Yup.
In most industries, that kind of consistency is a plus (especially if you consider where all that time was spent).
Ageism is every bit as illegal, self-destructive, and uncouth as racism, ableism, or sexism; but is actively —proudly, even— encouraged in tech.
I understand where a lot of it comes from, but it’s really no different from “All our girls start off in the typing pool.”
As I mentioned, I’m quite capable of making other people a great deal of money, but it’s more important for them to treat me in a shabby manner, than to create great product.
Here’s an example.
I’m working on a fairly ambitious (40 screens) app. It’s getting ready for our phase one testing. I’ve been working on the frontend app (native Swift UIKit app) for about a year and a half (I also wrote the backend. That took seven months, a few years ago, and I also wrote another backend that we use as a data source, about ten years ago, that is now a worldwide infrastructure, but backend is not really my forte). This time has been mostly spent refining the app. I actually had a “shippable” app, after a month of coding, but we needed to make sure that it would be suitable for our end-users, so all that time has been spent working on over 600 TestFlight releases. At one point in the project, we probably had over 60 screens. I really like removing large swaths of code.
I’m also working for free. If no one wants to pay me to code, I’ll do it anyway.
Yesterday, I was bored. I’m at that part of the project, where I make a release, then wait for the team to decide the next step. The steps are small, at this point, and the team spends a lot of time arguing about things like colors.
So I wrote another app.
In an afternoon.
It’s already ship-ready, but I’ll spend a couple of days, polishing it up. It is a fully-native Swift UIKit app (not some ghastly hybrid), is small and lightweight, already completely localizable, adapts to dark mode, works on iPad, and has a high degree of polish. I shared it last night with the team on TestFlight. Some haven’t even had a chance to install it, yet, and it hasn’t completed the first Apple vetting.
It’s a fairly humble (4 screens) app, but it will be fun for our users, and will be a great “brand reinforcement” tool. Down the road, we’ll probably integrate it into a suite with the main app; but that’s icing on the cake.
The code Quality is out of this world, and it is done in a fashion that documentation comes from running a bash script, called “jazzy.command”. That creates a “docs” directory that can be uploaded to a GitHub Pages site.
The team will spend more time coming up with copy for the App Store, than I spent, writing the app.
That’s the kind of thing that experience gets you. It’s quite obvious that I’m capable of this kind of thing. A quick shufti at my portfolio makes it clear. I’ve met many folks that are more capable than I am.
It’s just that people are so fixated on my gray hair, that they, literally, refuse to look at my portfolio.