When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Don’t Even Bother to Lie
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And for the record, I'm 55, work in tech, and yes, ageism is a problem, but this book doesn't seem like its going to help.
This idea is alive and well in Canada (a more conservative culture generally); their tech scene hasn't exactly exploded as a result.
This is a pet peeve of mine, and exactly the same ageism the author is complaining about. All of these things mean that you're not getting the best people for the job, both ways.
And then the environment and expense of Vancouver makes most gtfo to Toronto or SF (like they wanted to in the first place).
Even now I'd rather go to Vancouver than SF or Toronto. I went to Seattle instead of Vancouver because my job offer was for Seattle.
I bet after that MS share holders though damn we should have hired Mulally.
Some on at his level should not make that sort of mistake evver.
For reference - Netflix said it best in that masterpiece of an HR document - a pay rise should never come up as a topic, because you should already be paying your people close to the top of what the market thinks they are worth .
I'm not complaining about genuine experience/wisdom/etc. I just think the correlation with age is a lot weaker than prevailing wisdom in the great white north, where age is almost seen as a requirement.
That is far down the list of reasons why Canada's tech scene is weak.
More conservative generally?
The result is that assistance offered to start-ups (via accelerators, etc.) is way too often in the form of finding "experienced" entrepreneurs to "guide" the start-ups, instead of actually enabling the young founders. The experience of a former low-level exec from Nortel, RIM, IBM or Microsoft Canada is generally not relevant to a start-up.
You may disagree, but I feel I spent enough years grinding it out in Canada to justify an opinion.
But when someone calls someone a "bitch" it doesn't make much sense to assume they meant that.
It's 99.99999% more likely that he said those things pointing out their age.
Well, there is a thing as experience and immaturity.
And someone looking "just out of high school", or an executive being "like an intern" could be legitimate concerns -- if he doesn't say those things as his sole arguments, but proceeds to describe how (in his opinion) these people fared badly due to their inexperience.
When people don't have any actual evidence to support their claims, they use bullshit phrases designed to push emotion over facts.
It can also mean that he looked AND acted inexperienced, immature, bro-ish, etc.
Often I'll use emotions over facts even when I have facts. My own experience has been that discussing with other humans goes easier when you include emotional arguments. While a mix of both works best, if you have to give a very simplified argument and cannot include both factual and emotional argument, the emotional argument will tend to go better.
I fully agree with your claim that those without factual argument will use emotional argument, but the use of an emotional argument does not guarantee they are lacking a factual argument.
For example, if I describe someone as an intern due to their lack of maturity, I may have numerous stories to tell about their lack of maturity, but as I only have one line to describe them in, I stick with describing them as an intern.
Besides "he looked just out of high school" can be corroborative evidence, as it's something that can statistically explain their immature behavior/inexperience etc.
In other words, it's not like everybody who is "just out of high school" is immature/inexperienced etc, but if we want to predict or explain such behavior, it's a statistically very good tool.
The person you reject because they are over 40 today will be you in 10 years. If you pass on someone due to their age you can't turn around and get mad when some other 20 year old does the same.
Whenever I interview someone I always ask myself, if I was the person across the table from me would I think I got a fair shot during this interview.
Having said that, this is a two way street. You need to be aware of what your skill set is. I took the Scott Adams career advice [0] to try and be in the top 25% in two areas. In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time.
[0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
What are 40+ doing in your surrounding environment, your friend's and people like you? How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments? That should give you a clue what you most probably will be doing and what your "goal post" should be when you join 40+ group otherwise you are going to have bad time too.
All the 40+ crowd around me is doing math and programming, that's kind of the day to day job at a hedge fund:)
:) I'm sorry, I've read your comment 4 times and I still can't make sense of it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?
Could you please try and restate your opinion to be clearer?
Hedge fund might be an exception like academics and research. In most non-research oriented companies you will see more 40+ in management than in programming. Like you mentioned FoxPro people having bad time, even if you are skilled in latest 'programming' trend, a company might prefer (IME, most of the time it is true) someone younger than a 40+ in that role. For most companies, the marginal utility of a person plateaus or declines after about 5-7 years of progressive experience.
