Maybe, maybe not. If it was only one incident being mentioned by the media, I wouldn't worry about. But when one reading personal testimonies of individuals that are EXPERTS and that they can't get a job for months, that's worrysome. Plus, I've seen a couple of managers or interviewers making bold statements such as "that guy is too old to work here. he is a dinosaur. there are younger people with equivalent expertise and cheaper". Besides, we live in a society where it's not uncommon for people to make career changes in their mid 30's or 40's. When Pan Am went down, I knew several people that worked there, and who decided to study computer sciences. They completed their studies, they have a degree AND they have prior working experience in other fields (administration, accounting and so on.) Clearly they (should) have more knowledge and greater potential than a 23 year-old man-teenager with no working experience at all. Yet these "old" people may be denied a chance to make a living since we keep thinking that "at 40 you got to be an expert." Life doesn't end in the mid 30's. Why should we end their professional lives, then? If an older person has the potential, he should not be denied just because of his/her age. Hiring should be done based on credentials and personality. Doing otherwise is no different from discriminating based on one's race. We cannot possibly generalize over these people, nor make conclusions about their job performance and capabilities just because they are "old" or because they don't know the latest stuff. Whatever new hype language or technology there is, it can be learned regardless of age. It is true that being an expert is valuable, but I think it is more important to be an expert in being adaptable, in being job resilient. There has been this old stereotype that programmers in their 40's are stagnant or unable to update their skills, who keep holding on COBOL as a falling monkey holds to a branch. I just wonder how much of that has influenced current ageist practices. What kind of logic it is to not hire a programmer in his 40's because he may not know C++ for instance but hire a youngster fresh out of college that has no experience, and whose C++ programs are just C programs with cout's instead of printf's? For the record, I'm not in my 40's; I'm 29 and concerned about these trends;)

Peace too;)