A lot of older programmers seem to think they have 20 years of experience, when they only have the same year of experience 20 times.
If you don't keep up to date and current, it's not ageism.
If you don't keep up to date and current, it's not ageism.
A lot of younger programmers seems to think they have 3 years of experience, when they only have the same month of experience 36 times.
Experience is made up by the experiences you had, if you have never worked in a proper environment or never actually tried to improve your craft, years doesn't matter much.
And the myth of "being up to date", it can mean different things for different people. Sadly sometimes it just means that you need to have played with the latest fad that will disappear in a few years. In that case i'd prefer someone that's not up to date but can learn something different and it's used to do things the proper way.
And this is not a dig against old people per se. But it's the sunk cost fallacy.
If you've only been doing something for 3 years, and it's wrong, it's easier to convince them that it's wrong, vs. if you've been doing something for 20 years, it's a lot harder to convince somebody that they're doing it wrong.
Especially if they've been successful doing things their way for 20 years.
What's the difference between somebody who works on four different projects over 8 years for company X and somebody who works on four different projects for four different companies over the same period, in this context?
Maintenance work is easy, less time consuming, and frankly mostly requires less effort. If you fall into that trap, and end up maintaining a large system that is slowly becoming obsolete, you're not building up more skills.
A lot of older workers (and I am one of them) end up doing that cause that's the easy path, the one requiring no effort at all. And that leads you to becoming unemployable.