Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias
reuters.com
reuters.com
Straight talk:
I'm the CTO at a startup and I often have to call out the founders and employees for ageism. I resent that they say things that make me think they wouldn't take hiring an experienced engineer seriously.
I resent that they think my profession is best served by dumb happy newbies with no private life.
I refuse to tolerate this in any company I work for and I will ceaselessly call them out for this ageism.
I'm 24 years old and I will not stop programming just because I eventually grow a unix beard.
Youth might fuel the launch of your product, but experience will help it keep flying.
I can only imagine what 20 years will do for me. That's why I actively seek out more experience in candidates because I believe it'll make them more competent and sharp at what they do.
Somebody with battle-scars is something a startup could really use. Most of my pre-startup experience is as a contractor/consultant.
Lots of young engineers don't know how to interview. (In addition to being interviewed by young ones lately, I also realize how I've fucked it up back then.) Lots of them don't know how to listen. The vast majority don't know how much they don't know.
Really that's been the story of my 30's. A series of cringe-worthy realizations that I was not nearly as good at my job as I thought I was at 26.
Age bias is awful, and I have worked with a lot of older developers who know their stuff and are extremely competent, but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong. Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
Me to.
And I've worked with devs in the 20s who are awful. And their 30s. And their 40s. And their 60s.
I've also worked with great devs in all those age ranges.
Proportions seem about the same to me.
Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
I've not noticed a difference.
I have noticed that it's harder to spot the folk in their 20s who don't learn and adapt quickly since folk in their 20s have to learn something to make any progress at all. Once that pressure is off and they've become fixated on Rails / C# / whatever they seem just as unlikely to change as any other age range. They just get fixated on the "cool" thing - so it takes longer to spot.
Are you sure the proportion was the same? Reason I am asking is because for people who are bad at programming, there are various process/ management roles available that might better suit.
It seems rather impossible to me that someone would voluntarily continue programming for a couple of decades and not be excellent.
Beyond the 30's, I imagine people would be passionate about it to continue taking up programming roles. And this passion should translate into excellence.
Happy to be corrected if you have any data-points.
I don't have any hard data I'm afraid - just my fallible recollections ;-)
Some of ways of getting non-excellent old developers that I've observed:
* Not all old developers have been programming for a couple of decades. People can and do come into development late - and suffer all the normal problems of newbie developers.
* You'll be amazed at how little work you can get away with in some large organisations. When you have a couple of hundred people on a project you will find one or two Wallys from Dilbert.
* The devs who have sunk deep into some gnarly legacy system or language. Being the person who knows the right bit to tweak in the middle of a 1500 line procedure in the middle of a big-ball-of-mud project might be stupidly valuable to a company - but produce a lousy developer in any other context.
* The "senior" developer / architect / lead who has been Peter Principled to their level of incompetence, but whose team is good enough to cover up the deficit in leadership ability.
* The large chunk of bad developers (of all ages) who don't realise they're bad developers. Folk can't improve until they understand where they suck.
Seriously? You think you can do something for 25 years without getting better at it?
But, I'm saying, all other things being equal (which is what I meant by "You think you can do something for 25 years without getting better at it?" I mean, I meant the /you/ specifically, but it applies to "any one individual")
I mean, there are a lot of other factors. I'm just saying, all other things being equal, you get better with experience. UNIX is far older than I am. So is C. Yeah, how you use both has changed a lot... but most people that have remained employed that long follow those changes.
>I think the only constant thing in software engineering is that you need to be able to learn and adapt.
Lisp, anyone? Most concepts in programming are older than I am. Many of the "new" concepts are rehashes of old concepts.
Actually, I think this goes back to what someone else was saying; It's harder to say "This time it's different" to someone with experience.
I know I've been watching these articles about how vc is switching to "enterprise" and away from "consumer" - My first thought was "wow, I remember the same thing in the very late '90s. they called it 'b2b' but it was the same thing- people eventually realized they needed to start making money."
Many companies seem to want employees that buy into the 'vision' even if that vision is clearly as ridiculous as selling dogfood over the internet. (I mean, selling dogfood over the internet is a valid business model, but it's not the billion dollar business that pets.com hyped it up to be. Just like facebook has a reasonable business model; it's just not the billion dollar business everyone thinks it is.)
Of course, I'm not sure how much that has to do with being old. I wasn't old enough to drink until after the first .com crash, and living and working through it, even as a kid, it was obviously ridiculous.
"Some people have 25 years of experience in a field while others have one year of experience repeated 25 times"
So yeah, anyone who is developing software and keeps learning new things and pushing their boundaries is going to improve quite a bit over those years, but someone who just sticks with the same language/framework and basically reimplements the same CRUD app over and over is probably not going to knock your socks off no matter how long they've been at it.
Source: I'm a 39 year old developer and have worked with fantastic older developers and terrible older developers.
No one is suggesting that it does. However, to dismiss 25 years of experience as nothing is equally, if not more wrong. Consider that all other things being equal, the person with 25 years of experience will be better than the person with 0.
> Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.
What you are saying here is: Often, older developers aren't good. Maybe that's not what you mean, but that is what you are saying.
As for your assertion that good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, I'm not sure what you mean (not sure of the context here).
Of course, the key is still, as always, cultural fit. You have to have youngsters who are willing to take to heart a hard-learned lesson from a graybeard, and veteran devs who are willing to keep an open mind to a new technology espoused by the younger generation.
