When she’s alone, she takes one cautious step at a time, “Like my grandma always did.”

Just watch her on the steep office staircase, with her high heels and postsurgery knee. When colleagues are around, she grips the rail and schmoozes through the pain. “I’m smiling,” she said. “I’m chatting.”

At 46, Nancy Joyce is not elderly. But at the Somerville startup where she works, Paint Nite , most employees are in their 20s or 30s. So while Joyce doesn’t lie about her age, she doesn’t flaunt it, either.

In many ways, older workers have always tried to downplay their “maturity.” But at startups in and around Boston, the employees trying to conceal their advanced years are often in their 40s or early 50s — ages typically considered prime working years in traditional offices.


From Kendall Square to the Innovation District and beyond, middle-aged workers are feigning familiarity with apps and texting acronyms. They’re glossing over the precise age of their college-age children. They’re drinking seltzer at office happy hours, determined to stay sharp.

“You can be 35, and be the oldest guy in the room,” said Maria Cirino, a cofounder of .406 Ventures, a Boston venture capital firm.

In the first quarter of 2015, millennials surpassed Gen-Xers as the largest generation in the US labor force, according to the Pew Research Center. (The millennials, generally considered to have been born after 1980, blew by the baby boom generation last year.)

There are 53.5 million of them, and their ease with all things digital, social, mobile, and Meerkat is making even fortysomethings feel like old timers.

Today’s youth-centric office culture is particularly pronounced at high-tech startups, where the median age is 31.7 years, according to PayScale, a Seattle compensation data firm. That’s compared with a median age of 33.8 for workers at large, established tech firms, according to PayScale — and a median age of 42.3 for the workforce as a whole, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.


At 51, Cirino, the venture capitalist, has not only observed others struggling to avoid the dreaded “in my day” syndrome, she’s living it. She recently ditched her beloved BlackBerry because it was pegging her as old.

“I’d go to meetings and a lot of guys had never seen one,” she said. “They’d say, ‘Is that a BlackBerry? I didn’t think those were still around.’ ”

She now e-mails and texts on her Android phone. On the virtual keyboard, she types slower and makes more typos, “but it’s the price I pay for looking contemporary,” she said.

Nancy Joyce, chief marketing officer of PaintNite, helped pack boxes in Somerville for the company’s third year celebration party. John Blanding/Globe staff/Globe Staff

In Cambridge, Ann Lee Cahill, 54, a senior director at a Cambridge biotech startup, says that trying to appear young sometimes threatens to get in the way of actual work.

Cahill needs glasses to read small type, but she often forgoes them in meetings, and pretends that she can see the data a colleague is showing on his mobile device. “I’ll nod as if I’m taking the information in,” she said, “and then ask them to e-mail it to me.”

Keeping up with young colleagues would be like a second job, she added. It would require her to: bike to work and be seen carrying a helmet; discuss “Mad Men” and other shows she doesn’t watch; and play volleyball on a nearby lawn at lunchtime.


“I don’t want to participate,” she whispered into the phone on a recent afternoon, “but I don’t want to be seen not participating. I pull my shades down.”

For Michael Bird, 51, the former chief executive of NetProspex, a Waltham tech startup that was recently acquired by Dun & Bradstreet, the challenge comes not from an inability to read the words on his mobile device, but, occasionally, an inability to understand the acronyms he encounters there.

Bird, now a general manager at D&B, said he recently fumbled his way through a “rapid-fire text stream” with a young colleague, and then — secretly — asked his teenager to explain the meaning of “nagi.”

Turns out that stands for “not a good idea,” which is how he feels about publicly declaring an age. “When I was 20,” he said, “50 seemed ancient.”

Light-hearted joking aside, age discrimination, and the fear of it, is a serious problem, especially in high-tech meccas like California's Silicon Valley. The New Republic captured the feeling in a 2014 piece called “The Brutal Ageism of Tech: Years of experience, plenty of talent, completely obsolete.”

“Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old,” the magazine wrote, quoting a widely shared 2007 remark by Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg: “Young people are just smarter,” he told an audience at Stanford.

Locally, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, H. Harrison, says his agency “doesn’t see a lot of age-related discrimination.”


In the first 10½ months of 2014, for example, the MCAD closed 480 cases related to age, and found probable cause — meaning discrimination was likely — in 48. None of the cases in which probable cause was found involved startups.

The number of cases in which the alleged discrimination was determined to exist could be higher than 48, Harrison noted, because some cases were not investigated to fruition by the MCAD, but rather went to court or mediation.

He also speculated that MCAD might not reach a determination on every age-discrimination case because it may be more lucrative for a worker to file elsewhere. “If an age case is brought to superior court, the plaintiff may be entitled to punitive damages or double or triple liquidated damages in the event the court finds a willful violation,” he said. By comparison, the MCAD may award compensatory damages only to make the plaintiff whole.

Meanwhile, it’s possible for employees to date themselves without even realizing it. Printing documents — instead of reading them on a screen — can be a giveaway. So can organizing a conference call rather than a Google Hangout or expecting a co-worker to listen to a voice-mail message or demonstrating an ignorance of “Wikipedia racing,” a game that involves getting from one Wikipedia page to another in as few clicks as possible.

That last insight comes courtesy of Jessica Cole, the 25-year-old outreach director at Panorama Education, a data-analytics firm in Boston that focuses on K-12 education.


She recalled that at last summer’s Panorama Decathlon, where Wiki racing was an event, “We had this moment where the younger workers had to take the older workers under our wing and bring them up to speed.”

In that equation, Cole was one of the kids. But with yet another class of college grads coming up behind her, how much longer does she — or anyone — have? “I don’t feel as young as I once did,” she said.