If you entered a field at 35 (appear 35) when most of the peer group in the company is 21, you are going to have hard time getting hired for same role being performed by 21. If the company that expects/has most 40+ employees in management, you are going to have hard time staying in technical role unless you have built bridges with management that want to keep you around.
I still have my Vax though, and copies of Knuth, K&R, ...
There's also an issue between the experience / what a person can accomplish for you vs. insistence on integration with a particular framework. If someone is a COBOL programmer and can demonstrably solve my problem more expediently with COBOL than by slowly plugging into my pre-existing Java system, then I should want them to work in COBOL and I should solve the problem of integrating disparate systems instead of effectively removing the comparative advantage that the COBOL expert brought to the table by forcing them to do things in my Java system for reasons of uniformity and standardization.
Obviously this is a simplification. For example, I enjoy programming in Haskell, but it's hard for employers to locate good Haskell programmers and so there is some extra hiring risk if you agree to bring Haskell into your family of tools. That's not trivial, but it is often deeply over stated. And the actual specifics of that kind of risk are rarely analyzed or considered -- as opposed to just rattling off a glib dismissal based solely on the mere fact that a risk, in principle, even exists at all, because dismissing for this reason is probably convenient to someone else's political power play to re-org around Java or something.
Many enterprise technology investment decisions are very bad decisions that are made by non-technical people for purposes of nepotism, status signalling, and creating bonus fuel for middle management and executives. The newer and sexier the technology, the better. Or, if new and sexy doesn't work, then buy a brand, like IBM, regardless of whether it actually fits your needs.
I find that most programmers are very happy to learn new things and are even motivated to do it and find it pleasant. But most programmers also cannot deal with being forced to learn clearly and unequivocally inferior tools that don't have redeeming engineering trade-off pragmatism to support their adoption -- which is the majority of modern frameworks, new languages, and libraries.
You can say "get with the times" but it's just the wrong diagnosis. "Getting with the times" generally means being underpaid and overworked in order to take poorly designed tools and use them to cram square pegs into round holes. Some people call it "gainful employment" and if it doesn't make you feel soul-crushingly miserable, that's great for you. But other people call it "talent wasting graveyard that will cause me to die early from a life of absurdly needless stress" and they seek other careers.
I wouldn't judge those COBOL programmers the way you are. They have a comparative advantage with COBOL and know its pragmatic use. If they recognize ways of solving a problem better without dealing with enterprise Java inanity, and their economic preferences imply that it's just not worth it for them to be overworked and underpaid if they are also forced to use an inferior tool, then they are being perfectly rational.
You are trying to characterize it as "adapt or die" but the reality is that many modern software shops are just graveyards, so it is "adapt and die" -- at least by refusing to adapt, you might find some more pleasing way to spend your time before you die.
(I'd argue the same goes for other trends too -- like the way start-up jobs are becoming cult-like lifestyle communes, and how basic human needs like privacy are required to be sublimated away in awful open-plan surveillance offices. "Adapting" to "tolerate" these things is a bad outcome -- and for many it's a far worse outcome than being unemployed or having a very hard time with job searching).
@p4wnc6 what are you using Haskell for?
What I like working on in Haskell is numerical linear algebra / machine learning / data analytics toolkits.
But I also know Python pretty well (much more experience than with Haskell) and Python has the advantage of actually having a decent-paying job market, so I mostly stick to that. The few times I've interviewed for possibly decent-paying Haskell roles, they have been with large banks whose tech dysfunction was so large that it destroyed any credibility that may have been assumed due to the usage of Haskell.
One of the most eye opening things in my working experience has been that when someone says they use "functional programming" in a business setting, it generally means they don't follow any of the established practices or ideas that make functional programming worthwhile in the first place. So for jobs, seeking functional programming perhaps makes me overly skeptical.
I have heard of a few start-ups that really do functional programming, and one or two even using Haskell. But the pay and work environment are just too poor to consider it.
