
Readers offer tales of Silicon Valley's ageism - auctiontheory
http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/Readers-offer-tales-of-Silicon-Valley-s-ageism-4758726.php
======
lambdasquirrel
I've had mixed feelings on this issue for a while. On one hand, I think
there's a real danger in hiring people who are like you. I'm frequently
surprised how much people defend this practice in the name of having a
cohesive company culture.

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.

~~~
badman_ting
Ok, but that works in the other direction -- a person may be closed-minded
with respect to the age of people they are willing to hire. Don't get me
wrong, I would like to believe that all I have to do is keep learning and not
get mentally lazy. But I fear it ain't so.

~~~
asdfdsa1234
If they are, they're hurting themselves by overpaying for less valuable young
workers.

~~~
lambdasquirrel
The money is no big deal. The damage you do to your long-term prospects is
probably insurmountable. Groupthink becomes a big deal as companies get
bigger.

------
richardjordan
A lot of Silicon Valley ageism is just fairly simple. A lot of the folks
starting companies have a deep seated lack of self-confidence and just don't
know how to hire and manage people who are older.

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.

------
badman_ting
Yeah, I mean, what the hell do people do about this? I may have other skills,
but programming is really the only one that can I can make a living on. I
guess I'll just go live in the woods when the economy decides it's done with
me? I have no idea.

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.

~~~
pyre
If your dad is having trouble finding work, then he should just learn to code!
Oh, wait... /s

~~~
bennyg
My dad is literally doing that right now. I talked to him this past week, and
he downloaded Xcode and is going through tutorials in hopes of making an
iPhone app idea he had. He is a self-employed cartographer making print maps,
and had an idea for something that could translate to apps that wasn't already
filled by existing niches.

------
engineer40
Inexperienced people don't value experience, because they lack the experience
to know the value of experience.

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.

------
fingerprinter
A few days back there was an article about the real estate prices in SF and
SV. It felt very much like it was broken down into two categories:

* 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?".

------
nilkn
Most Silicon Valley companies produce products or services whose revenue does
not scale with the cost of living in the area. Yet they pay their employees a
lot more than in most parts of the world and they pay a hell of a lot more for
office space. Contrary to what is written very frequently here by SV dwellers,
it is actually not common for fresh graduates to get six figure salaries--only
in Silicon Valley and NYC.

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.

------
seivan
I remember some young MBA asshole in Singapore on stage telling people he
wouldn't hire anyone with a kid.

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.

~~~
_random_
Working with people who have kids makes staying late optional :).

------
impendia
Legal and ethical issues aside, if there are indeed excellent older people who
are being passed over, then businesses have an opportunity.

~~~
asdfdsa1234
This. If irrational bias is undervaluing a class of workers, firms can gain an
advantage by hiring those workers, ceteris paribus.

~~~
muzz
In theory, yes. I'm not claiming to have the answers, but clearly we don't
always see this play out that way. There are many examples of in other
industries of undervalued talent not being utilized, things like the absence
of black quarterbacks in the NFL for many years, etc

------
mililani
This is why I'm leaving the field for healthcare at the age of 39. I saw the
writing on the wall when I worked in SV for over 10 years. I saw how young
most of the employees were at most of the start ups and smaller companies. I
saw that the older folks worked at tired corporate cogs such as IBM--nothing
wrong with that, just not for me. I also saw that these older folks were just
not capable of keeping up with the rapidly changing field. In fact, I worked
with one guy in his late 50's or early 60's who had a Ph.D. from CalTech in
EE, and he either would keep forgetting, or not understanding, what Telnetting
or SSH'ing into another machine was about. I remember working with the guy and
setting up a distributed monitoring system, and we were SSH'ed into several
different machines on his laptop. The way he kept stumbling through the
installation and configuration of each machine was pretty disheartening to
see. That wasn't the only older person I've worked with who had trouble
keeping up. It was ALL of them. Mind you this was at IBM, so I don't know if
it was the corporate culture that eventually did these guys in or their age. I
will never know. What I did eventually realize is that I needed to find a
different career. So, here I am, 39 and starting a graduate program in health
care.

~~~
filereaper
Thank you for your comment.

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.

~~~
hga
" _Since client /server has been around the 60's from System 360...._"

Eh??? What was the client to the 360's server?

(Then again I never actually did IBM mainframe programming at that level.)

------
od2m
Startups are not looking for great engineers. THEY'RE LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO
WILL TAKE ABUSE. Older folks will not take abuse.

------
engineer40
I've recently given up on applying for jobs with startups in Silicon Valley
for this very reason.

