Seven of 18 largest tech companies have a median employee age of 30 or younger.

If the comment had been about discriminatory hiring practices, or even just generally about ageism in the industry, I would have nodded, and probably upvoted.

But he phrased it as the OP being "too old for a FAANG", which centers the fault on the OP.

Besides which, in whichever sense it was meant, the comment was almost certainly factually incorrect. A math PhD with significant software engineering and engineering management experience isn't someone that gets turned away that easily.

I'm the OP, and I do wonder if I would be too old for a FAANG, with the fault being on me. Building a company as an entrepreneur at age 45 (my age) feels very reasonable, and I've seen research that suggests that my age is perhaps even a sweet spot for building a company. In contrast, I think I would find it difficult to work as an employee at a FAANG company, since it's very different than everything I have done so far in life, and most other employees would be younger than me (informal observation based on having lunch at Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Facebook regularly).

More importantly, joining a FAANG company would mean completely giving up on my longterm goal to massively fund Sage development, and that would be very hard for me to do.

Please don't buy into the industry's ageism.

While most other employees at any tech company would be younger than you, is having lunch at AmaFaceGoogSoft really so different from having lunch in a university campus cafeteria?

I am not trying to change your decision, BTW. Your long-term goal is an admirable one and I think achievable, whether CoCalc remains a private company, goes public, or is acquired.

According to the Stack Overflow survey, the median age of a professional developer is 30.

The tech industry has been growing rapidly, so a low median age isn't evidence of age discrimination (I'm not claiming there isn't any - just pointing out that a low median age is what you'd expect to see even in the absence of discrimination).

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019#key-results

Which means that 11 of 18 do not.

The average age at google is 41.

But the average age hired is lower than 30. The whiteboard /stanford/group hire filters helps ensure only the best past a certain age has a chance.

"Only the best past a certain age"?

Google's own research shows no correlation between "elite school" or "grade average" filters and job performance. Their hiring comittees (from which the hiring manager is excluded) also make decisions while blinded to factors such as age, race, and gender.

Thank you for pointing this out.