Ageism in the Game Industry | Hacker News Reader

Ageism in the Game Industry

gamasutra.com

85 pointsRed_Tarsius83 comments

It's crude, but prevailing ageism makes a big opportunity for non-moronic employers. Basically, there's a giant talent pool right there for you to hire from, no matter your location, as long as you don't insist people are 22 and willing to sell all waking hours to your business.

Increasing the average age of your employees is a much smaller change to make to your company than, for example, hiring remote people (assuming you aren't already doing that). Even if you're currently the all-work-no-life 80-hours-a-week always-crunch-time kind of company, if you really have trouble finding the right talent, there's an option right there for you. It requires more sane working hours, yes, but maybe that's not a horribly bad idea anyway.

People not even considering this are doing themselves a disservice.

Anecdotally, I have found the argument that not-super-young people are somehow less smart or less eager to be entirely false.

I wonder if increasing the average age of your employees could cause younger candidates to be less eager to join.

only if the younger employers are ageist take your argument and apply it to women, African American or Latino?

Not the younger folks I'd want on my team. Note, I said "older", not "boring".

Probably not as much as the other way around.

Only if it's at an extreme. I have heard of interns saying they didn't want to work at company X because every interviewer was over the age of 30.

I've also heard people complaining about not seeing a single woman or any person of color.

I strongly advocate representing diversity in the interview loop: Include a recent college hire, a senior dev, an ethnic person, and a woman. Or maybe just have all interviewers be brogrammer--each company can shape their own talent pool demographics.

You are entirely right that there is an overlooked advantage here iff the kind of older people who are willing to work for you are at least as good as the kind of young people you can hire.

Intuitively the longer a person has been on the job market the higher the chance that person has either developed deep expertise in some subject or gotten a strong network. Most people who have either shouldn't have any problem getting employed (in the tech industry anyway) and so the kind you can hire are probably less likely to be as good as your younger employees. Note that this doesn't disagree with your anecdote, you just can't hire those people.

In addition, and this depends on how old they are, you might not want to make your first hire a person who is likely to have children soon. If suddenly half your workforce is on maternity/paternity leave that might sink your business (yeah discrimination based on this is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't a risk anyway).

If you don't want "a person who is likely to have children soon", the best person to hire is someone who's 40+. Anyone younger is still in their prime making-babies years.

> In addition, and this depends on how old they are, you might not want to make your first hire a person who is likely to have children soon. If suddenly half your workforce is on maternity/paternity leave that might sink your business (yeah discrimination based on this is illegal, doesn't mean it isn't a risk anyway).

If your company would scuttled by some portion of your employees taking paternity/maternity leave, it sounds like your company has organizational problems and you should be looking at why your business will fail rather than worrying about employees taking some time off.

If you are twenty people yes. If you are a startup with one employee, you have fewer options.

I still see this as a sign of an organizational problem for your startup. Naturally you'll have few(er) people and resources as a startup, but if your business plan requires that you constantly have output or be available to make changes, it sounds like you need to have more than 1 employee anyway and take that as a cost of how you operate. Alternatively, as a primary business owner you could take on that responsibility yourself since you reap the greatest rewards of the company success.

Also older people have much better people skills. The young, myself included, need to learn tact.

Hiring some one who is 50 sort of a problem. They likely know what a salary is supposed to be. 20 somethings work for pennies in the game industry.

"if you really have trouble finding the right talent"

I was under the impression that kids with all sorts of skills were lining up ready to be exploited if it meant they can make video games.

I felt like I experienced some age related bias about ten years ago. I had been working mostly on Nintendo and Disney projects in California - a great experience. After my wife and I moved to Arizona, I kept getting calls from Electronic Arts HR people. After a year or so of getting emails and a few phone calls from them I said that I would fly to Vancouver for an interview.

I had probably four or five people during the interview process nervously laugh or giggle when they first saw me. The receptionist who initially showed me the the interview conference room rolled her eyes at the interviewers while nodding in my direction. The technical interviewers seemed really weak, as far as the questions and our interactions. Not very professional.

