Dive Brief:
- The median age of an Amazon Web Services engineer is between 40 and 45 years old, according to Redmonk analyst James Governor, reports Tech Republic.
- Comparatively, the median age of developers in the tech industry overall is 27 years old, according to data from Stack Overflow.
- While PayScale reports the median age at Amazon is 31 years old, that does not hold as true at AWS, according to Governor. Instead, the cloud giant has a healthy mix of older and younger workers. Industry giants Oracle and HP also feature a high median age of 39 years old.
Dive Insight:
While most tech companies chase tech workers just out of college, Amazon is taking a different approach, according to Governor. The company is bringing on older tech workers who are more experienced and more stable professionally.
An older, more experienced tech professional could give AWS the edge it needs to make its cloud products even better and to keep it on top in the cloud market. This is especially true with the recent hire of James Gosling, the so-called "father of Java." Gosling created Java, one of the most popular computer programming languages, while at Sun Microsystems in the 1990s. Attracting big names in the industry could also help draw more developers to Amazon's products.
With such high demand for tech talent today, more organizations are exploring alternatives to the traditional young tech worker. For example, IBM recently pledged to hire 2,000 U.S. veterans over the next four years as part of the company's broader effort to hire 25,000 "new collar" U.S. workers by 2020. And in Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe launched an initiative last fall to provide free cyber training to veterans interested in working in the cybersecurity sector.
