Readers offer tales of Silicon Valley's ageism
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Would it be more nice to have a greater proportion of older folks? I think so. The problem isn't older folks per se. The problem is just people, period. Just as much as I'm surprised by cultural homogeneity, I'm surprised by how close-minded young grads are to things they weren't exposed to in school or in youth. It's kind of baffling that by 30, a lot of programmers act like they've seen it all and done it all, and then they start snarking out on the newer, unproven languages, frameworks and platforms. It gets worse as a programmer builds up more experience to back up his case. Case in point: you ever talk to an older Lisp guy? The ones who will rip into you just for using Clojure?
In a nutshell, I think that we do it to ourselves, and it is just a matter of time, before the current crop of "young" people turn into "old" people. Mental age does not correspond to physical age, but there is a correlation, and it would lend an appearance of ageism. The problem isn't one of age. The problem is close-mindedness, and you can pin that one on people regardless of age.
There are outliers to this. They tend to build very successful companies.
It's the same starting a company as an entrepreneur. A lot of angel investors who made their money through Facebook or Google or similar, who are still very young (not their fault, nothing wrong with that) are much more comfortable throwing some angel cash at folks younger than them who'll look up to them and listen to their 'advice'. This is understandable because everyone wants to think their money is smart money.
I hear a lot of older entrepreneurs complain about the latter, but my thought is quit bitching and show some results - you'll get funded if you get enough traction no matter how old you are.
My father (almost 60) doesn't work in tech, but had a very successful career until two years ago when he lost his job to workplace politics (ie, not his performance). Hasn't been able to find anything since, and eventually took a crap job at Lowe's to have something to do. It haunts me because I always saw him as resourceful and able to make things work, and now he just seems defeated.
Bay Area Startups hire inexperienced people because they are cheaper, and more willing to take a bad deal. (Experienced people are more likely to know a bad deal.)
These inexperienced people are the ones doing the interviewing (and often the ones running the companies) and so experience is not valued.
* below 30 yrs old, no kids * older than 30 yrs old or had kids.
I have kids now. That is one of the major reasons I do not like SF anymore (mid 30s) but I did a decade ago. IMO, the entire SF/SV tech scene is built for young 20 somethings who want to live only to work.
When you reach a certain point in life, your priorities shift and you don't live to work anymore. If this happens to you, SF/SV is going to be an awful place to be, IMO.
Related to this article specifically, I have no doubt this is absolutely true. I've had interviews for jobs and while they don't ask questions about family or what not, they ask about "commitment" and "hours". Questions like "can you commit 100% to this job?" or "can you work 6 days a week or put in the hours necessary to do this job?". Those are questions asked to suss out if someone is going to basically live the job and push everything else away. They might ask that of everyone, but when asked to someone in their mid to late 30s it smacks of "hey, are you going to neglect your family for this job?".
The terrible irony of it is that the over-abundance of high salaries has led to those salaries meaning practically nothing; there have been plenty of threads here on how people can barely afford 1br apartments in San Francisco while still saving for retirement and living a comfortable life, etc. Salaries for very senior folks become so massively inflated due to the cost of living--sometimes in the $200k+ range--that very few startups can afford to hire even just a few of these guys. If they were in a cheaper area where a top salary, rather than a starting salary, was $120k, though, then they'd be in a much better position to hire a range of employees in terms of experience and age.
The last interview I had, I asked if they had people with kids. They had and they were on parental - no problem.
I'm 24 and will never have kids, but I do give a shit if they treat parents or engineers older than me like shit.
It's always sucked, and it's not getting better.
Example: Recruiters don't know anything about what it means to be a software developer, yet they feel they need to "weed out" the unqualified ones. So they do things like say "So, it says you know SQL, what database were they using at company X?" "OH, I'm sorry, this company is looking for Oracle SQL people, not Microsoft." --- in response to a job looking for Java developers who "know SQL". EG: You'd be writing code, probably dealing with an ORM, not writing too much SQL directly.