Elm is written in Haskell, and you can only build the latest Elm with a late Haskell install. Found this out the hard way trying to install Elm on debian/Raspberrypi. [0]
I ask, because I'm curious to see what applications haskell are used for. I see Haskell being used, but limited to specific roles. [1] One thing I have noticed is Haskell to build you require a low level tool chain, like C. HS also is a moving target. Latest development should be via Stack yet a lot of documentation and code relies on Cabal. This is a pain installing some things.
All I want to use Haskell is for building a new language. I could use the "C tool chain" and I will do this if I can't grok Haskell. But to tell you the truth the learning hump and pain is worth the advantages of the advanced compiler, types and the clean code.
Builds and implementation is a hurdle I'm looking at.
[0] Unless you cross-compile or re-compile Haskell which is a PIA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_%28programming_languag...
Just try not to only be good at FoxPro DB support, forever.
Probably also big part of women leaving the workplace after having kids.
I have a lot of confidence in young people, and I have a lot of confidence in everyone’s ability to do more than they think they can do. I have very high expectations for people, and I push people to reach even higher.
I take these young kids at HubSpot and I give them huge responsibility. Sometimes they mess it up, but more often than not they get it right. I think, at least in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated. I think my gray hair is overrated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/brian-halligan-ch...
Maybe I'll have a different perspective when I'm older, but this doesn't sound like outrageous age bias to me. He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated". That's not the same thing as saying that he won't hire "old" people, or that given an "old" person whom he thinks will perform better than a young person at the same salary, he'd prefer the young person.
Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim.
Reading TFA, the author comes across as pretty entitled. His argument is that older people are better than younger people, and he's upset that this CEO doesn't get it.
Over time, most people get better at what they do. They become wiser, calmer, more self-aware. They’ve also put in the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell says are required to become expert in a skill. Why would companies not want employees who have gained that expertise?
I dunno why, maybe this CEO is an idiot. Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune.
If you manage to start a company that could make a fortune, then you don't have to hire people the market is overlooking - everyone will want to work for you. You're putting the cart before the horse.
Absolutely: hire for skill, and there's a shit tonne of it being ignored outside young men in Silicon Valley.
If you believe the difference between a great employee and a mediocre employee is marginal, then I see your point, although I don't subscribe to that view.
Totally agreed that hiring skilled people isn't, on its own, going to make or break your company.
> It's just probably not relevant to the ultimate success of the company.
Disagree. Hiring is super critical. You have a limited runway. You need people who can get shit done, and while there's a bunch of skilled SV middle class Americans, there's value being left on the table:
- People outside SV are overlooked. Get a PhD from Cambridge with who just wrote a book on machine learning for the same price as an SV grad. Or someone from Warsaw (Poland has awesome CS fundamentals).
- Women are overlooked: we all have unconscious biases: I originally thought one of my go-to crypto people was a front end developer, for mostly dumb reasons, even being aware of this stuff it's hard to not do.
- Poor people are overlooked: same reasons as women. We look at stupid stuff like mannerisms and decide "that's not how a programmer sounds".
- People who don't buy into 'nerd culture' are overlooked. See above. Dress nicely and people think you're a salesperson.
- Old people who keep up to date rock. I bet 55 year old Ruby guy in this thread a) knows how to make shit on a current stack as well as a younger Ruby programmer b) brings with him a bunch of experience - not making him a better Knuth-style programmer, but making him a better get-shit-done-ship-it programmer.
Having been the oldest dude in my e.f. cohort (I'm 35), people look to me for:
a) Network arch, load balancing, Unix, regexs, other non webdev stuff.
b) decisions. I've started and failed and succeeded more often and am faster at making decisions.
c) Shipping. Telling people to get their shit out to customers even if they manually do X and Y because they haven't written the code yet.
d) node, just because I started node earlier than they did.
Plus you can get them for $0.70 on the dollar!
And he's right, if his claims are prefaced with "can be". Kids "can be" capable of more than the credit given. No one is a whiz kid just because they're young. In fact, most aren't. Most are wet-behind-the-ears welps that can do go work with a little guidance. Experience "can be" really overrated. As I told a former manager of mine who was tasked with managing my test team because he'd done it before, "just because you've done something doesn't mean you did it well". [0] And twenty years of doing CRUD in COBOL with no source control probably won't give you a huge leg up in a Django shop talking to a MongoDB data store using git to keep it all sane.
