I hope you're right because I'm 42 (today!). I doubt any companies I know would actually refuse to hire an older developer, but plenty of them have hiring practises that are much more likely to dissuade an older person from applying; for example, I recently saw an advert that mentioned "regular all-night coding parties". While that's not ageism per se, it's definitely designed to appeal to people who are much more likely to be younger.

There are institutional issues, where a single job can take 5 years to learn do do efficiently but company policy is to give raises every year to people who meet expectations (called a "salary ratchet"). In such a situation, if someone has been doing the same job for 15 years they probably have 10 years of raises that were "seniority" based rather than "skill" based.

The discrepancy between what it costs to get the 'skill' to do a job versus keeping someone on who has a lot of history can easily reach a breaking point. Is that ageism? Or is it a failed compensation policy? Would it be better if a company said "The max we are going to pay for this position is $X" and once you get to $X you won't be getting any more raises in this job."? That might work for some jobs, it sounds a bit like forced attrition in others.

There is also skills movement, which is to say that an engineer that has developed skills and understanding in a particular "stack" may find that when that stack is no longer current, their skill level on the new "stack" is functionally identical to a new hire, with a bonus of additional wisdom. But is that pay the same as their current pay?

People change jobs to get an increase in pay, which works until it doesn't. People rarely accept a reduction in pay when they transfer within a company. It's hard to internalize how you are "worth" $X in one role, but only worth $0.8X in a different role. So that transaction has the person leaving and someone getting hired who currently only makes $0.75X and they get a bump up to $0.8X and they are happy to come on board.

The "new" thing in HR would appear to be that salary ratchets are dead and variable pay on a fixed base is the thing. This is a fairly common situation at big tech companies these days, base pay plus some variable modifier, either additional pay bonuses or stock 'units' that convert to a variable number of shares based on contribution.

My guess is that today's new engineers will find that 10 to 15 years from now their pay is no longer growing and their bonuses and RSUs never seem to quite be all that much better than they were the previous year. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but as a career, engineering is becoming a lot more 'standardized' than it was.

The way I see this expressing itself is that older engineers who are up front about being ok with more median salaries tend to get hired. Ones who insist on their 'top of the tech ladder' salary from the previous place where they worked for a decade or more, have a much harder time of it.

I know from being both an engineer, a manager, and an executive that they equations usually have nothing to do with age and more to do with work product per unit $ applied. It is easier to hire someone below their optimum value and give them a pay raise than it is to hire someone at a premium and ask them to take a pay cut to bring them in line. I also know that Google tried to do this with their 'slotting' system and it had a lot of issues (mostly negative), and that the stack ranking type systems that Microsoft used to have were similarly designed to prune toward the optimum value. Bottom line is that there isn't a good system that I know of for having this kind of salary discussion that works.

So my salary and career progression over the past 10 years looks about like you would expect from someone who graduated from a decent school in 2008 and worked in a major city that is not on the west coast or NYC.

I changed jobs 5 times over the last 10 years and saw my pay go from a slightly above average junior developer in 2008 (because salary stagnation is real) to about the median for an “Architect”/“Principle Developer” for my market. I’m not bragging, we are talking about less than the first year salary at Facebook.

But then over the past two years, I changed jobs which was basically a vertical move. For the last two years and for the next two, I’ll probably be hovering around the same $10K range.

It’s also a very real possibility that after three or four years, my salary at the company I’m at now will be above market value because I have a combination of skills as a developer that is more valuable to my company than they will be on the broader market - the same thing that happened to older IBMers.

If I see what I am doing at my company as not helping me stay marketable, I have to leave. I can’t put myself in that situation at 50 that I was in at 35.

I also can’t get use to an above market salary if I intend to stay in development instead of going into consulting.

But it’s also import to remember that any year your “merit increase” is lower than inflation, you are actually getting a pay reduction (and official inflation usually lags behind rent and some other expenses).

But how do you communicate that you're OK with a merely average salary? Just saying it outright sounds awkward and goes against every piece of advice I've seen.

You need to communicate it before the interview, too, because I see many, many people here on HN who say they avoid even interviewing older people because they assume they will require more money.

When I was an intern in a bank they were laying people off on a massive scale. They only keep critical staff and recent graduate, cause they were cheap.