Pixels don’t care | Hacker News Reader

Pixels don’t care

warpspire.com

764 pointsdpearson133 comments

(Author here)

Just wanted to clarify, since it seems a lot of people seem to think I'm frustrated with being discriminated against. I'm not. It's a fact of life. I got over it pretty early in life. I love being short, it's fucking awesome. If ever you meet me, you'd probably agree I don't have an issue with it.

I wrote this article to illustrate the power of the internet and this industry we work in. I used two examples of actual stories that I've lived through to show a dichotomy. This is not to say there were people set out on destroying me because I was short. That's crazy. I wanted to point out an amazing thing the internet has brought on, and especially how amazing it can be for people who deal in pixels for a living.

That being said, if ever you find yourself telling someone who talks of discrimination that it's their problem, you should probably re-evaluate your stance. This is why discrimination is so difficult to counteract — it's rarely a conscious or malicious process. I discriminate against people every day, and I'm discriminated against every day. To think otherwise is absurd.

Hey Kyle, great post! Not sure if you remember, but we worked at that same company at exactly the same time (and I'm pretty sure we're exactly the same height).

I was more on the programming side of things at the time, but when I found out the difference between what I was paid and how my hours were billed to clients (also around 20x), I had the same sort of reaction. Since I was just barely starting college at the time (so no degree, but had the skills), I really think this was mostly just a function of the labor market around that area. I had younger/taller/thicker/balder/older co-workers who were similarly 'discriminated' with respect to their salaries as they were starting out there.

The high multiple probably had a lot to do with the type of clients this company was able to land. If I remember correctly, they charged something like 10x market rate for managed hosting, and clients happily paid because of the nature of the product.

Also, I'd say the unique thing about you that made (makes) you really stand out is not just the pixels, it's the glorious combination of both pixels and bits [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn

> I discriminate against people every day, and I'm discriminated against every day.

First thing I thought of when I read that line was: Well yes, dropping support for older IE versions could be called discrimination, but its needed, and justified :)

I secretly cringed after that time we were in Berlin and I told that terrible "Have you guys... SEEN KYLE??! (He's about this tall.)" joke.

(For those that don't know it, you extend your right arm out, palm down, horizontally, while saying the last part loudly.)

It wasn't until after I'd said it that a) I realized that it was totally and absolutely illegal to tell there and b) that I was calling attention to the height of someone named Kyle.

Herpity derp.

That's a common misconception. Making fun of nazism is allowed. Spreading propaganda that nazism is the best thing since sliced bread is not.

> "Making fun of nazism is allowed."

Making jokes using the word "Nazi" is common in America and England but is not well received by German people. I would recommend not making this type of jokes in Germany.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xnNhzgcWTk

Depends on the German. I know Germans that are faster in telling Nazi jokes than I am. :-)

Of course, only do that with those you know well enough. For the rest, the Fawlty Towers advice is golden.

"seen kyle" might fall on the wrong side of "making fun of nazism" line however. To reiterate, it is illegal to make the Nazi salute in Germany. It is possible however to use the nazi salute in ironic/mocking way, but you would get arrested and the court would decide what is what. Few people have tried to make this defense, but ended up losing.

a little explanation for those who not get it: he said something which resembles "sieg heil" (hail victory!) while doing something which resembles the nazi gesture, i.e. the two parts of the nazi salute.

Great post. I love that this industry is more a meritocracy than many others. One note: your ENTP link is https://entp.com/ when it should be http://entp.com/

I started out as a 13-year-old entrepreneur selling stuff on eBay (which was pretty new at the time). There was a loophole when they first opened where you could sign up under someone else's name and switch all of the records over to your name; that way you didn't have to be 18 to register.

I first grew to love the Internet as the only real meritocracy I experienced in life. No one knew I was 13. When I talked to people in person I would get a pat on the head and a "you'll do great some day," but the little eBay company I had started was taken very seriously. It's still around today, and it makes just over $2 million/year in net profit (not on eBay any more).

While the Internet is no longer as anonymous, and I am no longer with the aforementioned company, I believe product still speaks for itself. While it's true that investors may be looking for a dropout Stanford grad student, if you create something people love you can grow a company regardless of what anyone thinks about you as a person. Hell, I raised half a million dollars as an 18-year-old kid, not because I looked or acted like the quintessential entrepreneur, but because I could show numbers. If you can show someone, "Here's a black box where you put in $1 and $10 comes out," finding money isn't hard. Even if you're 18.

You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find me on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the many reasons) why I love the Internet.

> While the Internet is no longer as anonymous

> You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find me on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the many reasons) why I love the Internet.

That's the one sad thing, though: as you yourself point out, the Internet is moving in a direction where this concept of an anonymous meritocracy is already becoming more and more difficult - and, eventually, likely impossible.

The internet was a much smaller place.

Instead of seeing the change in the way most of the web is used as invading this anonymous meritocracy, perhaps it would be more reasonable to say that the meritocracy is now surrounded by settlers who are using the land in a different way.

In the long term, anonymity is not the real solution to the problem anyway.

What is the problem?

Human nature probably.

It might become more difficult, but mostly because most of us don't care enough about being hard to track down.

Piecing together most of my "online identity" for example is easy, because I don't care. My id here is my first name and last initial. My name is all over my blog which I've acknowledged ownership of in many contexts, even where I use user names that does not match my name in any way, for example. But there are the odd pieces you likely won't find, because I don't want you to find them.

People just need to, and will, learn to curate their identity more.

Incidentally, things like Google's attempt at a real name policy for G+ in some ways makes anonymity easier: It makes people trust names that have not been verified - just eyeballed for "looks like a real human name". Everyone knows that "chimeracoder" is not likely to be your real name. But if you posted as pjohnson (just to pick something at random), people would be likely to assume it is your actual name and be none the wiser.

> It might become more difficult, but mostly because most of us don't care enough about being hard to track down

I would argue that's already not possible anymore, with today's Internet.

