
How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley? - steven
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-can-we-achieve-age-diversity-in-silicon-valley-11a847cb37b7
======
DavidWoof
I'm in my 50s, and I used to say that I never saw age discrimination. Then a
couple of weeks ago, I interviewed for an Internet company, and my age and
experience was commented on by the majority of the interviewers. Which is
fine, since most of the comments were positive (e.g., we need people with more
experience because we have so many new graduates), but it was still a bit
strange.

Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly
hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other
tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered
that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it
with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in
bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well,
interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but
bad culture fit" euphemism.

As with all discrimination, the unnerving part is just not knowing. Was it
really age discrimination? Or maybe I just looked like this guy's hated father
or ex-boyfriend or something. Or maybe he's just a bad interviewer with low
skills, and really didn't understand the stuff I was telling him (I usually
sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those
questions); that's hard to judge when there's no follow-up questions. Or maybe
at the end of the day it was just money and the company didn't want to admit
it. Who knows? I'll never know, and I suspect the company won't either.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
Am I the only one who finds it crazy that at age 50+, ostensibly after working
in the industry for at least a couple of decades, a candidate would be
subjected to inane technical interviews and useless whiteboarding exercises?

I understand that folks have to do what they need to do to stay employed, so
opting out isn't possible for everyone, but this is pure insanity.

~~~
jerf
Unfortunately, I've interviewed people with 20 years of experience who were
only marginally more skilled than someone with two or three years. The "1 year
of experience ten times" effect is unfortunately a real one.

For those of you who are early in your career, be sure to keep trying new
things out every so often. It's really easy to get trapped because it sneaks
up on you; you shouldn't be trying something new every week, because you need
some depth, but if you've gone a year with nothing new tried, you may be in
some trouble.

And be sure your "something new" is a new _type_ of thing, not just a new
thing. Learning Python, then PHP, then Ruby, then Perl, is really just
learning one thing, maybe 1.5 things. You ought to be learning a dynamic
language, then a static one, then maybe SQL, then learning about reliable
cloud programming, then perhaps a full functional language, then perhaps go
write a GUI with a conventional GUI toolkit, then learn some dynamic front-end
Web programming, write a compiler, write a network app starting from sockets,
use SSL for something serious, etc. etc. IMHO, the truth is that the
programming world doesn't move that fast, but part of the illusion that it
does is that it is quite a big _bigger_ than meets the eye at first. It looks
like it is moving quickly because there are things that look _new to you_ all
the darned time. But under the hood, progress is actually pretty slow.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
> Unfortunately, I've interviewed people with 20 years of experience who were
> only marginally more skilled than someone with two or three years. The "1
> year of experience ten times" effect is unfortunately a real one.

If you are not capable of identifying these people without spending hours of
staff time and engaging in whiteboarding exercises, something is very wrong in
my opinion. The person you're describing will not be able to pass a thoughtful
15 minute phone screen, and that's if a phone screen even happens because this
type of candidate probably doesn't make it past a resume review if the person
reviewing the resume is qualified.

~~~
g8gggu89
How exactly do you think a resume review will reveal how in depth they went on
projects and coding? Or even a 15 minute phone screen that has no coding
involved? It's pretty easy to list interesting sounding projects you worked on
and not mention that you had only minor involvement in them. I'd love to know
what questions will actually reveal this.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
A _good_ resume from an experienced candidate will describe the work the
candidate actually performed. A resume that is ambiguous as to the candidate's
contributions is usually worth tossing.

In the case of a phone screen, I honestly find it hard to believe that folks
have so much difficulty believing that it's possible to get a good sense of a
candidate's skill and knowledge without sitting over his or her shoulder and
watching him or her code. A phone screen is a conversation. In most cases, a
candidate who is faking it will have a very hard time describing in technical
detail his or her work, and answering technical questions about his or her
work.

Start with candidates who have good resumes. Ideally get code samples and/or a
portfolio. Prepare for your phone screen so you can ask good questions. It
really is that simple.

~~~
cpitman
A resume can say _anything_. Some of it may even be true. So how are you
telling the difference between a _good_ resume and a _faked good_ resume? It's
just like spam filtering, both the candidates and companies are in an arms
race to try to improve/bypass hiring filters.

~~~
7Figures2Commas
This level of paranoia is kind of amusing.

If you take the time to review a resume thoroughly and ask thoughtful
technical questions about a candidate's past work in the phone screen, the
phone screen is almost always going to be a painful and embarrassing
experience for a lying candidate. And such a candidate will virtually never
make it past a reference check.

The problem is that most companies are lazy. Hiring managers don't read
resumes closely and wing it (i.e. jump on phone screens without preparing).
Reference checks? What are those?

~~~
g8gggu89
It's hilarious that you think this is paranoia. I almost wish I could live in
your rose-tinted world, where no one lied ever, references were a good way to
judge coding ability, and apparently all new grads magically have relevant
references.

People can memorize the key features of OOP, but still not be able to use it.
So do you not hire new grads? Do you never hire someone with an extensive
background in C, because you dare not quiz anyone and you don't want to risk
hiring someone who can't really ever get a handle on OOP? Are you going to pay
the total cost of all these people, who probably won't last 3 months?

What's even sillier is that I bet most people, given the option, would prefer
to try solving some small problems for a short period of time if they knew it
could help their chances of getting the job. Why wouldn't you if you knew you
were competent?

------
ThomPete
You can look at this from a slightly different angle:

 _"...It is often said that “Youth is wasted on the young”. Based on my little
spare time study, in this context, it seems truer than ever.

The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no
financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to
these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems
primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing
products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time
and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than
fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing.

On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a
lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them
because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide
for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly
vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve
things in a new technological paradigm.

So I now realized that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply
don’t know of, because the people who are exposed to them aren’t connected
with the people who have the opportunity and creativity and energy to solve
them. Which begs the question:

Are the old and young generations wildly underutilizing each other as
resources? ..."_

[http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems](http://000fff.org/the-problem-
with-problems)

~~~
hacknat
To piggy-back of off this. The hidden problems aren't just extensions of old-
age experience vs young-age experience (i.e. social-network vs hospice
placement). It's often domain expertise vs none. There are so many older folks
out there who have had decades of experience in one domain that none of us
have even heard of, or are only, maybe, vaguely aware of. They are aware of
that domain's problems, know most of the key players, etc.

My father is a Director-level exec at a Fortune 100 company, and I've talked
to him, ad nauseam, about the problems he wishes the enterprise line-of-
business crapware his company keeps purchasing would actually solve. I keep
trying to convince him to strike out and do something, and have even offered
to go in on something with him, but he's just too comfortable. He has more
than enough money, and he's decided to retire early if he doesn't get the next
promotion he's gunning for.

He was recently honored by the trade association of the domain he's an
executive in (I guess there's no harm in saying it's logistics). I'm sure the
contacts he has would send a startup hurtling into the stratosphere within a
few years. How many people are like him out there, who are going to waste all
their domain expertise on retirement or the next promotion?

I feel like someone needs to write a manifesto to the older and successful
among us about how they owe it to themselves and the younger generation to
disrupt the industries they've been leading for so long. These fat-cat, lazy
ass, companies just get to skate by on pure inertia.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
>These fat-cat, lazy ass, companies just get to skate by on pure inertia.

How long before young and sexy startup becomes lazy fat cat nowadays? Maybe
ten years? So, now the older crowd needs to constantly re-do everything
because the younger guys got lazy? I'm not sure what the solution you're
advocating here is. Eventually, everyone becomes a fat cat it seems, at least
to the eyes of the new guy. I suspect the $bad_vendor or $bad_project isn't
that bad and the time/work commitment to constantly re-do it is non-trivial.
Especially if by the time you finish this big rewrite its already obsolete or
unlikeable in some way -- not HTML5 or not whatever is hot right now.