Interesting choice of words to attack ageism :)
I also know yuppies angling for a "big win" whose only joy in life is playing Xbox at work and getting drunk. Who at the age of ~26 only have a couple years experience because they were too busy partying in college and didn't build anything while in school.
But they totally know how to run a company because they 'get' product and engagement and read Hacker News.
People come in all shapes and sizes.
It's not about the age, it's about wisdom and where you are in life.
You could be 26 or 56. I don't care as long as you care about your work and what you do.
And yet they appointed a 24 year old as CTO. Better pack up your stuff, since you refuse to tolerate it.
They'll usually do that when he's the most experienced person in the company (like I was and am).
I've been working since I was 18, not 22. That makes for six years rather than the usual two, and the first 5-10 years of a career are pretty impactful for everyone.
Further, they were very dense years spent studying on my own time and working a lot of contracts.
I didn't sit in a junior position at a large corporation, I've had enough time to become a decent backend engineer in my own right but also develop a decent specialization. In addition to that, my contracting and consulting background has made me somewhat less provincial than when I started so I'm capable of relating to business needs as a C-level needs to.
I don't question your capacity to perform your job without knowing you, please afford others the same respect. I was trying to talk about the prejudice in the industry, not have it projected against me in the opposite direction. (Against younger people)
- You are not as easily impressed by or eager to try new technologies. (many of which are new spins on old ideas you've seen before.)
- You fail to see the appeal of the types of technology younger people are using. Or, you see the switching costs as too high to move away from what you are using now.
- Your lack of ignorance leads you to (often correctly) identify that an idea will lead nowhere. The problem is sometimes you are wrong.
I think the best way to fight against ageism is to make an effort to retain an open mind and curiosity. Try new things, even if you think they are going not be worth your time. Try to see the novelty in things that may seem to be a rehash of old ideas. Realize that no matter how stupid an idea sounds, sometimes it's worth trying, because you can't always predict the future, no matter how much you've seen.
Just think of the number of people on HN who have posted about how they don't understand Facebook, Twitter, or shoot down some whiz bang new technology. I've done it sometimes myself. Engineers are naturally skeptical, but this skepticism can grow out of control. It's fine in moderation but there's a tendency for this type of perspective to grow with age naturally, and that can ultimately undermine your ability to recognize and execute on genuinely novel, good ideas.
If I could hire someone who had both extensive experience but did not have a chip on their shoulder and lived on the edge of the curve like a 20 year old I'd do it. But it's pretty hard to not have a chip on your shoulder in this industry after a decade or two, and it's hard to continue to adopt the latest technology and not just settle in at some point along the way.
You've hit on one of the most important quality filters here. If someone is really, deeply intelligent, one of their analysis tasks will include a diligent try at making your idea work. The weirder your idea, the more curious about it they will be.
The problem is when these problems re-appear, problems that you personally grappled with for many years, it's easy to just want to throw up your hands in frustration because you thought the issue was settled. But of course, in reality its not about the issue being settled or not, it's about the capability of technology evolving and macroscopic design patterns falling in and out of favor due to the particular tradeoffs available with the state-of-the-art. But it's hard to see this objectively when you had a lot of emotional investment into any problem, developed some expertise, and see your entire way of solving problems being thrown out for what you perceive as a fad.
A contemporary example that I've mentioned already is the recent abandonment of the relational model/ACID in databases. A cynic will tell you the people doing this are stupid because it's an inferior solution. But they fail to mention the reason people are doing this: it's because the relational technology has not caught up with the scalability requirements of many problems faced by engineers today. An experienced engineer with the right attitude can have an excellent perspective and hedge their technology bets accordingly: the people deploying NoSQL are not stupid, they are just getting their jobs done. But at the same time, this too shall pass, since the relational model and ACID are fundamentally good ideas, and eventually someone will swing the pendulum back that way once other problems are solved. So, for the experienced engineer who takes a longer view, certain types of NoSQL databases can serve a role but are likely going to be considered a transitional technology and systems should be architected accordingly. The inexperienced engineer will not recognize this and will go all-in with NoSQL and fall right into the traps that relational modelling and ACID are designed to solve. Lo and behold: Google Spanner paper is published -- but we're not on the other side of this cycle yet until this tech is commoditized.
This tendency of cynicism is particularly worsened because engineers are naturally repulsed by the idea of reinventing the wheel, particularly a wheel as giant as these "big problems I thought we solved already." It's also worsened by the fact that within any new technology cycle, there is often more noise than signal, and so it's easy to latch on to the noise as evidence that there is no signal if you're biased to believing it's all noise. It's also much easier to tell yourself that there is no new innovation happening, it's all noise, when the people building the new stuff are all younger than you and many seem to be unaware of history.
This is so very true. I was pretty young when twitter first came but remember being incredibly skeptical about the idea. Although to be frank, the way twitter is being used to consume information (as a news feed) was not how it was being thought of then. However, the greater point still remains: If you are skeptical of nascent ideas, you will never let them grow or become mature.
The problem is that doesn't fight ageism. It panders to it.
Ageism is when you don't get treated fairly just because of your age - no matter how curious and open minded you may or may not be.
If somebody things I'm closed minded and incurious because I'm in my forties they are being ageist. They are the one with a problem. Simples.
You fight ageism by pointing out bigoted asshattery when you encounter it. You fight it by not staying quiet. You fight it by lobbying to make it illegal. You fight it by giving people concrete advice on how to deal with it in the workplace.
You don't fight it by trying extra hard to demonstrate that their bigotry doesn't apply to you. That's a coping strategy. Not a fighting strategy.
