I'm 54 and once again looking to a new gig. My experience makes it easy(er) to get into conversations that aren't totally pointless and those conversations are interesting, but I also find that a lot of people who do the hiring are often at a company for a longer period of time and are often looking for Yay-sayers and do so by posting more or less random job descriptions. Sort of like "We've got total chaos here and we need you to put up with this BS and secure my position for as cheap as possible." They too fear for their jobs and rightfully so. Major shifts incoming. No news here.
This is ageism in so far as I simply can not be bullshitted anymore like some 25 year old and smell a bad project or a business model about to go belly-up from 10 miles away. I can't help it. Which makes be often times brutally honest in conversations. The result being that many don't get back to me or even give me notice of the fact. Quite a large amount of people I think fear that I could replace their job with a small shell script or something and they might even be right.
I've grown a thick skin throughout the last 24 years and also haven't had any larger illusions about industrial IT, Cloud-stuff or AI and am preparing to make a switch to a specialist user-end job where I am responsive to people needing help and handholding and otherwise just automate all the work that I can. My strong suspicion is that my skills as a dev will actually help me in that.
Ageism or not, the truth of the matter is that Peak Digital, the industrialization of IT and now AI are upending IT positions left, right and center anyway, regardless of age, so getting away from the IDE and doulbing down on learning people skills and becoming a prolific high-end user of specialized ready-made systems is most likely the way forward anyway.
Old/Senior or not, nobody needs me or anybody else to program yet another OIDC service or DBAL or CMS. They _do_ however need people who help them make sense of it all. And until AI has humaniod bots that look and talk like a young in-shape Emily Blunt do exactly that I might as well move into those jobs.