There's not been a 'traditional' software career yet, so it's hard to tell if what's happening is what 'should' happen.
Thinking about this from a numbers standpoint, the market for people with software development skills on a truly national (or global) scale only really developed in the late 70s at earlier - I'd say not until the mid 80s did we see enough of an uptick such that the idea of a long-term career for large numbers of software developers was viable. With that viewpoint, we're just now seeing a ~30 year mark from the start of that time period - people who started in their 20s or 30s in software are now hitting their 50s and 60s. Watching and learning from what their careers have been will be instructive for people, although I'm not sure there's a whole lot of lessons we can draw conclusively from that yet. It's only one generation, and the world of tech changed dramatically during that generation.
Will this always be a problem? I don't know - embeddable bio-devices may be the next seismic shift, but "the internet" - the idea of billions of people always connected to services - this was little more than a dream in the eyes of a few people back in the 80s. Given that viewpoint, the career of software developers in the "always connected" age of the internet has been not even 20 years.
Unrelated, I've had pretty gray hair since my early 20s, and I'm not sure I've been too affected by ageism, but I know it's been a factor during some hiring - people assuming I was in my 40s or 50s when I was ... 31. :)
Thinking about this from a numbers standpoint, the market for people with software development skills on a truly national (or global) scale only really developed in the late 70s at earlier - I'd say not until the mid 80s did we see enough of an uptick such that the idea of a long-term career for large numbers of software developers was viable. With that viewpoint, we're just now seeing a ~30 year mark from the start of that time period - people who started in their 20s or 30s in software are now hitting their 50s and 60s. Watching and learning from what their careers have been will be instructive for people, although I'm not sure there's a whole lot of lessons we can draw conclusively from that yet. It's only one generation, and the world of tech changed dramatically during that generation.
Will this always be a problem? I don't know - embeddable bio-devices may be the next seismic shift, but "the internet" - the idea of billions of people always connected to services - this was little more than a dream in the eyes of a few people back in the 80s. Given that viewpoint, the career of software developers in the "always connected" age of the internet has been not even 20 years.
Unrelated, I've had pretty gray hair since my early 20s, and I'm not sure I've been too affected by ageism, but I know it's been a factor during some hiring - people assuming I was in my 40s or 50s when I was ... 31. :)