Too Old for Silicon Valley? Think Again. AI Is Changing the Math | KQED
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upper waypointNews<br>Too Old for Silicon Valley? Think Again. AI Is Changing the Math
Now that AI can do a lot of the work of junior programmers, Silicon Valley employers want engineers who can confidently direct it. For one experienced engineer, that shift was an opening.
Jul 9, 2026<br>Updated 9:01 am PT
Rachael Myrow
Ben Kovitz poses for a portrait at his place of work at Impulse Labs in San Francisco on June 19, 2026. Experienced engineers like Kovitz who can confidently work with AI may have a better chance of riding tech’s next wave than the news headlines suggest. (Tâm Vũ / KQED)
Longtime tech worker Ben Kovitz grew up far from Silicon Valley — in Appleton, Wisconsin.
“If fewer than 26 inches of snow fell in a night, they wouldn’t close school, because they had the plows to clear those streets by morning,” Kovitz said.
Jobs pulled him to sunny California first in the 1980s, where he spent about 15 years in tech. His first full-time programming job was at a small company in Encino called Information Management Systems, where he learned, as he puts it, “most of what I know.”
Perhaps his most prestigious gig was at Palm, Inc., the consumer electronics and software pioneer.
The perks weren’t as lavish as at Google during the “glory days” of Silicon Valley employment, but there was a ping pong table, and the cafeteria was “fantastic,” which meant a lot to the young foodie.
He eventually pivoted to academia, feeling he could be “paid to indulge my curiosity and teach, which are two things that I would do all the time if I could,” pursued a Ph.D. in cognitive science and computer science at Indiana University, and became a computer science professor at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Ben Kovitz poses for a portrait at his place of work at Impulse Labs in San Francisco on June 19, 2026. (Tâm Vũ / KQED)<br>But when Kovitz decided last year to return to full-time work in Silicon Valley, he discovered a labor market dramatically reshaped by artificial intelligence.
He’d reinvented himself before. The question was whether the industry would let him do it again.
It turns out, yes. For all of Silicon Valley’s recent mass layoffs and historic ageism, experienced engineers like Kovitz who can confidently work with AI may have a better chance of riding tech’s next wave than the news headlines suggest. But to survive the brutal hiring gauntlet, they just might need to invest in help — both human and AI.
Is the market leaning in favor of experience?
Overall, tech jobs are surging. Online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter, which tracks job postings in IT and computer science, reports they were up 16.7% year-over-year nationally in May.
But that rosy picture looks different depending on your experience level. The share of senior-level job postings has risen to 43.1%, up from 38.8% a year ago. At the same time, the share of entry-level job postings has fallen slightly, from 8.1% to 7.4%.
“A key challenge within this job market is a distinct preference for senior or highly-skilled talent over entry-level hires,” ZipRecruiter labor economist Nicole Bachaud wrote to KQED.
LinkedIn logos are displayed on laptop computers for an illustration. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg-Getty Images)<br>That’s not great news for newly minted college graduates, but it is a hopeful sign for Kovitz and others with decades of experience.
Meanwhile, more than a quarter of employers now ask for AI skills. That’s nearly double the share a year ago.
“This surge is primarily fueled by businesses expanding their AI integrations, products, and services, creating high demand for workers to implement and deploy these new tools,” Bachaud wrote.
The fastest-growing roles in software engineering aren’t traditional coding jobs, according to Kory Kantenga, head of economics for the Americas at LinkedIn. They’re positions like “forward-deployed engineer,” a title pioneered by companies like Palantir to describe engineers who embed directly with clients to install, customize and troubleshoot AI tools on-site.
LinkedIn has seen an 18-fold increase in such roles.
“Those are the roles that we see have a lot of momentum,” Kantenga said.
How Ben Did It
While shy about sharing his exact age, Kovitz will say he’s old enough “to have watched moon shots on television” as a boy in the early 1970s, and to have programmed computers with punch cards.
He’s also old enough to know the Silicon Valley job market is vastly different from the one he learned to navigate at the start of his career. Today, AI defines not only the jobs, but the job search as well.
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