I started hearing about age discrimination from others, IIRC, when I was in my late 20s, and blissfully unaffected.
The first time I recall hearing it, a colleague (very plugged into the dotcom startup scene) was at a big event where one of the more reputable FAANGs happened to have employees doing recruiting. Colleague saw a group of the employees hanging out and chatting, and was appalled by how they were just ripping on one of the people who had talked with them, because he was "old". I got the impression like of a clique of popular high school kids, mocking another student who was "ugly" or "poor", for having the audacity to ask out one of them. I recall being surprised, and thinking badly of them for acting that way, and I don't think I'd heard of that kind of age discrimination in software before.
I was aware of a positive "whiz kid" boost people could get, by being skilled ahead of their years, but not a negative bias towards people in 30s and 40s. (The majority of my work at that point had been at a technical software engineering company, where the developers in their 40s tended to be well-regarded.)
The first time I recall hearing it, a colleague (very plugged into the dotcom startup scene) was at a big event where one of the more reputable FAANGs happened to have employees doing recruiting. Colleague saw a group of the employees hanging out and chatting, and was appalled by how they were just ripping on one of the people who had talked with them, because he was "old". I got the impression like of a clique of popular high school kids, mocking another student who was "ugly" or "poor", for having the audacity to ask out one of them. I recall being surprised, and thinking badly of them for acting that way, and I don't think I'd heard of that kind of age discrimination in software before.
I was aware of a positive "whiz kid" boost people could get, by being skilled ahead of their years, but not a negative bias towards people in 30s and 40s. (The majority of my work at that point had been at a technical software engineering company, where the developers in their 40s tended to be well-regarded.)