally laid off, after a 27-year run at one of the world&#x27;s marquee imaging companies (which I think was overbalanced by experience). I started looking around for more work, as I wasn&#x27;t really up for retirement (which I was quite capable of doing).<p>I was absolutely shocked at how shabbily I was treated, and fairly quickly gave up the search.<p>I find it offensive, that companies are so self-destructive; especially smaller companies, where a top-shelf employee could &quot;make or break&quot; the company. I have a fairly unique confluence of skills that would have made a startup <i>very</i> happy <i>(I&#x27;ve been ARCHITECTING and SHIPPING software, since my very first engineering project, in 1987. I am quite used to production engineering. I&#x27;ve been doing it my entire adult life. I&#x27;ve heard that could be useful, to some companies)</i>. I was also quite willing to work for a <i>lot</i> less money than most, as my retirement was set, and I was looking for work that interested me.<p>Instead, I was rather quickly told -in no uncertain terms- <i>&quot;Go away, old man. No one wants you.&quot;</i><p>I took the hint, and found some non-profit folks that were doing work I find interesting, and started working with them, for free.<p>They are <i>quite</i> happy with my work.