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I literally just finished reading an article on Hubspot by Dan Lyons: My Year In Startup Hell

" 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...

You and I may choose not to work at such a place, but is it morally wrong? Is designing your business in this way equivalent to racism, as the author explicitly claims?

Yes, its morally wrong to take advantage of young workers (arguably in violation of labor law).

If you think "making work fun" so you can pay people less is "taking advantage" of workers, I encourage you to hang out with some food-service workers, or retail workers, or migrant farm workers, or...basically anyone who makes minimum wage (or less).

Don't get me wrong; I'm an advocate for all labor, not just underpaid office workers.

No offense intended at all, but personally I am unable to see how an employer can take advantage of an employee when employment contracts involve voluntary free-will agreement by both parties.

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¢... :)

You can't sign away your rights. If your employer's contract or environment violates labor law, it violates labor law.

yes, of course, and explicitly targeting workers under 45 over workers over 45 does violate labor law in many jurisdictions.

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"

> I am unable to see how an employer can take advantage of an employee when employment contracts involve voluntary free-will agreement by both parties.

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.

> 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?

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.

I used to work at HubSpot. The company isn't perfect, for instance the lack of diversity is a huge problem. Taken in isolation, there's nothing in the article that's wrong, but the overall picture he paints here is wildly inaccurate. HubSpot is full of incredibly intelligent and capable people, including some of the most talented engineers I've ever worked with. I had the opportunity to meet and speak with every executive during my time there, I've even been to Halligan's apartment. The fact that he managed to find something negative to say about Dave, one of the most genuine people I've ever met, tells me all I need to know- the reason Lyons didn't fit in at HubSpot has nothing to do with his age, it's because he's an asshole.

Valuable input...but if you say that there is nothing written in the article that is wrong, I am not sure how you can say that the article is wrong.

Maybe the author wasn't wrong in the facts presented. But maybe he wasn't giving the another perspective that would alter your perception or understanding of whatever picture he was trying to paint. If you aren't given the full context, then you haven't fully understood the situation.

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.

Yes, let's take it in context:

>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 phrase literally means "I think younger people are discriminated against, so I'm making a company that hires them at bargaining prices".

That may be true or not, but is not discriminatory by itself.

So you think it's cool to offer "bargain prices" (i.e. lowball) when hiring people from discriminated groups?

I understand the moneyball angle, but in this case it's not one I'd be comfortable with.

It is one of those behaviors where we think it is cool to do it, but uncool to admit you are doing it. In a lot of human interactions, there are things that are fully accepted and cool to do, but if you try to point it out (or if you can't naturally do it and poorly attempt to emulate it), it becomes very uncool if not downright creepy.

> 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

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.

> 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.

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.

Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim.

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.

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

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.

Maybe just track the employees and their ages? Objective enough?

Similarly, calling thirty-somethings "old" is...maybe insensitive? I dunno, maybe it's ageist.

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.

> 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.

He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated".

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.)

And twenty years of doing CRUD in COBOL with no source control

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?

EDIT: apparently I didn't answer the question asked. Too deep to reply, so I blew away this one and rewrote it.

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.

That still doesn't answer why you brought it up.

EDIT: The above line was in response to an earlier version of the parent comment, which was, itself, subsequently edited into oblivion.

One of the things I do like about the older programmers I know -- making a fairly safe generalization here -- is the comparatively evolved early warning radar systems they have against the more insidious manifestations of kool-aid that have become amazingly popular in the industry in the past few years.

"Agile" being one of the most common instances.

And this idea that your startup is "setting the world on fire" being another.

This has to be about the jillionth time, here in HN comments to ageism-related stories, that I've seen it either asserted, implied, or tangentially-suggested that older developers have most likely spent their prior years working mostly in COBOL or with similar outdated technologies. Their experience will almost certainly be at megacorps ("culture" mismatch!) and they've been avoiding new technologies and approaches because they're either pleased with COBOL or content to sit fat and happy and collect a paycheck like drones. They can safely be assumed to be stagnating because an older person is after all unlikely to care about their craft after some point in their careers.

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

Yeesh, the old folk are a touchy bunch, eh? I don't just pull this stuff out of my ass, you know. And, no, I didn't assert, imply, or suggest anything. But people that have been using the same development environment for over a decade are a thing. I can point you to mailing lists full of such developers, most of whom hope their preferred technology stack can keep them going to retirement. And those people can go on and on about their experience, but no one will care. If that doesn't apply to you, or the developers you know, umm...have a cookie?

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.

An innuendo is an insinuation or intimation about a person or thing, especially of a denigrating or a derogatory nature. It can also be a remark or question, typically disparaging (also called insinuation), that works obliquely by allusion. In the latter sense the intention is often to insult or accuse someone in such a way that one's words, taken literally, are innocent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innuendo

I am so tired of grown, 20 something adults being called "kids" in American culture. Why so much infantilization?

Well, as a cohort, this group (to which I belong) seems extremely willing to let employers infantilize them and happy to be seen that way.

- 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... >

I agree. I've been bouncing around the idea of creating a "Millennials[1] Union" blog to promote more collective bargaining and expose how my generation's getting fooled.

[1] I hate this word

> 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.

As opposed to when the last generation sat around while the government made unpaid OT legal?

Why do you assume there's a comparison? You could view both cohorts as infantile if you wish. The actions of past cohorts don't make the actions of the current cohort any less infantile.

I can see how the hyperbole can get old after a while. However, in defense of that position, it's because a painfully high proportion of younger people indeed seem to behave like children.

> 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.

All companies 'could make a fortune' Actually making one is not a sudden event, but a slow one.

Absolutely: hire for skill, and there's a shit tonne of it being ignored outside young men in Silicon Valley.

You're missing my point: hiring skilled, older employees as a strategy is not going to make or break your company. It's just probably not relevant to the ultimate success of the company, because you will be able to hire skilled employees in general if you are on a strong growth trajectory.

Employees are one of the most important factors in a company's success, obviously, and if you believe in the 10x developer then it could easily be a winning strategy.

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.

> hiring skilled, older employees as a strategy is not going to make or break your company.

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.

>Women are overlooked:

Plus you can get them for $0.70 on the dollar!

No, you can't.

I don't know where you are from, but in the U.S. I am repeatedly told by every other politician, activist, talking head, and celebrity, that I can. Who are you going to believe: all these people who are telling you this truth or the simple market that doesn't have any companies making a killing by employing cheap woman labor to do the exact same jobs!