The fact is, most of the older people I know (my parents, grandparents, etc) still listen to the music they were listening to at age 25. Many of them (such as my aunt) are still working at jobs that use technologies they learned 30 years ago. It's not because they are incapable of evolving. I think it is because they never made it a point to sharpen their openness & curiosity.
If I saw a 55 yo engineer with a Github portfolio of Ruby and Python projects, hell yes I would interview that candidate. But the reality is that when I've interviewed older candidates in the past, they are in general more likely to be behind the curve when it comes to speaking the language of the latest tech and developments. My hunch is that complacency breeds this attitude. It is hard to constantly learn new tech for 40+ years, because so much of the learning process is about being wrong repeatedly.
My solution personally is to try to constantly force myself to understand and appreciate the zeitgeist of music, programming, and design as I age. In terms of personal empowerment, it seems to me one of the most sensible routes to fight ageism.
Calling out others who promote ageism is good too, but it doesn't directly address the fact that someday we will all be old, and we'll need an actionable strategy to succeed in spite of that.
Intentionally taking on an attitude of openness and curiosity is, of course, a good thing at any age. I read (possibly misread) it in this context as meaning that you have to demonstrate this in some more extreme way if you're old. That, to me, is pandering to bigotry.
The fact is, most of the older people I know (my parents, grandparents, etc) still listen to the music they were listening to at age 25. Many of them (such as my aunt) are still working at jobs that use technologies they learned 30 years ago. It's not because they are incapable of evolving. I think it is because they never made it a point to sharpen their openness & curiosity.
I know people like that. My experience has been though that those people are just as inflexible in their 20s as they are in their 50s. It's just that it's trickier to spot - because they've been stuck for a shorter period of time.
If you're in your twenties and look around your peers now I bet you'll find some folk who are still really into the same bands they were into when they were in their teens. They'll still be into those bands in 30 years time.
My solution personally is to try to constantly force myself to understand and appreciate the zeitgeist of music, programming, and design as I age. In terms of personal empowerment, it seems to me one of the most sensible routes to fight ageism.
That's a fantastic approach to living an interesting and fulfilling life.
It's a lousy strategy to fight ageism.
Ageism is what others do to you. It's bigotry. It's not looking at you because of your age, not because of how open minded (or not) you are.
Being open minded doesn't help you since the person on the other side of the table doesn't see an open minded person. They see an old one. And they assume.
Then you'd guess wrong. Take it from somebody in their forties - and I'm fortunate enough to be mistaken for being in my 30s quite often (the fat hides the wrinkles ;-)
I'm pretty skeptical that many startup entrepreneurs have a "if you're over 40 we don't want to talk to you policy" but instead decide based on 50 year olds coming into their door telling them in their interview how relational databases were figured out in the 70's
And there is the problem in a nutshell. That is ageism.
The assumption is that they're saying it because they are old. Not because their an idiot (or not ;-). It's http://xkcd.com/385/ - but for age not sex.
There are older developers who suck. But it's not because they're old. It's because they suck.
"I'm pretty skeptical that many startup entrepreneurs have a "if you're over 40 we don't want to talk to you policy" but instead decide based on 50 year olds coming into their door telling them in their interview how relational databases were figured out in the 70's"
I read it as roughly: "Young entrepreneurs don't have a <40 policy. They're making a rational decision not to hire old people after encountering lots of old people telling them things they think are incorrect because of their age.". Which, I think, we both agree is dumb logic.
[edit; Actually said "sorry" ;-)]
It's a hard balance. In the long haul, you often want people who are careful and diligent and have experience that tempers their urge to jump into things too quickly. But, this type of attitude can actually hurt in startups. In an interview where the particular 3 or 4 things you touch upon are extrapolated (correctly or not) to be the main self-identifying traits of how you work and how you think about problems, if you tell even just one story about superior databases from the 70's or seem to be overly-pedantic when it comes to blowing holes in ideas this can be a 'red flag.'
In a startup environment, I'd rather have the engineer who I think will fall in a hole 3 times and figure out a solution eventually than another who I think will think too hard and fall in one in 3x the time due to their fear built up from previous failures. In an interview, if I am spending my time with the person mostly talking about things that have gone wrong and how everything new is old, I will worry they will be too paralyzed to just hack on and break things -- and this type of focus, while obviously invaluable in many situations, tends to come from more experienced engineers since they have seen more shit go wrong.
So yeah, it's an opinion. YMMV.
Is this good or fair when it does happen? No.
Is it illegal? Sometimes, but making formal proof is daunting at best and usually not possible.
Thus, it comes down to this: treat others as you yourself would want to be treated. If a workplace reflects that ethic, it will be a place where old and young alike will want to work and where older workers will receive their due as befits their experience, skills, and performance, good or bad; if it does not reflect that ethic, it is a place to avoid if at all possible.
While Silicon Valley may represent the ageism problem in a particularly acute way owing to its youth culture, it really is no different from anywhere else. There is the good and the bad, and we each need to do what we can to uphold a high standard of common decency for ourselves and to make sure others do the same. It may not be a complete answer but it can help a lot in our immediate work environments and that will go a lot farther toward solving the problem than the law ever can.
Put another way, I'd take Einstein in his 40s over a thousand other randomly-chosen physicists in their 20s
(I don't think I've seen a more clear example of a false dichotomy.)
I agree that age is rarely the determining factor for someone's general competence: someone who's competent young is going to be competent when they're older. Their strengths do shift slightly, though.
