
Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010) - jrs235
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/silicon-valley%E2%80%99s-dark-secret-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-age/
======
leaveyou
I'm not "young" anymore and not "old" yet, but I'm quite saddened by this
point of view: 'The young understand new technologies better than the old do,
and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods
and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”'. Software
business seems mostly about exploitation of the naivety of the youngsters and
less about software and programming.

~~~
seiji
To start a "modern" project today, you have to know programming languages,
infrastructure, and packaging systems that didn't even exist _five_ years ago.

That's the surface-level "technology" they (VCs) mean. VCs don't care about
your deep algorithm knowledge or domain experience unless it can accelerate
user-facing interfaces to the moon.

If you hire people with 30 years experience, do they know what a Gruntfile is?
Do they know the difference between Gruntfile.js, component.json, and
package.json? Do they know the relation between Docker and Vagrant and
Kubernetes and CoreOS and rkt and etcd? Maybe they still love XML a little too
much. Now they have to re-learn the same things they already knew, but with
new fads and new syntax and new bugs built-in, all while trying to keep "old
ways" vs "new ways" straight in their cluttered heads.

Even look a hyper-accelerated areas: Ember? Angular? React? React forks?
Become an expert in any single one and you're irrelevant within 3 years unless
you want to support "legacy" apps forever.

Saying "old" is confusing too. Is "old" 30 years COBOL experience at one
company where they wrote everything themselves and can't think any other way?
Is "old" 30 years of always chasing the latest fads, master of none?

If you have a long work history, and if you are _good_ at something, there's a
good chance soon the thing you're good at will be replaced by something you're
not good at. Congratulations, now you are "old" and out of touch. Younger
people created something new and now your experience isn't relevant. In a way,
"experience" is a fool's game. Experience requires a fixed point of deep
understanding, but while you're getting experience, the world is moving out
from under you.

You're almost better starting off as a 15 year old who learns everything new
with no historical baggage. Nobody wants to hear old stories about stacks of
punchcards and time sharing woes when we've got to deploy and monitor 1,000
instances to AWS in the next 15 minutes. But, you can't go back and become a
blank-slate 15 year old every 5 years when the fads change out from under you.
Ergo, you're old and out of touch and worthless and go live on a programmer
retirement farm in iowa because you're not a culture fit with the 22 year old
CEOs anymore. yolo, and you wasted it by not becoming a billionaire by 28.

~~~
overgard
I think this is a symptom of the fact that most SV startups aren't actually
doing anything that's truly technically challenging. (Most startups read like
social/marketing experiments that happen to need a web page). So they don't
need to hire people with actual experience, and since the tech is largely
disposable, fashion tends to rule.

That doesn't mean all programming is like that though. For instance, you know
what I was using for graphics programming 15 years ago? C++ and OpenGL. You
know I'm still using 15 years later? C++ and OpenGL. They've evolved a lot for
sure, but that knowledge hasn't become irrelevant.

~~~
seiji
OpenGL is a neat example because it's an abstracted physical interface, and
the physical interface isn't drastically changing. It's like being the world's
best assembly programmer — you're always going to be the best because the
platform isn't going through 50 generations of evolution underneath you ever 3
years.

Carmack is a great example of experience+useful. So is notch. But, they are
both very tied to hardware, algorithms, and physical implementations of things
so they have stationary expert-level targets.

------
dominotw
It is definitely not a secret.

Age bias is so obvious that its actually celebrated. Look at this example from
Jetbrains Jobs page
[https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/](https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/)

    
    
      We offer:
       Fascinating work in a friendly, young team

~~~
LyndsySimon
For what it's worth, I'm 31 and read that as "the team hasn't been around very
long", not "the team is composed of 20-somethings".

~~~
gohrt
Why would that be worth advertising? "Come join us, we have no idea what we're
doing here, but we run a legacy product?"

~~~
LyndsySimon
Again, my own filters in play - but I prefer to be a part of a young team
because it means I have a much greater ability to impact the growth and
direction of the product. It also means that the team's culture isn't as
concrete, and I'm more likely to be able to fit in to it socially.

------
makeitsuckless
The denialist culture in tech and especially Silicon Valley is so absurd. Even
in this thread people are scrambling to come up with excuses.