[0] (Lest you think me rude, this was after the umpteenth jillion time he'd remind me that he'd "managed test teams before", and role he proved time and again he didn't have the first clue about.)
Just curious, are bringing up the 20 years of COBOL with no source control because that was your manager's background?
Or is that your impression is of what the typical older tech worker has under their belt?
I brought it up because "experience" in and of itself doesn't mean anything. 20 years of COBOL and practices from that era only means you were paid to do "work on a computer", and probably is not an indicator that you're going to walk into that Django/git/agile shop and set the world on fire.
Just as some tire of the stereotype of the older tech worker, I tire of the assumption that "experience" automatically means someone has something to bring to the table. Bring me a resume of someone who has been doing primarily FoxPro for the last twenty years, and watch how fast I can dash to the shredder. Bring me another resume with experience writing apps in Turbo Pascal, and later moving to Delphi, with a brief stop in FoxPro during its heyday before moving on to .NET and mobile work, and watch how fast I type that email begging them to come in for an interview.
EDIT: The above line was in response to an earlier version of the parent comment, which was, itself, subsequently edited into oblivion.
"Agile" being one of the most common instances.
And this idea that your startup is "setting the world on fire" being another.
The assertion/implication/suggestion is absurd and only perpetuates the stereotype that competence and relevance and value are inversely correlated with age. I'm not exactly young, have very little experience working at megacorps, and have a lot of experience working at startups and at very small companies. I do consulting (no, not COBOL, not at megacorps), am constantly learning, and do a lot of coding for fun, both on side-projects and in the course of volunteer hacking. I don't have any reason to believe, none, that I'm not representative of most technical workers my age. No reason, that is, other than reading suggestions to the contrary here on HN.
Edit: grammar, content
The assertion/implication/suggestion is absurd
The only thing absurd in this thread is the assumption I'm lumping all the oldsters in one bucket, when what I was really implying was, "20 years of maintaining the same COBOL app is really one year of experience done 20 times."
Oh, BTW, the odds overwhelmingly favor that I'm older than you are. Not that it should matter.
>Brian Halligan, explained to the New York Times that this age imbalance was not something he wanted to remedy, but in fact something he had actively cultivated. HubSpot was “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” because, “in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said.
Had he said that he'd actively cultivated a race imbalance and was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and maintain white and Asian employees", would you still be cool with that? This seems pretty open and shut to me and it's pretty discouraging to see people defend an openly bigoted statement.
That may be true or not, but is not discriminatory by itself.
I understand the moneyball angle, but in this case it's not one I'd be comfortable with.
" Another reason to hire young people is that they’re cheap. HubSpot runs at a loss, but it is labor-intensive. How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room for $35,000 a year. "
http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
Now, misrepresenting the situation to an employee as to disadvantage them is something I can easily see as morally wrong (although not necessarily illegal).
Just my 2¢... :)
However, to the best of my knowledge, there's nothing illegal about offering people $35,000 a year for full time work. I mean, you are delusional if you think you are getting any but the programmers nobody else wants at that rate, and right now, there's not a lot of those, but there's nothing illegal about hiring people who don't have a lot of other options, and from experience, when you underpay, people will use you as a stepping stone to get to a job that pays well, but none of that is illegal, or I think even unethical. One could argue that you are giving people who otherwise wouldn't have a chance a chance, and once they have a programming job, even if it's a job that pays shit, it's way easier to get a programming job that pays okay.
(at $35,000 you are going to have a hard time arguing that they are exempt, of course, which could be a problem... but you could legally pay them a lower hourly wage and time and a half overtime, if you wanted; that's just an accounting/planning "compliance issue." And there's a lot to be said for just working eight hours, which is more common in my experience than it is in conversation.)
