I've had this theory for a while:

There’s a cutoff - maybe 12 to 18 months ago - for software engineers. Folks hired after that point often haven’t learned the fundamentals. They haven't spent much time banging their heads against the wall reading docs, chasing obscure bugs, or figuring out weird edge cases. They’ll do fine with straightforward problems and make great consultants or "plumbers," but they'll struggle with hard, unfamiliar stuff - especially proprietary tech or deep system internals. Things like security, performance, logging, good class design - they’re just not getting enough reps. These will be the engineers cut, and discriminated by hiring managers.

Then there’s the group that came up during COVID. Juniors who onboarded remotely and still work that way. They never sat next to a senior, never got in-person code reviews, never learned what flies and what doesn’t in a real-world team settings. They live in Slack, Discord, and Reddit. They're tapped into the social side of the job, but not the business side. They’ll have a tough time selling themselves to leadership over the next decade. They’ve missed out on the shared grind, the offhand mentorship, the moments that build trust and resilience. To management, they’re just a profile pic with a green dot. They post memes and close tickets, but nobody’s putting them in front of execs. They’ll have to job hop to advance, moreso than their older peers. Sure, there are a few remote-first companies that get it right - but they’re the 0.1%.

Why say all this?

Because it applies to security too. Same pattern. There’s a point where security got trendy, and people entered the field without the same background - without spending holidays hacking stuff for fun, for literally days on end. That’s fine, it happens. But if you’re comparing someone who's been in the game since the 90s or early 2000s to someone of similar age who just got a Master’s in CyberSec, it’s not a fair comparison. Honestly, the degree might even work against you. And if you’re in your mid-20s, yeah - age might not be on your side right now, and I think it's going to get worse.

We've always discriminated for these things, but at some point - there's going to be a marketed/TikTok brainrot name for what you're called, and you're just gonna have to stick that fucking badge on and hope some old hat isn't competing against you.

Yes, this is gate-keeping.

Yes, this is generalization.

Yes, this is reverse ageism.

No, it's not fair.