Depending on the mission, experience may extremely valuable; when breaking new ground, sometimes creativity and energy are more important. It's hard to argue that there's no correlation with age there over a person's life, even if it's relatively minor.
Ageism to me seems a lot like sexism, racism, and every other -ism. The error is to use those characteristics as false metrics for someone's competence: e.g. "you're old, therefore you're slow" or "you're young, therefore you don't know what you're talking about". Let their work speak for itself and see if they're the right fit for the job at hand. The fact that there are age biases due to the type of work isn't always indicative of discrimination, though it often is.
(In Zuckerberg's case, I would be unsurprised to hear about discrimination given his YC07 talk about "hiring young").
If it's mainly selection based on metrics of certain types of competence and strengths that may correlate with age, then we shouldn't be hearing stories about people having to shave or dye their hair, get a hipster-wardrobe, just to have a chance at getting a second interview. (or plastic surgery ...)
When I was young, I thought my designs were excellent, because they were the best things I had done so far. I was able to look around at amazing code (NT kernel, for example; open source was much less prevalent back then) so I realized there was a continuum of excellence. After five years, I looked back as some of my earlier code and it looked bad. I did the same five years later and had a similar experience. After that, improvement came by degrees and was more related to breadth of experience in different domains. So it's clear to me that "older" people, in my profession, at least, are usually more capable than a younger person at this particular skill.
That said, there is the "hipness" factor, for lack of a better word, and it's very real. Older people tend to get set in their ways and do what they do. If they like watching TV, they'll keep up with their favorite shows. If they like sports, they'll keep up with their teams. They are unlikely to know the hottest bands or Internet memes. They just don't keep up with current culture, which happens to be largely youth culture. They might like their iPhone or Android and know how to use it. But the fact is, that most older people merely use technology. They don't bury themselves in it every day. So when they talk to someone younger about culture or technology, they seem out of touch.
As someone who follows technology, it's pretty lonely in my cohort. There's literally nothing to talk about in the area that holds a large part of my interest.
I think the people under consideration here are biasing against the experience factor in favor of the hipness factor because it's just so apparent. It literally takes a couple of minutes of conversation before determining that the older person is "clueless".
If a person want's to work in technology (e.g., in a Bay Area startup) and they don't keep up with technology and/or culture, they are going to have a hard time.
Thankfully, I have not encountered this problem yet :-)
This isn't ageism, it's a filter against older people who are unable to adapt themselves to the changing environment. It's like classic cars: no-one is going to buy a neglected rust bucket that hasn't been serviced since the 1960s. Yet if the car is loved and cared for it can be worth millions (http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/ferrari-250-GTO-sells-for...).
Startups.. the web.. the valley.. they all thrive on new ideas. On people who keep their mind open to new ideas. Older people who are both relevant and still have "that".. are rare. Very rare. But if you can find one, they're priceless.
Look at this comic: http://xkcd.com/1139/ - the playground jerks call the guy a loser because he isn't playing the social game. They are right that he is "losing" the social playground game. He doesn't care, but that's kind of what these startups are looking for.
jobs wore black-t-necks to be anti-fashion
ives is a designer, fan of colour etc.
people that make fasion != people that follow it (or: victims, slaves, etc)
At the CEO level, I'd argue that you must look for people who understand the value of understanding their target audience ("customer") and taking the low cost / low friction action required.
Or, put simply, spend a couple of hours and $200 on cloths to look the part.
What, exactly, do you think would happen to a 24 year old hotshot banker who goes to an interview at, say, Goldman Sachs wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt?
> Or, put simply, spend a couple of hours and $200 on cloths to look the part.
Assembling a $200 wardrobe tailored to appeal to the innate biases of someone hiring based on the clothes you wear is not low cost, low friction, or even representative of many audiences for the kinds of software people write. Also, that you tie looking appropriate to spending a bunch of money on clothes is laughable and goes against startup culture in the first place (when you have little or no money, you mend and thrift your clothes).
> What, exactly, do you think would happen to a 24 year old hotshot banker who goes to an interview at, say, Goldman Sachs wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt?
If your company is aspiring to the Goldman Sachs culture, I will never apply to or do business with it or you.
There are a lot of things to fault Goldman Sachs for, but they are a tremendously effective and efficient organization. Most startups should be so lucky to be so well-run.
A couple of examples: Look at the whole anti-brogrammer movement: There were people conflating being fit, wearing polo shirts and dressing preppy with being obnoxious, sexist assholes. I am fairly certain that there were examples of such people but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone who tries to be fit or dresses preppy is one. Personally, I don't like ironic graphic t-shirts and dressing in Cargo shorts and looking like a slob but that doesn't necessarily mean that I would go to a startup interview in a 3-piece suit. This is mainly because while I try to make an effort to dissociate the image you present with who you are, it doesn't necessarily mean that I should expect everyone around me to do that.
And fashion means nothing, just that you read fashion blogs. The guys who invented the internet in the late 1960s wore 1950 dork clothes.
It doesn't matters.
My experience is interesting in that I'm blessed with genes that make me look decades younger than I am. And dress pretty much the way I did in my 20s, so everyone who initially looks at me thinks I'm somewhere in there.
After I hit 35 or so I increasingly found it difficult to find work ... until I scrubbed my resume of all evidence of exactly how old I was and then tried to be careful in interviews. I did this in the middle of one job search and the difference was like night and day.
