Picture this: You’re thirty-four years and eleven months old, and your calendar shows a red circle around tomorrow—the day you supposedly become obsolete. According to industry folklore, you’re about to hit the expiration date stamped on your programmer ID. After that magical thirty-fifth birthday, the algorithm of life supposedly stops compiling your career, leaving you with nothing but legacy code and regrets. Except this is complete nonsense. The “programmer retirement age of 35” myth has haunted the tech industry like a ghost that refuses to acknowledge it’s been debunked a thousand times over. It’s the kind of mythology that gets passed down in Slack messages and tech Twitter threads, whispered about at conferences, and perpetuated by people who’ve never actually run the numbers. Yet somehow, it persists—a zombie idea that keeps shambling through our industry, even as the evidence against it piles up higher than a stack of unmaintained legacy systems.

The Myth That Refuses to Die

Let’s address the elephant in the room first: No, programmers should not have mandatory retirement ages. Not at thirty-five, not at forty-five, not at sixty-five. It’s not just that mandatory retirement is ethically questionable (though it absolutely is), it’s that it’s functionally absurd. It contradicts everything we know about how programming actually works, how careers actually develop, and how valuable human experience actually is. The origin of this “35-year-old retirement” theory is murky, like most internet folklore. Some people blame it on the brain’s supposed inability to acquire new technical knowledge after thirty-five. The theory goes that around that age, your neuroplasticity enters a gradual decline, your reflexes slow down (wait, we’re developers, not athletes), and you simply cannot keep up with the relentless pace of technological change. New frameworks appear every Tuesday. Languages evolve. Paradigms shift. Surely, the theory suggests, only the young and limber can handle such chaos. The problem? This theory is built on faulty science and faulty observation. The observation part is particularly interesting. People look around tech companies and think, “Hmm, I don’t see many forty-year-old developers here. Therefore, programmers must retire at thirty-five.” But this is a classic logical fallacy. The accurate observation should be: “There have been a massive number of younger programmers added to the industry in recent years.” The programmer population has been growing exponentially. We’re not losing older developers; we’re being flooded with junior ones. The ratio shifts not because older developers vanish, but because new developers appear at a rate that makes Moore’s Law look quaint.

The Experience Premium Nobody Talks About

Here’s what actually happens when a programmer reaches their mid-thirties and beyond: they get better. Not worse. Better. I know this might sound like I’m trying to sell you a self-help book, but consider what an experienced programmer has accumulated by this point. They’ve:

  • Debugged systems at three in the morning and learned what actually matters versus what merely looks impressive in a code review
  • Failed enough projects to recognize failure patterns early
  • Worked in enough different codebases to distinguish between “this is genuinely problematic” and “this is just different from what I’m used to”
  • Developed enough side projects, professional applications, and internal tools to have built genuine intuition about what works
  • Mentored (or should have mentored) enough junior developers to understand how to explain complex concepts clearly
  • Lived through enough technology waves to know that JavaScript frameworks aren’t actually immortal The real kicker? Older developers can produce the work of entire teams. It’s not hyperbole—it’s just mathematics. A developer with twenty years of experience working at full capacity, making smart architectural decisions, and avoiding the mistakes that would require weeks of rework, can accomplish what might take a team of six junior developers months to produce. They don’t write more lines of code (they write fewer, and better ones). They write code that other people can actually understand and maintain. And here’s the uncomfortable part that nobody in Silicon Valley likes to admit: experience compounds.

The Real Problem Isn’t Age—It’s Economics

If mandatory retirement for programmers is such a terrible idea, why does the myth persist? Why do older developers report difficulty finding work? Why does ageism in tech feel so real? The answer isn’t that programmers actually become incapable at thirty-five. The answer is that the industry has built an economic structure where hiring managers optimize for specific factors that happen to correlate with youth—and we’ve mistaken correlation for causation. Consider the hiring landscape: A junior developer might cost $60,000 annually. A mid-career developer might cost $120,000. A senior developer with twenty years of experience might cost $180,000 or more. They can’t extract quite as much relative value from the senior developer—or so the logic goes. The economics seem to favor younger workers, especially in companies optimizing for growth and not profitability. But this is where the math gets interesting. That junior developer costs less per unit of time, sure. But cost-per-productive-output? That’s a different calculation entirely. The senior developer who ships the project in three weeks versus the junior team that ships it in three months has actually cost less money in total compensation, even at a higher hourly rate. Add in reduced technical debt, fewer critical bugs, and better architecture decisions, and the senior developer becomes a bargain. The problem is that many organizations don’t account for this. They see the higher salary number, get sticker shock, and hire the cheaper option instead. Rinse and repeat across the industry, and suddenly older developers are crowded out—not because they can’t do the job, but because someone in finance drew a line on a spreadsheet and decided experienced talent wasn’t in the budget.

