Will the average tech worker get older?

Will the average tech worker get older as tech companies start to exist for longer?

Hi All,

I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …

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Recently I met with a friend who works for a well-known tech company. Over a wonderful lunch, we got to talking about life and careers and I asked her how she was doing and she wasn’t too happy. Here’s why: She is in her mid-30s and her new boss is going to be a 20-something-year-old (talk about career trajectory!)

On its own, this wasn’t much of a data point but then I saw this post on LNKD which talks about age bias in executive hiring. In a minor rant, the author talks a lot about how there is no substitute for experience! 

Around the same time, I read Byrne Hobart’s post “Is everything getting old”. This article talks about how the average age for CEOs at hire has been going up. You’ll notice the same across a variety of careers including politics.

Of course, the LinkedIn Post is quite specific to Indian hiring, but India’s median age is a mere 29 years. Young, dynamic, smart, and scrappy; all the things that startups tend to look for. 

I think there may be multiple things happening here but I suspect if we break out technology companies both at a CEO and worker level either in India or the United States (and quite possibly every country) the average age will tend to be lower than any other Industry. But that is also not quite true … 

The chart is a bit dated (from 2016)  but I don’t believe we’ll see much of a difference in tech companies, especially the highly in-demand tech companies. But as companies become less “cooler” to work at (post IPO) the more mobile and younger employees leave to take risks thereby upping the average age of an employee. Even these companies try to avoid older employees. For example, IBM had to settle an age discrimination case recently. I used to work at Oracle and when I joined Oracle was a cutting-edge company. I can’t say that is true anymore.

Several things are happening here. The funding for tech (even though 2022 wasn’t a good year) allows for more companies to be created and this has over the last decade resulted in more graduates each year in STEM.

The below graph from NCES shows that engineering degrees have been on an uptick. This means more prospective employees for a company to choose from

Even with this, there is still a talent shortage (and I know it might not appear that way with all the layoff announcements). The more profound point is that as some of these startups scale they can hire more and more younger engineers reducing the average age. I suspect that at some point the company grows large enough and two things happen 

1. The younger employees leave for higher risk/higher reward situations; the next Uber, Airbnb, etc

2. Older employees continue to stay and the average age increases over time

3. Younger employees do not want to join as much anymore; the risk-reward profile does not suit their needs

I suspect companies such as Facebook and Google are starting to see this trend in their internal hiring data. Some of this is hard to tease out because such companies have a variety of different job types that are all not “technology” roles

I keep telling everyone that I talk to that tech companies and outsized outcomes are not yet done but are we getting there? Probably in the next 2-3 decades we’ll start seeing this play out:

• Tech becomes highly regulated

• Outsized profitability is no longer a given (it never has been for a majority of failed startups of course)

• This results in good-but-not-better-than-other-industries pay at tech companies

• Less new graduates enter and compete for stem jobs

• Average and median ages for tech companies increases

Interestingly enough tech as we know it started with semis and Shockley would have been a 67-year-old company had it existed today. Tech has of course proliferated in the last two decades and most graduates who joined the tech rocketship 20 years ago are starting to be unhireable (except as execs) at most of these tech companies. 

Anecdotally, a friend of mine who worked at another MAANG (f.k.a FAANG) company while in his mid 30’s felt like as he put it “the grand-daddy of the group”. There are also tech workers that self-select and consciously choose that such companies are not right given their family, personal, health, or other situations. In my network, I know of several people opting to leave huge sums of money on the table for a less cutthroat culture. Obviously, in this analysis, I have not covered hiring outside of the United States but I strongly suspect that this is the case in other countries with a young workforce. Way back when I worked at Oracle I witnessed a situation in which an “older” candidate did not get the job because well, he’d want seniority and he was older. I was flabbergasted back then, and I am just as flabbergasted today. Just another day in tech! 

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