And for a specific example, once I screwed up and mentioned working on PDP-11s, at which point my technical interviewer exclaimed "Just how old are you?!?!?!!!" Which is of course illegal, but in all fairness he'd just realized his model of me was seriously off. I said "Older than I look" and got the job, but it didn't end well....
When your CEO gets up and says "We don't hire anybody over 28 years old," a dozen lawsuits should be filed within a week. It's amazing people let other people get away with ruling the world this way.
*edit: I had over/under switched in the CEO quote. Fixed.
> The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states do have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.
Note: It's completely acceptable to discriminate against your boss though. If your boss is going through his fourth divorce and has 8 kids, maybe you don't want to work there.
You don't know if the interviewee is married to a Muslim, an invalid, etc -- if they are, you're open to a lawsuit claiming that was the basis of your discrimination. Just don't ask!
For the second link, it seems like most include protection for marriage status, but almost none for familial status. I'm not sure how that translates in this scenario.
That was five years ago, so I can only assume that now I'm completely useless for anything beyond gumming food into a paste-like consistency.
I'm a fellow 43-year-old. I invest in early-stage startups, and that includes YC companies. I wouldn't invest in a company with that attitude for a very simple reason: they are handicapping themselves. I know what I'm capable of doing right now compared to when I was 25. Maybe I would be a great complement to my 25-year-old self.
The attitude reminds me of this:
"Bill Gates recalls once being invited to speak in Saudi Arabia and finding himself facing a segregated audience. Four-fifths of the listeners were men, on the left. The remaining one-fifth were women, all covered in black cloaks and veils, on the right. A partition separated the two groups. Toward the end, in the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience noted that Saudi Arabia aimed to be one of the Top 10 countries in the world in technology by 2010 and asked if that was realistic. “Well, if you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country,” Gates said, “you’re not going to get too close to the Top 10.” The small group on the right erupted in wild cheering."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?pa...
It was not. Added one word to clarify.
Wake up. Discrimination is not cut and dry, law is not cut and dry, and reality is not cut and dry.
The closest I could find was this: http://www.paulgraham.com/mit.html
But all he really says there is that younger founders have an advantage that they can live on less money.
Try this for example: "Our VC firm does not invest in companies with black founders. We looked at the data, and companies with black-founders have a measurably lower ROI."
Are you still pretty sure?
I think the group who actually get discriminated against, if otherwise just as qualified, are 0-18. That's who I would discriminate against, based on US laws, contracts, etc.
We know from public YC companies that the majority are in their 20s, but there are a lot in their 30s, and several examples in 40+. What we don't know is 1) how many applied in each age group and 2) were they of differing quality other than age.
I'd be inclined to suspect YC gets a lot of the best 20-something entrepreneurs to apply, but doesn't yet get a large percentage of the qualified 35+ year old entrepreneurs to apply. I think that's for three main reasons:
1) a perception that YC is youth-focused
2) diversity of resources and other diversity for older entrepreneurs (IMO, a 25 year old who just did a $50mm exit from his second company has a lot more in common with a 45 year old who has done the same, than either have with a 22yo who has done nothing but college or a 45yo who has worked for the local government in IT his whole life)
3) people get trapped into mortgage/family/etc. and aren't willing to take 3 months off and move to the Bay Area to do YC, even if they think they're willing to do a startup (3 months in the bay area is far from the greatest hardship you'll face...)
If I have missed such a law, please do enlighten me.
As far as I know, I may pass a company directive that we'll only buy stuff from companies run by homosexual mormons born on friday the 13th; and that will be just as legal as those companies that have declared that they will only buy stuff from local companies. I may create an investment fund, stating that it will only invest in companies with Christian (or Islamic) values and it will be just as legal as creating an investment fund, stating that it will not deal with companies allegedly involved in bribery.
Other than code quality, how was I different as a 25 year-old? Much more likely to adopt new technologies, libraries, etc. because they were shiny and hyped. Did this serve me well? Sometimes I got lucky, but I also wasted a lot of time figuring out the hard way that Technology X was way too bleeding edge for production. I was way too willing to go along with (or even suggest!), massive, all-things-to-all-people architectures which looked great as block diagrams but didn't match up with timelines, project risk, etc. Now, I push for incremental change over big bang projects.
One way I've regressed in the eyes of an employer: I'm no longer willing to put in long hours in exchange for vague promises of future pay-outs (bonus, promotion, whatever).
This is a coping strategy - not a fighting strategy - but think about options for working by/for yourself.
Playing the grizzled consultant rich in lessons learned can play well. You're, unfortunately, working with the opposite age bias that anybody under 30 doesn't know what they're talking about.
Ageism wasn't a major factor - but it was a minor one - when I decided to start my own company up again when I hit forty.
I figure that I'm not going to discriminate against myself ;-)
I doubt that truly qualified people are being turned away for age. I doubt that really capable companies are that hung up on age. I do believe that there is discrimination among _under_ qualified people. Given the importance of learning experiences and networking and luck, this is probably a serious disadvantage to older under-qualified people. It certainly isn't fair. But anyone who is under-qualified really should think more about making themselves more qualified than looking around for someone to make things fair.
(That needn't be extended to race or gender discrimination law. Those are targeting structural disadvantages thought to be outside the control of the discriminated, e.g. they lack the same opportunity to improve their own qualifications. And they are often intended to make it more clear that the economy offers opportunities to all comers, in the face of a variety of perceptions. Whether you agree with those arguments or not, I don't see how they apply to people getting older.)