To me, this whole conversation is weird... my experience interviewing at startups is that yes, they expect me to be younger and cooler than I am... but they also pay way less and expect more work than big companies do. I kinda think that the "young and cool" thing might just be a cover for the "not willing to pay very much" thing. It's more socially acceptable to be openly discriminatory than it is to just openly say "Hey, I'm cheap"
You don't see how the implicit threat of being able to fire you at any time, for almost any reason, gives employers an advantage?
You don't see how the (horrible/disgusting/bullshit) law exempting IT workers from overtime gives employers an advantage.
I do tire of the endless "young people are so stupid, working past 5!" refrain. If you don't really have anything to do at home then staying an extra hour and doing some work while chatting with people isn't really a big deal. People lower down on the totem pole working more to try and move up isn't unusual either.
No, I don't. At all. I can fire my employer at any time as well -- and for a wider variety of reasons than the law allows for them to fire me.
If partial truths always lead to the correct conclusion, we would never have wrong convictions in courts caused by incomplete evidence.
Or to bring the analogy closer to home, if we know only some (but not all) of the use cases, we can't know if our solution truly and completely solves whatever problem we're trying to solve. Maybe Floegipoky knows of another "use case" (insight) here that Dan Lyons happened to leave out.
Why would any sane CEO prefer young, or old at the same salary?
I can understand reluctance with someone a year or two off retirement - extra recruiting costs on the horizon, but...
If it were me employing say 10 people on identical salary I'd want as diverse a mix of age, gender, race, background and interests as I could manage.
The young un will perhaps have fresh new ideas; some stupid, some naive, some hopefully genuinely fresh and exciting.
The old git will have seen it all before and perhaps can warn why doing it that way is a silly idea, maybe you should try this first. Maybe they have a bit of business or other non-tech in their history so can bring other relevant knowledge to bear.
Of course some older folks can be set in their ways. So can freshly minted degree holders. Some 23 year olds think they know everything. It's later you realise you don't. It is the tendency of youth after all. I may have experienced this too. ;)
Of course both age groups can repeatedly tell you how great they are at something. So can CEOs. They can all be lying/deluding themselves about this.
OK, sweeping generalisations time.
The CEO perhaps prefers young people because they're still wet behind the ears and believe "Just another push this weekend" (the 10th this year) "and we'll see you right come end of year/IPO/share options".
Or he just wants folks that do what he says, however stupid. With the terrifying ex-designer produced PHP codebase with copy/pasta where functions should live. Old fart might point out how shite/insecure/slow/whatever the code is.
Dead on, especially if you are relying on creative solutions to anything at all.
> The CEO perhaps prefers young people because they're still wet behind the ears and believe "Just another push this weekend" (the 10th this year) "and we'll see you right come end of year/IPO/share options".
Nailed it. Another factor is the behaviour of homogeneous groups, often you want groupthink to occur if you need work pushed along a fairly static assembly line. And homogenous groups get along and cooperate with much less work, it's a quick way to get to a local maxima.
The bias against people who are different from you is, unfortunately, present in everyone to some degree. Left unevaluated that means a lot of well meaning people can be very racist/sexist/ageist/etc and feel like all they are doing is building an agreeable, likeable, cooperating team.
If you reduce everything that Lyons is saying that that one quote from the CEO, perhaps the evidence is slim. But if you take the observations he's making together, as a whole, a different picture emerges:
The place was like a frat house, with refrigerators stocked with cases of beer and telemarketing sales “bros” drinking at their desks while hammering away on the phones. Thirty-something employees were considered “old people.”
And of course the quote about HubSpot “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” also attributed to the CEO.
I guess I don't see the fact that there's beer in the fridge or that people drink at work as evidence of the CEO's ageism. It seems to be evidence of a relaxed attitude towards alcohol.
Similarly, calling thirty-somethings "old" is...maybe insensitive? I dunno, maybe it's ageist. I'd think it would be hard to say without being there.
Clearly the author feels discriminated against, because his CEO doesn't see how amazing he is at his job. It's definitely his right to feel that way, and who knows, maybe he's right, but in any case I'm not inclined to take his observations as direct evidence of discrimination.
I don't know if I'd want to dignify it by calling it "ageist." But it's definitely a very callow, naive thing to say.
