Comment by weatherlite

lol yes this is a good point. We should all volunteer in a hospital or police department for a few days to get some perspective... And another thought: many jobs descriptions list any technical novelty under the sun even though only some small project in some small team somewhere in the company uses it. Why? To look more appealing to job seekers. It's much cooler to describe the job as PHP + Elixir + Kafka + Big data than simply PHP - which is mostly what the job is about.

I'm not denying the field is changing fast, it is. But there's other reasons why 50 year olds are pushed away besides some imagined inability to keep up.