There are many industries around the world where agism is rampant, and there
is only ever one excuse: money and control. Young people are cheaper and more
gullible.

It's not a secret, far from it, it's one of the few things for which the
cliche "everybody knows" actually applies.

Sure, many industries try to cover up this fact a bit, but only tech makes up
such elaborate stories to pretend it isn't all about cold hard cash.

Obviously, there is a reason for this beyond creating a flattering self-image:
Most other industries that exploit the young and naive have plenty of supply.

Good engineers however are rare at any age, so market forces aren't sufficient
to maintain this exploitative relationship, it needs to be artificially
enforced.

Resulting for instance in the insane situation that many older engineers are
unemployed whilst the industry is importing cheap young and easily abused
engineers from abroad.

(Full disclosure: I too used to believe the main cause for that was that these
older engineers had outdated knowledge and no longer making the effort to
learn anything new, until I became a hiring manager. And although I have
nothing but anecdotal evidence (so has the other side btw), I will be so bold
as to state that that is a big fat lie.)

~~~
edc117
Speaking as someone in the middle (mid thirties, have my masters, led several
teams as a technical lead/architect, been up and down the hiring process), I
agree completely. I've met several older developers/engineers that I have the
utmost respect for, and so much of this field seems to move in circles.

Does anyone outside of SV/startups actually find this ageism nonsense to be
anything but a convenient story? I can personally think of two excellent
engineers that are 60+, and are some of the most amazingly detailed,
experienced and all-around intelligent men I've ever met; age has not dulled
them in the slightest.

------
dpweb
And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or
face unemployment

Had to stop reading at this. Completely wrong. It's a move up or stay a
programmer for 40 years career. You decide which appeals more to you. People
forget that hiring and accessing talent is mostly done quite poorly. There are
not many unemployed programmers and the reasons why they are unemployed could
be many things.

------
PythonicAlpha
I guess it is the same old fallacy that crept into some big software companies
long time ago.

The fallacy is called "speed":

Some companies are just looking for young, smart people who can solve problems
fast.

This fallacy has some correct side: Software development is most of the time
about solving problems and when you can solve them faster, you will have the
software faster.

The fallacy part is, that fast is the only _quality_ you need.

With many, smart and young developers right of the college, you can create a
huge pile of software in short time ... but you can also create a huge pile of
problems in a short time. That is the reason, there are so many quality
problems and security troubles around. Those young, smart people just lack the
experience to make good design decisions ... and those decisions do not end,
when the rough design is done.

Those people make fast decisions, but they just lack the experience to oversee
the consequences of those decisions.

Without also having experienced developers around, which can share their
experiences and guide other people, many companies are doomed to have bad
quality software also in the future.

~~~
seiji
_Some companies are just looking for young, smart people who can solve
problems fast._

When your company only exists for 6-18 months before being acquired at $2
million per developer, it's worth getting the build-big-who-cares-about-
correctness drones in your hand.

People with no experience have fewer reservations about being "led" a certain
way or actually doing the wrong thing (because they may not have the real-
world experience to say "nope, bad idea.") As a bonus, the uninitiated will
probably believe well-spoken, optimistic lies about becoming a billion dollar
company within a year, everybody gets a Tesla as a bonus next year, etc, to
make them work harder for no tangible reward.

------
11thEarlOfMar
The issue is really more practical: Young engineers can afford to take more
risk, particularly if they are not married.

VCs want people who can go all in on an idea that looks like an obvious fail,
because often enough, the young engineers who don't know better actually pull
it off. These companies become high profile and their founders become famous
for being young and wealthy. When VCs profile the successful investments,
young, smart and driven all correlate.

Experienced engineers with families can seldom afford take those risks.

~~~
rayiner
I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that
assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual
income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious
reasons.

~~~
adevine
As someone in a 14 year DINK relationship, I totally disagree with this. When
you are in a relationship, decisions need to be collaborative - you can't just
chase any opportunity that comes along without thinking about how it will
affect your partner. Also, when I was single, I could spend the vast majority
of my time working. In a relationship, not only CAN'T I do that (my partner
would kill me), but I don't want to; I'd rather spend more time on what is
truly important - my personal relationships.

~~~
rayiner
Even single people should be thinking through high risk decisions, so I don't
really see your point there. A dual income couple has inherently more ability
to make higher-risk decisions that have larger expected returns.

As for time spent working, I'm a bit skeptical of that. It's not like single
people don't have socialization needs that need to be met. My single friends
spend a lot of time and effort on dating and trying to arrange opportunities
to see friends.