The good part of the interview was that EA flew me up a day early, and I also had the morning after the interview to enjoy Vancouver, so it was not a waste of time. I appreciated a free trip.

I had a very different experience working at Google last year: there was not any feeling of ageism, at least none that I noticed.

Didn't EA get the hints of your age? Like graduation year, year of first projects?

Looks like they're not the brightest bunch

Great point!

I graduated from college in 1973 and that was on my resume. Also, on the phone I had mentioned that I had mostly retired except for small consulting jobs.

"You don’t fit in with our culture"

I've seen similar sentiment in many other places in tech, applied to ageism, sexism etc. Maybe I'm naïve, but I fail to see this in any way other than discrimination by proxy.

Whenever I see this I wonder if getting sued for age, sex, or racial discrimination, and losing, does fit in with the company's "culture". That can be expensive. Very.

The percentage of people who would take that route is very small, I'm afraid. There are countless little insults and grievances that simply get shrugged off as the cost of living in society. It shouldn't be that way, but the punishment for bravery is just too severe.

If no one is hiring them anyway they have nothing to lose, and the payoff can be quite large.

http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20140227/66-year-old-m...

Note that insulting "jokes" were a factor.

I wonder what it would take for someone to flip and say "yeah, we discussed why we didn't hire that person, and it was <ageism, sexism, racism>." How much longer until you learn the real reason?

I once had a boss who didn't want to hire someone who had fought in Vietnam. Said boss had escaped the draft by being in college (and from a rich family). I was pretty shocked that he would say it out loud, especially by how much he considered himself super-progressive.

Culture fit can be important in a sufficiently small company. What's baffling is why anyone would say that out loud to a declined candidate.

Ageism, sexism, racism, you don't look like me/model(ism) I would say runs rampant in many industries that are fueled by egos and trying to out do each other.

I have had more negative experiences dealing with tech douchebags at meetups and in tech communities in general then say attending hiking meetups via meetup.com. Everyone at a hiking meetup is there to make friends/not try to out do each other.

Not to say I havent met some nice people who are not douchebags, but you don't expect to have to deal with dBags in tech communities whose age range from 20 to 45.

I attend and have attended tech events to meet similar nice people and share interests, but half the time or more you run into Dbags who aren't genuine, friendly and make you feel like it's high school all over again.

I'm happy that this is NOT the case at the monthly SacJUG meetup I attend. I think there is a "hump" of 40-ish +/- attendees, but the age ranges from 20-ish to retired, and it's an enthusiastic, friendly, group. Even though the core Java topics are very "ordinary" and work-related, aimed at the Sacramento job market, people are always exploring the peripheries for interesting libraries, new databases and related platforms or alternate JVM compatible languages. Anyway, it's a friendly group, and we usually go out for a good long BS/dinner/drink session afterward at one of the local bar & grills.

Of course, Sacramento is not Silicon Valley, and we're just working stiffs, not maneuvering to make our next million.

Oh I live on the east coast and experienced this from DC to Baltimore to Philadelphia to New York.

Again, not everyone in the "scene," is a dBag, it's just jarring to meet and encounter a large percentage of them!

It makes starting up and doing a start up a whole lot tougher, but whatever you just do it because you are driven no matter how you are treated.

It's not just the game industry -- it's high-tech in general. As a 50-year-old programmer with zero desire to manage people, I am in the same boat.

If it makes you feel any better, as someone in his late 20s that has led a couple teams and is eyeing management, I can't think of any particular reason not to hire you (except maybe that you'd demand more money than a recently started programmer, but now we're just talking cost-benefit analysis, which seems a fine basis for decisions) and several benefits, assuming you'd be okay taking direction from someone that much younger than you.

Can you perhaps elaborate on the kind of responses you get or conjecture on why you think people are making those kinds of choices?

I've heard similar stories from mentors and older friends who work in tech, but I've never really gotten a chance to discuss it in detail. It's kind of an awkward topic, so I won't take it badly if you decline, I'm just honestly hoping to hear a view that I'm not exposed to, being young and fresh in the market.