Agreed. Doesn't sound like the kind of place I'd want to work. Possibly a bad business strategy. I'm merely disagreeing with the author's explicit claim that the CEO's attitude is morally equivalent to saying "this is a whites-only workplace". I find that pretty offensive, frankly.
- They agree to work in open-plan surveillance offices with maybe 2 lateral feet of personal space and no privacy.
- They seem to care more about office trendiness, amenities like roof deck, climbing wall, ping pong tables, than about adequate working conditions.
- They allow paternalistic ideas like "unlimited vacation" [0] instead of demanding such things as stated, negotiated, and protected parts of an employment agreements.
- They are willing to devalue their labor to accept start-up wages and worthless equity to obtain the above items, mostly so they can pursue social status, particularly tied to living in certain special places.
I don't think this is necessarily my generation's fault as much as it has been a concerted effort on the part of organizations like YC to actively influence naive young people to believe they must value these things.
But whatever the cause may be, I think it's quite reasonable for people outside of my generation to view us as hilariously infantile for essentially trading away all possible negotiation power for a craft beer at work and the chance to buy $7 coffee.
[0] < http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlimited-vacation-onl... >
[1] I hate this word
As opposed to when the last generation sat around while the government made unpaid OT legal?
Good work knows no age.
There is no programming, reliability, stability, or scale. Most greener engineers program mostly for the sunny day scenario, which is the crux of the problem.
They can't see race conditions and timing problems like someone how have spent years doing that. I see other people's code and quickly understand that they're doing really cost prohibitive queries while others who are green will never notice it.
With experience, you also learn better ways to express your intent in the languages and frameworks you know well. Inexperienced, high energy devs will just be fast at writing boilerplate.
Remember when MongoDB, for example, was widely assumed (by the inexperienced, mostly) to be the obvious data storage tech for building virtually any web-facing application? Now, after wide experience with formerly-shiny Mongo, it's viewed as just one among many alternatives for reaching "web scale".
For some definition of cheap. If you look at $/hour, no question they are cheaper. If you look at $/amount of value created (which is far harder to capture, but worth it), I don't think it is a slam dunk.
Seems like it does matter.
Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult. And they're filled with young people that can build on the hard work done by (now older) people on cloud platforms, with frameworks, tooling, etc.
So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option.
That's an interesting bifurcation that mirrors what's happening in broader society (plenty of both low and high end jobs, and a hollowing out of the middle).
I wrote an essay a decade ago about how you get senior folks if you outsource all the junior work. I wonder the same thing in this situation--if you don't have a middle tier of developers, how do senior developers develop out of junior/entry level devs?
What do you consider difficult? Maybe it is because I am just a fresh-faced new grad, but I think there's a lot out there I would find hard to do, even with languages and frameworks aside, unless I trivialize it by thinking "oh that's just an application of solved problem X" or "it's just a lot of statistical plug-n-chug".
Poems are full of traps. I think you can read The Charge of the Light Brigade either way, or both ways at once. On the one hand, it calls on us to honor the heroism of the young cavalrymen. But on the other hand, "someone had blundered." Their heroism is futile. Tennyson had to be seen supporting the team, as it were, but when I read the poem, I see his reservations more than anything.
My conclusion on this topic is that there is no problem with age itself. The problem is that some older people lose interest and just coast on their skill set which becomes stale over time.
Not all older people are like that. I had engineers in their 40s and 50s who read programming blogs, learned new languages in their spare time, tinkered with their pet projects in the lab, etc. They were passionate about engineering. THOSE guys were never a problem. They were awesome. I mean, if Bob Pease [1] were still alive, I'd hire him in a minute.
The mistake is to jump from "some fraction of older engineers are in the former group" to thinking all older engineers are like that.
All of that said, I agree with the sentiment that a good team should be made up of a mixture of people of different ages and experience levels.
That's some HP board level disfunction and paranoia. I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass.
Like completely lacking a useful product and halfway down the road grasping that fact? 22 grands ea month for a little SEO and marketing-analytics of the shelf. Is there anybody who wants to work with professionals left today?
Additionally, younger people have fewer familial commitments, less to lose, fewer mortgages, so outrageous overtime is easier to extract.
