3 ms·

... assuming that the number of 20-year-olds going into programming 30 years ago is the same as today.

• mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Precisely. Computing has been changing rapidly throughout history, but the advent of the PC was a big change, because it created a massive cohort of people like me who had encountered computers even before high school. How old is that cohort? Let's see... if you were fourteen when the Altair came out in 1975, today you would be... 47.
  • timr 18y ago
    There have been massive fluctuations in interest in computer science since the 1970s, so it's a poor assumption that 50-somethings would be under-represented in the industry. If programmers were staying in the field, we should probably see a distribution where there is a good representation of 20-somethings from the early 80s (the last major boom) -- those people would be around 40 today. I don't see that; I see a lot of 20-somethings, and a few 30-somethings, and it's been that way for as long as I can remember. There seem to be other forces at work.