It's not universal, on my team of 8 there is a ~60, ~65, ~70. I use ~ because I have never actually asked, and that's unlikely to change.

I review a lot of resumes. Age is never a factor. It's all about experience; basically, trying to figure out what value you bring.

If your resume is difficult to read, then that's a problem. I still try, but I lean pretty heavily towards a "no".

If your resume doesn't contain any detail and I can't figure out what you've actually done, then I stop. I'm done. Learn how to write a better resume.

If I still can't tell what you've done because your resume is littered with phrases like "empowered the team..." and "synergized the product..." then it's a pretty much total plonk. Feel free to rewrite.

A good resume tells me what you've done and doesn't contain unsupported stuff. I can skip over obvious verbiage ("... team player ... fast learner..."), but in the end it's what you've done and how you did it that matters.

How old are you? I don't care, I don't even want to know.

Could you an example of what you'd like to see?

It's invariant for any company I've been at. Pretty much what I said: Be clear and be factual about what you've done, including how you did it and what happened as a result. I'm looking for evidence that you've done things that are interesting.

You realize this is most often hampered by the team the individual is working on? Not every company puts their employers in an opportunity to claim great successes.

Or give time nor opportunity to do great success. This is why I appreciate it when a potential employee wants to see tools or code as well.

That's when the weekend projects become necessary.

That's nice. Are you the only one involved in the hiring process? You receive resumes directly, and make the call yourself without consulting and relying upon the opinions of others who might be biased? If so, great! Too bad you're working for such a small company that is hiring so comparatively few.

Indeed. The times here and there I've looked over resumes, they were the ones that H/R and The Management saw fit to send to me.

Cheap labour from kids too young to realise how much they're ripped off, and how badly the company is treating them. The bizarre glamour of making games attracts enough suckers to the big production-line, conveyor-belt studios that there's no need to pay well or treat the staff well.

People with experience tend to know what their time is worth, and tend to tell the boss to shove it when he's taking the piss, and can see past the glamour.

I hear this sentiment a lot.

Honestly, I think young people in the technology industry generally are paid very well and treated very respectfully as well, so I've never understood where this notion comes from.

What other career options would come close without requiring significantly more education? Finance maybe, but young people are definitely treated way better in technology than in finance. Other engineering disciplines generally can't keep up in pay with software development, with the one exception being chemical engineering.

Practicing law is out without getting a law degree, passing the bar, taking out a vast amount of debt, and then successfully getting a high-paying job (which is not easy in the current law market).

Practicing medicine is even harder. Medical school is 4 years and costs even more than law school. Then you'll have a bare minimum of 3 years of residency, during which time you will be a practicing doctor but will be paid less than a freshly minted programmer (and you'll be treated like shit too, working 80 hours a week).

So, yeah, I think programmers, even young ones, have it pretty damn good right now. As a career, it's pretty much "best in class," meaning that it's at least as good as all of its peers in terms of entry requirements.

Honestly, I think young people in the technology industry generally are paid very well and treated very respectfully as well, so I've never understood where this notion comes from.

We're not talking about the technology industry generally. We're talking about the games industry. The games industry, generally speaking, pays worse and offers worse conditions. Because they can. People with more experience know when they're being ripped off, and know when the working conditions are far worse than they could get outside the games industry. Kids blinded by the glamour of the games industry are cheap labour.

My bad, I was too quick to respond to your comment. I was thrown off a bit by the other discussions in this comment thread that seem to be discussing the technology industry in general.

I think background and circumstances feed into this, as well.

If you grew up poor, you are more likely to need to take a job right away, even if the wages are low and/or the working conditions are abusive, and you don't know any better.

Also, if your background is not the current hotness, and you have no "network" yet, you can be stuck for a while working on whatever technology it is you have been using. Most young people don't have networks at first.