This problem has existed since the 1980s. Despite it creating massive inefficiencies in placement... the system hasn't (seemingly) gotten any better since then.
"If hiring [Minority A] provided some sustainable advantage, then someone would have started a company and simply hired loads of [Minority A] and kick ass in the market."
I would like to add that not everybody at IBM is like that just to prevent HN from forming the wrong image.
Since client/server has been around the 60's from System 360 its hard to find a grey-beard who isn't familiar with the concept.
Although the grey-beards may not know the new upcoming frameworks such as node.js et al... they're worth every penny when it comes to design and architecture of large software systems, its usually the foresight of what will work and fail which matters the most.
Many wisened gray-beards still code everyday but they do approach us wet-behind-the-ears on simple day-to-day details.
Eh??? What was the client to the 360's server?
(Then again I never actually did IBM mainframe programming at that level.)
Anti-intellectualism is a problem all throughout the software world. It may be that a certain late-career decline is one symptom of it, but I've seen it manifest just as badly in young people.
I recently interviewed with one, which was supposed to be a "phone" interview. We did it over skype. No surprise, but the guy asked me to turn on video so we could have a video call. This really added nothing to the interview, was more a distraction than anything, but I got to see I was being interviewed by a 22 year old (with virtually no experience, I later discovered when I researched him online) and he could easily see my age.
The questions he asked were not discriminatory, but more along the lines of vague "technical" questions for which I would explain in detail ... detail that went over his head. Several times he assumed I got something wrong, mainly because of his lack of experience. For instance, explaining how to do something concurrently to someone who thinks in terms of threaded programming, they often don't see the issues, because they haven't done enough of it to see the terrible pain that can come with threaded solutions in certain situations.
In this case, I have been learning new things quite a bit. It's not a question of my skills being old, in fact, he asked me about a language I'd learned recently (I expect he thought this would trip me up), but I named one that I'm keen on, that has been in existence less time than the company I was interviewing with.
One of the great, fundamental problems of interviewing engineers is GIGGO-- if the interviewer is not a great engineer, and not a great interviewer, they will often presume an interview subject is not good based on their own ignorance. (ok engineers who are great interviewers don't suffer from this, of course.)
He also suffered from the problem of trying to ask the problem-solving questions, but describing the problem vaguely, or leaving key details out. OF course, in his mind, he knows the full problem, so he doesn't remember not telling me a key detail. In one case he asked me "how would you do X in Language Y"... to which I answered you couldn't, because the language didn't support it, but if you wanted to have a similar effect you could do this other thing, and here's the three things wrong, or dangerous about that approach. He then decided I'd gotten it wrong and told me how to do it in a whole other language than the one he specified in the question!
So, he's a poor interviewer, no doubt, but every single one of these questions, I'm sure, he assumed I got it wrong because I was older... it puts a spin on their perception of you completely.
Plus, I don't understand the contradiction that exists in startups-- they claim they want "great engineers", but they also want cheap engineers, and they also want young engineers.
One thing that makes me a good engineer is that I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and learned from them. I wouldn't discriminate against someone younger simply because they haven't made as many mistakes yet, but I don't discount the value of experience either.
It takes all kinds, and the monoculture that so many companies seem to seek is part of the movement to turn software development into an assembly line, and take it out of the realm of craftsmanship.
I think part of the cause of this is the easy funding for quick-to-flip ideas started by MBA types from Ivy League schools... that aren't really technology companies so much as a form of investor arbitrage. (EG: put money into an entity which uses the money to buy "traction" and then flip it to other investors or the M&A department at a large company using acquisitions as a way to hire.)
My conclusion is this: IF you're in your 30s, you can't just be an engineer anymore.
You need to start working into management, and become a manager if you want to work for others, or you need to become a founder.
Because by 40, you're on your own.
Not everyone is capable of going those ways. I hope there is a cure for ageing. Western civilization desperately needs it.
