I wonder about that - is it that tech sheds older workers, or that tech just seems to skew young because it's a young "industry"? There weren't a lot of older programmers in the 90's because there weren't that many young programmers in the 70's. The "older programmers" today are the ones (like me) who were young programmers in the 90's, and today, at 45, I've never felt any real age pressure. I think it's just a bit harder for me to find jobs now than it was when I was in my 20's, but I don't think that's because I have a few gray hairs and more wrinkles than I used to, but because I'm asking for 3 times as much money.

Or maybe I'm just being unrealistically optimistic and life is about to get really difficult for me.

I think you hit on the key point. Like you mentioned, you're expecting 3 times as much as you were initially. On top of a better understanding of your own value, you're also going to have a better understanding of the employer:employee relationship. In other words you're not going to bend over backwards solely in in hopes of proving yourself, achieving some sort of recognition, or other such things. I don't think companies are choosing not to hire older developers because of any form of discrimination or even a belief that older developers have less skills. Instead, it's just a value measurement no different than e.g. outsourcing. It's the same reason that I think most large tech companies are pushing hard for 'get [anybody with a heartbeat] into computer science'. Increase the labor supply, lower labor costs, increase profit margins.

This would also explain why other industries don't suffer from a similar problem. In software development companies collect software developers by the tens of thousands. This results in extremely high labor costs and so reductions on this front can see tremendous savings. As an example Google has about 100,000 employees. That means reducing their average salary by just $10 per year is worth a million dollars of 'free' revenue (yeah, ignoring taxes etc). Really amazing to think about those numbers! By contrast even very large companies in other fields will have relatively small numbers of engineers. For instance petroleum engineering is critical in the fossil fuel industry which is an extremely large industry, yet there are only a total of 33,700 petroleum engineers in the entire country.

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/architecture-and-engineering/petrole...

There is bias against tech workers who haven’t learned anything in the last 10+ years. I’m less certain that there’s bias against workers over a particular age per-se.