I'm 36 with seventeen years experience as a designer/creative director shipped dozens of titles on all platforms since the PSX and no one will touch me. I've long suspected that my age was partially to blame, but I also know it's because most studios don't value design as a discipline.

If you started working at 19, you might consider going to college and getting some kind of degree, just in case.

List a recent AA in art (or whatever suits your tastes) and the most recent 10 years experience before that and be done with the rest of the list on your resume.

The game platform you worked on in 1997 is probably about as significant for most employers as the C code for batch processing I did around that time :-)

(I'm not implying that you didn't learn anything valuable - of course you did - but trimming resumes to a Goldilocks size for the benefit of the reader is a fine art)

The fifty year old with ten years experience in X is identical to that thirty year old with ten years experience in X, except with an extra twenty years of other experiences to draw upon. Any other consideration you make based on his/her age is pure unfounded assumption; age should be a -plus- when hiring, not a detriment.

It's notable that in all the recent 'diversity' announcements made by tech companies, none of them (AFAIK) have studied the age range of their employees. The subject seems to be ignored by them.

You know what? Good

Older people have less patience for endless crunch time, BS management, new overhyped fads (but that's more in Web development than game), unreal deadlines, etc.

I think many people cry "ageism" when there is in fact a legitimate reason not to consider a vastly experienced person for a role: people with more experience typically demand more pay for it, not to mention that taking a significant salary cut is something few people can afford to do once they get settled in to a lifestyle. If I don't need that much experience for the role I'm hiring for then I'll take the less experienced person every time in order to save cash.

Merely starting the interview process with someone who far exceeds the requirements for the role is a risk... my employees and I may waste our time interviewing this person just to find out their salary requirements are too high. I would say "too experienced" is a legitimate reason to reject someone from a role for this reason. This is especially true in the gaming industry, which is extremely competitive and has no shortage of young talent with low salary requirements that are appropriate for senior management.

Strangely, you're describing ageism. Replace older/more experienced with women, and salary demands with pregnancy and family responsibilities, and you're at sexism.

Older people tend to have more job experience. Not even starting the interview process on someone because they have a lot of experience, means not starting the interview process for older people, which is ageism.

Rather make the offer if they earn it, even if it isn't in the range the person might seem to want. It's up to them to decide to accept it or not.

This is not ageism. I can judge a candidate based on her work experience. I would be just as quick to reject a 20-something with too much experience as a 50-something, and I would absolutely hire a 50-something with the right level of experience.

Don't get me wrong - there is an ageism problem in the tech community. If we take these arguments at face value though and don't make an effort to understand why a rational, unbiased person might appear to discriminate, then cannot effectively address the problem.

IANAL, but you can advertise and recruit for junior developer positions without risking ageism.

I see some merit in your argument. However, there is a very strong trend in this industry to equivocate around titles and responsibilities. When "Senior Software Engineer" comprises everything from people with 2-5 years of experience to people with 15-20, it indicates something is fundamentally wrong with the way companies view the work they need done.

The fact is you're basically right: most companies don't want experienced people who will do a very good job and expect appropriate compensation for that work. They want people who can do the job just good enough to pass off products that are marginally adequate enough to bring in a target margin. If said people are also more inclined to be easily "persuadable" or awed/intimidated into putting more effort in for less compensation, even better. Such a condition naturally leads to the implicit age discrimination we see in our industry.

Also, if companies were more open about the salary and compensation packages they will offer with a position, it might more effectively deter the unwanted "seniors" from even expressing interest.

>> most companies don't want experienced people who will do a very good job and expect appropriate compensation for that work

Most companies can't afford experienced people who will do a very good job and expect appropriate compensation for that work. If they could, then hiring these people would be a no-brainer.

>> Also, if companies were more open about the salary and compensation packages they will offer with a position, it might more effectively deter the unwanted "seniors" from even expressing interest.

I agree with you here. I would never personally reject someone with an impressive background without first communicating to them the "reality" of the position they're applying for.