Being completely anonymous, including to Google/Facebook/your ISP is much more difficult than you think. You essentially have to write off large parts of the web as unviewable, which to me only confirms that anonymity on the Internet is all but a thing of the past.

I agree it's becoming a lot easier to find out who people are on the internet, but its still very easy to create a new pseudonym and no one will know who you are :)

Silicon Valley has a strange fixation on age which waffles between discrimination and fetishisation.

I started working as a trader at a Swiss bank in New York when I was 20. There were lots of jokes cracked about "traders south of the drinking age" and the number mattered more to some than others, but in the end it was meritocratic.

When I was 21 (after leaving the bank), I interviewed at a well-regarded Palo Alto-based tech firm and painfully remember every round of the interview bringing up that I didn't go to a prestigious enough university and that I looked "baby-faced". Granted, I look older in a suit, but it's a curiously consistent cultural artefact. You don't find anyone lauding over 22-year old hedge fund or energy venture founders as VCs do over over their 19-year old "rock stars".

Yes probably 25 is the perfect age -- and even then some (unprofessional) professionals will still consider you too young to seriously talk to. But the most amazing fact is this: these kind of people who do this discrimination probably also discriminate against people who are older than themselves. And one day chances are they will be discrimininated against for that.

This definitely must change, everywhere.

I had the totally same experience with early online communities (Everything2, Slashdot), and for a long time made a conscious effort of keeping my avatar off the Internet.

It's a little utopian, yes, but being able to deal with people based on their ideas, ideals, and quality of work, and develop fast friendships without ever being aware of so much (Great line: "How could the internet know you were gay? 80 years old? Hispanic? Transgender? Karl Rove? It just didn’t matter.") is what made the pre-Facebook net magical for me and so many others, and what, in many ways, makes the rash of so many social-mobile-local startups so boring: They trade personal flare for personal expression, let users show off badges instead of actual achievement.

One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money (possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the local BBSs "special" in some way, kept the communities at a manageable size, and made it easier to develop an "audience", so to speak, in a little niche where you weren't competing with everyone on the whole planet for the same audience, like you are in the flat geography of the internet. But, at least in the circles I ended up in, nobody really tried to meet up, or wanted to know much about who you were IRL. So it had this odd feeling of both very cyberspacey, where you could be anyone you wanted online, but still a "clumpy" cyberspace where the clumps were related to RL location.

I was also part of my local BBS community but many/most of us did meet up in person. It was kind of interesting seeing faces to match the online personas as I pretty much always guessed wrong. I never imagined that some of us were women, some were very young, some pretty old, and one was the 6'6" tattooed scary guy at school.

I was part of an Internet based, but highly topical, forum. The experience was somewhat similar. Clumpy and fairly self-selecting. Some people did meet, out-of-band and/or in real life. But the nature of the community, and the worldwide physical dispersal, kept this rather limited.

Actually, while the forum had a very specific topic of focus, people there got to know each other rather more generally.

It's the one place where I wore an avatar. One of the cartoon character defaults.

The anonymity and strong community ethic of respect for privacy actually facilitated communication.

I find the "real name" initiatives ("now with photos") trending to the same sort of superficiality I run into "in real life".

"Brogramming" and a lot of the rest of the "current trends" also come to mind.

I think some of us are going to continue to look for those more intimate, even while more anonymous, communities. HN used to be (more than) a bit that way, before it exploded. (Where, too, people chose to reveal themselves to others, but on an opt-in basis.)

On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog—or at least, they didn't until Facebook came along.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog.j...

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. (From Wikipedia.)

At least they ought to give credit.

It looks like that comic is signed, "P. Steiner"?

Reminds me of the Malcolm Gladwell anecdote about how orchestra auditions are usually biased unless they hide the musicians behind a screen, so that the music is judged free from distraction.

You can see the same principle at work on a new TV show called The Taste, where contestants cook up and serve a single bite of food that the judges eat without knowing who the contestants are. So far the home cooks have been not only holding their own but beating out the pro chefs.

The reality TV show "The Voice" is similar. The on-TV auditions are done such that the judges cannot see the performer and must select them for their season-long team based purely on their voice. It's worked well.

"For the first time in human history, it’s possible to be represented (almost) solely through the merits of your work."

I enjoyed the piece, but this is overstated. Represented by an agent that protects anonymity, or just working by correspondence only, writers have enjoyed this ability for a long time.

George Eliot and J.K. Rowling obscured their gender and let the work speak for itself.

Nitpick: `J.K. Rowling' might be obscuring gender, but `George Eliot' isn't just obfuscation.

Yes it is. Mary Ann Eliot using George as a pen name obscured her gender. She didn't claim to be a man: she hid the fact that she wasn't. George isn't a uniquely masculine name and was more frequent for women in the past than it is now.

http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/George

Thanks!

What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated against due to his height.

It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with any big clients", could it?

Agree, the author has confused us and not disclosed his complete background.

Height is actually a weird one when people get fixated on it. I worked with a guy once who was about 5,5 but was absolutely obsessed with "height discrimination". He filtered everything that happened to him through that lens and it severely warped his view on reality and it kept him from addressing real issues that would have made him a more hireable employee.

I think we've all met people like you describe. But let's not tar the author with that either. What he describes does indeed happen all the time, and you don't need to invoke irrational discrimination to explain it: employers offer lower salaries to the young and inexperienced because they can (these people are hungrier, "need" the jobs more, and have fewer options) and because it saves them money. That's maybe not noble but it's not insane either. This may be especially true in the web development world which (to my eyes as a 41 year old systems hacker) is populated by a much larger fraction of young and inexperienced developers. Unless you're a true rockstar, there are a half dozen candidates just as good as you willing to take that job.

I'm 5'5" myself and rarely even think about it, other than to make the occasional self-deprecating joke about it. Everyone's life experience is different but I think you are right that people can focus on more insignificant "shortcomings" (har har!) to take focus off their real problems.

He was 20, so he might still have not finished out his growth.

/speculation

If you have demonstrably great work, what does formal education do for you that will affect your work for some company? Similarly, if this guy isn't the one landing the client or dealing directly with them on a regular basis, how can the pixels possibly care about for whom they are assembled?

