Silicon Valley ageism versus the productivity of famous inventors
thomason.io
thomason.io
Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. They don't have the proverbial family to feed, and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner.
If you want even more cynicism, it is also possible that less scrupulous VCs find younger founders easier to manipulate, over promise, over work, and under deliver.
... and they're easier to take advantage of.
Also, they have a lot of energy and enthusiasm, so they work longer hours than older founders.
> They don't have the proverbial family to feed...
..or distract them (e.g. "I want to be home in time to put the kids to bed." vs "I pulled an all-nighter and finally cracked that problem."
> ..and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner.
That lack of experience also means that they are less likely to reject an idea as too crazy/off-the-wall (which is what many people think the best ideas are, at first glance).
Older founders are more likely to perceive the risks and downsides, and be more tentative and less aggressive as a result.
But no VC is ever going to fund that.
I've come to believe that self-improving processes (such as economics and technology) exhibit a "natural growth rate", that this could even be applied to a person, and that for programmers it's about 20-40 percent per year. Compared to anything else, that's very high. We can reliably grow a skill base or a company at around that rate, give or take. Of course, starting a new business is risky, but there's not strong evidence that it ought to be riskier than starting a new job. Sure, half of small businesses fail within 5 years. But half of all jobs turn to crap in 5 years.
At any rate, the mid-risk / mid-growth space that tends toward 20-40% growth and a non-zero but not obscene rate of failure is... as you've noted, severely overlooked. Bank loans require personal liability and are therefore only viable if there's nearly a zero chance of failure. VC builds disposable companies that have a 1/10 chance of returning 20x and a 1/100 chance of returning 250x. In the mid-risk / mid-growth space? Nothing. I think part of the problem is that such businesses-- even though they add more value in toto than anything else (they're where most open-source software comes from)-- are very difficult to sell.
The issue is that VCs are optimizing for their careers rather than their portfolios. You can just as credibly build a portfolio out of mid-risk/mid-growth businesses as these get-rich-quick-or-die gambits. The problem is that you don't become a celebrity investor by building a great portfolio, but by having "been in on" the Facebook or Google that comes every few years.
Coding is a marathon, not a series of crazed sprints. Nuff said for now.
First off, while younger people have more energy, they are also much less efficient. Experience means you can produce more for a given amount of energy.
I'm single, due to a recent divorce, and have no kids. So, what family do you think is distracting me? Do you think Steve Jobs was a poor CEO because he had a family to distract him? Hell, he had a major illness and still executed.
I really don't get where people think that experience means you'll reject ideas as "too crazy".
I thin there are people with imagination and vision. Most people don't have it, and most people reject ideas out of hand whatever their age.
People with imagination and vision embrace ideas, no matter their age.
Percieving risks and downsides is a good idea-- because it means you can avoid them while still executing your idea.
The assumption they are more tentative is a nonsequitor-- and illogical. How is having a better perception of what at is safe and what path is less safe going to make you MORE tentative than someone who can't see as well?
Aggresiveness is boosted by confidence, and experience produces confidence.
It doesn't matter whether they're true or not. What matters is whether the VCs who lack the common sense James refers to in his blog post, believe that they're true.
Or perhaps you have an alternative explanation for ageism?
You're making this comment on a post exploring the age of famous inventors when they were awarded patents. Instead of responding with stereotypes it'd probably be a stronger case to point out inventors of similar caliber who achieved their most innovative pursuits in their early 20s rather than later in life.
I'm trying to make the point that finding justifications for having a bias against older men are just as easy as finding biases against women. Neither are particularly useful.
I have a daughter and everyone, my ex, various family members, the school - they don't push her as hard "because she's a girl" - they don't see her getting into tech "because she's a girl". She herself is trying to learn to program and already she's facing a struggle. At the same time she's being sold a sexualized image of women through the media.
Granted I haven't thought about the racism aspect. My quick thoughts on it are that it starts at a lower level - home environment, racism in grade and high school and probably throughout college. If you're tall and black in america you're most likely getting sports pushed on you rather than tech. If you're from a poor area your parents may have grown up with poor education and aren't really showing you the care you need (regardless of skin color) and now you have to figure out a way to learn in perhaps a very loud environment, or a drug filled environment. This is an issue that might be solved by easier access to technology and education for low income environments.
As for ageism - its a terrifying prospect because it means everything I've spent the last decade absorbing which has improved my craft gets shit on and goes to hell. then again, that's how it works anyway - you make a website perhaps and its refactored and gone 6 months to a year later. The tech industry is kind of a joke right now. So many people have spent so much money to go on to build, fund or scheme up the next shitty flash in the pan iphone app. But hey, there's free lunch every day in the kitchen... and dogs roam around our open office where "random" nerf fights break out every wednesday between 3 and 4:15.
edit: fixed some stuff.
Ageism, racism, sexism, homophobia all belong in the same bucket. You can't argue for one and against the next -- either bias _in general_ is a problem that needs to be addressed or it's not. You can't cherry-pick. Attempting to do so just makes you look self-interested (and kind of a dick.)
Saying for example that adding a woman to a team might affect team cohesion negatively is the exact same as saying that adding an older man to a younger team might affect said cohesion, or a non-white to an all-white team. The problem that needs to be addressed here is a lack of diversity, not ageism, or sexism, or racism.
I haven't seen anyone in this discussion cherrypick ageism over sexism or racism. I think the reason you're not hearing talk about the other two is because ageism is mentioned in the article. But you're right. All three hiring biases have origin in the same fallacy (that good hires should look a certain way).
There seems to be some political will here to combat ageism. I guess HN users are worrying about their future. But mention sexism / racism and everyone gets defensive. I suspect nobody wants to solve these problems, because they're hard (or because it doesn't directly benefit them).