That's just one data point though. YMMV.
Boyd FTW.
Commenters here, rightfully, say that experience matters in producing a good product that sells and makes a gross profit. That 3 greybeards are worth 10 fuzzfaces. I think they are right. But that is not the objective for so many of these places. The idea is to 'grow', show this to other VCs or the NASDAQ (maybe) so that they will want to buy your company. Then the board and c-suite get something of a return on the time and money, while the employees get less of a return than having worked at Boeing for those years.
Again, ageism is fine, because the point is not to have a sustainable business with a good product, the point is to grow and sell. This is slash-and-burn ranching not sustainable farming.
[0] Those are VERY important to signal to the outside world and to potential employees though. It makes the company seem 'techy' and 'googlish', which is thought to translate into dollars. Still the decor means nothing in the end.
[1] Do you feel like you have no idea what is going on? That you sometimes have imposter syndrome? Most people, including VCs and C*Os have this too. No-one know what the hell is going on, and if they say they do, they are ignorant or lying. Mostly.
http://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smar...
which were made 9 years ago.
My guess is no.
Our company is almost completely people with background in computer vision, AI and 3D rendering and our youngest employee is 31.
My guess is that "trendy" startups have this problem, not ones building hard technology.
----
One unmentioned thing, which is weird until you've seen it first hand, is that it's easier to sell and finance a bigger startup, and by "bigger", I mean: higher headcount.
Obviously, in general, older people are more experienced and cost more, and also do more. However, this is a net-negative because you have a (potentially much) lower headcount. Another poster commented on how he'd take proverbial three LISPers over 20 NOOBS. (I have no doubt he's telling the truth.)
Quick test: If I tell you startup A has 8 developers, and start up B has 80 developers, which startup seems "more successful" to you? Which seems likely to have had more funding? More market share? Is more stable? Better managed? Which seems likely to have an exit (esp. acquisition) in the future?
It's little comfort knowing that startup A has 8 LISPers coding circles around the 80 devs at startup B struggling to make Grunt work and keep MongoDB from crashing. Politically, startup B is a much bigger success—at least in SV today.
Startup B is what SV optimizes for and funds, and that leads very naturally to hiring young people—all else being equal.
I look at it this way. Everyone's career is a baseball game. Most workers get 5 or 6 at-bats throughout their lives, and can afford to just go for base hits. A tech worker gets 1 or 2 at-bats so he has to swing for the home run if he wants to score.
Notice that many of the arguments presented here about why younger workers are favored would equally apply in more conservative professional fields, like law - it's certainly not the 50y old partners doing all-nighters on a regular basis. But there does seem to be a certain level of inter-generational respect among lawyers that is absent in tech. Why, I don't know.
The latter is probably the most important. I'm in a situation that is a typical example of how that gets abused: company needs to downsize (funding dried up), and wants most of the team to sign a piece of paper and go away. The salespitch is that it's for mutual benefit, but in reality it's 100% for the company's benefit. The employees would sign away their rights, including at least 2 months pay and in some cases get screwed on their visa. Also, be complicit in forgery, since the dates on the paperwork are false. The younger employees would probably have been railroaded and screwed hard if it wasn't for the more experienced members of the team.
Tech companies want young people as cheap guinea pigs, to try out all kinds of "entrepreneurial" ideas without having to pay the price. Pure and simple.
But experience helps tremendously when you are working with complex system that needs to be scaled and maintained efficiently. Also as an older person: why work for cheaper in a startup when you can have a higher salary at a big company? You should already know that it's not worth the effort for the stock options for an employee.
That never seems to stop anybody from doing it, nor feckless funds from throwing money at those ventures. But you don't start a business and then hung for a product. You start a business because you have a product you intend to try to sell.
"Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language" [0]
A reference to Lord of the Flies. If you read Lord of the Flies, the disfunction runs along the lines of "insider" and "outsiders" resulting in the ritual killing of the outsiders.
The observations of bias against certain outsiders in this context are valid. The bigger question is why and who is driving this behaviour, the VC/finance industry seeking to maximise profit regardless of the externalities?
