alt Hacker News> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.
At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life; exactly because "everybody" knew that programming is a "young man's game" (i.e. you likely won't get a programming job anymore when you are, say, 35 or 40 years old).
So,
> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.
is rather a very recent phenomenon.
Replies
> At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life; exactly because "everybody" knew that programming is a "young man's game"
That seemed commonly held among folks participating in the dot-com bubble. Plenty of people had been doing it for decades even as the bubble was growing.
> Software engineers didn’t just disappear after age 40.
>> is rather a very recent phenomenon.
Not really. It's not that they disappeared, it's that they're a small fraction of the overall SWE population as a side-effect of how much that population has grown.
> At the end of the 90th and beginning of the 00th ("dotcom bubble") it was a common saying that if as a programmer, when you are 30 or 40, you don't have a very successful company (and thus basically set for life), you basically failed in life;
This wasn't common anywhere except for maybe the Silicon Valley bubble.
The rest of the US and even the world could see that not having a very successful company of your own is to equal to being a failure.
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