I Thought I'd Be the Oldest in the Room

I started in tech in 2001. I was young, and so was the industry. Walk into any room and almost everyone was under forty, because the field itself was barely older than that. For a stretch a few years ago I caught myself wondering if I was going to be the oldest person in every room I walked into.

Then I looked around properly. The people I started with are all still here. We're in our late forties and fifties now, and we didn't age out of the industry. The industry aged with us. The youth that defined tech in 2001 was never a law of nature. It was just a young field not having veterans yet, the way medicine and law and engineering all do, because that work has always rewarded the judgment you only get from time.

The shape of a career changed underneath us while this happened. One job until sixty-five was built on pensions and lifespans that no longer exist. People aren't working longer only because retirement got expensive, though it did. It's that "decades of productivity left" has stopped being a figure of speech. Nobody is used up at fifty-five. The version of retirement where you're finished and the porch and the banana bread are waiting assumed a body and a mind that were spent. That assumption is gone, and most of us have no interest in pretending otherwise.

Then AI arrives, and the lazy reading is that it comes for the older workers first. Too expensive, too slow to adapt. The actual pattern is the reverse. AI is very good at the codifiable, learnable, written-down work, which is precisely what entry-level roles are made of. What it cannot do is decide which problem is worth solving, or recognise that the confident answer in front of you is the same mistake you watched a company make in 2009. Experience becomes the scarce input, not the obsolete one.

I see this in the teams forming now: AI doing volume, and industry veterans doing the part that needs someone who knows the territory. Because AI output is plausible whether or not it's correct, and only someone with the years can tell the difference. The veteran isn't competing with the model. They're the reason it's safe to use.

Which leaves the question I can't quite put down. The thing that made me useful was doing the unglamorous work for years before any of it became judgment. If AI removes those rungs, where does the next generation of veterans come from? The experienced people are irreplaceable right now partly because we may be dismantling the machine that produced us.

About Gail

Gail Weiner is the founder of Simpatico Studios. She works on Trust Architecture - the question of how organisations integrate AI when the institutions building the AI are themselves subject to political capture.

Her consulting practice focuses on the human layer of AI adoption. Her brokerage practice places vetted senior development teams from Serbia, who use AI daily in production, with UK and US companies that need engineering capacity without the political exposure of US-only solutions.

Originally from South Africa, now based in the UK, she writes on AI adoption, geopolitical risk, and the conditions shaping how the next decade of technology gets built.

gailweiner.com