Which is typically a symptom of having worked at a start-up vs. an established company.
During the dot-com crash, I went from working at a 40 person start-up to a 25,000 employee utility company, and it was a real eye opener. A lot of my "cutting edge" (for the time) skills were dismissed as being flash in the pan, and all the "real work" was done with tried and trued technologies. I ended up finding my way back to a start-up a few years later, and everything was reversed again.
That says "startup". ML is the buzzword that investors love, and k8s/devops allows avoiding big investment into infrastructure which may need to be dropped anyway when it turns out the market doesn't actually want yet another "apply ML to click stream to save on ads costs" startup (I'm stereotyping of course but you get the idea).
I'm 42, and until recently worked for a well known tech company in San Francisco. Most of the time I didn't feel like I was the only person over 30 in the room, but after moving to another city and starting to work on a truly age-diverse did I realize how unbalanced my previous team was.
My current team has a good mix of industry experience and excitement for new technologies, which makes planning both effective and exciting.
Part of the problem is that SF is just so damn expensive... it's going to self-select for people that can afford to live without the additional burden of a family and that tends to be people <30.
Some parts of SV push for diversity and inclusion, but when push comes to shove, firms are quite happy to protect established power structures - shitty managers, retaliatory practices, toxic culture, etc.
No, I am one of the people I just described. I dont know where I fit in with the OP. I'm struggling to keep up with the avalanche of new stuff coming along.
