Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups / small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft make up even 10% of tech workers.

My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined, for example.

Facebook - 25,105 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook)

Amazon has 566,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps.

Apple - 123,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.) Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers, so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers.

Microsoft - 124,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)

There are around 7 million tech workers in the USA (https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...)

Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers.

860,000 / 7 million = 12.3%

That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of the richest tech companies in the world.

Oracle

Cisco

IBM

Dell

HP Enterprise

HP Inc.

Lockheed Martin

Northrop Grumman

Raytheon

General Dynamics

General Electric

Intel

AMD

Qualcomm

Texas Instruments

United Technologies

Analog Devices

Samsung

Phillips

Toshiba

... I'm gonna stop listing all the big tech companies I can think of. I madey point.

Most SV companies talk a big game about "diversity," but that never extends to diversity of age.

It's funny how so many people in the valley don't understand that discrimination based on age is just as illegal as discrimination based on race or sex or any other protected class.

Only if you discriminate against old people, it is legal to openly discriminate against the young.

I guess I'm biased because I'm young but it's a little non-sensical since young people are the ones with student debt and record-high housing costs to pay for while 50-year-olds have decades of savings and stock market and real-estate appreciation to fall back on if they find themselves unemployed.

That's a lovely stereotype, but far from the truth; which is why so many people are working into their 70's these days and why reverse mortgages are on the rise.

There was an article in the newspaper (You can Google what that is) recently that noted that more than half of Americans have less than $5,000 in retirement savings. A similar number live in apartments.

The whole "decades of savings" thing is a cultural myth that Millennials use to make themselves feel like victims. Somehow they think they're the only generation that's ever been through hard times.

Not sure how you inferred this from my comment. My parents went through much harder times when they were my age.

However, unemployment would be a trivial inconvenience for them now at 50. They’d probably just retire and not bother looking for another full time gig. I don’t really know any 26-year-olds who could say the same.

Edit: I looked at the data and the median 55-59 year old in the US has US$150k in net worth vs. US$19k for the median 25-29 year old. Why would the former need extra legal protections against employment discrimination and the latter not?

And insight gained from a world of experience that a junior or intermediate devs doesn't have.