However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs.
The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company.
I got the hell out of Dodge after that.
I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level.
Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.
I know one attempt to have a sub visibly middle aged programmer local talent maximia who know the local language didn't work out as well compared to a former technician consultant who operated a bit more rote standards familarity.
There may have been conflating other skillsets including social. To put it crudely the programmer was slightly jerkish, the former technician apparently always wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Regardless the bias seemed to reinforce itself from clients.
The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry.
None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.
I like the story about the worm farming. It'd be appealing, except there's a slightly creepy feel to it when you're this close to senior citizenship. :)
1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years.
2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on.
3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.
Incentives matter.
The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.
Both sides have power, and the same incentives.
I also find "don't like it, leave" to be a very unaware oversimplification of the situation many American workers are in.
It's not at all clear that there a net gain here, so the situation is at best complex.
It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.
I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.
If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.
An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved.
So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built.
Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.
> It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.
Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack.
> Experience is expensive.
Fang Graduate roles pay > $200k. Lots of experienced people would love that but would never get hired.
Or the old "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience ten times".