I think part of maturing is knowing how to recognize the grind and when to
actually disrupt it in some way. Is $boring_logistics app really the problem
that needs to be solved at $big_co? Arguably, the execs have better things to
do and that judgement is what we're paying them for. When it becomes a problem
they should know and address it, but to a young guy spoiled by ultra-shiny
ipad apps, well, that logistics interface looks "old and boring" but its
actually doing the job well.

> but he's just too comfortable.

Perhaps this is besides the point, but maybe there's a shelf-life on human
'can do' attitudes? Ten years ago I'd do anything that piqued my interest,
obsess over it, and now its a lot more difficult to get excited and motivated
especially if you have been in the grind long enough. At a certain point you
realize this is all folly. Another product, another roll out, another set of
unhappy/happy customers, another sales projection, another competitor to worry
about, another thing that will obsolete in a week, etc. From a psychological
perspective, we don't often talk about what it means to have a lifetime of
work under your belt. How does it affect us? Is it reasonable to spend ages
22-65 working in the same industry/focus?

Imagine if we put monkeys in a cube and forced them to do the same-ish things
for decades. We would probably be arrested for animal abuse. But its okay to
do to people apparently. Maybe have some sympathy for the codgers, they're as
much victims of this weird world we call work as anyone.

~~~
DaveWalk
This is an interesting question: is there a shelf life on "can do" attitudes?
I think just in allowing that this fact might be true changes my perspective
-- hinting that we might be in a kind of startup-frenzy groupthink even in
this discussion.

------
TimMeade
As an upper 40ish something who has been coding since I was 10, this one made
my day. So very very true.... but it's amazing how many 20 somethings are to
narrow in their thinking or too lacking in medium to long term vision on
projects and just hack together a bunch of web found code to make a non
extendable solution.

Then there are those who I call the 'google' generation, they just google the
problem and proclaim the number one result as the solution without really
understanding what and especially why the problem really is occurring.

Every generation has it's exceptions, but also each has their share of
averages. Great article, nice way to start Monday morning.

~~~
throwaway13337
I also developed before web framework proliferation and stackoverflow.

I see most of these things as speed boosts. If you take the rose colored
glasses off, in the old days - we simply worked slower on easier (though more
interesting) problems. We didn't have to deal with so much damn integration
and the mountain of spaghetti we've built!

The non extendable solution gets the job done as well. No need to worry about
'technical debt' when the vast majority of your projects never see scale.
Moving faster is better.

When I see a developer wasting too much time on the above - not googling the
solution, spending too much time overengineering, and not using the libraries
available (not hacking together components)... well, I guess I'm disappointed.

In the old days, I did think more in your terms. I changed to fit the needs of
the time.

~~~
Jtsummers
Technical debt is not an issue, just, of scaling code (presumably you mean to
large numbers of connections or database sizes or something). It's really an
issue of maintenance. The more technical debt you have on a project, the
longer any round of maintenance will take. Even simple tools that are just
slapped together quickly might be easier to rewrite than modify, but rewriting
them each time results in a different sort of technical debt. Implementation X
has features used by user A, implantation Y has features used by user B, so
now both tools have to be maintained or you try for Implementation Z that
tries to pull it all back together (but probably fails, because you're still
not properly budgeting time and engineers).

Overengineering is still a problem, but underengineering is the one I run into
more often.

~~~
TimMeade
Oh i agree with both of these responses. It's not that google is a bad thing,
personally i laugh at how we used to have a wall of books to run to. It's more
of the 'take the first google hit' that i was referring to. Not understanding
how routing in the firewall works, just throwing code that seems like it might
be what is occurring.

~~~
Jtsummers
Yeah, that's definitely a problem. I kind of miss the wall of books, though.
Though I came in at the tail end of that era (more while I was still in school
than after). I get a better understanding for things when I have a physical
resource to go to. It helps that I (apparently) have an above average memory,
but it works mostly by associating the physical act with the information I
learned (I remember notes by recalling literally writing them on the page, for
instance). So books seem to be more effective for conveying information to me
in a retainable way, and I imagine that I'm not unique. That many of my
colleagues with "terrible" memories are really just suffering from using the
wrong resources to learn subjects, something about the computer screen as
information source seems to stick less for people.

My pet theory: The lack of other senses involved. A book has smell, texture,
and then the physical act of turning pages. A lecturer versus a video, the
lecture hall at least has a smell and feel to it, and there's more variation,
less polish, on a live lecture compared to a video that's been thoroughly
edited.

------
jfmercer
I know a woman in her mid-60s who has been programming since the late 1960s.
She's much more than an "experienced dev": she is a sage, a teacher, and a
grand-master of the art of computer programming: a true engineer in the very
core of her being. Yet she can't find steady employment. She believes that is
because of age discrimination, and I cannot help but to agree with her.

~~~
TheCondor
Is she a badass engineer or is she a sage? I don't mean it to be offensive but
I've worked with oldtymers that wanted to coach more than actually do. They
have tremendous knowledge and experience but if they're advisors or extra
managers, they aren't building; some companies need and can afford that and
value it, a lot of startup type places see that as an extra cost.

Our industry has these polar ethos that are pretty deep: one group sees old
product that has stood the test of time as an indicator of quality. Like "UNIX
has been around over 40 years, it clearly did some things right." The other,
and it's insanely popular right now, thinks that anything that is too old
clearly has some damage and its no longer good technology, like the neovim
crowd, "vim doesn't even use the newest C standards features.." Some times you
have to believe that you're doing something different and everybody did it
wrong before and that's while you'll succeed this time, that's how you take
the risk and ignore the downsides. being old can be a detriment to that
belief.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
To evaluate whether _age_ can be used as a descriminator for those attitudes
and behaviors, I suggest you substitute "woman" or "black" and see how that
reads.

There are young people who will only use the tools they are comfortable with.
Ageism is the mistaken belief that this is somehow associated with your most
recent birthday, akin to astrology.

~~~
TheCondor
I'm not endorsing or accepting discrimination, I simply offered up a meek
rationalization as I see it.

Honestly, if you find and older person that _wants_ to work at a startup,
there is a good chance that they could be doing a few things right to have
that energy and drive. You want to know how they live and what they do.

------
Fradow
No one seems to talk about the elephant in the room: salary. Isn't a more
experienced person going to cost more? Are you going to feel comfortable
offering them a low salary (relative to their experience), because that's all
you got to offer?

And the other way around, even if you would love to have an experienced
developer, what do you do if for the same salary you can get an average
developer (who will get the job done, because you already have experienced
enough people to help), and another profile (sales for exemple)?

This is especially true at small companies, where there just isn't that much
latitude to adjust the salary.

~~~
rmah
Perhaps, but it's not like you have to pay 2x or 3x more to hire a programmer
in their 50's. More like 20% or 30% more. For 200% to 300% more experience.
That's a deal, in my book.

~~~
throwaway101916
It depends. It's possible to find a younger programmer who is less confident
in their skills or vastly underestimates his net worth. This tends to
normalize with age and experience, so an older programmer with the same
skillset is likely going to be more expensive simply because they know how
much they can ask for.

Similar to the effect of women being paid less because they are less likely to
ask for raises.

------
edw519
60+, programming for 44 years, triumphed over adversity more times than I can
recall, wimpy looking nerd discounted by almost everyone I ever met. Hardly
ever got the girl, got to be on the team, got the part, or got the job.

I'm a programmer because I can code, and at the end of the day, that's all
that really matters.

You can hate on another person because they're too old or too ugly or too
nerdy or too black or too female or too gay or too anything else, but the real
beauty of our field is that success is binary and relatively easy to measure:

    
    
      1. Can you build it?
      2. Does what you build matter to someone else?
    

I've always considered rejection for any reason a self solving problem: if
you're too stupid to accept me (whether you're in Silicon Valley or not), then
I would have never wanted to work with you anyway. I'll find someone else who
understands the value I produce and can provide the environment in which I can
thrive.

Life is unfair, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not about the unfairness,
it's about our response to the unfairness.

There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building
software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're
like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do.
So go do it.

