By this logic, there must be millions of unemployable past-40 software engineers out on the streets. Or maybe the simpler explanation: Our industry has been growing exponentially for two decades and the cohorts that are past 40 are small compared to the ones that came later.
Further, the "look around your office" result varies wildly from office to office. Looking around your average SV startup will skew to gullible, er, I mean risk-tolerant mid-20s engineers. My office is more than half composed of experienced engineers in their mid 30s and up who know their market rate.
Well, not millions. The unemployment rate for software engineers is nearly double for 55+ year olds compared to younger workers [0]. Still, I guess at "only" 9.6% it's not so bad.
Since those stats aren't for software engineers, it would be enlightening if there was a breakout of the IT workers who couldn't find jobs to see how much of the more-affected population was some variation of manager or pseudo-manager, as those roles tend to skew older and are also the roles that (anecdotally at least) I saw less hiring of. When I think back to the people I'd worked with who had trouble finding their next gigs during the recession, 100% of them were some variation of PM, scrum master, and so on. Almost universally their resumes/LinkedIn profiles had very vague descriptions of what it was they did for the 5+ years leading up to the recession. There may be a lesson in that as well.
Those figures count just a subset of the U-3 unemployment rate, which is itself a subset of the true (U-6) unemployment rate. Anyone counted as long-term unemployed is omitted from those counts.
Further, the "look around your office" result varies wildly from office to office. Looking around your average SV startup will skew to gullible, er, I mean risk-tolerant mid-20s engineers. My office is more than half composed of experienced engineers in their mid 30s and up who know their market rate.