~~~
netfire
I think the point is that the decisions aren't as high-risk when you are
single and don't have other people to support (especially children). The
consequences of failure aren't as high.

Instead of being able to share a place with a few people (maybe even sharing a
room) and sharing utilities, internet, cable and so on, you are paying
significantly more for housing, food, utilities, transportation (bigger car),
clothes and insurance/medical costs. Those costs could easily be 3-4 times as
much as a single person.

If you are a dual income family, you may also be paying for child care and
have the extra responsibilities of getting your children to and from child
care and/or school (let alone actually spending some quality time with them).
Working late has a much higher cost and being out of a job has much greater
consequences.

~~~
rayiner
My point is that these days, especially accounting for assortive mating, a
married person is better seen as having someone to support him or her, not as
needing to support someone else.

Your roommate isn't going to pay for your food and rent. Your spouse will.
Moreover, old married people are much more likely to have assets to draw on if
someone is unemployed than single people. And while they may have higher
expenses, a lot of those (like child care) disappear when one person is
unemployed.

Just looking at my friends, very few of my single friends could tolerate
loosing their jobs as well as my married friends. That includes older couples
I know with kids.

------
parasubvert
First, Keep in mind this was written by Vivek Wadhwa, who has a history of
attention-seeking articles and statements on social issues in tech.

Second, while the startup scene may follow this trend, the larger employers of
the SF Bay Area are not staffed with 20-somethings, they're staffed by all age
groups.

~~~
aaggarwal
Also, in the startup scene, since new upcoming startups are mostly headed by
young newcomers, I guess they would prefer working with the same age people to
avoid criticism from an experienced professional. An experienced guy would
probably be not as easygoing as them. However, I think, in the end its their
loss, one can always learn from others experience.

I don't think experienced guys would find learning a new technologies hard, in
the contrary it might be easier for them.

The only point where the young people could be a better choice for a startup
is the working hours. Assuming experienced professionals are married and
settled, working at a startup might be difficult for them.

------
bottled_poe
Don't worry, I'm sure the union has your back. What's that? No union in the
tech industry?

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Why do we need unions when it's so easy to start a company? There is no
monopoly on means of production when it comes to software.

~~~
seiji
The fun part about unions: when you see your company has $200 billion cash in
the bank, the union gets together and says "we made that. everyone deserves a
raise."

If you're a programmer working at Apple or Google making less than ~$3 million
per year (or any other large-scale, profitable firm), you're being taken
advantage of.

~~~
michaelochurch
I laugh heartily when management types say they want someone to be "more of a
team player".

A team player-- that is, a unionist-- is the last thing that Silicon Valley
investors and executives want.

------
r0naa
There is something I frankly don't understand.

Why would anyone discriminate against older, more experienced engineers? Tech
companies are spending millions of dollars on their offices and employee-perks
to attract and retain talent and yet they discriminate against the category of
people who has the most experience?

It just boggles my mind.

I have a very limited perspective, but come from a country where the ageism is
reversed. It is really hard to find work as a new grad. I am now living in
Waterloo where the situation seems to be more balanced. But seriously, I would
kill for a job where I have the chance to work alongside experienced engineers
that can see the "bigger picture" and know a thousand tricks!

Could anyone explain where this obsession with youth is coming from? Is that a
US or a SV thing?

~~~
rshlo
It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more.
An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.

~~~
michaelochurch
_It 's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more.
An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less._

However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the
CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks.

Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-
skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your people. Then
you're striving for mediocrity and deserve to fail miserably.

~~~
r0naa
Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part?

I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the
company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the
fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the
product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?

~~~
michaelochurch
Scrum isn't so bad for juniors, but when you get older and want to tackle more
ambitious projects, you won't want to be justifying mere weeks or days
(sometimes even hours) of your own working time.

These methods take management strategies typically reserved for juniors and
the underperforming and try to apply them to everyone. It's awful.