~~~
onion2k
_95% of the battle is what you can do._

If you're in a minority group that suffers discrimination then that
discrimination skews the balance away from being 95% what you can do to more
like 50% what you can do and 50% what colour/gender/sexuality/age/etc you are.
And a big chunk of the 50% that's discrimination is the fact that people
outside of your minority grossly underestimate how much of an issue
discrimination is.

If you see something that's unfair it's not especially reasonable to just
ignore it with a "Life is unfair" line.

~~~
Jhsto
I think what he is trying to say that it is possible to publish an app or
service online and gain momentum completely by marketing it on the web. In
such case, I do not see how your color/gender/sexuality/age/etc would matter.
You could hide yourself behind a domain and nobody would ever care who runs or
maintains the thing.

~~~
s73v3r
It would be nice to have a job with which you can pay rent and buy food, and
pay for that web hosting.

------
techterrier
Funnily enough, working 80 hour weeks for stock isn't really much of a winner
if you have a mortgage to pay and or mouths to feed. The ping pong table
doesn't make up for it either.

------
leroy_masochist
A few comments here saying that salary is the elephant in the room, which is a
valid point, but I think the biggest elephant is the insecurity which lurks in
the heart of every entrepreneur.

Co-founder/C_O types in their early 20s are often intimidated by people 35 and
older, especially when those people have a long record of working in tech and
all the war stories to prove it. The thought of hiring such a person, even
when they are superbly qualified for the job and amenable to the compensation
package, makes young entrepreneurs a bit uncomfortable.

I think there are two specific fears that drive this feeling of discomfort.
First is the fear that older employees might see right through the fact that
they have no idea what they're doing and call them out on it.

Second is the fear that older people will destroy the culture through their
relative lack of enthusiasm and exuberance. In young founders' minds, it's
better to hire someone who's been drinking legally for all of 18 months and
who can be counted on to nod earnestly when you talk about "our mission" at
the all-hands.

~~~
ckozlowski
In sports (I'll use Hockey as my example here), teams that are going through a
rebuilding phase to stock up on young talent will often bring in a few
veterans, players who are past their prime physical ability but are deep on
wisdom and experience. Their presence there is to stabilize the new players.
They (often) provide a calming presence ("Down by 2 and 3 minutes left? Bah,
been here plenty of times. Don't panic.") and provide leadership.

However, you won't see them wearing the Captain's "C". That's the job of your
young star that the team is coalescing around. Instead, he's there to be the
mentor, the teacher, and build the new for their role and help them avoid
mistakes. Lemieux mentored Crosby. Sergei Federov mentored and played
alongside a rising Alex Ovechkin. The older guys were well established. They'd
been young, excelled, failed, and seen it all. They had valuable lessons to
impart and weren't as prone to panic or mood-swings.

Startups have some good resources in organizations like YC to get that level
of mentor-ship, but perhaps it would be worthwhile during that incubation
phase to impart on those new companies not to dismiss your older workforce.
Making your new founders understand that they're not to be feared, but
consulted as a source of wisdom could steer them around potential mistakes,
and provide that steadfastness when the cluster craps itself at 2AM.

Of course you want everyone to believe in your vision, even if there's some
skepticism, you need people behind you to succeed. It's perfectly reasonable
to evaluate on that.

But if I were in charge of an incubator, I'd be instructing that founder that,
when she or he is building that young crack team, grab a few veterans as well.
They're in this for the long run.

The Cup awaits.

------
donatj
This is my biggest fear as I enter my 30s in a number of months. I've been
programming professionally since I was 20 and for fun since 10 - I can't
imagine having to do something else, it's what I was born to do. I'm still
relatively young but I just got married and the long hours and complete
commitment I used to wear as a badge of honor no longer seems appealing.

Am I going to be able to do this for the rest of my career? I honestly doubt
it, but I have no idea what I would do instead. My father was a draftsman for
years and made good money but the market for draftsmen completely dropped out
and he spent the last fifteen years of his career unlocking doors at a school.
I have such a strong desire to stay relevant but I can't spend nearly as much
time studying as I used to even a year or two ago. Sigh.

~~~
agentultra
You'll be fine.

I'm a few years ahead of you. I had the same fears. I was newly married and
didn't feel like I was ahead of the game. I'm now 33 and have a house and two
kids. It's a trip but I'm still a programmer somehow.

Companies come and go. They go on huge hiring sprees and then either go under
or layoff people in a few years. Few, if any, will invest in you long-term or
care about the stability of your family. So don't count on having a career
path the resembles anything like what your parents or grandparents enjoyed.

"Retirement," doesn't seem like something on the menu for people in our
generation or the ones to come.

So plan for it yourself. Education is your best, first defense. Study the
right things (Maths should be the top of the list IMO). Next plan to save
everything you can and spread it out into investments in a good balance of
stocks and bonds. If you decide to have kids start an education fund right
away and look into any grants or assistance you can get from your local
government to kick-start it; if they do better than you in life then chances
are your retirement will be fairly comfortable.

You can still stay sharp. You just have to change the yardstick. My young
friends always talk about the latest languages or frameworks but it always
comes back to data structures and transformations. I've just learned to be
more picky about how I spend my time because once we started having kids I've
had far less of it to waste.

~~~
fohara
I think this is solid advice. I continue learning by picking
problems/inconveniences I encounter while working during the day, and then
doing whatever research is required to make those things less inconvenient. In
the process of researching the problem space, I'm often introduced to new
programming concepts and tools that I would have otherwise never known about.
Overall, I find it easier to learn new things if I have a real problem I'm
trying to solve.

------
tatx
While most of us are pointing fingers at the fast-changing nature of and
innovation-craziness in the tech industry, I think the core reason may be
quite the opposite.

It seems plausible that the tech industry, innovation-wise, is actually in a
rut where companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people
whom they have to pay less. The changes happening in the industry today are of
a fickle and shallow kind, not fundamental and lasting. And in an evolution-
like process the older amongst us, who are the only ones with enough
experience to really innovate, are being driven out of the ecosystem and
forced to disrupt an industry going stale.

~~~
pjc50

      > companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less
    

.. and yet still starts up in Silicon Valley, among the highest salaries and
real-estate prices in the world.

~~~
wellsjohnston
What's your point?

~~~
mikekchar
The salary for any given employee is not a limiting factor. I think this is
true. Even when you have a _very_ limited budget, many places will prefer to
be under head count with a higher performing team. If you can get that guy who
is going to let you avoid running down rabbit holes all day, every day, they
are worth the extra bucks.

I think the problem is that these people are hard to find -- whether young or
old.

~~~
VLM
"I think the problem is that these people are hard to find -- whether young or
old."

Find as employees, and its harder to find them as they get old. I've already
found myself, my family and I have a high standard of living without having to
put up with open offices, long commutes, cult like office culture, more than
80 hours a week, or less than six month runway till we're all unemployed.
Maybe I could be convinced to consult? The odds of this being the situation at
42 are a bit higher than at 22 and the odds rise over time.

Life is different now, WRT culture fit, for example, a quarter century ago
employers didn't care about my religion or lack thereof, or my reading matter
or hobbies, but now its all about everyone trying to fake that they're the
same 22 year old kid, which is really weird. I think I'm a pretty good actor
and if I got accepted into a cult like environment, it would be really weird
for everyone when I stopped acting, so I'm not sure hiring people based on
acting skills is necessarily producing culture fit to begin with.

Strangely, I'm told that the best work teams have great interview actors
and/or really are groupthinkers of the highest (lowest?) caliber, yet
observation and experience show the most productive teams I've seen have been
fairly diverse. Maybe they're trying to select for the best liars in
interviews. (Yeah boss, just like you said, groupthink is awesome!)

------
smikhanov
It seems like ageism in tech is subject to a different dynamics compared to
sexual or racial diversity.

With age comes more work experience and most SV companies (even the unicorns)
usually don't need it. Most of them is driven by pretty trivial tech anyways.
As soon as you start looking into technically challenging fields, you see more
and more older people: Sebastian Thrun is in his late 40s, Guido van Rossum is
almost 60. People like Doug Lea, Lars Bak, Martin Odersky, Fabrice Bellard,
Matthew Dilon, Simon Peyton-Jones etc are all well beyond their 20s.

It makes perfect business sense. It's an overkill (and a recipe for disaster)
to hire someone of that stature to build you a website. There's also nothing
special about tech in this regard: if 90% of all legal work in the world
could've been done by a paralegal, law firms would all be full of cheerful 20
somethings.

