[jesusmichael]

Where do you think they go? Do you really think that a 20 something with no experience programming is more valuable than a 43 year old with 20 years of experience? Maybe in some SF based start-up where culture is more important that productivity... but in the real world people hire guys that can do the job. Most real tech is done by guys over 30.

[scottedwards]

These aren't SF startups (see above). I see plenty of 30's and quite a few 40's, but where are all the 50's and 60's? These days I don't think many are passing away at that age, right?

[jesusmichael]

Well considering that the PC was available until the 80's, you'll find few guys in their 50-60's writing code in Ruby or PHP... most of those guys are Fortran an Assembler cats. There are plenty of jobs still available working in host controllers and hardware systems. Being a "Programmer/Developer" as a career wasn't really available until the early 90's. I wrote in about 5 different languages back then, including Dataflex... hahaha

[scottedwards]

Good point, but I'm seeing this phenomena in ALL jobs at these companies - and both have been around for over 30 years. There just aren't alot of older people around - where did they GO?

[jesusmichael]

That's a good question... but where are all the 50-60 year old firemen? Electrical engineering paid pretty good back in the day... so I can assume that if they managed their money wisely, they are sitting on a boat on some lake in Wisconsin.

I'm working on a hardware project right now and the guy that's doing the board design is 57 and retired. I can only call him between tuesday and thursday and he has an aol.com email address, but he knows what he's doing... so who knows...