I don't. Not even a little bit.
I saw it fifteen years ago when I was able to snap up amazingly talented developers that were piteously grateful for the opportunity after being turned down for similar positions elsewhere due to their age.
I see it now where every decent developer I know past 35 I've discussed it with has some variation of the "I'm not ageist - it's just that old developers are inflexible blah blah etc." story to tell and are noticing it becoming more of a problem as the years go by.
Saw it earlier this week when a conversation with a potential client completely derailed after they found out I was 42.
This shit happens all the time.
If I was hiring a CEO, someone who would be my boss, I'm definitely going to pick someone that seems like a person I could get along with. If a guy walks into the interview with a suit on and I'm wearing jeans and a hoodie, it could be a sign that we aren't going to get along all that well.
If the old guy came in and seemed like he could relate to me though, I wouldn't have a problem at all hiring him.
Now here's the question, if I'm asking for twice what a company claims that they can afford, are they better off employing me, or two (or three) engineers with little experience?
More and cheaper may be better, YMMV
I was out for drinks recently with some people who were programmers as well as others some of whom were doctors.
The mean age was probably about 27. A 27 year old developer is a grizzled vet whereas a 27 year old doctor is considered a noob at the start of their career.
It's not a phenomenon specific to Silicon Valley. But insular culture of SV is more well known, but exists anywhere there is a cluster of particular types of business.
Back in the distant past when I was in my 20's I was the Technical Director of a company (kinda-sorta CTOish equivalent). One of the guys I hired in ops was in his late forties, early fifties.
We worked in the same office.
We regularly got great entertainment value from people who had come to talk to me naturally walked over to the nicely dressed distinguished looking guy at the large desk (needed for building new kit) rather than the pony tailed youth in the corner ;)
It's probably difficult for a 40 something year old to know how to design an application for this crowd.
EDIT: Some stats here - http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/22/social-media-demographics-...
Worth noting that on that chart, HN has the second lowest avg age.
After all, I would think that 80-90% of toys are designed by people who are not between the ages of 3-9. I am fairly certain these toys are profitable.
I'm not sure what the mean age of the early adopters of stuff like pinterest is but I'm guessing under 30.
I am sure there are old people who suck at this stuff, as are there young people who are great at this. The point here is that you can't sweep people with a broad brush using one parameter. You get to know the people and figure out whether they would be the right people to build your team without going by silly filters like age or sex or whatever.
I thought the hivemind determined pint' was one of those middle age middle america housewife demos?
The whole situation has now got to the stage that companies shun talent if it is over a certain age over getting somebody younger for a cheaper price. They then find it hard to find somebody with the skillset who will take the job for the wage they offer and then cry skill shortage.
There are exceptions, as with any rule but you will notice alot of talented mid-life IT professionals changing career just becasue they are sick of the office politics.
I have worked with old and young managers, both good and bad but the real difference was the good ones knew or had done the job they are managing and the ones not so good had as much IT skill as most school leavers but are great at dealing with HR and in that HR love them.
Only real way is to start your own company, your own rules and with that age is what you make it.
[Disclaimer: I'm an EIR at Sequoia at the ripe old age of 46]
Does bias exist? Absolutely.
I often tell people that being an engineer in certain fields (like software) can be very much like being a supermodel. Not one of them will reach fifty and stay in the Victoria's Secret catalog. In fact, when it comes to VS, 30-something and you are pushing it.
Is this wise? (back to CS now, not VS). Nope. People should be hired based on what they are able to do. What they can contribute to the company's mission. Often-times a more experienced developer just knows the path to a solution, if I may say, instinctively. And, yes, it is about making a bunch of mistakes and learning from them.
This, in my eyes at least, is no different than gender discrimination which also exists in CS.
A Silicon Valley startup is just one type, but there are infinite businesses out there to start and grow at any age in your life.
Nope.. the 60 year old would want them to succeed rather than working 18 hours a day ;-)
That's so unbelievably untrue that I wonder if he cringed when he saw it in print. My father is completely untechnical and works in government policy. 12 years ago, when he started looking for a new job (aged ~45), he went to a recruiter who told him to shave his (grey) beard and maybe dye his hair.
While I am sure that Silicon Valley and tech in general does have a more pronounced age-ism problem than everywhere else, it does nobody any favours to repeat this kind of hyperbolic bullshit that 'everywhere else is amazing! We suck!'.
1. There's a big difference between job-searching at 40 and job-searching at 60. At 60, you're potentially 5 years away from retirement, so it's not surprising that companies are hesitant to hire.
2. Depending on the specific startup, younger people really may be more effective, at least in certain areas. For example, something like Facebook (during its early days), which targeted college students. A twenty-something will have much more insight into the mind of a college student than a 60-something. This obviously doesn't apply to areas of the company that don't relate directly to the end users.
Edit: I don't agree with the logic of companies, I was just playing devil's advocate.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, hiring for experience doesn't make as much sense if your company is the next iteration on mobile/social with an uncertain business plan.
In the B2B/enterprise space this makes more sense, and anecdotally I've heard of great results from hiring people over 40 that can crank out tons of high-quality code while working sane hours.
I think the model that most people, including investors, see when they picture early stage start-ups is a small team that is so connected to the success of the company that they are willing to work themselves to unhealthy lengths if need be to succeed. That image is often associated with young recent grads or drop outs because they have student debts, are less likely to be able to find another job, and don't have any substantial savings to fall back on if the company goes under.