~~~
bluetomcat
Exactly my thoughts. You don't see a lot of twenty-something hipster types
writing memory allocators, device drivers, kernels and critical middleware.
Yet, the industry nowadays is dominated by people who believe that cobbling
together a single-page application using the latest, shiniest framework is at
the edge of tech excellence.

~~~
steveklabnik
In my experience, a significant portion of the hobbyist operating systems
community is highschool or college students, actually.

------
rongenre
What I've noticed in tech is that the further you are from the [being polite]
demographic core -- the better you need to be.

In the context of this discussion, there's room for you as an older employee,
but the way it seems to work is you need to be really really good at your
jobs. Because when you make the inevitable human mistakes, the number of years
you've been at it is _always_ brought up.

~~~
amyjess
I have to wonder how much of that is discrimination and how much of that is
salary mechanics.

More experienced people demand higher salaries. When I apply for a new job, I
expect a higher salary than my old job, and I'll use my experience to justify
it.

Typically, older people have more experience and thus ask for a salary to
match. When you're asking for a high salary, companies generally want to know
that you're good enough to justify that salary. Companies aren't going to put
that kind of pressure on a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old because such a
person is going to be working for peanuts.

~~~
aianus
> Companies aren't going to put that kind of pressure on a fresh-out-of-
> college 22-year-old because such a person is going to be working for
> peanuts.

22-year-olds don't work for peanuts in SV. They make double the median
_family_ income in the US _before_ stock.

~~~
s73v3r
We're speaking relatively. In the context of the conversation, it makes
absolutely no difference what someone working in a McDonalds in rural
Wisconsin makes. We're talking about the cost of engineers. And compared to
people who do have experience, they're working for cheap.

~~~
aianus
It's somewhat irrelevant how much money you're being paid between $100k and
$300k.

I know from experience there's not enough free time to spend that much money
anyways so unless I'm getting a part-time job or I'm trying to retire early or
something it's not a priority.

After $100k I'm going to start looking at other priorities like equity, how
interesting the work is, food and ping pong tables and so on. It wouldn't make
any sense to further pad my 401k or whatever at the expense of my day-to-day
happiness.

~~~
s73v3r
Depends on where you live. In the Bay Area, the difference between $100k and
even just $150k is quite a bit in terms of housing.

------
littletimmy
I cannot help but think that companies dislike older people because they don't
put up with that much bullshit.

You can underpay a young (naive) person, make them work 12+ hours a day, if
they get disgruntled pacify them with a nerf gun fight or catered lunch. Older
people might not go for gimmicks and ask for appropriate working hours and
reasonable vacation time etc. That puts off the corporate types.

~~~
csixty4
And the yelling/bullying. What is it with managers at startups and yelling? I
got enough of that growing up. I have zero patience for it from my boss.

~~~
MisterBastahrd
Yep, that I draw a paycheck from your company does not mean that I am paid to
put up with your shit. I don't care that your wife is cheating on you, or your
kid set your dog on fire, or your mom is dying of lupus. If you can't keep
that shit at home where it belongs, then you need to stop trying to manage
people because you can't even manage yourself.

------
codeonfire
I recently went through a job search and began writing off companies that were
all 20-somethings who obviously didn't have a lot of interviewing skill. I
would say bias against older interviewees is 100% politics. Many of these
interviewers were not experienced. They knew they wanted to be top dog in
their respective department,s and thought that it was in their best interest
to keep experienced people out. It's not until they go through a few cycles of
pain and disappointment do developers start to want to work with experienced
people. It's not out of respect. It's because they now understand that they
are only hurting themselves and want someone to relieve their workload. Mid-
tier and experienced interviewers loved me. Early career people tried very
hard to throw their best curve-balls, but I had already spent a week working
problems. In the end, one company in particular, Facebook, simply just said
that I answered correctly but answered too 'slowly.' I knew they had cracked
when I heard that word.

~~~
raincom
'Slowly' is another thing going on in the industry, not just facebook. They
want 'speed' with 'correctness'. I don't know where this leads to.

~~~
codeonfire
It leads to interview arms race. People will try to find ways around any sort
of objective measure devised. Soon we'll have sexiness! "Your code works. You
were fast and correct but just not sexy enough. Thanks for stopping in."

------
DrNuke
Let's go the the very core of this: smart old people are massively more
productive than fresher minds. They know the fundamentals and they know the
tricks, they also know themselves and their needs. They can tell youngsters
that you are wasting your time and they are right. Point is: youngsters need
to waste their time in order to learn life, the trade and -in this
environment- in order to get something really new out of their own evolving
needs in an evolving world. A corollary is that domain-specific applied
problems are probably better suited to older people but unpredictable ways are
easier to come from fresher minds.

------
tamaatar
I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.

For older people, who have experience building stuff,e.g-software developers
who have done some development in their life- they are worth their weight in
gold. BUT most older people I work or have worked with, they are not all
developers. People like sysadmins,IT people, sharepoint admins, automation
managers,DBAs,Managers some system architects etc- I have seen some common
traits- 1) They have no enthusiasm for work. Work is not even secondary for
them. Its the last thing

2) They either think they are doing hard work or act like they work hard.
Exaggerate all issues or whatever work they did even if its just an
installation

3) No passion for technology 4) Do not want to learn anything new 5) Don't
care about above, because its time for their retirement and so they don't care
what others think

Given this, if I were building a team, I would lean towards the younger crowd.
Unless the older person has experience building stuff.

~~~
brlewis
>I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.

Yes, you are going to get a lot of flak. I'll start. Yes, it's your personal
experience. Personal experience is where prejudice usually comes from. If you
get beat up by 3 people in green tee shirts, you're going to cross the street
to avoid people in green tee shirts. That's the way our brains are wired. It's
natural. It's instinct.

It's also natural to pee on the sidewalk when we feel the urge. But we
suppress that instinct because society functions better when we do. Similarly,
society functions better when we suppress our natural prejudices while
interviewing. We use our intellect to remind ourselves that there are people
who don't fit the mold of our personal experience, and force ourselves to
interview one person the same as anybody else.

And you keep doing it even after interviewing several people who _do_ fit the
pattern you've seen previously.

------
felixgallo
My very favorite interview question ever, from when I was 41, posed by a fresh
UCLA grad: "do you think a gentleman of your age can interact with programmers
today?"

------
datashovel
I have been brought in, as an independent contractor, at the tail end of
enough projects to "salvage" them to have a somewhat cynical point of view on
this.

In all of the worst cases the projects probably had no one over 25 working on
them.

I'd figure eventually enough money will have been lost on such failed projects
for tech companies to change their minds on this.

~~~
chipsy
As long as the industry keeps growing quickly, we'll keep seeing teams that
consist entirely of inexperienced youth.

I think the only thing that distinguishes now from previous periods in the
software industry is that there is less of a engineering-driven culture in the
companies - product and sales more frequently take a leading role, and the
technology used is cheap and accessible enough that bad developers can still
make a go of it, get the business through launch and into profitability(albeit
with catastrophic bugs, no security, no backups, etc.).

------
mikekchar
There seems to be some assumptions that companies prefer to hire younger
people. I have yet to see that, myself (getting close to 50). When I was
interviewing people, I was _looking_ for older people with good transferable
skills. We just couldn't find anyone. However, I think that there are some
caveats.

When people are young, you tend to cut them some slack. You don't really know
how they are going to turn out in a few years. You hire someone with the hope
that they will improve quickly over the short term. When people are older, you
have a track record to look at. Sometimes it is very obvious that they have
had a hard time of it in their career.