I read these parts of his anecdotes as excuses concocted only after an in-person meeting.

What -should- be the case and what is the case are often demonstrably, and substantially different.

Witness government organizations who pay $x for a position, or $x * 1.25 for the same position if you have a degree, for but one example.

I have heard that people with formal education are less likely to flake out on jobs. As in just stop showing up. Which is both important and independent of the quality of your work. Granted it's anecdotal evidence, but hiring is far from one dimensional.

Completing formal ed generally indicates good character and work ethic in a person. They will focus on the task, get it done well and on time, are reliable, polite, think problems through, work well with others too, etc. Conversely, it is possible to be very talented technically but have a poor character, which will inevitably create problems.

Raw talent is just one factor in finding good employees. A successful company requires well-rounded individuals, or a strong structure if you're going to successfully incorporate poorly-rounded individuals. Everyone in a company has to work together in a team in some fashion.

That would be a great argument if my peers had formal education or experience with big clients. None of them did.

There is no "point" to be made by my post, rather a description of two vastly different ways I was treated for the same work I was doing during the same point in my life — one online, one in person.

As an anecdote: I'm 5'6", and I don't think this has been a barrier to anything.

I've had to be more careful about my appearance, of course. My clothes fit well, I'm lean, and I work out.

Despite my diminutive stature, men get out of my way, because I look strong and I walk confidently. Men didn't do this until I got strong.

I get looks from girls all the time. They don't seem to care that I'm in about the 2nd percentile, height wise.

Attitude about height is often more important than actual height for a man. Things would probably be easier if I were taller, but being short is far from the insurmountable obstacle it's made out to be.

Agreed, but I think you're selling yourself short on your percentile: http://www.cdc.gov/growthcharts/data/set1clinical/cj41l021.p...

That's says he's 10th percentile in the US, right? Although that's true, I'm guessing if you corrected for the ethnic and social groups he's judged against that you'd find 2% is pretty accurate.

Interesting, thanks. Hadn't looked up those stats in years and lowballed it as a result.

My weight percentile is around 40%. I feel good about that compared to my height percentile, since it's muscle and not fat.

How much does it matter to you that you're taken seriously? Does it satisfy you that you intimidate other men and get attention from women?

I don't go out of my way to intimidate men. It's a side effect.

It's also an example of how short =! disrespected, as OP was implying.

I'm pretty sure anyone would not be too upset if that suddenly started happening.

All the same, you should be careful about using deductive reasoning in this way. You're assuming that the only criteria upon which you were measured were formal education and experience with big clients, but what about how you struck them emotionally? Did you have that trustworthy/hardworking/whatever air about you that perhaps some of your colleagues had? Did your mode of dress impress them as much as for other candidates? Had the interviewer seen one-too-many people with the exact same qualifications as you, and thus was looking for a little something more that he didn't search for with the other hires before he got desensitized?

I'm not saying that it WASN'T height discrimination; I'm just saying that you should be careful about concluding such things so easily.

You might not be saying it, but you certainly are implying it.

It's possible to nit-pick potential reasons for bias against some unknown stranger on the internet while discounting his actual experiences and feelings.

It's also reasonable to ask whether there is another side to someone's story beyond what they're telling you.

I had no lower education than my peers, equal or better skills, and did work of the highest quality.

== did you read the whole piece? granted it's easy to perhaps skip the "no" in "no lower" education.

http://www.jonathanrauch.com/jrauch_articles/height_discrimi...

I'm sure they gave the client a discount to reflect that. 2,083% does seem a little low. I started out in a consultancy that did the same sort of things. There's only so many times you can bill more than your annual salary every month and be told there's no money for raises (or in one memorable case, a laptop).

I, too, am short. I'm 5'6". I have always worked on teams with people much older than me (seems like a 15-20 year average). When I was in my early 20s and in sales selling high dollar value equipment I recognized that my age wasn't going to help. It took a few moments to dispel that once I began talking with someone as I just needed to overcome the view that I was inexperienced (As that would be associated with my age). It definitely did not hold me back and I'm fairly sure that if I lost a deal it was because of something other than my height.

We all face challenges and each are unique to us.

I meet a lot of people and I don't know anyone who would actively discriminate against someone short. I read through the article and based on it alone I got the sense that these challenges my stem from within the author rather than something external. I didn't read an examples of a situation that you'd reason resulted due to his height. Just interpretations.

"Ultimately, your greatest competition is yourself." - Guy Kawasaki

>We all face challenges and each are unique to us.

Completely random musing, but it reminded me of my height being disadvantageous when in perspective:

I'm a pretty tall guy, a little above 6'4", and have an extremely large reach --

Also a pretty avid rock climber. I can rarely climb at my gym without someone commenting about how it must be so nice to be able to just "reach" for all the holds. Ignoring the fact that I probably weigh 30 more pounds than my sub 6' climber buddies, most route setters at our gym are probably closer to 5'10" and set/grade the routes accordingly; I often end up using sub-optimal (and tiring) form on the "crux" of the route as I end up cramped together awkwardly.

Agreed. That nice rest everyone gets on a "perfect" knee bar, just doesn't work for the taller people.

Rock climbing strength doesn't scale with weight. And tendon strength which is so important develops so slow. After crimping on tiny holds so many times, I don't really want to hear about how my height is an advantage in climbing. Every once in a while you get to reach past the small holds to a nice big jug, but the rest of the time you're carrying the extra weight.

I'm a sports-climber my-self (around 5'10" and average I guess). What people forget is that as length increases in two dimensions, weight increases in three. Also the top climbers tends to be sub 5'10", but idk, it's all about having fun and compete against yourself!

I suspect he wasn't skilled in overcoming his appearance and projecting himself yet.

I had a similar experience to yours, perhaps, but in engineering. Most of my coworkers were at least 25 years older (and one good friend calls me grandson). It took a while to learn to project "I know what I'm talking about and can prove it" without coming off as pretentious. And I've had people note the change.