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.

~~~
_random_
"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."

Not everyone is capable of going those ways. I hope there is a cure for
ageing. Western civilization desperately needs it.

~~~
eugenejen
East Asian societies needs it, too. Dropping birthdate in CJK has caused
middle aged people to work longer in life. But same ageism exists in tech
business.

~~~
_random_
That's true. In my defence, Japan's plan seems to be investing in domestic
robotics :).

------
asdfdsa1234
The flip side of this is that the economy has been absolutely grim for young,
inexperienced workers for several years. SV is a small bright spot for the
Lost Generation; boomers should cede it gracefully.

------
mwfunk
SF and SV are very different places, in terms of the types of tech work
available and what sorts of companies are hiring. I strongly get the sense
from talking to people that the SF job market is much more biased towards
startups, whereas SV is more of a combination of startups, huge companies like
Cisco and Google, and everything in between. Also, I've got to think that
there are vastly more jobs in SV to begin with, just based on population if
nothing else.

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.

~~~
auctiontheory
Very good point, and just as true on the business side. Basically, as your
value to your particular employer (because of proprietary knowledge)
increases, you cannot assume that your value on the open market will also
increase. In fact, the reverse is often the case.

------
fiatmoney
There definitely seems to be a demographic bubble in the programmer
population. Should we expect that as the population of programmers itself
ages, we'll see less age discrimination? Or is the bubble itself a product of
age discrimination?

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?

~~~
engineer40
There was a previous demographic bubble when the dotcom era meant that all the
jocks who would have become lawyers switched to getting CS degrees, despite
not really being hackers. Now the same thing is happening, only they want to
"do a startup".

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.

------
jswinghammer
I can't help but believe there is more going on here than just age. The reason
being my own experience with hiring the last decade or so. I don't see too
many older candidates come across my desk but I never really care much about
their age when they do interview with me. I'm just trying to find out
something simple:

\- 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.

~~~
DanBC
The research done is clear - you take two identical resumes but change the
ages[1], and then send these in to a bunch of advertised jobs.

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.

~~~
lutusp
> You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.

 _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...](http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-less/)

~~~
DanBC
Prescriptivists demand a difference between less and fewer.

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.)

~~~
lutusp
> Prescriptivists demand a difference between less and fewer. Those poor fools
> have lost!

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.

------
smurph
In my last job I had to lead a team of people and I had one developer in his
50s and one in his early 60s. They were fine, I loved working with them. The
guy in his 50s was just a awesome engineer who could code circles around me
and everyone else on the team and was still getting better every year. The
guys in his 60s wasn't as good, but he was on his second career after going
back to school for CS. So his technical knowledge level was about the same as
a 26 year old.

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.

------
mahyarm
People hire people who they relate to, and they tend to hire people close to
their age. In a company of many young people, they are more likely to hire
people close to their age. The startup in the south bay where I work tends to
have an average age of around early to mid middle age, with many young
families. There is also an age group with teenagers or children who have moved
out. I'm probably the 3rd or 4th youngest engineer in the company.

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.

------
riggins
I suspect there are 2 1/2 types of older workers.

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.

~~~
DanBC
Apply your idea to any other group facing discrimination.

It's abhorrent to blame discrimination on the people being discriminated
against by calling them dumb.

~~~
asdfdsa1234
What about dumb people? Anti-dumb discrimination is rampant in Silicon Valley.

------
nawitus
>To stay in the game, these readers urged, make sure your skills are up to
date, especially in areas like coding, and be prepared to work longer hours
and get paid less than you're used to.

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.

~~~
auctiontheory
Is experience (of more than a few years) actually useful in technical fields?
I think that's the underlying question. For web-development, the market seems
to be saying: no.

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.

~~~
epo
> Anecdote: I recently learned that Facebook and Amazon have teams dedicated
> to rebooting crashed servers

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.

~~~
auctiontheory
It is actually true. Unless both these engineers were lying to me when they
described their jobs. (Or unless I'm confabulating or hallucinating, I
suppose.)

------
michaelochurch
I turned 30 recently, and job searching does seem to become more infuriating
with age, but I think a big part of that (at least from what I've seen) is
that you don't even consider the bad opportunities, so the landscape seems
more limited only because you're that much more selective. I could be wrong,
but I don't think a competent 50-year-old programmer is excluded from _all_
jobs; I think it's more accurate that the list of jobs they would really want
has become short (and even if you're really good, people get rejected for all
kinds of reasons, and a short prospect list might have you shut out).

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.