>>Merely starting the interview process with someone who far exceeds the requirements for the role is a risk... my employees and I may waste our time interviewing this person just to find out their salary requirements are too high. I would say "too experienced" is a legitimate reason to reject someone from a role for this reason.

I'm pretty sure this kind of thinking is exactly the problem and accurately describes ageism. You've made assumptions about someone based on their age and don't even want to bother interviewing them based on stereotypes that you think are true about older people. Of course, there are extremes to the "too experienced" situation. If a person with a Ph.D in Biology and Astrophysics applies to a job at McDonald's, then perhaps something is off. But you should still talk to the person and find out what's going on; not just assume.

I'm allowed to judge someone based on her work experience. This is not a stereotype, this is a fact on a resume put there by the candidate herself.

>> Of course, there are extremes to the "too experienced" situation. If a person with a Ph.D in Biology and Astrophysics applies to a job at McDonald's, then perhaps something is off.

Ok, so where do you draw the line? At what point is it not OK to judge someone in this way?

I don't think my original comment had the impact I was looking for. Sorry if I offended anyone... I don't want to imply that ageism is OK.

my employees and I may waste our time interviewing this person just to find out their salary requirements are too high

Advertise the salary up-front. Of course, this gives up your negotiating room.

Quote: "After several phone and in-person interviews, the company flew him and his wife to their location, put them up in an expensive hotel, and conducted a final interview. However, in that interview he was finally introduced to the person who would be his immediate supervisor, someone twenty years younger. The next day, he was told that he was no longer a candidate."

Wait... they passed over all this to figure his age in person? His résumé hadn't age?

You don't put age on a resume.

You may leave out earlier projects and graduation date on a resume; even if you don't, speaking as someone who has interviewed, you don't really look at the years. "Oh, they worked at X, Y, and Z", not "Oh wow, they've been doing this professionally for twenty five years, they're at least in their mid 40s". Especially if it's a newish technology. This person has ten years of Javascript experience, two of that with Angular, awesome, we need a front end dev familiar with Angular. Holy crap, they're in their fifties; they just didn't list, or I didn't notice, all the non-relevant experience.

I see what you mean!

But in that case they should do a webcam interview first, before make someone move around (even it's paid) to see he "doesn't" fit the "requirements".

Well, he wasn't moving, yet. Just he and his wife were flown out for the interview; his wife was included so they could take a day or so to go look for rental properties for the short term, I am guessing.

I don't doubt discrimination against age exists, but it's wrong to automatically assume it's the root cause for a rejection.

Maybe they had a stronger candidate? Maybe the interviewer overestimated his performance?

Why would you want to work in the game industry at 50? Poor pay, too many hours and being managed by someone 20 years younger than you.

The only exception I can imagine is if you have already built enough of a reputation to go and do your own thing via your own studio or kickstarter etc in which case you don't need anyone's permission.

> According to data collected by the Entertainment Software Association, the percentage of people over 50 years old playing games is slightly higher than the percentage of people under 50 playing games. We ARE your audience.

It would be interesting to adjust that data for amount of time spent gaming and amount of money spent on gaming related products.

Somehow I don't get the impression that COD servers at peak times are rammed full of senior citizens.

I've never understood why someone would ever want to work in the game industry, regardless of their age. It's full of people who are willing to make absurd sacrifices just so they can make games.

It's a much more rational decision to write code for a "boring" industry. You're still honing your software engineering prowess and gaining experience, but you're getting paid a lot more and not being required to work ridiculous hours - a win-win situation.

Because it seems like a high status career choice when you are 21, other 21 year olds will be jealous.

It's also a good place to get a lot of practical experience actually writing code, ex games programmers tend to be pretty good at taking a big messy code soup and turning it into something that actually works.

I usually tell "kids" (I'm 53 and this describes a lot of you, okay? No offense :-) ) not to get started in the games industry. I lucked out by starting out writing game cartridges, then doing systems programming for the next 25 years. Now I'm back to games (or rather, gaming platforms).

