How is the Software Engineer market for 45 year olds?

I will speak from my own experience of interviewing a lot of people in the last 5 years. Age has not been a factor, it's the skillset. At a senior level, the expectation is to be a bit of a generalist and have at least one skill that you are very strong at. What I don't like about the current trend of interviews is the strong focus on leetcode style interviews, most of which you will don't get to practice when you are at a staff level.

It'll depend on what you've worked on, what you want to work on and how you present at interview.

If you've got 25 years specialised in some crackpot internal system that noone else cares about you may have a bad time. If you can obviously add value to whatever the company is currently worried about, it'll be fine.

There's some risk you'll be grilled on optimal hashtable design by a raw graduate who doesn't know the right answers. Some places expect you to write code using unfamiliar tooling while someone watches over your shoulder. There's a lot of nonsense in programming interviews. That's not very age dependent though, except in that you might remember a less absurd approach from last time around.

You didn't say where in the world you are.

This is of paramount importance.

After 40, which unfortunately for me coincided with the credit crunch, my tech career withered and nearly died. I lived in London and was too old to find work in IT, and I had no more luck across Western Europe, where ageism is endemic and entrenched.

Luckily for me I came across a role in Central Europe, relocated there, and never looked back.

But it very much depends where in the world you are, and the English-speaking world is particularly bad for this in my experience.

I'm not quite that old but I work with several people who are. No one cares how old you are or what you look like as long as you have the skillset for the job. I want to work with competent and motivated people and I don't care if they're 16 or 60. You don't even have to put anything age related on your resume. Just list your experience from the past 5-10 years and mention a degree if you have one (year of graduation isn't important).

I’m 52. It’s booming. I’m constantly being offered interviews. I’ve switched jobs 3 times in the last 4 years and was by far the top candidate for each role and was able to leverage multiple offers. I’m in web game development, which is super-specialised, so that might be an advantage, but even in the middle of the recession salaries in my field are going up and I can pick and choose.

You only need to be worried if your skillset is "deprecated", for example if your current position of 10 years consists of mostly Adobe Flash programming

In fact if your skills are applicable to the job market you are in much more demand than any 20 something year olds even if they have 5 years of experience with the same technologies

Honest question: does the company one is applying to needs to know our age?

Let's say I'm 45 like you, but I cut my CV to include only the last 13 years (because I like to keep my CV one page only and because what I did 20 years ago is kinda irrelevant by now). On my CV I don't put pictures nor date or birth (this is common in many European countries). So, they interview me: in the video-call they cannot tell if I'm 45 or 35 (I have good genes), so they like me and proceed to send me the contract. They will only notice my age (if any) when they examine my national id or passport. But by then it would be too late for them (besides, they liked me, so I guess my age is irrelevant).

In reality, I'm 37 (but I look like if I'm 27), and I never ever have included my age or date of birth on my CV. I have cut some stuff from my CV that is not relevant to the roles I apply (e.g., graduation dates), and very old roles at the beginning of my career are not included on my CV anymore. So far nobody has ever asked my age.

Graduated with my degree at 45 and started working part time various places.

Took my first fulltime job at 50 in 2020. I took a new job in August 2022 at 52.

I think it is a numbers game. A lot of appplications get denied w/o a single interview. Some I get denied after an interview. Ive bombed the shit out of every leetcode interview Ive taken which luckily isnt that many.

In my experience demand for senior people is very high right now, at least in web dev. There’s a huge amount of people in the industry but seems like at the senior level there’s a shortage. By senior I mean people who can manage a project and deliver it, end-to-end.

Age matters far less than skill set. I've ran into very little ageism. The caveat being I am not at the top 1% of companies. The problem with older engineers (myself included) is that their skillsets tend to atrophy. When you're a young gun you're jumping languages and frameworks as soon as they come out. When you're older, generally, you settle into a nice spot and stay there.

I'd estimate you'd do as good as someone 20 years younger than you provided you are willing and able to learn the newest hotness in your chosen sub-field.

This all being said I have personally seen 0 candidate over the age of 30 in the last 3-4 years of interviewing. Some of this might be how my job selects candidates, but given they selected me, and my boss is similarly aged, I would guess that there's a lot of aging out that happens naturally due to the factors I mentioned.

Started my last two jobs past age 45. Didn't have any issues.

Domain knowledge is probably more important than most things.

I hear if you know Cobol that is young...