In issues like this, it's important to interpret statistics correctly. For instance, the article cites this:
>“Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger.” In comparison, the Times reported, the median age of the American worker was 42.3 years old.
Ageism is not the only explanation for this discrepancy. The software industry has exploded in growth in the last twenty years. Most other industries have not seen the same rate of growth. When a labor pool for an industry is strained, it sends a signal to young people to pursue a career in that field. As a result, the labor pool is filled by proportionally more young people.
Eventually the growth of an industry will cease. Then less young people will pursue it as a career path, and the median age of laborers in that field will rise.
The growth appears to have leveled off in the early 1980s except for the momentary dotcom bubble more than a decade ago.
Google and the computinged wordpress blog claim the BLS reported 550K-ish programmers in the mid 80s and about 500K now. We're in a long term decline since 2005 and it looks like we might drop below 400K by the end of the decade, but for the last 30 years its more or less been around 500K.
To quote the computinged blog "Getting reliable data on programmer employment is surprisingly difficult."
Going into the field would have been a brilliant idea in 1975, but in 2013 its kind of like becoming a UAW autoworker, its more like when are you going to be downsized, not if.
>“Eight of the companies, the study said, had median employee age of 30 or younger.” In comparison, the Times reported, the median age of the American worker was 42.3 years old.
Ageism is not the only explanation for this discrepancy. The software industry has exploded in growth in the last twenty years. Most other industries have not seen the same rate of growth. When a labor pool for an industry is strained, it sends a signal to young people to pursue a career in that field. As a result, the labor pool is filled by proportionally more young people.
Eventually the growth of an industry will cease. Then less young people will pursue it as a career path, and the median age of laborers in that field will rise.