The flip side of this is true as well. Ageism is a real problem in our industry. People are just more patient with young college grads and more willing to help them out. As somebody who transitioned to SWE in a big company(FAANG) after a decade of wireless communications research, I found out despite all the processes and supposed practices a big company has in place to onboard people from different backgrounds, you need to rely a lot on your teammates for the tribal knowledge to get anything significant done. And people are far less helpful than they think they are. Often they assume things because in their minds X years of experience means you should already know this stuff. Almost all of it is non technical and specific to the company so you won’t have a way of knowing it beforehand but that consideration is readily given to a fresh grad than an experienced person. Also a lot of the times tenured people will feel insecure/threatened about/by someone else joining at the same level and would constantly point out their shortcomings in order to maintain their place in the hierarchy. Was oblivious to this until I was managing people and saw newer experienced people joining the team face this. Had to coach people to stop them doing this unconsciously.
Anecdotally, ageism seems to mostly exist in FAANG-type companies, web dev, and startups. If you look around at other industries like logistics, transportation, etc. there's less ageism.
Ageism is higher in companies in domains/work with lower barrier of entry, such as the ones you also identified like web dev, mobile apps and so on.
Ageism is less in domains that require domain expertise and hence have a higher barrier to entry for a newbie. Look at systems engineering, hardware, semi conductor, deep science and so on.
Ageism is a fundamental truism of all society throughout history. It's pretty much baked into the species via evolution.
* women are unable to reproduce until a certain age.
* women stop being able to reproduce at a certain age.
* NOTE: we need not delve any further into the inherent ageism of female biology.
* women select men for mating for a multitude of reasons, of which includes the dichotomy of dominant men.. who (for young women) tend to be slightly older then the men of the woman's own age group.
* men compete with each other for dominance, and age is a factor. Young men have a strength advantage, older men potentially have more experience.
* dominant men who grow older, become less dominant, etc... are no longer as useful for mating.
* older dominant women tend to have different selection criteria, they tend to select younger males who are less dominant then the other males of their own age, yet more so then the men of the woman's own age.
* this is not an exhaustive list...
Older men & women tend to be less useful beyond natural selection, but evolution is a great starting point.
Ageism is everywhere, but I'm surprised by your anecdote that it's more intense in FAANG-type companies. I wonder why?
Perhaps the FAANG working environment is competitive? Perhaps men & women are competing with each other for a kind of workplace dominance? hrm.....
Honestly, have been long tenured (comfortable) at my current job for the whole of pandemic so only have second hand experiences through my direct reports. But on the whole I think remote work has made this problem kind of worse. When I was new I could walk over to someone, gauge their mood or how busy they are and have a direct conversation. Even if I lacked the ability to communicate my problem clearly it was definitely easier to get help. They could just see where i was stuck and get full context. Here for every simple thing people have to ping one on one on DMs or in group channels. There are few problems with this. One in large channels a person who asks a lot of questions is looked down upon. (Shouldn't be in an ideal world and we keep emphasizing this with processes and what not but it's human nature). Plus unlike an in person conversation every question you ask becomes a part of permanent/semi permanent record which discourages people from asking questions. Also you don't know when you are interrupting people. Even if you dont expect an answer right away when the person doesn't respond for a long time you naturally feel resentful. And repeating my earlier point it's much easier to provide full context when somebody has your undivided attention by showing them instead of typing out what you think the problem is.
If you're not working fully async, you can always ask the person to schedule a call where you can discuss X if you can't come up with one simple question.