The end result is not that people prefer younger people to older people, it's
that they prefer unknown quantities to known, poorly performing quantities. If
there is someone with an exceptionally good track record over a long period of
time and who can do a good interview -- my experience is that they will be
snapped up quickly.

I don't really buy the idea that length of employment is a serious issue
either. Attrition in IT is huge and I never assume that _anyone_ is going to
last more than 2 or 3 years.

------
netcan
I think some, perhaps most of this effect is related to the growth of the
industry. Far fewer 25 year olds started a career in coding in 1990 than 2015.
Fewer 25 year old coders in 1990, fewer 50 year olds in 2015.

That dynamic has existed for a while. When Gates' & Wozniak's generation
started coding it was an unusual pursuit. Age gaps became part of the
demographics. Like everything else, being common translates into being normal.

Other than that, I think there is a little more attrition in coding.
Experience is important, but current knowledge is too. SV startups are
riskier, so more appealing more to younger people. They use new technology, so
less of a comparative advantage for old skills.

I'm not saying discrimination doesn't exist, I'm just saying that demographics
play a big role explaining the average age. Some of the discrimination that
does exist likely comes from simple human pattern matching. That's not what a
coder looks like. All the coders I know are 25-40.

If I'm right, time will fix this.

~~~
ASinclair
A relatively well known 60+ dev would agree with you:
[http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html](http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-
bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html)

~~~
edc117
This is an underrated comment. The data is right there; even if you disagree
with the author's conclusions, it's pretty hard to argue he's incorrect about
the correlation between knowledge and age. Here's to hoping I'll be one of
those older programmers in 15 years.

------
SCAQTony
YMMV, I am 58 and I am a UI designer. In my 30's I thought I would be
unemployable by 40-years-old due to exceptional "kids" in their 20's who were
either as good as me but less expensive or who were better, more current, and
available for the same price. This paranoia has kept me employable.

My experience is that your rate has to match the quality of your work not your
experience or names of the NASDAQ 100 companies you worked for. If you are
simply equal to the competition then you drop your rate. If you're better you
match the rate.

------
alecco
It's too late and too hard to change SV/YC cultre. The Zuckerberg-wannabes
have a mantra that after 30 you get slow and incompetent.

The only realistic path is by making new startups like the WhatsApp guys did
and then the Zuckerbergs need to eat their words and shed some of their hard
earned billions or get stomped by some old programmers.

------
tlogan
One of my friends commented on this like this:

My friend: "You know, majority of actresses in porn are young so it make sense
that it same for Silicon Valley start ups".

Me: "Start ups are not porn"

My friend: "Yes they are"

Me: ... thinking... "Yes..."

------
uptownJimmy
I must admit that I feel myself to be in the monority of middle-aged people
who are aging kinda/sorta gracefully. That's not to brag, rather to point out
that I know a LOT of middle-aged people who don't seem full of vitality and
vigor, usually because of self-indulgent habits with food and drink.

I do wish that more of us were able to control our various appetites: the
evidence that we might have a hard time doing so tends to accumultate with
age.

~~~
mahouse
This is really important, must people overlook how eating healthy and doing
exercise helps. And it even makes you look 15 years younger!

~~~
JohnBooty
Yes. 39 here and I feel better now than I did in my 20s, and I can run a mile
faster now too so I at least have _some_ objective evidence I'm not totally
fooling myself. :)

I'm far from svelte today but I've really improved my life by taking better
care of my health.

To everybody in their 20s: the health-related stuff you can get away with in
your 20s (poor diet, no exercise) might be working for you now but it's not
going to fly forever!

------
devereaux
There are many interesting comments, but they neglect the intersections of
discrimination.

To put that simply:

a) it's hard for a >30 yo white male

b) it's hard for a >30 yo white female

c) it's hard for a >30 yo black female

a, b and c are correct -- but it's several times harder for c that for b than
for a.

------
api
This issue is intimately bound up with the workaholic culture issue. Older
people often have families and lives and aren't interested in 80 hour work
weeks, and they've also kind of wised up to the fact that someone demanding an
80 hour work week with the promise of (unspecified) riches is just using you.
SV's 80 hour work week culture is about exploiting naive young people and
burning them out.

If we can do something about that, then some companies might realize that
someone who's been coding for 35 years actually might know more than someone
who's been coding for 5.

------
lazyjones
It's all fine until you accidentally hire people whose age doesn't correlate
with their experience and maturity. 2 years of getting by as a fine-tongued
know-it-all impostor with mediocre technical skills is fixable with some
effort, 25 years are not.

That said, there are some extremely valuable older devs out there. It's a pity
that most employers cannot afford paying them an appropriate salary.

~~~
marktangotango
I think this is a key insight; experience demands compensation. The question I
have is; when is the experience really necessary? I took a job once, I was
recommended by a former colleague to the dev maanger of a fast growing
company. I was one of the best developers this person had ever known (I found
out later this is how I was sold). I even flubbed a couple of the technical
interview questions, but was still hired at my required salary.

My work at this company consisted of maintaining an application written in
framework X (where X had long since fallen out of favor). The idea was to
rewrite, but due to business requirements this never happened. Had they done
the rewrite, my salary and experience would have been justified, but doing
maintenance on an old app? They could've gotten a green or junior dev to do
that for half the price.

~~~
matwood
What lazyjones was alluding to is that time != experience. A 25 year dev
veteran who has just done the same code over and over has very little
experience.

I've seen this while interviewing people. Person has 5 years experience on
their resume, but it turns out they really have about 3 mos. experience. They
got the job, learned it in about 3 mos. and just repeated it over over and
with minor tweaks. Part of the blame is the company for no growth path and
part is on the employee.

To the original point. Where I work now only 2 of the 7 devs are under 30, and
they will both be 30 soon. Having this level of experience lets us build
things very quickly. It also lets the business side trust the dev team to
usually make the right decisions on the fly.

~~~
pluma
As they[who?] say:

Sometimes "20 years of experience" turns out to be just "one year of
experience, 20 times over".

------
marknutter
Let companies avoid older programmers at their peril. The companies that do
hire them will do much better by avoiding reinventing wheels, repeating the
mistakes of the past, and losing valuable tribal knowledge due to high
turnover rates. I firmly believe that nothing "needs to be done" about lack of
diversity in work places because the penalty for avoiding candidates based on
gender or ethnicity will levied slowly over time.

Interviews should be conducted online without any indication what race or
gender the applicant is. Their work and expertise should speak for itself. I
also think trying to find people who "fit the culture" is a terrible way to
hire. On the surface it seems to make sense because interpersonal
communication is half the battle, but it's usually code for "hire people like
us" so even though you may try to hire more diverse people on a visual basis,
you'll end up hiring less diverse people on a personality basis which can be
just as bad.

------
pervycreeper
Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons
are for preferring younger candidates over older ones, and then compare those
same justifications transposed unto other well represented vs.
underrepresented groups _mutatis mutandis_. If the reasoning is unacceptable
in the latter case, why not the former?

~~~
yummyfajitas
I can think of at least 2.

1) A young company, light on technical background, has build a castle on
webscale sand. A few of the smarter young folks have become experts in this
system, and get a lot of clout by solving "difficult" problems. Suddenly an
old guy comes along and says "lets just use MySQL and CREATE INDEX".
Basically, he's been there, done that, and realized that J2EE + MySQL will get
the job done with a minimum of fuss, or that the "simplification" that comes
from denormalizing carries a huge maintenance penalty.

This old guy threatens the young "experts" \- if the system is rebuilt
according to industry standards, suddenly they are just another dev.

2) The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and
outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory,
FooBarFactoryFactory, etc.

You can't transpose these justifications onto non-Asian minorities, women,
etc. A non-Asian minority or female 25 year old is fundamentally equivalent to
a white/Asian 25 year old male. Nodejs is equally "close to the metal"
regardless of your demographics.

Tech in 1996 was radically different - a CD ROM filled with a small subset of
wikipedia was actually a _huge technical challenge_. As a result the old guy
_really is different_.

