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There definitely seems to be a demographic bubble in the programmer population. Should we expect that as the population of programmers itself ages, we'll see less age discrimination? Or is the bubble itself a product of age discrimination?

In other words, is age discrimination more due to "hire people like me" bias, or "work 'em hard while they're too young to know better" bias?

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There was a previous demographic bubble when the dotcom era meant that all the jocks who would have become lawyers switched to getting CS degrees, despite not really being hackers. Now the same thing is happening, only they want to "do a startup".

I think it's common for youth not to trust older people, probably a byproduct of being raised by parents, and that combined with a desire to keep costs low and get maximum productivity (Eg: a deal in favor of the company at the engineers expense) go hand in hand to make hiring older people who would want a better deal less likely.

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