The Skills That Matter Never Get Old

Let me be specific about something: The idea that programmers can’t learn new technologies after thirty-five is demonstrably false. The human brain doesn’t suddenly stop functioning at thirty-five. Neuroplasticity doesn’t have a hard shutdown date. What does happen is that learning becomes more intentional and efficient. A thirty-five-year-old learning Rust doesn’t memorize syntax the way a twenty-five-year-old might. Instead, they map Rust concepts onto existing mental models from a dozen other languages they’ve already mastered. They understand memory management, trade-offs, and system design principles at a deeper level, so they learn Rust faster and better, even if the learning process looks different. The technologies you use are actually the least important part of being a good programmer. They’re the weather—constantly changing, but the fundamental rules of physics don’t shift. What matters is understanding:

  • How to think about problems systematically
  • How systems fail and how to prevent those failures
  • How to communicate technical concepts to humans
  • How to recognize when you’re solving the wrong problem
  • When to implement a solution versus when to refactor
  • When a piece of code is going to cause pain in two years These skills have nothing to do with age. And if anything, they’re easier to develop with experience.

A Practical Framework: When Experience Actually Matters

Let me give you a concrete example of where experience makes an absolute difference. Consider a scenario where you’re architecting a new system:

# Junior developer approach (pseudocode)
class UserService:
    def get_user(self, user_id):
        return fetch_from_database(user_id)
    def update_user(self, user_id, data):
        validate_user_input(data)
        update_database(user_id, data)
        return fetch_from_database(user_id)
    def delete_user(self, user_id):
        delete_from_database(user_id)

This works. It’s fine. It’s also a time bomb.

# Senior developer approach (with experience-informed decisions)
class UserService:
    def __init__(self, db, cache, event_bus, audit_log):
        self.db = db
        self.cache = cache
        self.event_bus = event_bus
        self.audit_log = audit_log
    def get_user(self, user_id, bypass_cache=False):
        if not bypass_cache:
            cached = self.cache.get(f"user:{user_id}")
            if cached:
                return cached
        user = self.db.fetch_user(user_id)
        if user:
            self.cache.set(f"user:{user_id}", user, ttl=3600)
        return user
    def update_user(self, user_id, data, actor_id):
        existing_user = self.get_user(user_id, bypass_cache=True)
        validated_data = self.validate(data, existing_user)
        self.db.update_user(user_id, validated_data)
        self.cache.invalidate(f"user:{user_id}")
        self.audit_log.record({
            "action": "user_updated",
            "user_id": user_id,
            "actor_id": actor_id,
            "changes": self.diff(existing_user, validated_data)
        })
        self.event_bus.publish("user.updated", {
            "user_id": user_id,
            "changes": validated_data
        })
        return self.get_user(user_id)
    def delete_user(self, user_id, actor_id):
        self.audit_log.record({
            "action": "user_deleted",
            "user_id": user_id,
            "actor_id": actor_id
        })
        self.db.soft_delete_user(user_id)
        self.cache.invalidate(f"user:{user_id}")
        self.event_bus.publish("user.deleted", {"user_id": user_id})

The second approach isn’t “better” because the developer is older—it’s better because the developer has seen what happens when you don’t handle caching properly (everything falls apart at scale), when you don’t audit changes (compliance nightmare), and when you don’t use event systems to decouple services (systems become tangled). A junior developer can learn this. They often learn it by making mistakes and paying the price. A senior developer walks in knowing the patterns because they’ve paid that price before—and they’re saving the organization from paying it now.

