How do you handle your Aging in IT?

You might consider contracting. I've been doing that the past few years and loving it. One of the things is that I get to (have to, in fact) choose my projects, so the clients I say yes to are ones whose projects I am interested in at a level beyond just "you'll pay me". They also tend to be in my specialties (UI, graphics, C++, iOS, in my case). I find that I learn a lot more, too, because generally the projects last about 6 months, and inevitably they use things I don't know about. In the past few years I've learned: TypeScript, WebGL, WASM/Emscripten, CMake, "github workflow", pybind, basic Ruby, basics of physically based materials (PBR) rendering, new UX patterns, how to convert Bezier curves to renderable line segments, basic image processing with OpenCV, Dear ImGUI, and vector graphics with OpenGL. I did not know any of these when I applied for the contract in question (in fact, a contract I thought was going to be a C++ or at least C# contract ended up being TypeScript, which was a tad scary for a day or two), but they start to accumulate and make me even more valuable. I think being a generalist as a contractor is an advantage, it gives more areas where you can demonstrate "I did this". I also think clients value age in a contractor more than employers do in an employee, because you can show a long list of similar things you have delivered and it's clear that you have experience successfully solving problems like yours.

"How do you handle your Aging in IT?"

Not well. I'm not even that old. I'm tired of the BS and games.

I guess I would say suck it up. That's what I'm doing. I can't say it's really working that well.

Get out of analyst work, you are just fodder for the endless cyber campaigns and you never have anything convincing to show management to justify getting promoted. It's a waste of a career.

I wonder about this too and find it’s hard to get good intel.

First, there’s not many “old” hands-on technical types that I see anywhere.

Reading material seems so focused on hiring large numbers of people from early to late.

So it’s hard to get evidence, but what I’ve been working on is being able to understand my organization and industry well to be able to code solutions to answer strategic questions that no one cares if I’m hands-on technical or not, but as long as the answers are useful.

Just a few years into mid 40s but the work is no longer “build me this app/system/db/site” but hairy problems that require learning new frameworks, writing move approaches, etc. so that’s pretty fun and as long as my brain keeps working it seems interesting 5-30 years out.

I recently talked with a 40-50 engineer through Lunchclub who was working as a “test driven development coach” that sounded horrible, but the way they described it was cool. They would mix design, code, and r&d to be part of teams and projects to help them code better. So they were just a senior dev who elevated above individual project design and they said they got there by just working on bigger and bigger projects before moving into this new role.

On ageism- it exists, but there are also other explanations on why we see relatively few older people in IT. One is just the rapid expansion of tech in general. In 1997 the number of people working in "Computer, Mathematical, Operations Research, and Related Occupations" was 1,832,390. In 2019 it was 4,552,880. Most people entering any given profession are young, so you'd just expect to see roughly 2.5x then number of young people to old people (yes, I'm abusing statistics, but I think it is roughly right). What's more, it is absolutely true that older workers are more likely to exit to other categories like management or sales than they are to reenter the straight up IT workforce. You can explain quite a lot of the "youngness" of the workforce by non-malicious means.

Ok, that out of the way- I do believe there is an expectation that you are able to do different things as you age in IT. When you are early in career, the expectation is that you do your job well. Later in your career, the expectation is that your job very well AND you help other people do their jobs, too.

I think you are right- learning another SIEM tool isn't going to be fun, and isn't even what others will expect of you. But being able to evaluate that SIEM tool, understand where it fails against older/other tools, and helping close the gaps- that's probably more interesting and rewarding. Helping that fresh college hire close the gap between what they learned in school and all the extra stuff you have to do in the real world. Helping to org navigate the regulatory requirements of a specific industry. These are all things that really only come with experience.