Perhaps like your experience, I've learned to establish myself quickly, and if I lose face it's certainly not because of my age.

... The first time. I've been very careful to be cautious, since it can easily _become_ a problem. In a management group, it's easy to lose face fast if someone doesn't follow a nuanced argument (which is admittedly a rookie mistake in such a setting). Then you're scrambling to correct the spoken typo and your already lost. I'm usually bull-headed enough that's not a problem, but meekness can be a stumbling block, and I suspect that may have tripped up the author (or perhaps perceived meekness of eager youth?), and that fear alone can pressure a person into feeling unfairly judged.

Just my $2.00 on playing devil's advocate.

> In a management group, it's easy to lose face fast if someone doesn't follow a nuanced argument (which is admittedly a rookie mistake in such a setting)

Do you mean, making a nuanced argument is a rookie mistake, or not following one?

I started doing freelance work when I just turned 17 and learned just the opposite thing:

“It's up to you to tell the story.”

I was able to turn my age into advantage, and the contrast between my obviously teenage avatar and a convincing portfolio helped me distinguish myself from most other freelancers.

It was the same with my first job: I just approached a guy after he gave a lecture and asked him questions he found interesting. He was a CTO of an outsourcing company, and I asked if they were looking for C# programmers. I sent a very pompous resumé and got hired despite its silliness—it made them curious enough to land me an interview where I was able to show I'm a normal guy.

If you're seriously different from the rest, you can turn this into an advantage as long as you stress this point and make it an integral part of your story—not something you hide. People appreciate honesty and some humour too, and that's especially true in freelancing.

Exposing your vulnerability (yes I'm young, yes I'm a minority, etc) while showcasing your great work makes you look humane and more likely to be a great person to work with. You'll attract better customers—I experienced this myself. People you'll enjoy working for.

Your work speaks for yourself in either case, but in the end it's how you market your work that determines if the one evaluating you feels excitement (“This guy's so young but his work kicks ass, he must be a real prodigy”) or doubt (“This work is great but he's so young so we shouldn't hire him”).

Of course getting a lot of signed positive reviews is important, and pricing can be tricky too.

Late last year, an artist by the name of Captain Murphy dropped a mix tape, "Duality". Duality had phenomenal production quality and very talented rapping. Everyone from "future beats"-type listeners to gangsta-rap afficionados wanted to know who Captain Murphy was.

Turns out, the biggest name in all of modern experimental hip hop, Flying Lotus, was behind the project, along with a wealth of his friends. When asked why he didn't release the music as Flying Lotus, he replied (paraphrased) that he didn't want people to say, "Oh, he's rapping now", and he wanted to be respected more for his talent than for his legacy, or who people thought he was.

I've always heard of this happening but I never really had a problem with it. I thankfully learned early on about getting things in writing, agreements, etc. after seeing people getting screwed over. I learned that if people didn't want to work with you because of your age, you shouldn't want to work with them either. I heard Zeldman say that he only works with clients that he personally likes. Something to that effect, but it rang true for me even to today. Only work with people you like. Don't get stuck in a crappy job like OP. You can get out there and do it if you try hard enough.

I'm 19 now and it hardly affects me at all. In fact I feel behind. I am cofounding a startup and working full time at another startup, and I still haven't had my great succes yet. I work hard everyday and that's all that matters. Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut. What really inspirers me are the ones that have gone out there and just killed it at a young age, it means that it is possible if you find the right way.

> Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut.

I've done that all, and been successful out of it. But at least in my case there was one even larger element in play: Luck. And I can't even begin to list all the different ways that I've been lucky (and unlucky), but I always keep that in the back of my mind.

I could have born in Somalia, or a Brooklyn ghetto, I could have tried to make my last career move a year earlier or later (when it would have been shot down for sure), or any of 80,000 other reasons I could have failed despite hard work, talking to the right people, and using my gut.

It's easy to say you won't get screwed if you're careful, but be very sure that it isn't just that you've been lucky to interact with good people.

"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." - Unknown (tons of attributions)

While some things are just random chance -- who your parents are, where you're born, etc -- but most things in life don't come from luck, much as we like to ascribe things to it. Most of the time it comes from hard work and -- probably more importantly -- tenacity. I've been "lucky" in a lot of ways, namely who has seen my work and decided to write about it, who's decided to hire me because of it, etc, but at the end of the day there were a dozen failures for every success. If I hadn't stuck at it, I never would've "gotten lucky".

I do believe that it's possible to "help luck along" (kind of the same theme as how "planning is indispensable, but plans are useless"). So I'm not saying this to say "Don't try", but rather to try to counter a bit the idea that "working hard" implies success. It's usually necessary, but not always sufficient.

Echoing the article and everyone else that this was an issue for me as well. I had an interview at a small-town agency once with the two owners. They talked to me for awhile, and then walked out of the room to speak privately. When they came back, one of them said he loved my work and he'd hire me today, but his co-founder wasn't comfortable with hiring someone "so young without any formal education" and wanted me to come back after I'd done so (haha, right). They actually bickered quite a bit between themselves on the issue right in front of me (which made me feel good), but settled on not giving me the gig. I went about my way, happier that I didn't have to put up with someone who cared more about paperwork than work on paper.

A few years later I was working at another agency where my art director was pleading with me not to go to college and to stay with the company (which, honestly I would have had it not been for the keylogger I found implemented by another manager). "School is a waste of time for talent," he said, "You'll be miserable. Stay here and do real work." Feeling like I'd rather see for myself than regret the opportunity, I went. It wasn't the private art schools I wanted (I couldn't afford something like that), so I ran into nothing but mediocrity and decade-old lesson plans. Underwhelmed, pissed, and broke, I went back to working.

Meanwhile, a girl I know that spent the better part of 10 years receiving design/multimedia degrees has little to show for it by way of skills. While she acquires jobs easily, she doesn't keep them for very long as her talents are so many years behind what people are expecting that she can't do what she wants to/what her degree seemed to "promise" her.

