[nathancspencer]

The claim this article makes about very short tenures at big tech is misleading. Because of headcount growth, the median tenure is naturally going to be short. Google grew headcount by 60% the year before 2013, so no wonder the median tenure was 1.1 years. A better statistic to use would be median tenure conditional on that the employee has already left.

[Terr_]

The same process causes us to overestimate the rate at which older programmers leave the profession.

Even if there was zero attrition, programmers with 40 years of experience would still be rare. The fresh newbie developers of 1985 were a small group by today's standards.