[0] "My Year in Startup Hell" ~ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...
Really? What capitalist wouldn't want this, especially if the quality of the work wasn't "good enough"?
I'm no fan of age discrimination, but I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality).
> I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality)
I agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality. It is factory thinking where they need to be thinking like a film producer. This is a creative endeavor and not a widget factory. You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently.
Agreed. And in the long run I believe the companies that accept this will win.
The entire premise of the article is about illegal age discrimination- a criminal act, not one of poor judgement. Making bad decisions is not necessarily a crime.
Don't let it happen to you. Choose one or two of those to focus on and change.
>> these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion.
The problems of this company, if the allegations are true, stem more from a lack of character, which can be found across the entire age spectrum.
I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here. In general, I think that age brings experience and wisdom.
Maybe you don't consider the military "industry", but they tend to recruit primarily from the young (and AFAICT, always have).
I grew up when the Internet became a thing. I've never had that expectation. I'm still learning new languages and frameworks at 34 and have no intention of slowing down.
Oh and pro tip to founders out there: if your competitors aren't recruiting middle age or older people (or black people or women), that's an untapped market! Take advantage of the things your less hungry competitors won't!
Hopefully that was the craziest story or else that book is gonna wreck them.
There are, I believe, many companies that do hire responsibly.
Disclosure. [mid 40s; with children;]
Seems like his ego got hurt and he's out for revenge. He also seems to be blind to the fact that ageism works both ways. Some of his comments, and those on the linkedin post in question, are far more worrying than those of HubSpot's CEO.
I guess once Halligan gets a little gray hair and experience, he'll realize how absurd this statement is and will regret ever saying it.
I've encountered plently of 40+'ers who discourage learning new skills during free time, programming on the weekends, hackathons, and the like. Simply because that stuff goes against work-life balance.
It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers.
Spending the nights and weekends learning is sort of another subject. I would rather employers spend more resources training employees during business hours, especially for enterprise and industry-specific technology, but that's an entirely different subject.
It might be true. But punishing everyone over 40 based on this stereotype is wrong.
Secondly, highly talented professionals do spend free time practicing their skills. Idk anything about surgeons.
I'm in tech because I think the work is fun. I'm typically on my computers up to 18 hours a day. As you can imagine I would have no problem doing some r&d after hours for fun.
Who cares what other professions are doing? I'm in tech because I'm a builder and that's what I care about.
There's plenty of reason why it'd be more difficult for a 50-year to learn a new programming language, here's a big one: time
As people get older they have more time constraints and generally have "better (or just other) things to do". This is true for 30 vs 20, 40 vs 30, and probably 50 vs 40 (you could argue that as your kids get older you have more free time but then again people have kids at an older age now). A young person is more likely to be able to forgo those other things and learn the latest transpile-to-js-lang-of-the-week (v2.x).
Sure, people need to be evaluated individually but if I interview 100 people I'd bet dollars to donuts that the older crowd would have less free time than the youngins.
The number of hours required to learn a second language or framework - which may rely on entirely unfamiliar paradigms and principles - may be much higher than the time required by someone who has already learned several over many years.
When considering the learning ability of any developer, free time is only one consideration. Past experience learning has to be another.
I don't even know if that quote is true. I suppose it doesn't matter.
I'd propose in software development the bottom tier is languages and frameworks, mid tier is paradigms, and top tier is algos architecture and debugging war stories. Plenty of room for alternate interpretations. I'd accept an argument that algos or debugging are mere mid-tier.
Anyway the world is full of ditches that need digging so don't be surprised if when you interview, you interview at a ditch digging company, and furthermore they have a laser like focus on shoveling, when you thought you'd be talking about civil engineering finite element analysis of bridge girders. Well, they shovel, thats what they do, best you find out now rather than after starting work there. And there's nothing wrong with the world being full of diggable ditches, other than the general population on average being massively too intelligent, over educated, and over experienced to spend their lives digging ditches, and the world having a distinct shortage of bridge girders needing a finite element analysis vs the number of people who can do it.
Rights of passage, and all that.