Doing good work and staying in touch with people who know you do good work.
I think ageism is awful, but it really hurts when I read blog posts of people in their 50s and 60s blasting out resumes with no response.
If you're good at what you do and have decades of work under your belt, there should be someone ASKING you to work with them, if not recommending you to their colleagues.
Do we have any stats on ageism? Are there not lots of older engineers happily employed and well compensated?
I've worked with some brilliant older minds and I've also worked with some older people who truly have become useless and grumpy and harmful to the team. Is there not possibly some bias because the employed ones aren't making blog posts about it?
Maybe I'm completely wrong. I've only worked with a room full of older engineers in total.
This. Experienced systems engineers who can reliably build, maintain and admin non-trivial backend systems are valuable. Let the spring chickens handle the UI/UX and strategy for a market of their contemporaries, which they know well.
I think ageism is awful, but it really hurts when I read blog posts of people in their 50s and 60s blasting out resumes with no response.
If you're good at what you do and have decades of work under your belt, there should be someone ASKING you to work with them, if not recommending you to their colleagues.