Remember who got rich in the California Gold Rush? Not the folks digging the gold, but instead it was the shop-keepers, bankers, real-estate men and similar infrastructure-like people. Be one of them. I don't mean go into things expecting to be rich, but don't be a starry-eyed fool and start at (say) EA just out of college, get burned-out and then expect to have anything out of it. Make sure you can use other things than a shovel.

Get a grounding in systems. Do graphics, do networking, do LAMP, basically do as much as you can "wide" and focus on some areas that interest you ("deep"). Then you can work on games (great!) or servers or UX or whatever you chose. You can work at a games company (great!) or you can work some place else (also highly recommended). Don't focus on games because they're cool, do the tech behind them, with games as an incidental.

Don't get into games and expect that rewriting the same piece of code in the same soccer game year after year is going to be fulfilling. You'll wish you had the ability to go somewhere else, so ensure that you do.

And for God's sake, never think that you're going to get a foot in the door by starting out in Q/A. Just don't do that.

For me, it's because I want to make games. When I had a boring job, I found myself braindead when I came home from work and found myself unable to make games on my own time. For all its pros and cons, working in games allows me to make games, and for all its ups and downs I still love the challenge and the work.

I seem to be riding the average age wave. When I joined the industry 10 years ago I was the average age. Now I'm still the average age. Working conditions have (for me, at least) got better and I crunch much less.

I have to say though, it is worrying. People in the industry above 50 are like unicorns, and most of them are senior managers or execs. I'm in my mid '30s and I feel that I can't stay in the industry for much longer, and then what?

This right here is where ageism comes from.

"Why would an older person want to work in the game industry" -> "why is this old person applying to my game company" -> "what's wrong with this old person" -> "what's wrong with old people". Ageism comes from bogus adverse selection.

The little derisive zing about "senior citizens" at the end did a nice job of selling it.

Introspect. You are going to be working when you're 50. You're sabotaging yourself.

PS: As a general rule, excellent game developers are among the best low-level systems programmers. But gamers are not; as a rule, people who sit around and play COD all day do not dominate life's leaderboards. Why are good game developers such good programmers? Because game programming is extremely challenging. Good programmers seek out good challenges like bugs, in the case of game programming, to a bug zapper.

So consider that there might be reasons for a 50 year old who feels about COD the same way Phil Fish does to still want to work on one of those titles.

I suspect you would find an age bias in most industries with a learning curve for lower level positions, i.e the type where you apply mainly by sending a cold resume. Try getting started as say a chef or electrician post about 30.

And so there you go, right off the bat, you're treating older candidates differently than younger ones, based on a stereotype.

Suggesting that older and more experienced candidates are older and more experienced? Hardly a stereotype.

In your comment I suspect you would find an age bias in most industries suggests that since it happens in other industries, that is somehow ok.

I'm not sure what you mean, it's not so much age as things that are likely to correlate strongly with age such as experience salary expectations and willingness to work insane numbers of hours.

So you admit to more bigotry... that you think older people are greedy and lazy.

That doesn't suggest it at all - it does suggest that the solution isn't likely be to change something that is unique to the gaming industry.

Attempting to immunize yourself from claims of bigotry by handwaving about virtues that offset the stereotype you're defending is the second oldest rhetorical tactic in the prejudiced debater's handbook.

The first of them would be, "but some of my best friends are older adults!"

This was a shitty way to argue; my comment above was directed at a comment on the thread, but this one feels more like it's directed at a commenter. I think the argument --- that some kinds of ageism might not be a problem, because they involve jobs old people shouldn't want --- is toxic. But I resorted to snark and sabotaged my point.

I apologize.

Thanks!

It was interesting to watch the karma swing here, my top post went from +4 to -4 within around 30 mins of your first comment in this subthread.

>Somehow I don't get the impression that COD servers at peak times are rammed full of senior citizens.

Judging from

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december12010/

you seem to be correct but Poker and 'Castle Age' seem popular with the older audience. Quite a lot of time and money is spent on poker.

True, but I'm not sure if online casinos are generally considered part of the "games industry"

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