On some level this does make sense, if you are relying on this company succeeding to be able to earn a living then you probably want to be looking at the guy next to you and see a guy in the same boat. However it fails to take into account the experience or expertise that may be brought into the company by someone who is older and has proven the ability to succeed in this industry, which may lead to the success that will earn everyone in the company a living.
Twenty year olds seem to be naive enough to go for the impossible.
Or at least that's the mass perception. I think this also might be the reason for this pseudo-agism. (of course Elon Musk if the perfect counter example)
I equate 20 vs. 40 with Entrepreneur vs. MBA. Same perceptions, similar stereotypes, same utility.
That said, I love it when a person 20 years older than me actively guides my inclination towards "big" without stifling it, regarding it as idiotic, or being indifferent to it. I LOVE partnering up with older folks - they are professional in the true sense of the word - they can do what they do even when they are having a bad day. And they like partnering withe me because, I think, in me they see themselves when they were this old. It's amazing how much you can learn from people who've been there, done that!
More than occasionally I've found an advantage in being underestimated and then over delivering ;-)
These days,"young people" are part of the technology. It's not something they learn as abstract concepts. They are it and it is them. You wouldn't expect a 50 year old Elbonian mud farmer to go to school and learn to be a world class electric car designer. But, you would expect a 50 year old world class electric car designer to still be hot shit.
Or, in song lyrics: maybe I should learn to shut my mouth -- I am over 25 and I can't make a name for myself; some nights I break down and cry.
The brilliance of our current situation is what "they" think of you is more and more irrelevant. Just make something people want. People have unlimited wants after all.
Do try not to believe in myths. Especially in 2012: people are young way longer than before and 'smarter and more capable' is quite relative.
The flip side of this analysis would be: YC and Sequoia prefer to fund kids because kids are easier to manipulate. Kids don't know how to read a contract or a term sheet. Kids don't know how to protect their own interests in their business when accepting funding. Kids don't know how to play hardball in negotiations.
Kids, in other words, are very easy to use as disposable resources.
(Indeed, with appropriate conditioning you can even convince them to believe that becoming a disposable resource is a sign of their Epic Founderhood.)
Someone who's seen peers get screwed over in previous gigs, or who's been screwed over themselves, is going to have learned a few things about how not to get screwed over the next time. So it's more profitable to deal with people who haven't learned those lessons yet. And once they have learned those lessons, you throw them overboard and replace them with the next batch of dewey-eyed innocents.
Ultimately, making a big successful company is really hard and VC's would want to bet on people who have the best chance of doing that - not the ones they can easily screw with.
Note: I don't buy the idea that only young people make good entrepreneurs. There's tons of evidence that older entrepreneurs can be very successful. It's probably true though that young people in general are more likely to massively revolutionize something entrenched, even if their overall success rate is the same or lower than older people.
Einstein, for example, was 26 when he published 4 papers that would change the field of physics forever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers
But given the "startup = growth" essay, where he says that only 1 company per cycle makes any difference to YC's returns, I can see the logic behind ageism.
Young people (I'm not one of them anymore) just have more unpredictable outcomes. They are the Black Swans.
The Black Swan theory is that the outliers shape our world. And that has been true in tech for sure -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are all anomalies. These companies grew enormously quickly and were all started by very young and inexperienced men. The two YC success stories that get pointed to -- AirBNB and DropBox -- were also started by the very young and inexperienced.
Older people are perhaps more likely to be successful. But there is less variance in their outcomes. There's the logic in investing -- once you're making money, you're less valuable. Because people know what you're worth. Before you make any money, people can ascribe crazy valuations to you. It will be wrong a lot of the time, but it doesn't matter because the one Black Swan event is what you're looking for. You only have to be right once.
Also, startups are a big risk financially. If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke. By 38 you can't take so many risks-- especially if you have kids."
We learn how to control our variance as we get older. (I'm 29, so I have no idea if I'm "young" or "old" by SV standards.) High-variance life isn't fun unless you hit an early home run. Otherwise, it's stressful and shitty. Experiences like getting fired because you were better than your CTO's-friend manager and made him insecure are pretty damaging, and they lead to self-filtering and variance-reduction as a survival strategy.
Give us an R&D environment that doesn't beat the shit out of high-variance people for 20 years, and you'll see a world where experience doesn't reduce variance so sharply, but delivers increases on the whole distribution.
So many current work environments have self defeating dynamics. You're not allowed to be better than your boss. When that gets thrown away (e.g. startups -- you have no boss) everybody can thrive. Well, they can thrive if they haven't been trained over a lifetime to be risk averse due to shitty management.
Story of my life! +1 to that!
This is premised on the assumption that everyone was trying to "make it" at 22. Outside the little SV social network bubble, founders are generally older with a deep well of experience in a problem domain. I worked at two companies run by their original founders. The founders at both companies were in their late 30's or 40's when they started the companies. They had PhD's, years of experience in the field, numerous papers to their name, and extensive professional networks. They weren't trying to "make it" at 22--they were working in the industry building up a solid foundation for starting a business.
I think this debate boils down to "acknowledging certain market realities" versus "creating market realities." If you advocate youth based startups, you have to define youth, which is entire subjective. "Youth" in this context probably just means "hasn't reached full creative potential."
Of course, people won't think that much. They'll see youth, think 25, then start evaluating the world from that viewpoint.
I also think that there is effectively another break point at the advent of the smart phone (circa 2007) - people who become adults after smart phones were commonplace have an entirely different worldview.