On a personal note, at my current company I'm both the oldest techie and also
the only techie who isn't a member of the majority ethnic group (sliced in US
terms, at least). My age is a significant factor - I'm sometimes out of touch
(I know fuckall about angular.js) and sometimes I'm the voice of experience
(we should have a metrics server and use it for all the things). My ethnic
diversity is completely irrelevant.

~~~
yodsanklai
> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and
> outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory

Garbage collectors have been around since the 60s with LISP.

I find it amusing to see that the first language I was taught in an academic
setting in 1996, Caml Light (ancestor of OCaml), is still very relevant today!

~~~
TeMPOraL
Pretty much everything that is "new and hot" was done in 60s and 70s with Lisp
and Smalltalk, only smarter and better. Hell, even a day or two ago we had an
article pointing out that React is basically rediscovered WinAPI. The old
guard that seems to be behind the current trends may in fact be _ahead_ ,
because they've seen how things went in the previous iteration.

As the saying goes, every field learns from its history - except software
development.

~~~
yummyfajitas
This is true only for a very narrow set of "new and hot". Lisp and Smalltalk
did not "do" the modern, statically typed, inference and category theory heavy
languages that are rapidly growing. Dependent types were not "done" in
Lisp/Smalltalk.

There are also a lot of "new and hot" things which are not programming
language features at all - e.g., the lambda architecture, the rise of bayesian
inference, and other such things. Even relational databases - so old that it's
easy to forget they were "new and hot" (with good reason).

~~~
yodsanklai
> statically typed, inference and category theory heavy languages that are
> rapidly growing.

All of this is quite old too. As I said, I learned ML as an undergraduate in
96, 20 years ago. Back then, many "hackers" laughed about such languages.

Actually, that's why I think a more foundational CS curriculum is a good
thing, as opposed to those that are heavily based on technologies.

------
oberstein
Zuckerberg saying "Young people are just smarter" seems like an instance of
[https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-
law/](https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-law/) Age
discrimination exists because most of us have direct experience with family
members who diminish as they age, especially when these family members didn't
keep up a habit of doing intellectual intense things they did when they were
younger and instead spend increasing amounts of time watching sports and doing
crosswords. It's possible to be a badass programmer in your 80s, Knuth will be
one soon, but it's very rare. We thus shouldn't expect to have an equal
distribution of old people and young people, regardless of whether that's
desirable or not.

------
gyardley
There's certainly ageism in Silicon Valley, but if we magically got rid of it
tomorrow it's not like startups would suddenly be flooded by applicants my age
and older. Most older people select themselves out of Silicon Valley because
most older people have lives outside of work, and they're not going to put up
with the inefficient and pointless lets-all-work-twelve-hours-a-day bullshit
you so often get from entrepreneurs and coworkers in their mid-twenties.

If we really wanted to achieve age diversity in Silicon Valley, we'd not just
have to get rid of ageism, we'd have to change the work culture to something a
wee bit more rational - and that's just not going to happen as long as all the
major institutions glorify overwork to the point of burnout.

------
hwstar
1\. From the article: Age discrimination is one of the last places left where
employers can discriminate. This sounds to me like we need to reform some
discrimination laws at the federal level.

2\. I think that we need to go to a single-payer health insurance system and
get employers out of the business of providing health insurance. If this were
done, more employers would consider people over 50. The ACA helps in some
ways, but is an incomplete solution as the employer still has to offer and pay
up for health insurance, and older engineers are going to cost more in
premiums.

~~~
tomsthumb
> I think that we need to go to a single-payer health insurance system and get
> employers out of the business of providing health insurance. If this were
> done, more employers would consider people over 50.

I've always wondered if small businesses would be more interested in hiring
women in their 20's and early 30's if single-payer was a thing. The difference
in health insurance costs is non-trivial because of possible maternity costs.

------
agentgt
I have noticed in other industries they at least try to come up with stupid
rationalizations why there is age discrimination and gender pay gap. The
reasons stated being older people raise the price of benefits and are closer
to leaving workforce. Females may leave the workforce to have children.

But in the tech industry we give reasons like old people are slow/stupid and
chicks just don't understand computers like males... seriously I have actually
heard that come out of people's mouths.

Its completely disgusting.

------
kelukelugames
I've noticed young people are very biased when interviewing older candidates.
It's kind of sad. On the other hand, older interviewers are used to hiring
college grads.

------
eloy
Relevant article from a few years ago:
[http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-
silicon-v...](http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-
valley)

That blog was also the reason that someone started this Twitter account:
[https://twitter.com/neckbeardhacker](https://twitter.com/neckbeardhacker)

------
sjclemmy
I am a member of the early 40s club. I've had what you call an interesting
career. I have delivered technology solutions wherever I have worked and they
have on the whole been pretty successful. One of my dreams is to work in
Silicon Valley and I have no doubt that I could be successful. However, it's
not a goal I am pursuing for various reasons, one of those reasons is the
perceived age bias that exists there.

------
throwaway101916
I run a design/development agency in Europe. I'm the only male (of <10
employees).

We had an applicant for a development job who said he was 50+ and had been
self-employed several times. In the end we decided not to hire him.

The age was a factor, but not in the way you'd think. The primary reason was
that he proved himself to be a very bad fit for the team and the kind of
clients we work with. He attempted to dominate every conversation to prove his
seniority (or assert his potential if it was on a subject he had no prior
experience with).

I'd like to think his age wasn't a factor at all and most of his behaviour can
instead be attributed to his prior experience being self-employed, but I'm not
sure whether this is true or not.

I don't think age is a valid argument any more than race or gender but I'd
like to think that these are just unfortunate proxies for the actual reasons
companies don't want to hire candidates. I've turned down a lot of
"foreigners" because their language skills were insufficient for the
requirements of the job. I've turned down "men" because of their macho-like
behaviour towards the women on the team and I've turned down "old people"
because they treated younger team members less respectfully.

None of these traits are representative of all potential candidates in each
group, but they tend to be common enough that you tend to become more
sensitive to them, especially when hiring people from that group. This leads
to unfair bias, but short of anonymizing CVs (which can be extremely
difficult) I don't see any fool-proof way of avoiding that.

There's a very thin line between due dilligence and unfair bias.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Discrimination is so popular because it works so well. As mentioned, there are
cultural values that you can quite often predict just from {being a
woman/black/old}.

A primary mechanism to combat this is, to get folks to evaluate each person as
a person. To do this, an effort has to be made to recognize and cancel out any
preconceived notions may have been formed from incidental cues like age.

I'm glad to see anecdotally that candidates were turned down for real reasons,
at least so far. I'd advice being very diligent at continuing to require real
criterion in hiring decisions. For instance, anonymizing CVs is not at all
hard - why consider it a last resort? E.g. put a piece of tape over the name
when reading a pile of them.

~~~
pluma
This is actually a big problem with deep machine learning based algorithms:
they're guaranteed to be discriminatory but there is no obvious mechanism for
making them obey laws that prohibit discrimination (which often means they get
away with it based on a technicality).

In a perfect world this wouldn't be a problem because you'd just fix the root
issues (i.e. eliminate poverty and crime in ethnic groups, fill leading roles
in tech with women, etc etc). In the real world, things are not that
straightforward (especially in the US where a lot more data can be collected
and used to feed the algorithms than elsewhere).

------
Justsignedup
I was looking over resumes 2 years ago. We saw a guy in his 50s. My boss's
immediate reaction was "he's 50?! wtf? so old!"

Ageism is real folks.

------
wyldfire
> In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data
> processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon
> Valley/Internet firms.

Maybe this could be explained by younger folks, not bound to a family's worth
of obligations, moving to California in droves from places all over the world?

So maybe we should normalize the data based on the age distribution in silicon
valley.

------
jongraehl
I'm not a fan of "protected category" hiring rules in any case. If good old
people are underpaid, then let your company profit by hiring them. I suppose a
tempting compromise is to not allow companies to solicit disclosure of age etc
(so people can leave the year off their degree, show only most recent
experience, etc), but honestly I think it might be better if those companies
that really will only hire young would advertise the fact and save everyone
some time.

