The point of age bias isn't bias against people without relevant skills, its an actual bias against person of certain ages.
Our industry is ripe with stories of folks with extremely relevant skill sets not getting jobs after a certain age (50 seems to be common).
There is some (unintentional I'm sure) age bias even in the response of "stay relevant" as if the implication is that older devs don't do that as a matter of course while younger ones do.
I don't think the industry is nearly as ripe with unemployed and relevant 50+'ers as you might think. I know many over 50 (I'm mid 40s) that have never and will never have any difficulty finding jobs for the foreseeable future because they've stayed relevant.
The main thing I would avoid is long tenures at employers where you are not working with newer technologies, not producing tangible accomplishments, or not challenged to learn on a regular basis. If you've been at the same thing for many years, it's difficult to differentiate age bias from a bias against someone who hasn't learned much or kept up with the industry.
Older devs that work for (or consult to) employers that use newer tech have no choice but to stay relevant.
I think you bring up an important point - your average 50 year old developer is much more likely to have spent the last 10 years at the same company, working with the same technology, maybe even with the same title, than the 35 year old developer.
Most of my experience has been .Net web application development in the northeast/mid-Atlantic. I think it'd be damn near impossible for me to get a job writing Ruby or Go for a startup at this point unless I made it a goal (it's definitely not) and spent considerable effort in my spare time working on projects. I'm only 29.
If you're a 52 year old developer who has spent 22 years writing RPG reports for AS/400s and you get laid off, you're either going to end up in doing the exact same job for another company, or you're going to be retiring.
Now that even the youngest of the first dotcom engineers are probably hitting their 40s, it will be interesting to see whether ageism will still be a factor in hiring for the industry.
I'm not sure if this accounts for 0.1% or 99% of alleged "age bias" incidents but I agree with you: this is most definitely a bad thing for a developer to do to themselves.
I would be very, very skeptical of a prospective employee with a resume like that.
On the other hand, I'd think very highly of a prospective employee with a resume like that looked like that and had additional open-source or other programming projects they'd contributed to. I'd think, "This person loves to code, and has been pushing themselves to grow and diversify their skills despite being stuck in a daytime coding job that encourages no such thing..."
What do you think? What if anything would sway your opinion of somebody that has been maintaining a PHP4 app at BigHugeBoringCo for the last 10 years?
Career fluidity has only been a somewhat accepted industry trait for the past 10 or so years. I had clients circa 2005 that wouldn't look at a resume for any candidate that hadn't been at their current job for 7+ years, which eliminated everyone who had taken a chance on a startup during the first dotcom wave.
The generation of technologists that started work in the 80s and early 90s likely had pensions and other retirement benefits that made staying at their job an easier decision, and they were likely raised with different feelings towards employer/employee relationships. Flash forward to 15-20 years into their career, and the job market, the definition of marketability, and job search itself changed dramatically. It's easy to point to ageism, but that's not really it, because the ones that joined startups or moved around a bit aren't seeing that same level of stigmatization.
If someone is maintaining that PHP4 app at BigCo for 10+ years, I'd think that person would probably need to demonstrate that they've been paying attention to dev trends or they won't get looked at. If you're not getting challenging work at the job, you need to find it somewhere else.
I started offering resume and career consulting services to job seekers over a year ago, and a large percentage of my clients are people in this boat who need to reinvent and market themselves to appeal to today's employers. It can be scary to look for jobs today if you haven't looked in 10 years.
Take two doctors. Both learned all their knowledge going through med school. Neither did anything else to stay relevant. One graduated 5 years ago, the other 25 years. Which is likely to have more relevant knowledge? Is it because they stayed relevant? No. It is because everyone has some learning period (be it through college or not), and on average older workers had that period longer ago than younger workers, so the relevancy bonus has decreased more.
The longer since you had a significant learning period (the longer since you graduated school), the more you have to work to stay relevant. This isn't tied to age, only correlated because it is rarer for a younger person to have had their learning period (graduated) longer ago.
However, there is more than one learning curve involved. Knowing Ruby or Objective C is only part of the story you also want someone that understands non technical pitfalls.
n the United States, many states require CME for medical professionals to maintain their licenses. For example, Arizona requires an average of 40 hours of CME every two years.[4] For a complete list of requirements by state, see State Medical Licensure Requirements and Statistics, 2006. Within the United States, CME for physicians is regulated by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) and the American Osteopathic Association (AOA).
Maybe it's bias. But I know for myself that the older I get, the less time I have to spend on staying relevant. Mobile revolution? Never bothered to learn. Super fancy new JavaScript? Took me years to start looking into. Go? Ugh, don't wanna. Etc.
Ten years ago I was chomping at the bit to jump on any new technology that started showing signs of promise. Nowadays I focus on just solving people's business problems and printing money. Tech is a tool, not a goal.
This already makes my resume look a lot less shiny to keyword matching recruiters. The fact that I'm old/cynical enough to say "expected value of options is 0" makes me all but unemployable.