I think that if your focus is narrowly on facility with technology at hand, ageism is a natural consequence.
I also happen to think that's a bad idea - a diversity of viewpoints is a goal to be pursued in and of itself.
Care to elaborate?
I know this is a classic laissez faire market argument.
Hypothesis: On the whole, older developers are not as productive.
If things have changed, then why?
Then again, I think some of it is subconscious and unintentional: unreasonably harsh age-grading, coming from an inexperienced and privileged set of people who've never had to do grunt work and therefore have slack-free careers. People who are young and have high career efficiency ratios expect a linear trend-- consistently improving projects-- but the reality for most people (save privileged 22-year-olds) is that they have to take the work they get, rather than being able to focus on their passion or highly-visible (e.g. open source) work. I, personally, would love to hire someone in his 60s with no slack in his career-- I'd make him my personal mentor and figure out how he did it-- but it's quite rare to find such a person.
The reason ageism exists is that most people have to take low-quality, career-toxic work to (a) avoid income volatility that becomes more unacceptable with age, (b) evade the "job hopper" stigma, and (c) remain employable without moving to another city every 3 years, and this creates a world in which premature decline is far more common than it should be.
Your job description skills matter, but only if you also are a functional alcoholic who is addicted to playing online games for 30+ hours a week in addition to working 60+ hours a week.*
Startup is Mother. Startup is Father.
* I write this out of bitterness because I don't drink or play video games, which oddly I feel disqualifies me from working many places. "Oh, you don't play xbox? That's okay, I guess. The entire company gets together for six hours on Friday to drink and play marathon games though."
Sure you can game in moderation, but if you do so you won't be a gamer. I think I average maybe a handful of hours a month playing games, and that is as much as I will ever see myself caring to spend on them. There is no way for me to relate to people who call themselves gamers.
I'm not sure what preconceptions you have about "gamers" are, but from what I know, most gamers are in their 30's and have lives outside of video games.
I wouldn't call myself a "gamer", as per your definition, but I've loved playing video games since the early 80's, which might not register with your experience. I'm an ordinary guy with a beautiful wife and kids. Not sure what your beef is.
I'll play video-games on occasion but to be able to pass myself off in that sort of gamer culture is I think impossible unless you are willing to glue yourself to a television for hours and hours a week.
Other types of "frats" do not need that level of dedication I think.
For me, work is about doing something that produces value for the shareholders so they can afford write me a paycheck on a regular basis. When I've finished doing that, I'd like to use my time the way I see fit, thank you very much.
Ugh I hate that. This one time, there was a few hours to bridge between the end of the work day and the start of the office Christmas party (presumably because some management guys had to drive back from out of town). The other programmers quickly set up a multiplayer Starcraft game and later an FPS deathmatch. I quickly found out both types of games are not a lot of fun unless you possess a modicum of skill in them (unlike, say, Tetris or 1000 Blank White Cards).
So maybe it's not the narcissists are limited by age, but rather that age limits narcissism.
Life is too short to not be working with decent people.
That being said if you have the opportunity to work with some people who have been in tech for 20 or 30 years - become their buddy - you're more than likely to find out they are some of the smartest out there. When I was first out of college I worked at a place where the 2 guys I sat next to were 40 and 50 years old - they still are the best mentors/collaborators Ive ever had.
"Narcissists hate being around young people because it reminds them that, once upon a time, they used to be young and able to do the sorts of things that narcissists cannot do on the weekend anymore."
This completely ignores the evidence directly in front of us that all good engineers will one day start looking older and start having a lot more trouble finding job offers.
I don't really understand how you go directly from saying that it's unintentional and is "unreasonably harsh age-grading, coming from an inexperienced and privileged set of people who've never had to do grunt work" but then proceed to (try to) explain how it's perfectly logical that you can have a positive outlook of the future of your career, but actually you're going to have to take what you can get, which is the reason why "premature decline is far more common than it should be".
Maybe I'm missing the gist of your argument here? Are you suggesting we should be doing job interviews on a curve, excusing 20 years as a code monkey at some place you've never heard of because they probably had a mortgage? I don't know if that's your point, but it is definitely off base here: those 20 years might have created a middle-manager toady or they might have honed razor-sharp gut instincts and experience with relevant languages and tools. Either way, walking in with the assumption that "premature decline is far more common than it should be" means you're probably going to miss the truth of the matter, which is the whole point. No one is suggesting affirmative action for greybeards, they're saying that the kinds of things many in tech assume because a person has grey in their hair means that they don't get a fair shot, even when their experience is extensive and applicable.
It's not about the money once you have 'enough'.
To be fair there are exceptions. There are people who just enjoy programming for the sake of programming and building stuff. These programmers will most likely never be out of date. If you're not one of those people, then you need to force yourself to step out of your comfort zone and try to use something new at least every year if not more often.
(a) Ding! I had to drop out of college to support my parents.
(b) Ding! I stuck around with jobs that made my physically unstable and emotionally depressed because otherwise I would have been unemployable.
I was originally an iOS dev, which I love, and I hate Android programming, but I've been forced by circumstance to get reasonably good at it over the past two years. And yet to some of the people I know, I'm the "old" guy, and I haven't even hit my mid-twenties.
If that's the case, it speaks to the immaturity of some of the people you know.
This phenomenon is not a secret, nor is it obscure.
Just that the numbers they used to support it are a little weak (LA likely has worse age discrimination for example). It would have been better to not state numbers at all and stick to the rest of the details in the story.