This reminds me of the project management triangle: do you want it cheap, fast or good? ;-)
So, someone living in SF and looking for work there would be much more likely to look around and think that the entire job market is driven by startups populated by a bunch of hubristic guys in their 20s who expect everyone to work 80+ hours a week and are more likely to be (at least subconsciously) ageist and more prone to being discriminatory in hiring people who they don't personally relate to (age/cultural/background differences, etc.).
I live in SV and have lots of friends who live in SF and commute to SV, or live in SF and decided to get into a startup because they were sick of the commute and wanted to do something different. I really get the sense that the only reason there is any tech job market at all in SF is because SV draws so much engineering talent, and there's a large population of younger engineers who want to live in SF so bad that they're basically willing an SF tech scene into existence by setting up startups there, so they don't have commute anymore.
Older engineers looking for work in SV are likely running into different problems. I see it all the time and am always paranoid that I'm falling into the exact same trap (I'm 42 BTW). You get a good job someplace. You continue working at that job for 5, 10, or 20 years. You become more and more valuable because you end up with really specialized knowledge, and carve out a really customized niche for yourself. Also, you get a raise every year. The end result is that after 10 years (or whatever), you're making a really good salary, and likely have very deep (but not so broad) knowledge about whatever your niche is.
Then, something bad happens (or you just get sick of whatever you were doing), so you go looking for a new job. Your great salary was from a combination of longevity, and very specialized knowledge of a particular code base. Unfortunately, when looking for a new job, you have neither of those things going for you. You can only hope for a decent starting salary, not an "I've been here for 10 years" salary, and it'll be hard or impossible to find a job where 100% of your deep, specialized knowledge carries right over into the new position. I think that for a lot of people the best case scenario is one where they're a good fit, but they've got to take a little pay cut because they're starting fresh in a new organization. They'll get back to where they were before, but they've got to work their way back there over the next 2-3 years.
None of this is anyone's fault, it's just the nature of the beast. The only defense against it is to always make an effort to keep your skills fresh, and not get sucked into a mode where you are 100% focused on learning what you need to know for your job and nothing else. A lot of people get comfortable and stop learning altogether, which might make things tough if they want to find a new job for similar pay. There's definitely something to be said for age and experience and maturity, and I think employers appreciate that as well, but not to the extent that they're going to totally ignore the technical requirements when hiring for a position.
In other words, is age discrimination more due to "hire people like me" bias, or "work 'em hard while they're too young to know better" bias?
I think it's common for youth not to trust older people, probably a byproduct of being raised by parents, and that combined with a desire to keep costs low and get maximum productivity (Eg: a deal in favor of the company at the engineers expense) go hand in hand to make hiring older people who would want a better deal less likely.
- Can this person program a computer?
I always come back there because it's actually more rare than I would have guessed when I entered the industry. I have to ask if these people actually know what they're doing or if they're just getting turned down a lot and happen to be older. Given the number of tech firms in San Francisco I have to assume that at least one isn't making a stupid mistake based on age. How could it be that all of them are overlooking these awesome folks? Most companies typically have standing hiring requisitions open basically all the time for developers.
I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.
You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.
> and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.
When we see companies making very stupid decisions very often that seems more likely than not.
Less responses? Do you mean physically smaller responses, on little note-cards instead of letter stock? Or did you perhaps mean fewer responses?
http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l...
Those poor fools have lost! Thanks for the link though. HN has an international audience and people who speak English as a second language need to know that some people see a difference between less and fewer.
(I have upvoted your comment in an effort to cancel out the downvote that someone gave you.)
Yes, I agree it's a lost battle. I also don't generally prescribe. But I make an exception for this and a handful of other usages, with the understanding that I can't tell people they're wrong -- which, if you noticed, I didn't do. I instead give both definitions and invite the recipient to choose between them.
My other recent pet peeve are the many people who say "reign in" when they mean "rein in". Reigning is what a monarch does to a kingdom, reining is what a cowboy does to a horse.
But these are annoyances, not a matter of right versus wrong.
A little sarcasm, but no disrespect.
Now I work with an engineer in his 50s who did not know what a VM was before working with me and still writes everything in procedural C. Our product still has a serial port on it because of this guy. So it goes both ways.