All this. You're absolutely right, and you're not being cynical or mean or harsh. You're citing what are essentially sociological facts about Silicon Valley.
If you want to go hard cynical, read this: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-t... The short version is that this funding of a certain type of young person (frat-boy psychopaths) is actually an expression of a midlife crisis. Instead of doing the midlife crisis honestly and buying a Ferrari or pursuing a new religion, they pick up young sociopaths as proteges, taking care of their careers in order to live vicariously through younger men who, given the cash, could do some real damage to the world (and toss back a story about his escapades in exchange for continued funding). The term for this is chickenhawking, because both common meanings apply.
The work that software developers do is different than the work of top theoretical physicists. So it's hard to say what the advantage of youth is with regards to a holistic creativity.
Creative writing might be more like software development (and entrepreneurship) than theoretical physics or pure math. Writers have a general objective that may evolve, an internal toolkit they've acquired over 10k+ hours of writing, and the task of building something where all the pieces work together to achieve the objective. And does anyone think writers in college are better than seasoned veterans that have been writing professionally for decades?
Also, variation in skill level among people >> Variation of an individual's ability across her lifetime.
Now, I have a ton of experience on how the world really works, which is great. Especially people knowledge. But it's really hard to relate to how my kids see the world, having always been connected at high speeds, etc.
I guess this also means those of us who refuse to participate in the patent system on ethical grounds are the least productive people in the world?
When people want to solve a problem, the problem gets solved. There's no proof for the money/power men that solving (ageism,sexism,and racism) increases profits. So, it takes a back seat.
The brightest minds in the world are centered on how to manipulate the weakest among us. Sounds like a young uncultured/unlearned man's testosterone fueled dream.
High cost of living/High tax narrowing focus even further. The crucible .
Why do the most significant discoveries center around the age of 30? Because, by then, you've participated in the rat race long enough to understand there is slim to no value in it or the majority of products pushed out of it. You've seen failures. You lived through enough specific experiences to be able to generalize. In your higher order representations of the world you've built, you grasp a deeper meaning to life, society, and knowledge and are truly able to give birth to an idea that serves to truly, deeply, and positively impact the world.
So, what happened to equality/diversity/society? Profits (A short sighted focus that is most easily ingrained in young males who have been taught that the pinnacle of life is carving out a little empire for yourself) .. 'Some' older men figure out the folly in this pursuit as they do/don't achieve this goal in a timely fashion. 30 sounds about that age when that happens. Of course, there are some of us who never grow up.
Story of the world.
"The first motion-picture camera was invented by the Frenchman Louis Le Prince in the 1880s, while working in Leeds, England."
The point is that Edison led hard, consequential engineering work well past his 20s and 30s.
In principle, the rules for inventorship for patents differ substantially from the rules for authorship in academic papers: Inventorship is determined by law, authorship is determined by, well, custom.
eg: http://www.unemed.com/blog/how-to-determine-who-is-an-invent...
Please feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong here.
Accusations of double standards need to be made against individual commentators.
In fact, that's one of the less-often-said (because, applied to individuals, it's still bigoted and obnoxious) matters in Silicon Valley. There is an adverse selection when it comes to age. Talented older people tend to have enough experience not to take the typical Silicon Valley deal (especially for startup employees) so what's left is a set of people who may be old or talented but aren't both (and, of course, most are neither, i.e. young and talentless).
Most of the really good, 50+ programmers that I know either want to do real technology (not Snapchat bullshit) or have moved into finance. In fact, in those domains, you find that the older programmers are often the best ones by far. Some of the very good older programmers will look for funding, but they're more likely to go into consulting and bootstrap than deal with the 6-month job interview and aggressive (and typically illegal, in terms of what things are discussed) back-channel reference checking that seems to come with the VC territory.
As a divorced father of two, who was fired from his last full time job, and can't disclose due to NDA prior work, I've been self employed the majority of my adult life since 2006. Since September, I'm a former alcoholic, which is news to many - I had drank regularly since I was 18 and only recently realized I could correlate a bit of my drinking to early communication issues that resulted in the "low end," classes in my first years of education.
I digress, though, as the first one in my family in three generations to receive a bachelor's degree, life in college and out is hard. In my family, during my "prime," my business expenses were over 100K per year in 2009 and 2010. However, things came crashing down and changed. It's a long, long story. Drinking helps zero.
Now, my software is free, I filed a patent pending because I need credibility. The world is flat, as Thomas Friedman said, and growing more so. Ten years ago I spent $50K on my own tools. If I had known then that I'd need them in 2013, and 2014 again, I would have done what I'm doing now.
Made them free. Open source. Given it away, hoping that with better tools, everybody benefits. That's the dream.
We got rejected by Ycombinator. I've worked with guys in the news way way more than I'll ever be, and I tell a lot of stories, incidentally, most are true.
Thanks for reading, I love this site and learn from it daily.
So no, I can't see your email, I can't mentally parse it from your username, etc. My contact info is in my profile - eg, if you know I'm Jeremy Goodrich, I'm not too hard to find. All too easy, in fact. I'm the only one of the sixty to one hundred folks with the same name who's been in digital marketing & search / information retrieval since finished college at University of Oregon. Feel free to write, I like chatting with people. Thanks for reading, listening and here's to a fun conversation.
If you're older and you're not doing well in SV you should take a look at yourself. Maybe you just don't have good ideas anymore. Maybe you just don't cut it, and should find a place somewhere else. There are plenty of other careers you could switch to that happily accept older people.
But there is no ageism in Silicon Valley. Anyone who says there is is just trying to start trouble.
(Paraphrasing arguments made against the suggestion of sexism in SV on HN yesterday. Hurts when you're on the receiving end, no?)