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A slightly cynical explanation:

Startups need cheap workers who will work long hours. And honestly, for every one Google (who legitimately needed genius level scientists), you have 10 WhatsApps (which are glorified simple CRUD apps).

Now how are you going to get a guy (who sort of knows what he's doing) to work 15 hours a day for pizza?

You've got to trick him "Change the world", " we're the next Google ", " you get to use any stack you want"

When your a 20 year old kid, with no responsibilities and a future ahead of you, this sounds perfect. When you're 30 (and all the more so 40), you go to work to 1. Feed your family 2. If you want to "change the world", you work for a non-profit.

And all the skills don't matter. Your knowledge how to save RAM? Useless. Just spin up another VM.

So for the CEO of a startup, a 30 year old is simply too expensive for what he needs - a cheep code monkey. All the excuses are just that.

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I'm 34 and I do work as a developer for a startup. But then again, I'm working in Germany where I saw 45+ lead developers in startups, and age is something that is mostly considered to be an asset, not a burden - as long as you're willing to learn every day. The good thing here is that you recognize hype better than when you're young.

I( worked as a developer for a startup aged 34 ... in the UK. I was the youngest person in the startup, too. (It went public via reverse-takeover and ended up being absorbed by Mastercard a decade later: as we were in payment services, you could consider this a win.)

There is an elephant in the room that the Americans on HN are reluctant to admit, which is that the US healthcare system sucks. Startups can't easily afford the corporate health insurance premiums they need in order to attract older staff, so they perforce rely on the young and healthy — who are cheaper, don't have families, and don't have expensive chronic conditions.

The US healthcare system thus applies invisible constraints to hiring practices that encourage unspoken discrimination against experienced adults.

(Whereas in the UK we had a working NHS to provide cover for us and our families, and in Germany the insurance system is at least sane. Sure, our VC and finance sector is (or was, in my day) less hospitable to startups, but: swings and roundabouts.)

American here, can confirm and will admit. Not only that but there is a lot of discouragement for developers to take time off, like a sabbatical, to learn and try new things, or to do consulting or contract work. Being able to count on healthcare equates to being employed. It doesn't suck as badly because there is an overall shortage of talent.

Things are going to be even worse IMO with the new adminstration.

I'm from a similar country (Belgium) but have seen both sides of it, both where age is an advantage as well as a negative factor.

At a startup I worked at, we were considering hiring a developer who was older than us (+20 years older), but in the end did not do it as we felt he might have trouble being managed by people significantly older than him. This was not my decision and I would have been in favor of hiring him - for the experience he could bring to the company.

Anyway, I now work in a team where most people (apart from 2) are older than me, and I consider that a priviledge. I get to learn from them in a great way, and I feel that I can teach them things as well. It goes both ways really.

And I do feel that in general here age is not such an important factor. Though that is just from looking at my colleagues, I am not in a comparable situation yet.

Just out of curiousity btw, does 'ff10' hold any relation to 'fast fingers'?

> we were considering hiring a developer who was older than us (+20 years older), but in the end did not do it as we felt he might have trouble being managed by people significantly older than him.

I am curious: Did something give you the impression he'd be bothered by a younger management, or was it just a general concern?

I am only 23, but I imagine I wouldn't have issues being managed by someone my age if I were 33. However, I know that I'd be pretty shit at management right now, and would definitely not want to manage someone older than me. Personally, I'd prefer to be managed by someone older than myself due to them having more experience. Then again, wisdom doesn't come solely from age; one can have more experience and wisdom at 15 than someone at 50.

My conclusion is that there is no conclusion, I guess.

> I am only 23, but I imagine I wouldn't have issues being managed by someone my age if I were 33. However, I know that I'd be pretty shit at management right now...

When you get to 33, look at the 23 year olds around you, and imagine taking direction from them.

Imagine them making blatantly/obviously poor decisions, and understanding that because of these decisions you may very well be out of a job in 6 months.

Imagine there are half a dozen or more folks in your org that have been in similar situations, and they all have experience in "domain X", and are available to be probed for info/insight on domain X to help avoid poor decisions. Now imagine them all being completely overlooked because they're "old" (40) or aren't in the "circle" of the 23 year old manager/ceo.