Starting from only a very small _real_ disadvantage in ability, any externally
distinctive group can quickly seem a 'market for lemons' \- for example, maybe
the oldsters you've seen so far across the interview table are
unrepresentatively bad, because the good ones are working and not
interviewing. So don't think because you've seen 4 weak candidates of 50+
years old that it's not worth looking at the next.

------
wahsd
Age diversity will be "achieved" when young developers start valuing
themselves properly, i.e., never. That whole nonsense of "culture fit" is
really just a euphemism for won't fit into a culture of exploitation and
extraction. You would also get a "not a good culture fit" if you had young
devs who respected their time and drew limits. That's the thing about the
abusive environment in the tech sector, you are only valuable if you are
willing to do the modern equivalent of back breaking work to the point of
exhaustion. Sure, it pays off for some ... usually the founders ... but for
the vast majority it will not pay off and they will simply be left with having
spent their young years hunched over laptops day in and day out in order to
make others rich. It's the modern equivalent of the gold rush and young devs
are the mules and hard laborers.

------
Frondo
What's most interesting to me is, after reading the comments on this article,
very few people are coming back with "but why do we need age diversity? What
if old people just aren't interested in working in tech?"

Swap out gender for age, and you'd see a whole different weight on the
spectrum of replies.

~~~
jongraehl
In my company, it seems we are (slightly) biased toward female
programmer/researcher candidates (that is, a female will get hired more
eagerly, all else equal).

------
techterrier
I wonder if the technical interview process can feed into this too.
Particularly the questions straight out of the final year of a computer
science degree. It'll be decades since senior engineers left university and
they reasonably wont have held on to the knowledge that they haven't used.

------
dalacv
I'm in an industry where most of the analysts are 40+ and many are in their
50s and 60s because the clients only want experienced developers / business
analysts. It's a niche market that a new-hire would have a tough time getting
into. It works both ways sometimes.

------
nashashmi
I would like to take this as an opportunity to ask:

Why is diversity important? e.g. in age, gender, race, ?profession? ... etc.
Isn't the business built on the advantage of particular "group"? And that
skill becomes be-all, end-all (e.g. important) to the success of the company?

~~~
logfromblammo
When all your constituents are the same size and aligned in the same
direction, your aggregate material becomes very strong, and hard, but it also
becomes brittle. Diamond is 100% carbon, all bonded via identical sp3 hybrid
orbitals. It is very hard (10 on Mohs scale), but it also has perfect cleavage
in 4 directions. You can cut a diamond in half with a light tap in just the
right spot. Diamond cannot be effectively carved, it can only be cut into
faceted gems.

If you incorporate materials of different sizes and orient them in different
directions, your aggregate material becomes very resilient. Nephrite has many
interlocking fibers of tremolite and actinolite, like the hairs in felt.
Nephrite jade can be carved with exceptional detail. A nephrite bell or war
club is reasonable, whereas trying for the same with diamond would be insane.

When your workforce lacks diversity, you are counting on its resulting
strength to accomplish some goal before an unexpected shock shatters the
organization.

Or perhaps you can look to the banana. Most bananas in cultivation are clones
from the same stock. Nowadays, the variety is the "Cavendish". But the banana
on store shelves used to be the "Gros Michel". Panama disease wiped them all
out, because they were all the same plant. No diversity means less resistance
to external hardships.

Cheetahs are so similar in genetics that regardless of numbers, they are just
one disease away from extinction.

So while similarity does produce better focus on positive goals, diversity is
what insulates you from negative shocks. So the natural conclusion that you an
I may reach is that companies which lack diversity are looking to grow as
quickly as possible and seek a fast exit before their first crisis hits,
whereas those that hire more broadly are in it for the long haul, being more
able to weather unexpected adversity.

------
speby
Does anyone know of any statistics that show people in the tech industry by
age? In other words, I wonder if the sheer number of older people "in tech" is
just dwarfed by young people who have been in it all along (As opposed to a
career change by a mid-career older person). Also, since the tech industry has
grown so exponentially, the number people in the industry in and of itself has
expanded to greatly include younger people (versus existing, older people who
choose to switch into the field).

This is to say that I wonder if people older than 40 or older than 50 are
truly underrepresented in tech because of age discrimination or is it because
there is, quite literally, not that many of them in tech to begin with?

------
jegutman
It seems like the biggest issue here is the compensation structure of
startups. People who have been working for a long time are those least likely
to take a huge pay cut for upside even if they're the people who are often
well-suited for that risk.

------
ori_b
I don't think this is possible in the short term. There is probably age
discrimination, sure, but to a large degree the problem is that programming is
a very young field. It has been growing at a rapid exponential pace for
decades, which means that the vast majority of people in the field have been
in it for less than a decade.

The only way to increase the stock of older programmers in the short term is
to convince people who are fairly far along in their careers to jump ship to a
new field, and start off from scratch. Daunting, and likely a step back
careerwise.

In the long term, the problem will likely solve itself. Assuming that you
actually consider it a problem.

------
fmax30
It would be very interesting to see when the millennials, people born
particularly in the 90's get to their 40s.

One of the reasons for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975
haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in
the 80s and 90s have.

Sure there are exceptions, those exceptions are people who were directly
working on technology. An alarming trend in our industry (at least in my part
of the world) is that a lot of people stop directly working on technology by
the time they are 30-35 and start going towards the managerial end of thing.

~~~
jnbiche
> One of the reason for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975
> haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in
> the 80s and 90s have.

What does that even mean? We _lived_ through the Internet revolution. And even
we can't claim to have invented it, because that was the generation before us
(Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, etc).

It's exactly because of this kind of mindset that it's becoming increasingly
hard for 40-somethings to find decent employment in development, and (along
with corporate culture) a strong factor in the trend toward becoming managers
once we hit mid-30s.

You're going to find the next 20 years enlightening, that's for sure.

~~~
JohnBooty
> What does that even mean? We lived through the Internet revolution.

I was born after 1975 (barely - the Internet revolution happened when I was in
high school and college) so I'm not just sticking up from myself here when I
say that a lot of people born before 1975 really do "get it."

Almost anybody who spent ten minutes using BBSs in the 1980s knew that some
kind of connected _thing_ was going to be the future. It was nearly
inevitable. Maybe it would have been a bunch of closed CompuServes and
Prodigies, maybe it would have been a BBS in everybody's home, maybe it would
have been something global and semi-mostly-kinda open like the Internet.
Whatever the form, that generation knew that connectedness was the next
logical step. You can see it in sci-fi of the era (Neuromancer, etc) ...they
weren't sure what _form_ or _forms_ it was going to take, but everybody knew
(hoped) we were going to be connecting to other people using our computers.

So a lot of people from that generation were right at home once the Internet
became an everyday thing. And a lot of them weren't, obviously, but a lot of
them were totally primed for it.

------
cousin_it
Discussions of workplace diversity try to answer the question "Should Alice or
Bob get the job?" That doesn't sound like the right question to me, because
one of them is still left without a job. Instead of 30%/70% unemployment,
you've achieved 50%/50%. That's nice, but...

I think we should try to create a baseline of happiness that no one can ever
fall beneath. Universal basic income might be a good step in that direction,
though I don't expect it to solve all the problems.

~~~
pc86
> Giving good jobs to everyone

Whether they're qualified or not, right? Because there are not enough jobs for
everyone, and most people are not qualified for most jobs.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Everyone slaving away is not anybody's idea of Utopia. Once upon a time, we
thought robots would take the yoke from our shoulders and leave us all more
creative and happy.

Automation is fast approaching something like that vision. But now any time we
talk about universal income or other such programs, it turns instantly to
make-work projects. How can we keep the slaves working? Because, if _I_ work,
everybody has to work.

~~~
cousin_it
Maybe there's a bit of misunderstanding here. I'm a longtime supporter of
universal basic income with no strings attached. But basic income or not,
people with jobs would still have higher self esteem and would feel more
valued by the community. So I'd vote for a universal job guarantee as well.

