Dive Brief:
- Almost half of the workforce in tech companies ranges between the ages of 20 to 35 — the entire spectrum of millennials, according to an Indeed study of about 1,000 U.S. tech workers. About 27% of employees are 36 to 40 years old, followed by 26% being Gen Xers or Baby Boomers.
- Approximately 43% of the respondents fear losing their jobs due to their age, and nearly a quarter of those said they think about it "all the time." Although 85% of those surveyed believe their company's take diversity into consideration, ageism remains.
- The top location for all three generations looking for work in tech is San Jose, CA, followed by No. 2 San Francisco, CA. For millennials and Gen Xers looking for work, Seattle is their third choice. Baby Boomers in tech prefer jobs in Huntsville, AL, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
The tech industry is notorious for its diversity woes, and ageism is just one of the latest to be highlighted. One of the most notable cases of diversity conflict came from Google after a male employee "[perpetrated] gender stereotypes" with an open letter denouncing women in the workplace.
The Indeed report follows another of 330,000 U.S. workers which found 42% of the tech workforce is comprised of millennials, though they only make up 26% of the non-tech workforce. Salaries were still proportionate to tenure and not dependent upon age.
Legacy companies including IBM and HP retain employees for an average of six to seven years. Newer companies such as Google and Amazon have an average tenure of about two years. The same held true in experience: older companies hired employees with about a decade's worth of career experience.
There are sectors of IT which require an older workforce with knowledge that is unfamiliar to the younger generations of IT. For example, the government's extensive outdated technical infrastructure relies on older generations capable of running "dead" codes that younger workers do not know.
Millennials are feared to pose the greatest threat to security in the workplace because of their independent ways of communication and information sharing. Older generations, however, are believed to be more vulnerable to phishing schemes.
