employment?

OK, the biggest reason is that most IT and Drafting jobs today, with some exceptions, aren't looking for guys with 20 years experience, they want some college grad that will work for 15 bucks an hour. That's why you spent 30 minutes wading through the entry level support to get to a real tech.

If you really believe that you were denied based on age, race, or military veteran status then that would be a violation of at least 3 protected classes.

My question is how up to date are you on new technologies? How are your interpersonal skills? Like I said they legally cannot discriminate based on age, race, or military status.

My guess is that IT in general has a huge ageism problem. Things are changing fast, and the adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" I think is something that follows older individuals around. I know that from a security aspect, if you are using the same tools and playbook as you were 6 months ago you are ripe for an attack. Also college students are just cheaper, typically have less health problems, don't have as many life obligations like children, and there is a new crop desperate for work every year.

In addition to the ageism, automation is making huge inroads in IT. Part of my job before was to identify any and all automatable tasks and create scripts to essentially remove the human component. Our goal was to save at least 40 additional hours of work every week. Because that is cumulative, it was the same as removing a full time job from the potential work pool every week. While it is true that there are some tasks that can't be automated (yet), every day there is more automation for more and more tasks. All this means that the primary item that most individuals have to trade, namely their labor, is being devalued every day.

So what do we do about this? From a policy perspective this could be solved by something like a basic universal income or some sort of guaranteed job. I am not in favor of someone doing unecessary or made up work just for the sake of getting a paycheck to be allowed to live. I do think that this is only going to become more pronounced in the future, and that for an individual it will be necessary to find income through unconventional means. For me, I hope that would be by starting a business myself, or possibly finding a niche where I can provide a service or good that no one else is offering at the moment.