However, "Agile" and "Scrum" seem to mean different things everywhere. Some
companies say they "do Scrum" but just mean that they have a 15-minute status
meeting (which isn't that big of a deal; it's a minor annoyance but it
actually can defuse politics and suspicion). Others haul out the whole
shebang, with nightmarish "ceremonies" that take hours and involve beasts like
"product backlogs" and "business user stories" meant to spread disease.

By "Scrum compliant", I meant the sort of mediocre (or junior) engineer who
will accept being managed down to the day.

That said, I don't think that Agile or Scrum is the right thing, even for
juniors. Junior engineers should be getting daily feedback, but it should be
in the form of genuine doing-the-right-thing mentoring, not continual progress
tracking.

------
gamesbrainiac
How is this a dark secret? This is true for almost all industries is it not?
Most business want young hires because the work more (in quantity, not talking
about quality here), and can be trained to fit the organization's needs.

~~~
justincormack
No, in many industries experience is (or was) valued.

People businesses are generally worse though, look at law firms where the idea
is to exploit the young, overwork them, and if they survive that offer them a
tiny chance of the huge profits that senior partners share. Apparently this is
supposed to be motivational.

------
SQL2219
I see a contradiction in this article:

"After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with
bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the
salary of those younger than 50."

If 50 year old programmers are cheaper, why are they being discriminated
against?

see here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689232](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689232)

~~~
adevine
"If 50 year old programmers are cheaper, why are they being discriminated
against?"

There are lots of other ways to interpret this data. Looking at the graph,
note that salaries are actually lower for 20 and 30 somethings that 50+. It's
possible that a majority of really good software developers get out of
programming by the time they are 50, meaning the overall quality (and
salaries) for the oldest developers is lower than average.

------
MPSimmons
> Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you
> how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching
> stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of
> thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

Pretty clearly, there are tens of thousands of unqualified engineers.

This is less about age, and more about whether you adapt with the times and
changing technology. If you're a developer who grew up writing, say, COBOL,
and you got REALLY GOOD at COBOL...I mean, just completely amazing at COBOL,
so that you're in the top 1% of COBOL programmers in the world...where do you
work in 2015? At one of the dozen or so banks that still uses COBOL.

But what about the people in the top 10%? The people who still devoted their
time to learning COBOL like no one's business? Where do they work in 2015?
Wal-Mart.

I hate to quote Seth Godin, but if you're going to devote yourself to being
great at something, you need to absolutely be the best at it, or you're going
to find yourself out of work whenever that thing isn't in vogue - and even
then, it's a gamble.

------
liquidcool
Last year I went to a talk by VC Mark Suster.[1] He addressed age
discrimination and how he doesn't participate in it and is actively against
it. Why do other VC's do this?

It’s their goal: a billion dollar company. That takes 8-11 years to build,
going at a full startup pace. A lot of life changes can happen in that time.
You sure aren’t getting more energetic as the years go by. Your personal and
financial responsibility is probably increasing over time. While he isn’t an
ageist, he does say that the earlier you can do this, the better.

That explains VC's and startups active age discrimination. For non-startups,
it seems more centered around a salary cap that is unattractive to experienced
engineers. (Not to say that ageism doesn't exist there, and for the record, I
am "plus-aged" myself.)

1\. [http://philip.yurchuk.com/career/mark-suster-talks-
startups-...](http://philip.yurchuk.com/career/mark-suster-talks-startups-
innovate-pasadena/)

------
ZanyProgrammer
I wonder if there's a difference between the SF Bay Area and the rest of the
country, as far as ageism is concerned in tech.

~~~
solve
Huge difference. CA companies and investors (e.g. YC) specifically require
your age to the interviewers. Using YC as an example, many interviewers are
happy to publicly boast about using age as primary factor - I can link to to
some comments written here on HN.

In some other places, e.g. NYC, this is all generally believed to be highly
legally-risky and no respectable employer would ever consider doing it.

Shame on you CA.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Can you provide some links (other than chatboard comments) to substantiate
this claim that "CA companies and investors require your age"?

[https://oag.ca.gov/publications/CRhandbook/ch2](https://oag.ca.gov/publications/CRhandbook/ch2)

