Is this essentially a Web 2.0/Bay Area issue? I recently went to a Java User Group meeting on the east coast where the presenter and about 60% of the audience....had grey hair. I think I may have been the 2nd or 3rd youngest person at the meeting and I'm 30.... I'm the 2nd youngest person at my current place of employment in the finance domain. I'm hoping that means by 40 yrs old there will be lot's of work and I can…
My experience is interesting in that I'm blessed with genes that make me look decades younger than I am. And dress pretty much the way I did in my 20s, so everyone who initially looks at me thinks I'm somewhere in there.
After I hit 35 or so I increasingly found it difficult to find work ... until I scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was and then tried to be careful in interviews. I did this in the middle of one job search and the difference was like night and day.
And for a specific example, once I screwed up and mentioned working on PDP-11s, at which point my technical interviewer exclaimed "Just how old are you?!?!?!!!" Which is of course illegal, but in all fairness he'd just realized his model of me was seriously off. I said "Older than I look" and got the job, but it didn't end well....