האם זה נכון שיש נטייה בהייטק לפטר מתכנתים מעל גיל 40?
לא.
הדוד בוב (בוב מרטין, מאבות Cpp)
מסביר שכל המתכנתים המבוגרים לא פוטרו, הם עדיין כאן, אבל אחוזם מכלל המתכנתים נשחקו בריבית דה ריבית
בפרפרזה לשפת פורום הסולידית.
Actually, most of the old programmers are still here and are still coding. The problem isn’t that the old programmers are fading away. The problem is that the number of programmers is growing by a huge factor every year.
I’m 61 years old. I still write code. I love writing code. I’m very, very, good at it. So why aren’t there more 61 year old programmers? Because, 40 years ago, in 1974, when I was 21, there weren’t very many programmers at all.
I estimate that the world, today, has twenty-two million programmers[2]. One of of every 300 people is a programmer. In the US it’s closer to 1%. But in 1974 the number of programmers worldwide was vastly smaller, and probably numbered less than 100,000[3]. That implies that in 40 years our ranks have increased by a factor of 220. That’s a growth rate of 14.5% per year, or a doubling rate of five years.
If the ranks of programmers has doubled every five years, then it stands to reason that most programmers were hired within the last five years, and so about half the programmers would be under 28. Half of those over 28 would be less than 33. Half of those over 33 would be less than 38, and so on.
Less than 0.5% of programmers would be 60 or over. So most of us old programmers are still around writing code. It’s just that there never were very many of us.