These days you'll see portfolios splattered with "~young designer~" or "~budding developer & entrepreneur~" and it completely goes against the spirit of being merited on your strengths rather than your accomplishments-by-age (ironically, I enjoy when kids/younger teens post their age in the titles of their ShowHNs). While it might make the kid feel more competent, acknowledging it is just asking to be underpaid because they know you won't know any better or inherently believe you aren't worth it.

Or perhaps instead of trying to fight their age to project a defensive false equivalence with older workers, these kids are embracing and flaunting their age as a virtue - their precocity, enthusiasm, even naivety. You said it yourself - you look kindly on young kids with the balls to show off something cool they've made on HN. It's natural as an older person to feel charitable towards earnest kids, so what's wrong with leveraging that?

I'm still pretty young and I often either genuinely come across as or play up a little an appearance of being incompetent and bewildered when I'm interacting with older, female shop assistants and office clerks in retail or bureaucratic environments. They like it, though they wouldn't necessarily admit it, and I get treated with faux-grumpy generosity. Works for me!

My issue isn't with their passion or desire; that's great. But I'm hiring people based on talent, not age or even enthusiasm, and I question the intent/presumption in citing that attribute alone before even seeing their work. It's the same argument about the worth of college [in certain fields]; does it really matter in the context of the role?

I've also seen 25 year olds use it to describe themselves, so at what point are you still "young"?

I'd assume this is the same reason people don't like seeing ages in ShowHNs, because it implies that it's some sort of accomplishment rather than simply a fact. I enjoy seeing pet projects "kids" do, and a lot of ShowHNs are really just advertising and attempts to get some users, when usually most of the younger audience is just getting their work in front of real developers to get a feel for the quality, usefulness and receive general advice on how to do better. It boils down to - are you being sold on a product or are you being asked for a critique?

My opinion only comes from my experience; I started working at 15 when my vocational school realized that I was beyond their training and put me up for work-based learning. Most of the adults I interacted with in the spaces I worked in (both design and development) did not take me seriously despite my work ethic, my skills, and my enthusiasm. I begged to be in client meetings and was denied because "they wanted the clients to take them seriously", I offered faster solutions to the roundabout ways we were doing certain things and was patted on the head and told to stick to my duties. My genuine interest into the sales and communication sides of the businesseses were brushed off.

I didn't mention it in the previous post, but I would also say my gender had a lot to do with it. While I couldn't be in client meetings, I was asked to come in an hour early to make the 'boys' coffee. I wouldn't be interacting with clients at all, but I was expected to wear skirts.

There's also a lot of kids that dial it in, so it's tough to tell someone that they should hire more fresh faces when you've gotta weigh who is there for the experience vs. who is there for the paycheck.

Sounds like you worked for idiots. Better employees would have noticed your seriousness and helped you develop your interest in the work I think.

These idiots are widespread throughout business. And with younger employees, it is often assumed they will not stick around (no family to support, incentives to travel) so how much of your time do you want to devote to building them up if they're just going to take that knowledge elsewhere?

This is one of the most transformative things of the Internet. It is also one of the most definite things I dislike about, say, the post 2005 closed web. Age/gender matters so much to people, even hackery types. It didn't seem to matter as much.

Good for him. My brother had a similar experience selling things online. If you are able to write professionally, people are more willing to trust you - even if you are 13.

Back when I was 14 I played quite a lot of Phantasy Star Online on the Xbox (which had a very small community). My voice broke a year or two beforehand, and I was pretty respectful and eloquent. I had people constantly looking to me for advice and help, under the assumption I was significantly older (I have a pretty low voice). It was quite nice being treated as an adult years before people would treat me the same in person.

Kinda crazy to think about, but when China gets up to speed and communications between our countries are open, the scale of what he mentioned at the end will be huge. Today, you could be one of the most sought out programmers in the west. Imagine competing against another intelligent millions of programmers from the east too. I can't wait.

What a beautiful blog post. I think too often we lament the anonymity of the internet without understanding that there are some serious upsides, too.

It's almost like a social Turing test: A good person is someone you identify as such based purely on messages written on slips of paper and passed under a door.

I totally agree with the "too young" thing. I'm 15 and been freelancing since I was 12, and this gets in the way all the time. People try to take advantage of you once they realize that you're young(er) than most in the field.

I think it's fantastic that you're here, freelancing and making money. Under the age of 14, though, I think US companies could potentially get into legal trouble hiring you. Under the age of 18 there are laws regarding maximum hours and what hours you can work (so not to interfere with school, etc).

I would agree that you should be paid based on your skill, though, not age.

I mostly worked with small companies in India (only a few projects) before I was 14. And, I am working nowhere close to the amount which even comes close to max. hours.

Unless you are a prodigy, you simply haven't had the time yet to become really good at anything. Supposedly it takes 10.000 hours or so of exercise, which would be 9 years at 3 hours daily.

I'm not trying to push you down, and anyone not paying you what your work is worth is definitely taking advantage of you.

Very true. But, I don't think that applies to everything. I don't think it takes 10,000 hours of practice to design a decent Wordpress theme. In fact, I would say that most college graduates (even from top universities) would still be quite far away from 10,000 hours in a specific domain of CS/SE, yet, companies do hire them.

Yes, and they are hired into a graduate position, if they are lucky. Most are brought on as Juniors because they do not have the required experience.

> But, I don't think that applies to everything. I don't think it takes 10,000 hours of practice to design a decent Wordpress theme.

Well it does, but you obviously benefit from all relevant experiences. Any kind of design, even print or illustration, is relevant. Obviously all programming, not only PHP/Javascript is relevant.

He doesn't have to be a rock-star to be able to freelance and charge decent rates. Also, it's not about the quantity of hours spent; it's also about the quality and focus.

I know some incredibly talented younger people. People who without a doubt will be brilliant developers, much better than me I am sure. Would I hire them into a senior position right now, no chance.

Sometimes being good or even gifted is simply not enough. You need to know when to be pragmatic. When to let someone else win. When to look at everything, not just the lines of code or the pixels but the commercial implications of your decisions.

