The tech industry didn’t lose talent. It deleted it.
They didn’t ghost you because you couldn’t do the work. They ghosted you because you remembered how this ends.
The Talent Shortage That Isn’t.
Ah yes, the “tech talent shortage” — a modern mystery, right up there with missing socks and disappearing office snacks. Except the socks didn’t get pushed out for being over 35.
Open Roles, Closed Minds
Every week, some VC or CTO posts a tearful ode to the "impossible hiring market." So many open roles. So few “qualified” candidates. You’d almost believe them — if you hadn’t seen those same companies reject résumés with 20 years of hard-won experience because they “don’t align with our culture of innovation.”
Translation: we want someone who can deploy to prod, meme about it on Slack, and still make happy hour.
The real problem?
Too Smart to Exploit, Too Old to Hire.
Tech didn’t lose talent. It age-gated it like a nightclub bouncer confused by gray hair.
Once you stop pretending to enjoy cold brew on tap, you’re done. Suddenly your depth of experience is “too rigid,” your questions are “a red flag,” and your salary expectations are “out of band.”
Why?
Cost. You ask to be paid what you’re worth. That’s adorable.
Control. You don’t worship the Jira board. You ask why the scope changed five times in one sprint. Uh-oh.
Ego. You’ve seen this mess before. And that’s a threat to the product manager who thinks “greenfield” means “doesn’t need documentation.”
Culture. You don’t vibe with Friday costume contests or “mandatory fun.” Worse, you remember the last five “transformations” that failed. Nobody likes a historian.
Instead, they’ll drop $600/hour on a consultant to rediscover the thing you already warned them about in a meeting they never scheduled.
"They can’t keep up" and other fairytales
“Older workers struggle to keep up with fast-changing tech.”
Sure. That’s why they learned COBOL, C, Java, Python, and Kubernetes — while your junior dev still thinks YAML is a programming language.“Younger teams are more innovative.”
Of course. Reinventing the same broken microservices architecture every year is very disruptive. Especially when it’s backed by a Notion doc with emojis.
The current result
Meritocracy, But Make It Age-Restricted
We were promised disruption. What we got was adult daycare for VC-funded children.
This industry didn’t misplace experienced talent. It quietly uninstalled them — then rebooted and blamed the lag on “pipeline issues.”
So let’s stop pretending this is a skills problem. It’s a vanity problem. A control problem. A "we want the illusion of innovation without anyone pointing out our bad decisions" problem.
If you’re hiring, ask yourself: are you building a team or casting a sitcom?
And if you’ve been pushed out, remember: they didn’t reject you because you were outdated. They rejected you because you’ve seen this episode before — and you weren’t laughing.