In my case I'm referring to a regular/traditional engineer and not software engineer for my particular industry, but the concepts a as far as management go are the same. One thing that makes me glad I'm not in a software shop is that I see virtually zero age discrimination. It takes years and years to build up industry experience, so generally speaking, the older the better. Where young folks usually do better is with computers/programming/automation as it wasn't common place outside of college for older engineers. This doesn't mean that some older engineers can't write some Fortran though.