For example:

> For every hour I worked, the agency billed my time out at a 2,083% markup. To the client (who couldn’t see my height), my time was worth over 20x the amount I was worth to the agency.

That's because they're not just billing for your time. They're billing for the time of the sales person who chased the lead, the time of the team who read the brief and developed the proposal, the time of the people who travelled to the client to deliver the presentation, the time of the secretary who handled the callback and the time of all the people who did all the same things the half a dozen other times where you DIDN'T get the job.

I know how it feels... I'm 22, 5'4", and look like I'm 17. This post reminds me of the Hacker Manifesto, by The Mentor: we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias.

I'm 32 and look like I'm 22 to most people. Trust me you start appreciating it more the older you get. :)

I had more or less the same experience doing freelance work early on.

Clients who judge you based on your age, instead of the value you provide to their business. Clients who are uncomfortable taking suggestions from a 20 year old, and instead, would rather get lower quality work from someone older, and more "experienced".

Glad to hear you're doing well now, keep it up!

I had a similar experience when I bought my first new car. I was 23 at the time, but could have passed for younger.

I went into the dealership and waited around until FINALLY someone came and talked to me. I talked a little, asked some questions and eventually got to do some test drives. I was already pretty sold on a certain car, but they didn't have any on the lot in the color I wanted. So I ask about it, the salesman tells me that what they have on the lot is all that's available (shipments were delayed by the tsunami in Japan) and that was that. I didn't buy a car that day.

Now, at that point I was borrowing my parents car, and would need to return them the car at some point. Luckily the dealership in my parents town had the car in the right color (according to their website) so I called them up and said I wanted it.

Unfortunately for me, it was already gone. But the guy bent over backwards for me trying to find a new one at other dealerships in the state that matched what I wanted and he eventually found one.

I always wonder how the second dealer would have treated me if he would have seen me before we made the deal.

Or, one was a good salesman and the other was not. Or maybe the second one was strapped for cash and really needed the sale.

I'd rather not theorize until we get some more data points.

>>>For the first time in human history, it’s possible to be represented (almost) solely through the merits of your work.

I don't want to detract from what he went through -- god knows short people and other physical "non-conformists" are too often treated differently (for bad and good) -- but Andrew Carnegie was short too. What we're all suffering under is image indoctrination from mass media, from magazines, movies, TV. Every time I hear someone say something like, "S/he looks the part," I want to reach for an imaginary gun. Life is not effin Central Casting. And it's all gotten worse in just the past 10-20 years, with everyone on mass screens seemingly all having the same damn jaws and jawlines, looking like they all came from the same limited gene pool. It didn't used to be that way. Anyway, Napoleon was also short. Don't let anyone push you around.

EDIT: After reading a sales-related comment here, I was reminded that Ross Perot is also short. He made out OK.

I'm not sure it's gotten worse in every aspect, particularly in terms of acceptance of foreign ethnicities and races. People do have an unrealistic model of the real world, and that model is being currently skewed by mass media, etc, but previously it was skewed by local cultural attitudes, religious doctrine, etc. I don't think people were ever objective in judging each other based on merits vs appearance.

This is an argument that there's no discrimination in tech? Or less discrimination than in other industries?

I think the suggestion is much simpler: That when everything happens electronically, it is less likely that discrimination will happen because people aren't even given an opportunity to apply their biases and stereotypes to you because they've never seen you in person, just read your text (or perhaps spoken with you over the phone/skype).

In my experience this is true, even if it doesn't wholly eliminate discrimination.

This is not news to me as I've had jobs offered by simply posting to debian and *bsd mailing lists from out of the blue once they read my posts on hunting kernel bugs. Mailing lists are still a secret gold mine for employment. I also didn't have to send a resume or anything was hired right away each time

Also +1 for IRC. Thankfully something social still exists where you don't have forced real identities, a whole profile of bullshit musical interests nobody cares about (i don't care that you love obscure hipster sweater and beard acoustic), or forum circle jerking and post count worshipping.

Plus it isn't monitored by your employers looking to fire somebody for slight twitter or fb breaches of conduct, and best of all the media and oprah have no idea what IRC is

Being self-taught, I too have had to deal with the lower than everyone else wage. It's hard work on a daily basis when you spend a portion of your time helping out other "learned" members of the team by fixing mistakes that you /facepalm at.

What is worse are the ones that use your lack of a degree as evidence that you don't know what you're talking about... it usually comes back to bite them in the ass when their systems collapse due to the issues raised months prior, you know the ones they never listened to you about.

If and when I get around to hiring my own staff, I will be doing it based on what they have done, not what they can do (on paper).

I've felt the same way for years. When I was younger I was on IRC all the time. I remember spending a bunch of time helping people out with Gentoo, and occasionally other code issues. It was funny one day after I helped a 35 year old guy out with a Javascript problem he was having for work, when he found out that I was 14. Haha, age has always felt like my biggest hurdle with my career, but it's not too bad, I'm far better off than others my age. I have always wished people would judge me more for my knowledge and abilities than for my age.

I'm going to hazard that they didn't pay you less because you were young- they paid you less knowing that, because you were young, that was your market value. In other words, they paid you a rate competitive with what they thought you could get elsewhere, which tends to be lower when you are younger.

I'm still debating this in my head, whether it is discrimination or not if they are saying "This guy is young, his market rate is lower". (Rather than "This guy is young, he must be no good") Because it generally is an accurate assessment.

'Market value' does not exclude discrimination if most players in the market are ageist, sexist, or racist

What would stop a company from framing any kind of discrimination as an argument from 'market value'?

What would stop a company from framing any kind of discrimination as an argument from 'market value'

Well, in theory the part where the employee goes somewhere else for a much better rate.

'Market value' does not exclude discrimination if most players in the market are ageist, sexist, or racist

Basically my argument is that in that case it is the job market that is racist; individual employers don't have to be racist to match market rates, even if the market is racist. Or at least that's what I'm mulling over.

Would it be discrimination if they judged that his market rate was less because of his skin color?