I think people tend to exaggerate the problems that can be solved by their
favorite idea, and discount other problems. A good utopia should address all
of people's needs, not just the material ones. The _need to be needed_ is a
particularly tricky one to solve.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'd be glad to give BI a try. I'll take that risk. I'm not so sure of the idea
I'm more comfortable at some made-up job that somebody else thinks I need to
be fulfilled.

Don't imagine for a millisecond that the only way I feel needed is because of
some bs job.

------
theworstshill
Don't want to step on toes, but in short - you can't. Part of the problem is
the age genius/criminal curve which shows you the productivity of a typical
male, another part is that as you age there is only so much more bandwidth
left for grinding shitty jobs and boilerplate code. The only solution is to
own a dev shop by that age, otherwise you're f __ __ __, excuse my bluntness.

------
davidw
Do something about housing costs? Living there with a family is an extremely
expensive proposition. I suspect a lot of people my age (40) simply don't
_want_ to be there. Here in Bend, I live 10 minutes from work by bike, have
all kinds of great outdoor activities year round, have good schools for my
kids, and the median price for a house is 350K - which is actually kind of
expensive for Oregon.

------
ldpg
Management will always want to hire the young ones simply because they are
easier to control and have lower salaries.

It would be great if this starts to change as the swell of tech workers hired
to work on internet and mobile products in the past 2 decades starts age into
their 30's / 40's / 50's.

------
fleventynine
I wonder how much of this discrimination is due to housing inequality. I
suspect many young programmers resent paying $3500 a month rent to a landlord
who bought their property for 75k 20 years ago. Denying jobs to that
generation might be their way of fighting the perceived injustice.

------
yuhong
As a side note, I do dislike anti-discrimination laws. As an example, one of
the ways to enforce it is via statistical analysis. I have a feeling this
probably works for certain kinds of jobs but not for others.

------
wellsjohnston
Won't this happen naturally as millennials get older? More people are studying
CS and going into tech these days.

------
Randgalt
I'm 51 and have never had trouble finding work. Stay current, relevant and,
most importantly, specialize.

------
WalterBright
I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member.

    
    
       -- Groucho Marx

------
oldmanjay
it just goes to show, everyone will whine when they see people getting things
they want.

~~~
Apocryphon
Will you do any less when it's your demographic's turn to be deprived?

------
dear
Maybe start at YC first?

~~~
karlkatzke
Except that YC is a very particular style of incubator: They're a growth
incubator that pushes companies to grow fast over growing well. On the
contractor's triangle (good/fast/cheap, pick any two), they're all the way
over on the fast/cheap line.

More experienced people tend to see the value in growing well AND fast at the
same time. So more experienced engineers (aka, older folks) tend to always
push away from the cheap and towards the fast/good side of the line ... or if
cheap is a mandate, then they push towards the good/cheap side of the line.

None of that is what YC is about.

~~~
jegutman
"They're a growth incubator that pushes companies to grow fast over growing
well."

Any evidence for this comment? Any evidence that there's even a tradeoff you
can make? Any evidence that your hypothesis (which seems to be that "growing
well" is better) is supported at all?

The reason (just guessing, not affiliated with YC) that YC feels like growing
fast is best is that "growing well" might involve a greater investment before
you've reached product-market fit.

I will also add that age-diversity has almost nothing to do with founders.
Founders are already slightly older on average. Plenty of companies founded by
young founders have their average age go up quite a bit once they have found
product-market fit and can hire more people.

------
j45
Lack of diversity, measured in any way, is often tied to folks laden with
insecurity or a lack of empathy, ending up in a position to impose their lens
over others, to the point where it becomes systemic.

At least changes for the better are needed.

Defining what good citizenship is for everyone in tech, and through it,
expecting diversity from management first, then downward.

\- Diversity is bullshit if it's not reflected and practiced from the very top
management to the bottom. When people wax diversity I check the management and
it tells me everything I need to know. You put up, or shut up. I applaud guys
like Eric Ries for doing the uncomfortable and succeeding. Diversity needs to
rise to the levels of decision making, and replacing them with standards of
good citizenship that applies to all is what's needed.

\- Being a good citizen in technology community needs to be the core of being
in the tech community. Maybe this is missing in tech culture, presumably
because it's so new. What will happen to the young people who look down on
others? They're screwed because the hurt train they build is coming their way
in 10 years.

Transforming into a culture where standards of good citizenship apply to
everyone, will need everyone to be equally comfortable and fluent in having
open minded conversations about diversity that might need us to look at
ourselves in the mirror.

Then, with awareness, disrupting the lack of diversity, breaking cycles of
discrimination.

In my experience of being a member of multiple minority groups in tech, I have
learnt and try to remember:

\- People who don't want to work with you will find any reason. That's what's
important to focus on, not the reason. You got every shot to make something
better to make jerks into dinosaurs. It's good to flush the turds out into the
sunlight whenever possible, good citizens will always be supportive of this
for the greater good.

\- Innovation doesn't live in a mindset of doubts and seeking permission from
others. You're not an entrepreneur until you stop asking permission and
validation. People who are givers and truly focus on adding value will do it
unconditionally, as long as you focus on being someone who focuses on adding
value.

\- Rather than become radicalized and negative, you may have no choice but to
become 8x as good as the average Joe. Your perceived gatekeepers can become
your slaves by pushing you to push yourself. If you feel you have to be 2x as
good to get half the respect, 4x as good to get equal respect, and 8x too good
to be ignored, you get to write more of the script. It's not fair. Nothing
worthwhile seems to be. I measure equality in society by what the average joe
can access, so by that definition this point fails, but I've selected pursuing
improving my abilities beyond what others can squeak by with in the hopes that
the future will have more diversity minded people at the top.

Many do not practice discrimination, but benefit from an existing benefit of
being a demographic that systemizes it. Becoming aware of the things you never
notice is the first step.

Thing you can do nothing about, your age, gender, the family you're born into,
where you are born, the color of your skin shouldn't define your
opportunities, potential or abilities.

It starts with the majority of people on this site and in our community.

What do you commit to do to become a better citizen of the tech community for
diversity? I know I'm sure as hell doing everything I can because I'm on the
other end of it far too often.

------
brogrammer90
As a person on the wrong side of 30, how can you live with yourself pandering
to 20 somethings? I've watched over the years my 40 something coworker do this
and it's the most pathetic existence I can think of. It's no surprise he sees
a therapist weekly. And yes ladies he's single and ready to mingle.

~~~
amyjess
I'm 30.

I'm also happily single and childfree, and a lot of my hobbies are more common
among young people. I watch the same movies, TV shows, etc. as people in their
teens and twenties. I voraciously read comic books.

I don't expect any of that to ever change. In a decade, I'm going to be
consuming the same kind of media in my 40s that I consumed in my 20s and am
now consuming in my 30s. Being childfree is never going to change (especially
considering I voluntarily sterilized myself), and I'm mentally incapable of
feeling romantic attraction to anyone, so I'm going to be single for the rest
of my life.

It's not pandering: it's simply be being the kind of person I am, which
happens to mean that, on average, I relate more towards people younger than me
than to people my age, and that discrepancy is only going to get larger as
time goes on (mind you, the "on average" is key because I've met and get along
with some fellow outliers, not just my age but also older than me).

~~~
magic_beans
Oh my :/ I don't know you, but this sounds grim.

~~~
amyjess
What's grim?

I love having freedom. When I say "I'm going to be single for the rest of my
life", I don't mean it in a sense of resignation like "aw bummer, I'm going to
be single for the rest of my life, this is gonna suck". No, I mean it in the
sense of "yay, I'm going to be single for the rest of my life, and it's gonna
be so awesome!".

Same with being childfree.

I have the freedom to do anything, go anywhere, and enjoy my life for myself,
and I love it.

I'm basically an overgrown kid, with the only difference being that I get
_paid_ to take my toys apart, find out how they work, and put them back
together in new ways, which I've always done for fun. I love it!

And, hey, my cousins have kids, so I get to be the cool aunt without having to
actually spend my life taking care of anyone.

