When I was a project manager I always preferred people with more experience. Sometimes that meant older developers, sometimes it just meant someone who had more experience with a particular infrastructure than anyone else, regardless of age.

The bigger brain drain I've seen, which is really troubling to me, is the outsourcing of everything IT. At first it was help desk type positions and low-level systems administration - stuff that could be done following a strict SOP. But more and more I see more senior development work, and even business analysis, being farmed out to contractors. The people who actually know the company and understand the business are being pushed out in favor of someone who *only* knows how to program, and who will be gone in a year as soon as he's learned about the company. The result is that systems are choppy, nothing integrates well, no one knows who to talk to anymore to get things done, etc.

Part of this outsourcing trend is that college recruiting is down. Instead of hiring college grads and training/mentoring them up, they're outsourcing all the entry-level positions and hiring only middle management to babysit them. Once those people move on/retire, who's going to run the place? It's a really troubling trend.

Ok full disclaimer, I'll turn 33 this weekend and despite all the trappings of adulthood (house, husband, kid, 11-year career), I hardly feel old and am constantly learning new things (including programming languages, even though I'm not a professional developer). But if you're really concerned that late 30's is way worse or something, consider this.

My dad died several years ago and left my mom with no income. His small business supported our household and for the previous few decades she had helped him run that business. Due to various boring details I won't get into, she had to sell the business when he died, and was left with no job and no marketable skills. She was 49.

She spent the next few years trying her hand at various things before settling into her current job. In the years between 49 and 60 (her current age), she learned: how to clean a house professionally (totally different than cleaning your own house), how to provide technical support answers for model-making tools and equipment (meaning she had to learn how they all worked), office management for two completely different industries, and finally library science. She is now head of circulation at her library and poised to potentially become director of the library someday.

So, age has nothing to do with it. Your brain is completely capable of learning new things at any age - in fact, constant learning can help stave off dementia when you actually do get old. But even if age had something to do with it, you are clearly not old. In other posts I've recommended various career moves instead of going back to programming, but if your actual question is "can I learn a new language despite my age", the answer is of course you can.

That's largely why I'm looking to move into the business side. I'm 33, with ten years of IT experience, mostly as a project manager (programming was never my thing but I understand enough to be able to work with developers). When they started offshoring all the developers, we kept the really good senior guys around. Then they started offshoring the senior development roles. They offshored testing. Now they are starting to offshore construction management and project management work. There is still a definite need for skilled senior engineers and architects to remain onshore and employed by the company, and the same goes for project managers, but I'm seeing the trend. My next career move will hopefully be to a technical-ish management position outside of IT.

It's really hard to move out of IT, because there is such a stigma that IT are "computer guys" and can't do anything else. But about five years ago I took a job supporting marketing applications and web sites. I got to take the training that marketing professionals got, I got to work closely with people in marketing and public relations. And now I'm fairly well situated to get a job managing web projects for a marketing department.

So, the moral of the story is that if you're interested in IT but worried about getting outsourced at some point, consider taking a role supporting a specific business area that you're interested in. Bonus points if you can get good at business analysis (requirements analysis, process engineering, etc. - these are real skills that take both training and experience to master, and are less likely to be offshored because they require proximity to the business). Then if you want or need to leave IT at some point, hopefully you'll have a few years of experience with that business area under your belt, which will make it easier to transition out.

I did IT project management and infrastructure support for ten years. What I saw was that people who truly preferred technical work to "management" type stuff, if they were good at it, would move into senior technologist roles. This could be senior developer, engineer, architect, etc. The type of work that your average 20-year-old code monkey can't do, because it requires a deep knowledge of many technologies. In those cases, expensive developers with lots of experience are generally preferable as long as they are willing/able to keep up with quickly changing technologies.

Some companies offer manager or even director-level positions that are primarily technical. Others top out the technical track at a "lead" type of position. The company I was at used to have senior directors who were purely technical and did no management whatsoever, but they all got laid off in the last few years.

The original poster, or the GP, could look into consulting firms as well. Often they prefer younger candidates who are able to travel all over the place, but the high-end firms that purport to offer in-depth technical advice for complex problems would probably love someone who's "seen it all".

And the reason I replied here in the first place is to second your "you can always learn a new language". I haven't programmed (besides html/css/js) in about twelve years, and a couple nights ago I was able to pick up enough in a couple hours to modify some jsps. Oh and a few months ago I wrote an app in php despite having never seen a single line of php code before that. Languages are easy, it's the principles that are hard.