It's a perspective thing. I think he missed an alternate reaction to his position. He could have been pleased with the money he was paid, honoured by the responsibility he was given, and driven to do the best he could. Instead he spent most of his time feeling hard done by. That's the kind of attitude problem that people pick up on when they consider people for a position - will this guy work his ass off for me? Oh, he thinks too much of himself? No thanks.

This is an attitude that employers work hard to cultivate. I don't think it's healthy for workers to 'work his ass off' for a company that isn't willing to reward those efforts. It's a weakness and employers will take advantage.

But he was being rewarded, no? And I imagine at a pretty damn good pay rate for someone so young and untested. and he was given a fantastic door into a high-power field. But he had to fixate on the fact that he was "only" getting X rather than Y. He had an opportunity to be thankful for what he was getting, but he chose to focus on the negative instead.

a company that isn't willing to reward those efforts.

What I'm talking about is not some sort of self-sacrifice, selling yourself into corporate slavery. It's the basics of what I would look for in an employee - is he going to work hard, do it without complaining - is he going to make my life easier or harder? Unfortunately people with a notably entitled what's-in-it-for-me attitude only make employer's lives more difficult.

Not saying that that's for sure what this guy was like btw, but that's the impression I get.

This is a great article.

As a student of mathematics about to finish his studies and looking potentially at a job in software development, this gave me a boost in confidence, reminding me that I should not be afraid too much on competition from people that have the proper academic background (although one might say that I'm not that in a disadvantaged position, I do know a lot less about the technical core stuff of computing).

Everything is still possible!

In interviews with agencies I've been told "You're not a designer" and "I hate personnel." In many cases the old agency curmudgeons are threatened by younger people with talent. This sounds like a similar example.

On the up side, this is an excellent indicator that you don't want to work for these people. There's always a better option.

Good for him that he managed to get around that.

But personal, face to face interactions are much better are gauging how a person is going to be when joining a team. Any sort of team.

People on paper sound nice, but when you meet them they are a bit off. I have a scary knack for this and can call out caustic people after the initial interaction.

Having worked on a lot of mainly (or entirely) remote teams, I think digital/chat interaction is just as good as face to face. Sometimes face to face personalities don't entirely match your chat persona but chat does a good job of passing along enough information to decide. I've worked with people for years while never having met them in-person. No need.

Regardless of remote/in-person, a piece of paper should never be the sole hiring decision.

It's not really that scary that you notice something that seems off to you, everybody has that. But how do you confirm your "gut feeling"? It's not like you hire the people you dismiss in that manner to see if you're proven wrong, so what makes you so sure?

I may be wrong but I think you missed the point. If "working together" is code for "we both have commit access to the same repo and the same functional test criteria and same target ship date" then it really doesn't matter at all if the person likes to work in their underwear and tell cat jokes since you're only interaction with them is going be through commits.

In a strangely wonderful way, people who have conditions that would make their 'productive' work in an office impossible have found work and even success as a remote team member on the other side of an email alias and irc channel.

That said, managers are more comfortable when the know their folks a bit more, but they generally are watching for things to go off the rails and head that off rather than whether or not the code is up to standard.

> "since you're only interaction with them is going be through commits."

I have had many jobs. I have never had one where the sole (or vast majority) of my interactions with people were via commits.

I've even worked remotely, and Skype, IRC, IM were all critical. Personality and communication skills matter, even if you never see someone's face in person.

I'm not disagreeing, I'm saying that if you've never met someone face to face but you've worked successfully with them using IRC/IM/Email/Some-source-code-revision-system as your communication tool (as the original article Author implies) then meeting 'face to face' to get to know them may not be necessary.

Daniel Suarez is this awesome writer who wrote "Dameon" which predicts a new form of government and organization that exemplifies this idea.

In a type of augmented reality where you are no longer seen as a person with an age or skin tone, but rather a person with a simple feedback rating based on your previous interactions.

I'm lost - where in the post is the discrimination for being short, and not just having the proper credentials?

it's great that this guy got his job and all but let's not pretend it's just about the quality of his work. he was hanging out in a chat room with these people. plenty of personality shows through.

If I read this correctly, the main negative point was that the author was not paid as much as his colleagues, though he did get the position. The author suggests this is because of his height. To me (a young professional in the software development industry) that screams that the author did not know his own worth and therefore did not negotiate a high enough pay. I'm young for the positions I have held, and am roughly of average height, but you can be sure that I will get paid the same or more than my colleagues, because I understand how much I am worth and I am willing to say as much.

sometimes age is on your side and sometimes not. If one thinks they are worth more than what they are getting they should go get their worth, period. You have to trust your ability and back it up with unflinching guts. We live in fabulous times where showcasing your work is easier and the reach global.

Well put kneath, well fucking put :)

If you look to history, you can see overtime we acquire new ways of changing ourselves. There was a time when there wasn't makeup, but nowadays people can use makeup and change their appearance. Same thing with dying your hair, getting a plastic surgery, or arguably even body building: by getting this down to a science, we can figure out how to best change our physique. But really, all of these methods are crude, really crude.

But I'm super excited about what the next of couple of decades will do change this. I think we're on the verge of being able to completely define ourselves, and I don't just mean in the sense of designer children, i.e. genetics. I'm also thinking more along the lines of augmented reality and new bionic bodies.

Even today, there is a woman, Aimee Mullins, who has prosthetic legs. In her TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics...), she talked about how she could redesign her legs however she wanted. For example, she could be 6 inches taller, or when she did a fashion shoot, she could have cheetah legs: http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/b/3/17/452/1745283.... (NSFW?) At one point in the talk, a person from the audience shouted out "It's not fair!"

And this is epochal, right? This is just a sign of what's to come. You look at Second Life and you see these avatars people have designed for themselves, they have control over how big their chest is, what skin colour they are, height, whatever. I can't help but dream of that being extrapolated to the real world, where we have complete control over how we express ourselves physically. Everybody would feel comfortable in their skin, everybody would look super-sexy, and we would find radical new ways of expressing ourselves (personally I would love blue fur).