I would say hiring a bad older engineer is actually more harmful than hiring a bad younger engineer because your team might subconsciously give the older person more benefit of doubt, and go along with more of their bad decisions. The solution is to not hire bad engineers or to fire them quickly.
Younger people tend to live in SF because that is where the younger person lifestyle and people their age tend to be. After I am finished with my current company, one of my criteria will either be a company with a bus to the south bay, be located next to a caltrain station or to be located in SF or Berkeley. The iOS developer having a hard time in SF should try looking for a job in the south bay because he will find many companies comprised of people his age there.
1. workers who stop learning
2.a. workers who continue learning, and
2.b. workers who continue learning and also keep ratcheting up the difficulty ... learning harder and harder material.
I suspect category 2.a will encounter little ageism and 2.b will be in high demand.
It's abhorrent to blame discrimination on the people being discriminated against by calling them dumb.
My clock speed is probably 5 to 10% slower than at peak (mid-teens) and will probably slow by another ~2-5% each decade, but software quality keeps going up and, as you probably know, clock speed isn't the most important factor when it only varies by a few percent.
PS: being 28 myself I am more of a concerned theoretician; I know three people who are 35-40 and quite better than me.
We still don't know when we peak. I tend to take that as a positive.
Where there is exponential worsening is in physical health: risk of death (also, risk of cancer) go up at about 9% per year, or a doubling each 8 years-- that's the Gompertz model, and it holds well from about 20 to 85. For mental decline, though, evidence for general decline in healthy people is pretty thin.
A study that has somehow controlled for continued learning? I'm interested because I'd be genuinely surprised if that's the case.
What we do see, anecdotally and in formal studies, is that if you vary only the variable of age, it makes a substantial difference.
I personally discovered that during a job hunt where someone pointed out I should drop my age from my resume, extra controlled as it were because for a very very long time I looked 20 something (a bit beyond age 50).
No I didn't. I had group 1, 2.a, and 2.b all along. I think that group 1 may suffer discrimination.
To elaborate the 'may', I'd stipulate that group 1 probably has a harder time getting interviews than a younger person with the same resume. I don't think it is necessarily discrimination though. I think there's a legit reason someone who's 40 who has the same resume as someone who's 20 would be less attractive.
To be succinct, the guy who's 20 may be the next Jeff Dean or Steven Wozniak. The 20 year old has 'he may be the next Jeff Dean'-option value. The 40 year old ... if he's been programming for 20 years and he's not Jeff Dean ... he's probably not turning into Dean now. No 'he may be the next Jeff Dean'-option value.
I think that's what many young software engineers have to endure, therefore it's also the young who face ageism.
Anyway, if you can only get hired for less than you used to, then your effective market rate is actually lower than what it used. And that's "fine". Perhaps the market rate for a software engineer follows a kind of bell curve. That specific issue is not ageism.
Anecdote: I recently learned that Facebook and Amazon have teams dedicated to rebooting crashed servers - it's cheaper and simpler than writing solid code. (As told to me by someone who does this as his full-time job.)
When "doing it right" no longer matters, because cheap hardware allows massive redundancy, maybe experience does become less important.
If you're building anything at all complicated, a few years of web-dev work isn't going to cut it bro.
The benefit of experience is you gain a more holistic understanding of wtf is going on, so you're not writing code in a vacuum of ignorance.
Of the seven billion people living on this plant none has a set of experiences such as yours. In a world of mass produced everything, uniqueness as a property, is actually more valuable. Whether or not the all mighty market rewards you for such is another story.
That's a nice anecdote. I'd hate to think it was actually true. There is potential loss of data to think about as much as anything.
There is, actually, a fair amount of age discrimination, but most of that seems to be in companies where I wouldn't want to work anyway.
On the other hand, I think that Silicon Valley and New York, because they are so expensive, have created a culture where it's socially unacceptable not to be a manager or founder by 35 (unless you've had an exit). There really aren't many good exemplars for older (50+) programmers in those places because everyone but the managers and investors leaves shortly after having a kid or two.