The dumpster fire of ageism in tech: What the industry sacrifices at the altar of short-term thinking
There’s a particular smell in the air when something starts to rot — not just the mildew-and-solder stench of aging server farms, but the moral decay of an industry so rabid with youth-worship it’s practically pissing itself in excitement every time a 23-year-old with a hoodie and a half-baked SaaS idea walks into a room and declares themselves a “founder.”
Welcome to Silicon Valley — or rather, what’s left of it after the endless bonfires of human capital and institutional memory. Tech, the supposed engine of progress, has become a bloodthirsty ritual sacrifice, flinging wisdom, mentorship, and anything north of 40 into the flames to keep the IPO gods happy.
This, my dear reader, is the ageist dumpster fire we’ve built with our own beautifully calloused hands.
The cult of eternal youth and the disposable engineer
In a sane world, experience would be revered. In Techlandia, it’s a liability. Past 35, you’re not seen as a senior developer — you’re seen as a dinosaur with a laptop, a walking COBOL manual waiting to be pensioned off like a nag with a bum knee.
CEOs barely old enough to rent a car are convinced they’ve reinvented the wheel, but better — because now it uses Kubernetes. The venture capitalists, high on optimism and overpriced kombucha, throw money at whatever TikTok-algorithm-infused nonsense seems shiny enough to distract from the fact that nobody involved has ever lived through a recession, a data breach, or a failed product cycle.
This isn’t just ageism. It’s intellectual arson.
When an engineer with two decades of battle scars is replaced by a fresh-out-of-bootcamp code monkey who thinks Rust is a lifestyle, the industry loses another dose of hard-earned pragmatism. No more “Hey, we tried that in 2002 and it exploded,” just blind enthusiasm and the comforting glow of burn rate spreadsheets.
The myth of the “untrainable old”
Ah yes, the favorite justification from the disciples of disruption: “Older workers just can’t keep up. They don’t want to learn.”
Bullshit.
These are the same people who’ve adapted through five generations of languages, platforms, and management fads. They survived the great JavaScript schism, the Agile inquisition, and the DevOps crusades. They’ve debugged code with coffee, tears, and the sheer force of spite.
But give them a new UI framework or a change in Slack emoji policy, and suddenly they’re Luddites?
No, the real problem isn’t that seasoned pros can’t learn. It’s that the powers-that-be don’t want to invest in them. Training costs money. So does time. And in a hyper-capitalist ecosystem driven by quarterly results and acquisition fantasies, the long-term is just a myth we whisper about in MBA programs.
Better to burn out a junior in 18 months and replace them with another sacrificial lamb than to actually build a sustainable, experienced, and — god forbid — diverse team.
The loss of mentorship and institutional memory
Have you ever noticed how every hot new startup ends up re-creating the same tools that existed 15 years ago, only worse?
That’s not innovation. That’s amnesia.
When you gut your workforce of veterans, you lose more than just technical skill. You lose storytelling. You lose context. You lose the people who remember why certain decisions were made, who can smell a doomed architecture plan from a mile away, who can explain, in detail, why every migration to microservices eventually ends in a slow-motion catastrophe of Kafka queues and human despair.
Mentorship is not a GitHub repo. You can’t just fork someone’s wisdom and install it via npm.
Short-term thinking: the real tech debt
The true tech debt isn’t just in code. It’s in culture. In how we build teams, treat people, and plan for a world longer than a fiscal quarter.
Right now, the industry is overdosing on its own hype, drunk on its own Kool-Aid, riding high on the delusion that the next AI-powered fart app will change the world. Meanwhile, it’s hemorrhaging the very people who could help it build something real, something lasting — people who understand the cost of scale, the agony of tech stack transitions, the brutal reality of production outages at 3 AM.
But no. We sacrifice them to the bonfire. Not lean enough. Not cheap enough. Not shiny enough.
The reckoning is coming
Eventually, the music will stop. The VC money will dry up. The talent churn will reach critical mass. The brain drain will hit so hard that even the most buzzword-bloated startup won’t be able to hire its way out of disaster.
When that day comes, the industry will look around at its organizational charts—full of mid-level “rockstars” with no mentors, historical context, or clue—and wonder where it all went wrong.
But we’ll know, won’t we?
We were there, tossing the kindling on the fire, roasting marshmallows made of hubris.
So here’s to the old bastards.
The ones with carpal tunnel, sarcastic commit messages, and stories that begin with “Back when Netscape was a thing…”
They may not be trendy, but goddamn it — they know how to build things that last.
And that, my friends, is something this industry sorely needs.
Even if it doesn’t know it yet.
Will Kelly is a writer, content strategist, and keen observer of the IT industry. Medium is home to his personal writing projects. His professional interests include generative AI, cloud computing, DevOps, and collaboration tools. He has written for startups, Fortune 1000 firms, and leading industry publications, including CIO and TechTarget. Follow him on X: @willkelly. You can also follow him on BlueSky: willkelly.bsky.social.