Now I know what some of you are thinking right now, isn't this really superficial? In Second Life we already see huge tits and perfect abs. In one sense, culture becomes magnified tremendously. The body almost becomes a blank canvas to extrapolate the mind onto. But also, it's not superficial at all, it's exactly the opposite.

Let me explain it by posing you this question: what defines you? I've thought long and hard about this, and I've come to the answer: you are defined by what you can't change. When OP can't change how tall he is, he's defined by that, especially so in his workplace. On the flip side, when you can change something about yourself, that is a means of expressing who you are. We can change the style and the colour of our hair, and this is a huge part of culture: just look at all those hair magazines.

So what we have here is you are defined by what you can't change and what you can change is a means of expressing who you are. But, and this is the point I'm trying to get at, when you can change something that you couldn't change before, what defines you becomes smaller. So when in the next couple of decades, when we can change our sex, skin colour, physique, species?, what will truly define us becomes an interesting question.

And it is in this sense how it is exactly the opposite of superficial.

There's a Buddha saying: "You are not your thoughts." And you are not your body either.

The weird thing is, I've been in some of those avatar worlds, and people still want to look humanoidish, often outlandishly 'supermodel'. Almost no one actually experiments beyond that. It's weird when I recall cyberpunk short stories from the 80s where people had all these radically weird and different avatars. Why should we be confined by our minds to looking like supermodels, why shouldn't we look like some sort of... alien thing in cyber reality?

Not sure. But it'd be an interesting study.

I never thought about it in that way, and that is interesting. It's like the more we have the opportunity to not look human, we take that opportunity to look more human. But, thinking about it, it makes sense. It's personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image. In response to your comment, I think you just need to give culture time to experiment with new ideas when new opportunities rise up. I've actually never played in an avatar world, but I imagine, for example in Second Life, new styles or physiques. Maybe you could tell me?

>personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image.

Ugh, social construction theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_aesthetics

You think the duckface is an aesthetic quality we've evolved to have a taste for?

What? No. I think the aesthetic features which most accurately signal good health, strength and fertility, which humans throughout history have consistently opted for in mate selection, are what we have evolved tastes for. I.e. we have evolved aesthetic preferences which have consistently construed reproductive benefits.

I agree with you. I've read about how a curvy figure (a high hip-to-waist ratio) is more attractive to males because it means offspring are more likely to survive when they pop out of the woman (small hips and big brains don't go well together).

The point I was trying to make though is there are some aesthetic qualities we like that are not evolutionary products, the example I gave was the duckface. Another example is women in China bind their feet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding), or yet another is Kayan women elongate their necks (http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ak1yxTngxW4/Tnen0_FXpgI/AAAAAAAAAW...).

I believe what aesthetic qualities we like are the result of our nature and our nurture, and it is in this way I believe society does create a perfect image.

The point I was making is, and the reason I dislike SCT, is that there is a very strong and relatively stable genetically-determined set of aesthetic preferences found in all cultures. There are no cultures where diseased and ulcerated skin on the face is considered sexy. "But of course" you might say - but that's the point, we take the real commonalities for granted.

And then, yes, on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings. But those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive success.

Which is all what you would expect from the result of selection pressures acting across tens of thousands of successful generations of descendants of ancient DNA-replicating machines.

Another way to say this is that it is in our nature to be highly responsive to environmental conditions, i.e. nurture. Nature builds the platform and tools needed for nurture to occur - but just because we are plastic in the face of nurture does not mean nurture negates or transcends the principles of nature (at least not so far, I believe.) If individuals had arisen in which this was so, they would have been selected against. You should read The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker makes this point about people who try and argue that the brain is effectively infinitely plastic and comes with no built-in "software" for processing and generating language.

(PS The main complication in trying to read human behaviour for evolutionary logic is that selection principles do not act upon individuals solely, because humans are all integrated into often multiple kin and common-identity networks of greater or lesser complexity. Evolutionary logic resolves at the level of these more-complicated networks.)

(PPS I believe that the head size-hip ratio theory is erroneous. Read http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/08/timing-of-c...)

I haven't read about SCT, but in the wikipedia article about social constructionism I read: "When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself." You said: "on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings." At first I thought are "the period, culture, and person" not "contingent variables of our social selves"? But you went on to say "those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive success." In other words, you're saying those factors can be boiled down to something that is an inherent quality that we possess in ourselves, which is we maximise reproductive success.

Does this make sense? I dislike SCT too now but I wasn't trying to imply the perfect image society creates is socially constructed when I said "personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image." I meant regardless of whether society is socially constructed or not, this system that I'm referring to as "society" creates an ideal image of what a human being should look like. If society is not socially constructed, and is in fact defined by our biology, then that would mean this ideal image also originates from our biology. Regardless of all this, there is a perfect image we strive for.

I feel like we're on the same page, and I totally relate to your view that, and I'm going to paraphrase you: "it is in our nature to be highly responsive to our nurture." Our nurture is not an individual entity from the system, our nurture is grounded by our biology.

1) I just called it "SCT" as shorthand, not to imply that it's a coherent theory. I don't think it's particularly coherent - from what I know it's one of the many parts of modern cultural theory, stemming from sociology, anthropology, and history, among others, which in modern times have become extremely theoretical and disconnected from reality, and tend to say very little with a lot of very complicated words.

2) Ultimately everything, including human behaviour, boils down to the principles of fundamental physics. Human behaviour is just the most complex expresion of these principles of which we are aware.

3) I mostly jumped on the hint of social constructionism because I absolutely hate it when people try to argue that beauty and aesthetic standards are purely constructed and hence artifical or arbitrary, which is patently not true. It's driven by a misguided desire to defend ugly people or something, I don't know, anyone it's stupid. Again I recommend Steven Pinker, his book The Blank Slate also touches on this I believe.

4) Mostly though I wanted to offer some logical reasons why people on online games might tend to wish to present themselves as, for men, muscular, strong, dominant figures, and for women, attractive, assertive, desirable figures.

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