The Data Tells a Story

Consider the programming population growth curve over the past thirty years. The supply of programmers has roughly doubled every decade. This means that at any given moment in time, roughly half of all programmers have less than ten years of experience. Not because older developers are disappearing, but because there are so many more young ones being added.

graph LR A["1995: ~200k developers"] -->|Double| B["2005: ~400k developers"] B -->|Double| C["2015: ~800k developers"] C -->|Double| D["2025: ~1.6M developers"] style A fill:#e1f5ff style B fill:#e1f5ff style C fill:#ffecb3 style D fill:#ffcdd2

This exponential growth creates an optical illusion. The cohort of developers with twenty-plus years of experience actually hasn’t shrunk—but they’ve become a smaller percentage of the total population. It looks like they’ve disappeared because they’re swimming in a much larger pool of junior developers. If you believe the “35-year-old retirement” myth, it’s probably because you’re seeing the bottom layer of that pool with fresh-faced developers and mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence.

The Hidden Cost of Ageism

Here’s what worries me most about this entire narrative: We’re shooting ourselves in the foot. The tech industry is in the middle of a legitimately difficult challenge. Complexity is increasing. Systems are getting larger and more interconnected. Cybersecurity threats are evolving. The number of critical legacy systems that need maintenance is growing (nobody wants to admit they’re using code written in 2005, but we all are). We need experienced developers more than we ever have. But we’re creating an environment where experienced developers feel pushed out. They face dismissive attitudes in interviews. They’re told their skills are “outdated” when what people really mean is “you’re expensive and we can hire three junior developers for your salary.” They’re asked to pass the same leetcode challenges as people fresh out of bootcamps, despite having shipped production systems that serve millions of users. Some experienced developers respond by leaving tech entirely. Others start their own companies or consult, taking their expertise out of the traditional employment market. A few stay on, often taking roles that don’t fully utilize their capabilities because that’s what’s available. None of these outcomes are optimal for the industry.

What We Should Actually Be Doing

If the goal is to build better software, faster, we should be: Valuing experience properly. This means paying for it, yes, but also using it. When you hire a senior developer, don’t ask them to build CRUD endpoints for your internal tools. Give them architectural decisions. Have them mentor others. Use their pattern recognition to catch problems before they become expensive. Creating realistic career paths. Not everyone wants to be a manager. Some of the best developers I know have zero interest in managing people. We should have clear, prestigious, well-compensated paths for developers who want to stay in technical roles their entire careers. Some organizations do this (Google’s Distinguished Engineer track, for instance). Most don’t. Fixing hiring processes. The standard “leetcode + live coding interview” format advantages people with free time to practice algorithm problems and disadvantages people with twenty years of production code on their resume. It’s a screening mechanism, sure, but it’s screening for the wrong things. Reference checks, project portfolios, architectural reviews—these tell you far more about someone’s ability to do the actual job. Accepting that growth is normal. Yes, there are more junior developers than senior ones. That’s fine. You need more junior developers. But denying that you need senior developers because they’re outnumbered is like denying that you need architects because there are more bricklayers than architects in construction.

The Myth Has Already Lost

Here’s the encouraging part: In practice, the “35-year-old retirement” myth has largely been debunked by reality. There are plenty of developers in their forties, fifties, and beyond doing excellent work. They work at startups. They work at massive tech companies. They run their own businesses. They freelance. Some of them are the most productive individual contributors in their organizations, shipping more value than teams of younger developers. The myth persists in stories and in certain corners of the industry, but the reality on the ground tells a different story. The developers who’ve chosen to stay in the field, who’ve kept their skills sharp, who’ve continued learning and growing—they’re thriving. They’re not retired. They’re valuable. What we need to do is stop pretending this is a meritocracy and then acting like merit means “how recent your computer science degree is.” We need to acknowledge that the industry grows, that different people have different capabilities at different points in their careers, and that diversity of experience (not just demographic diversity) makes better teams.

The Bottom Line

Should programmers have mandatory retirement ages? No. Absolutely not. It’s terrible policy, it contradicts basic economics, it’s ethically questionable, and it wastes valuable resources. The fact that we’re still having this conversation in 2025 is absurd. The real question shouldn’t be “when should programmers retire?” It should be “how do we build an industry where experience is valued, where developers can have long, rewarding careers, where architectural wisdom isn’t treated as a liability, and where the next thirty years of innovation benefit from the accumulated knowledge of everyone who came before?” Because that’s the industry that builds better software. That’s the industry I’d want to work in. And that’s the industry we could have, if we just stopped believing in a myth and started acting like experience actually matters. What’s your take? Have you seen the age bias play out in your own career, or do you think I’m overblowing this?