There of course are exceptions to these scenarios, but they tend to be just that - exceptions. Most 23 year olds simply do not have the depth of experience needed to understand how and when to best use the folks around them. Think about this when you're 30, 33 or 40, and revisit the idea of being "managed" by a 23 year old.

This doesn't mean no one younger can ever manage anyone older - not by a longshot. But it's not trivial, and getting it 'right' takes a lot of work.

> as we felt he might have trouble being managed by people significantly older than him

You didn't hire him because of his age. Isn't that illegal in pretty much the entire western world?

It probably is. But, given a reason as "not being a good cultural fit" does not have to describe that it is about age I presume.

I guess that you can always make up some kind of excuse other than just saying "too old". But I am unaware of how they corresponded this to the person in question.

It's hard to understand whether this was a concern backed by data (observation), or general discrimination.

The former is legitimate: "this person will have issues with management and cause problems". The reason for this is a moot point: the candidate has issues with younger people, the candidate has a chip on his or her shoulder, or some other reason.

The latter is questionable: "This person is old, and old people have issues working for younger people, so we won't hire him."

>but in the end did not do it as we felt he might have trouble being managed by people significantly older than him.

Why would he have trouble being managed by people older than him?

Thank you for pointing that out, that of course had to be _younger_ than him :-)

> Just out of curiousity btw, does 'ff10' hold any relation to 'fast fingers'?

Nah, I ain't that fast. There's a completely different story behind that but there's also a time and place for everything ;-)

Where do you live in Belgium? ( I'm also from BE ;) )

Live, studied, and currently work in Leuven :-)

A lot of what you read, particularly here on HN, tends to be more about silicon valley than about the US in general. The ageism issue is a particularly good example of this as the valley is so much worse in this regard than most of the rest of the country.

Sounds very sensible - I strongly believe in the benefits of having a diverse work-environment, and that includes diversity of age.

Out of personal interest (my partner lives in Germany. I'm considering moving there in the long term, and I'm your age), how would you describe the German situation when it comes to diversity in general?

Are you living in the US? That's a very broad question. Let me try to give you my impression in a few words...

I think the diversity situation is not as complex in Germany compared to the coastal areas in the US – if you're talking about ethnicity. Sexual orientation and identity is not as much of a big deal here as well. Not because those questions are frowned upon or considered unimportant, but because those things are looked at with a more relaxed, laissez-faire attitude, at least in the urban areas. It's much less charged with political and religious ideas and action, maybe also because those questions are considered _a bit_ more private as well.

Those are just my 2 cents though, maybe someone else can add his own view, I'd be very interested in that myself.

How is your German? Speaking the language is permission to play in most workplaces unless you are in some sort of ex-pat environment like the US military. Without language skills you are likely to remain an outsider in non-work situations as well.

(This is not a hit on Germany, which is a wonderful place. It's just how things work in the German-speaking parts of Europe.)

> How is your German? Speaking the language is permission to play in most workplaces unless you are in some sort of ex-pat environment like the US military.

This is contrary to my personal experience.

English was absolutely the lingua franca.

At my last jobs (I'm a freelancer, so I get around), Germans were clearly the minority. The language environment tended to be very fluid; people joining or leaving a conversation would cause a switch in language, sometimes mid-sentence.

I currently work with 3 Russians, 1 Pakistani, 3 Germans.

> Without language skills you are likely to remain an outsider in non-work situations as well.

If you're thinking of outings with the team, if they are halfway decent they'll take you under their wing.

If you're thinking of day-to-day situations, it'll be harder of course, but absolutely feasible. Many people speak reasonable English.

My experience has been more along the lines of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12769385. I speak German and most people can't tell I'm a foreigner. It would be a lot less fun otherwise. You're really missing a lot if you only speak English.

To be fair a lot of my interaction has been in areas outside of large cities like Berlin, which are far more cosmopolitan than they used to be.

WhatsApp is not a good example. They ran a high scale messaging service with a very lean team. There are some interesting challenges there.

All infrastructure, all solved many times many years before. The challenge is usually choosing a solution which can be adapted to match the unchangable assumptions of the non-scaled code (or removing those assumptions).

Are you familiar with whatsapp or just making a general remark?

Whatsapp at 20 engineers delivered service to an audience comparable to Twitter, except with 1/100 the manpower (and hardware) and a couple of 9s more in reliability. They patched FreeBSD and Erlang to get there in the process.

it's a problem that was solved many times before, but not successfully at this scale or cost. These are not your run-of-the mill CRUD developers.

