I'm 37, and I feel like I'm sorta on the cusp of being considered "old" for a lot of positions. I entered the field in ~2007, and I've been keeping an eye on the "ageism" that's always been talked about. I think it's real, but not insurmountable. I may catch some flack for this, but it honestly seems like being a white male in the US has about the same negative impact on my employer choices at this point - it's not a _negative_, but with all else being equal I will be passed over for a position if I'm in the running with someone who identifies as a woman or a minority.

That aside, a couple of things about your comment really struck me:

> Of course, as automation has decimated that workforce, there's major reluctance to assist in your own potential demise ...

I love automating myself out of a job, and that's been my primary goal everywhere I've ever worked. It was moderately successful at the "Fortune 100 Big Co." where I started out, but my career progression there was much slower than I'd hoped. I made the move to startups and fell in love. Yeah, it's less stable, but the compensation is generally better. Keep a few months' income in savings and you can ride out the instability.

There is a sweet spot where I like to join a company. Ideally they've built a product that works, they have a proven sales and marketing group that has actually made enough sales to prove that there are customers out there for it, they have funding available to grow the business faster than would be possible via bootstrapping, and finally, they're beginning the transition from a small engineering team of early employees to a much larger group composed of multiple teams.

I'm in that situation right now, and I'm loving it. Everything I do is intended to be short- to medium-term, and I make a conscious decision to put an end date on every project I work on and pass it off to another group within the organization. This is very much "automatic myself out of a job", as at the end of each project I'm somewhat adrift and no one is depending on me for anything more than occasional support adn guidance.

I also build relationships with leadership and the early employees by setting up meetings in the beginning and making explicit that I want to understand and buy in to the existing company culture so I can consciously promote and foster it as the group grows.

In my experience, this approach has worked either very well or very poorly, depending on the company and its culture. I'm happy where I am today, and if all goes according to plan will have the ability to make the decision in the next 2-3 years how I want to approach the future: specialize as an IC, make the move to engineering leadership, or exit the industry and take one of my side hustles full time.

> [...] young people with those skills only want to work in tech / consulting / startups.

As a group, I'd guess more young people want to work in this kind of environment, sure. A larger proportion of older engineers have a lower risk tolerance and/or don't want to skill up quickly and on a regular basis.

I noticed early in my career though that the older engineers who do have those skills and want to work at startups are worth their weight in gold. They're (obviously) just as capable as their younger peers but have the benefit of wealth of personal experience in similar situations. They can draw on that to save the company many expensive mistakes. Sometimes you have to make them feel comfortable first, though. A lot of the older engineers I've worked with have been badly burned by speaking up in the past and seem to be hesitant to do so as a result.