18 Years Old. Writes Better Terraform Than Seniors. Nobody Will Hire Him.

Ageism in tech hiring works both ways. I am thirty-four. To some recruiters, too senior for the role. To others — not enough enterprise AWS at architect level. The skills on the resume never changed. The verdict always did. The excuses rotate depending on who you are. Too young? Not ready. Too old? Stuck in old ways. Too honest about what you don't know? Risky hire. Too independent? Hard to manage. There's always a reason to say no that has nothing to do with actual work. My 18-year-old colleague writes Terraform better than most seniors I've worked with. Nobody will hire him because he can't physically have 3 years of experience. Meanwhile I've built pipelines that saved weeks of manual work, automated monitoring that cut incident response in half, and kept production running while rockets flew overhead. The pattern is the same: the actual output never makes it into the conversation. My young colleague caught architecture issues that seniors with a decade more experience missed entirely. Nobody congratulated him. They just quietly merged the PR. Age is just a number. Results are the only metric that matters. Stop looking at age. Start looking at impact. Real engineers are not…