Also, I remember reading that the initial Whatsapp team had a much higher median age compared to most startups [1], so I agree that it's not a good example here.

[1] https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/5-things-every-founder-...

Whatsapp is indeed a bad example for 'Code monkeyism', since it's quite the opposite.

The Whatsapp guys were smart enough to think about using the right tool for the right job in the first place, i.e. stuff like Erlang - which has been tried and tested for scenarios like this for decades - and applied it to a modern infrastructure.

Twitter OTOH was built with Ruby on Rails... That's more like a fitting example. :)

>> Whatsapp at 20 engineers delivered service to an audience comparable to Twitter, except with 1/100 the manpower (and hardware)

Twitter isn't really comparable to WhatsApp. How many people read a tweet compared to a WhatsApp message.

On average, each tweet is read by about one person, and an average whatsapp message is read by one than more person.

There are tweeter messages that are read by millions, but they are offset by many tweeter messages read by no one. The average no. of followers of a tweeter account is 1, and 5-10% of all tweeter accounts are bots.

The distribution is different, but there are a lot of similarities that warrant comparison.

While I agree Twitter's employee base is excessively bloated, comparing the two platforms is not really fair.

WhatsApp is a one to one messaging service.

Twitter is a one to many messaging service.

(that's a BIG difference, by many orders of magnitude)

Most of my Whatsapp inbox is from groups. Also, calls.

> it's a problem that was solved many times before, but not successfully at this scale or cost

I'm not familiar with the scale+cost of every every bank, stock exchange, flight search, messaging app, log transport system, telco CDR matching infra, etc. Can you comment re: similar scale/cost projects?

> They patched FreeBSD and Erlang

Neither of these are distributed systems, which I think is the interesting challenge part of messaging.

Do you have a link for this whatsapp info? It sounds like you got a lot of good information from it that others could benefit from by reading.

Here's a great talk from Rick Reed (a former mentor of mine at Yahoo!) about how WhatsApp scaled their Erlang infrastructure: https://vimeo.com/44312354

Here's another talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c12cYAUTXXs

> Neither of these are distributed systems

On the contrary - Erlang and its runtime were built from the ground up for use in distributed systems.

But it's not a distributed system: you use it to implement distributed systems. Each runtime is present on a single host & it provides some well-defined methods for RPC. Your application has to be aware of this to take advantage of it.

Hi downvoters,

Wow! I didn't know that asking for more information was frowned upon on HN! Here's me pointedly not asking for links to the HN commenting guidelines.

-- falsedan

I have to agree with the commenter here...a solved problem doesn't get you purchased for $20 billion with closer to $20 million in revenues.

WhatsApp is not a good example.

There's a reason that company's success drove a huge amount of attention to Erlang, led to the popularity of Elixir and caused a whole lot of experienced developers to look deep enough to go "Holy crap! This solves so many problems!"

Not meaning to praise WhatsApp, but infrastructure can by definition never be "solved".

Infrastructure is always messy and needs maintenance.

Yes, the challenge with infrastructure is usually, "how do we document the runbook for this?" & "how do we set up the paging schedule?"

Basically this. I was going to contrast a couple of (heavily anonymized) employees we just hired - a smart but inexperienced twenty something and a smart and very experienced 40 something, when I just remembered that I'd run into the 20 something at the office on a Sunday.

I was just there to show the new office and some of our toys to my girlfriend, he was there because he was really excited about the job and just wanted to really kill it.

Twenty year olds generally haven't figured out what really matters in life, especially when it comes to work life balance. That's a valuable asset to most companies.

I told the kid to go home and have some fun, but I don't think he did. Later that day the 40-year old posted a picture in slack of him flying a drone with his kids, and just looking happy as a clam in mud.

See here's the thing... as a "seasoned" engineer who now has work-life balance, I was once a 20-something engineer working for pizza on crud apps in the office on Sunday, that time _is_ fun. It was super satisfying and fulfilling to learn new tech, create something, solve a business problem and get a raise and promotion because of it. Even doing that some weekends, I still had plenty of time to hang out with friends and fly drones (hack TiVos in my case) or whatever.

As I got older, got married, had kids, that time is now spent helping my kids grow up. I have other things that take precedence over it. Honestly, I still think it would be fun to hack out a project for work on a weekend. I just don't have that luxury anymore.

