6. "Ageism is *very* real in the tech industry" In response to In response to 5
Older workers become managers, have specialized hard-to-replace skill sets or leave the industry it seems.
Web design/development is especially bad for this, since very little of the work nowadays even involves raw programming. Just setting up whatever new framework/library/cms/plugin/etc that's en vogue.
I'm with you... working on getting other sources of income, while working on a few of my own programming projects.