If you are 40 today, its reasonable to expect that you graduated college in 1994. That's 32 years after Purdue University opened the first computer science program in 1962.
That's true, but software development is special because not everybody can do it.
Don't get me wrong here, I actually think that mostly anyone (lets say over average) can learn to code, including very young children or over 40 adults ... the difference between normal people and people that make a carrier out of it is that building actual applications is a lot harder than printing hello-world or sorting an array or scripting your home appliances.
I think that if you don't start doing software development early in life (at most in your early twenties), then chances to make it as a software developer are rather poor.
A couple of reasons come to my mind:
- like with every hard skill out there, it takes a phenomenal amount of time until you're able to be effective at it
- we constantly have to learn, just like doctors and while doable, it gets tiring. You can learn new stuff based on what you already know, so you never restart from scratch, but many people simply stop giving a shit
- getting a hello-world working feels like magic at first, but repeat that 10,000 times and pretty soon it starts feeling like drudgery. That's the story of most things you end up working on. And it is impossible to work only on new stuff, in fact most of the work in software development is drudgery
- related to the above, the motivation of senior software developers has to pivot from working on cool stuff to seeing happy users, or to money earned, or to other tangible byproducts or your work, because "cool" is relative and the initial magic starts fading away (which is why I believe many developers move into management)
- the demand for "good" software developers is high. But it's actually pretty hard to find a job as a software developer if you're not at least decent or come from a good university. This makes it a hostile environment for rookies, being a bitch to get your foot in the door
- software development is not only hard, but must be complemented with people skills ... being able to communicate effectively with others is of extreme importance, knowing how to do efficient marketing is also essential if you want to build your own products or if you want a good carrier path
Yeah I agree that programming, for whatever reason, seems to be something that a lot of people just can't do well.
But we're talking about the people that have been doing real work in the field for ~20 years getting booted out to god knows where. Is this true? If so, where do they go? It's not really so easy to start a completely new professional track at 40. Are they stocking shelves?
I really think those people just gave up for one reason or another.
But do note here that 20 years ago there weren't many jobs related to software development. This industry started taking off in the early nineties and got popular in the late nineties. And as I said, it's not an easy job.
So if you want to make statistics based on that, the sample is really small. We should wait another 20 years for any meaningful conclusions, and my guess is that in 20 years from now there will be many software developers over 40.
Sure, computers were around back then. But I don't think there was much of an industry around them outside of academia. There are quantum computers now, but not many "quantum programmers" :P. (It's not a perfect parallel; I'm just being a little glib.)
Edit: My point was that there won't be very many programmers with 40 years' experience. Turns out the OP meant 40 year old programmers, which is a different story.
Sure, computers were around back then. But I don't think there was much of an industry around them outside of academia
And the banks. And defence. And aerospace. And factories. And.... well... lots of other places. IBM started selling the 1400 series in 1960 for Pete's sake!
The industry was obviously a lot smaller then - but it was well past the pure academic/military phase by that point.
If this is really true then where do they all go? There's only so many seats for managers and architects.