I like my life equally (or rather, I try to not constantly judge my life) now as I did then but it's different.

Hopefully your 40-year old employee brings something different to the table - domain expertise, ideas born of repetition, lack of mistakes, dedication to quality craft that is equivalent to the raw output of your 20-something.

WhatsApp is a glorified simple CRUD app? Lol I'd love to see you even approach the scale they had even after a year with a "glorified simple CRUD app." I wouldn't try if digging into the nuts and bolts of the Erlang VM isn't your thing.

My cynical response to your cynical explanation is that bottom tier engineers only see bottom tier solutions.

Yep. I'm in my late 30's, being interviewed by 25-year-olds for jobs. These people do not want to be challenged intellectually.

Some (paraphrased) excerpts from conversations I've had recently-- "Would you be willing to do a coding challenge? "Sure, about how long is it?" "I'm not sure." "What subject is it on?" I'm not sure." "When do you need it?" "A week from today." "I'm going to be traveling starting tomorrow, can we do the test the week after next?" "No, I really need it on Tuesday." "So the only thing you know about this test-- is the due date? I can't commit to an unknown amount of work in a week where I know I'll be traveling."

"We only hire the best, absolutely best programmers." "Oh really? What would you say your average experience level is?" "3-5 years."

"We insist on the highest quality work, would you be able to perform at that level?" "How does your organization define quality?" ... what ensued was 5 minutes of stammering and "uhhhsss" until I let her off the hook.

Experience, at least in California, is a liability not an asset.

Whatsapp is often cited as an example of startup where both cofounders were not as young as in most startups[1]. I know you are talking about devs not cofounders, but in Whatsapp both cofounders were technical so it is very likely that they actively participated to the development at least in the initial period.

[1] https://medium.com/the-story-of-grip/5-things-every-founder-...

>Now how are you going to get a guy (who sort of knows what he's doing) to work 15 hours a day for pizza?

Offer tenure? Then you don't even need the pizza.

So to be honest they should rather change job descriptions from "employee" to "slave".

Slaves are property and cannot leave. People who willingly enter into terrible contracts are suckers, not slaves.

That's generally how I feel about it myself, I just hit 30 and I'm done with the "work hard play hard" mentality a lot of startups run with.

I want to do great, efficient work, and leave at 5pm every day to spend time with my family.

I don't give a shit if your office has free snacks, beer, and ping pong, I'm an adult. Life isn't work.

I think the cheap work, long hours thing is critical because companies will see an older person and think more expensive which is true and the added cost is justified. I've seen companies turn down more expensive and experienced people in favour of less experience and cheaper, only to go back to the older and more experienced person once they realised the management overhead of dealing with less experienced staff.

I also think startups have less experience running a company so assume if a developer knows x language and some experience with dbs will be able to build anything but then wonder why they have so many bugs / made so many bad design decisions.

You're halfway there -- the other ugly side of our profession is stated rather plainly by the author --

"Ours is also one of the fewest industries based on scientific research which blatantly ignores the research, unless it is popularized in shallow books which rarely explore anything in depth. We have a constant churn of technologies which are often pointless, introducing new languages using extreme hype which is often unwarranted as those languages seldom expand beyond a basic domain representing a subset of LISP. I can’t think of a single developer I’ve met professionally who belong to the ACM or to IEEE, and when they run into an interesting problem tend to search Github or Stack Overflow, even when it is a basic algorithm problem. (I’ve met programmers with years of experience who couldn’t write code to maintain a linked list.)"

I find it difficult to discern a common thread to the various claims made, but if I had to choose one, it's an obsession with novelty, which overlaps with your comments a little.

WhatsApp is far from a CRUD app. Designing a messaging system to scale like they did, as cheap as they did, is a work of art.

"... you have 10 WhatsApps (which are glorified simple CRUD apps)" - wow., just wow. So you are calling one of the most reliable, well architected, and secure messaging apps <- a simple CRUD app? Oh HN, you never fail to amuse me. This one's a certified entry for http://n-gate.com/hackernews/

The attitude of this content explains some of the bias against older workers. There is a good point about getting engineers that are happy to work long hours but dismissing something like WhatsApp as a "glorified CRUD app" is just wrong and will result in poor engineering.

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