It's amusing to me that people in the tech community think they will get to work that long.
Look around your office. Do you see anyone over 40? No? Are you saving enough to retire at 40? Then what do you think is going to happen?
EDIT: I will point out that this comment has fluctuated quite a bit between +2 and -2. So, clearly some very different experiences, which is good to hear. Perhaps not as dire as it looks.
By this logic, there must be millions of unemployable past-40 software engineers out on the streets. Or maybe the simpler explanation: Our industry has been growing exponentially for two decades and the cohorts that are past 40 are small compared to the ones that came later.
Further, the "look around your office" result varies wildly from office to office. Looking around your average SV startup will skew to gullible, er, I mean risk-tolerant mid-20s engineers. My office is more than half composed of experienced engineers in their mid 30s and up who know their market rate.
Well, not millions. The unemployment rate for software engineers is nearly double for 55+ year olds compared to younger workers [0]. Still, I guess at "only" 9.6% it's not so bad.
Since those stats aren't for software engineers, it would be enlightening if there was a breakout of the IT workers who couldn't find jobs to see how much of the more-affected population was some variation of manager or pseudo-manager, as those roles tend to skew older and are also the roles that (anecdotally at least) I saw less hiring of. When I think back to the people I'd worked with who had trouble finding their next gigs during the recession, 100% of them were some variation of PM, scrum master, and so on. Almost universally their resumes/LinkedIn profiles had very vague descriptions of what it was they did for the 5+ years leading up to the recession. There may be a lesson in that as well.
Those figures count just a subset of the U-3 unemployment rate, which is itself a subset of the true (U-6) unemployment rate. Anyone counted as long-term unemployed is omitted from those counts.
Look around your office. Do you see anyone over 40? No?
Yes. A couple people on my team now, most of management (including our immediate supervisor, who just recently moved up from being a normal team member), whoever's in the cubes I saw those black "40" balloons on, the people who first built some of the corporate systems (well, the ones who haven't retired yet), etc.
Tech is a growing field. How big was it in 1995, compared to today? That's a decent approximation of what ratio of over 40 / under 40 you'd expect, assuming career changes aren't common enough to mess up the numbers too badly.
Things are a lot better in the real world, but I hear the Valley is pretty much Logan's Run. Which, if you get the reference, means you're probably too old to work in Silicon Valley.
I'm 40. My test engineer and lead developer are older than me. My director and VP are older. My team has two developers and one web designer who are younger than me.
But, this is a large enterprise software company on the East Coast.
Look around your office. Do you see anyone over 40?
Perhaps a more useful perspective is:
Look at the "careers" or "about us" pages for the tech company of your choice -- look for the group pictures of smiling faces. How many people do you see over age 40?
It cracks me up when such companies boast about how "diverse" they are, then show a group photo that is 70+% male. 80%+ white and asian, and 90% below age 40.
Look around your office. Do you see anyone over 40? No? Are you saving enough to retire at 40? Then what do you think is going to happen?
EDIT: I will point out that this comment has fluctuated quite a bit between +2 and -2. So, clearly some very different experiences, which is good to hear. Perhaps not as dire as it looks.