~~~
solve
Are you implying that YC doesn't require your age in the interview process?
Have you ever even filled out the application form? Let's start with that.

~~~
hga
From [https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-muses-successful-
applicat...](https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-muses-successful-application-
to-y-combinator-w12)

 _For each founder, please list: YC username; name; age; year of
graduation...._

Wow, I wouldn't have expected them to be so blatant. Not illegal, since YC is
not _hiring_ people, but, wow.

------
gexla
> The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a
> clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and
> techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the
> older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the
> young can pull all-nighters.

Underpaid AND you have to pull all-nighters? No wonder software engineers are
hard to come by. What are my other options?

Is building forms in Rails really that difficult for older people? EDIT:
Keeping in mind this article was from 2010.

------
jv22222
This topic keeps coming up. I think someone should start a community for older
coders. A place to brainstorm and help each other out.

Edit: SilverFox (and Foxess)

~~~
gravity13
Is it really because they're old? Or because they've established they are one
trick ponies?

I've met young programmers who I wouldn't hire (were it up to me) for the
exact same reasons most people wouldn't hire the stereotypical old programmer.
'Legacy' dudes from a time who seemed to understand bad code as a way to
always retain a job because who else would understand the shit they do?

And then I've also met (and worked with) older programmers who taught me about
the almost repetitive cycle of trendy functional languages, the types where I
can literally have a two hour long philosophical conversation about design,
extremely smart people I would hire.

I get the sense this is not entirely about ageism, but rather, the field
itself has two different directions for growth.

~~~
rhaps0dy
>almost repetitive cycle of trendy functional languages

This is interesting, please tell me more.

------
puranjay
In my line of work (digital marketing), I actually prefer slightly older
people because they usually have a body of experience and data to rely on to
make better decisions.

Yes, young people know social media better, but that's a role I can easily get
a couple of fresh college graduates for. For deep analysis and understanding
of customer personas, messaging, etc. I feel older people do better.

------
S4M
The elephant in the room is that most of SV companies don't do anything
technologically sophisticated, so for them it's simpler to take the latest
technologies and hire young people who will work without counting their time.
Were they working on more complicated problem, they would require more
experience.

------
niuzeta
I just turned 27 and this perspective frightens me beyond I prefer to admit. I
live in Toronto area, but want to work in Silicon Valley one day. One of my
fears is that by the time I turn 29 or 30, I may be "too old" to attract
employers enough to relocate me.

Well, just the more motivation to work on my github account...

------
JesperRavn
Just a reminder that the following are inconsistent (and both views go
basically unchallenged on HN)

\- Tech is exploitative, underpaying and overworking naive employees.

\- Tech is dominated by privileged White/Asian males who exclude women and
minorities from what would otherwise be a great opportunity.

(If you take a Marxist view that attaches a ridiculously high value to what an
employee is worth, then these views can be consistent, in the sense that you
can label almost any employment arrangement as exploitation. But I would guess
most people on HN subscribe to the (correct) market oriented view which
defines exploitation much more narrowly as getting a person to accept
something worse than their outside options by the emotional appeal of the job.
If startups were really duping White males into working for them instead of a
better paid and lower stress banking job or whatever, someone who really cares
about women and minorities would presumably tell them to steer clear of this
exploitation).

------
Filthy_casual
As a newcomer in my 30's I can only hope that this won't be true in Europe.

~~~
makeitsuckless
It is true in Europe. However, the effect is strongly dampened given all of
the social and job protection legislation in most European countries.

This means the extend to which an employer can profit from preferring younger
employees is very much limited.

Also, young people in Europe are generally less sensitive to promises of
future riches because of both cultural differences and the fact that it's
simply extremely rare that a European startup strikes gold.

The agism is the same, but it's easier to overcome since there's less profit
in it.

There is a downside though: youth unemployment.

------
yuhong
I am thinking of ditching anti-discrimination laws and instead allow EEOC,
anti-trust, or other regulatory agencies to impose anti-discrimination
conditions on companies as necessary, which hopefully will be a last resort.

------
sigden
I don't think this is much of a secret.

------
chriscareycode
On the flip side Netflix only hires "fully formed adults". No interns and no
fresh college grads.

~~~
hga
Netflix doesn't care all that much about the costs of their IT, because it's
overwhelmed by the costs of licensing, and now I assume, creating content.

Or so we're told in reference to their moving to AWS, they could be an
exception that proves the rule.

------
graycat
=== Summary

It seems to me that the article:

(A) is a reasonably correct description of some dysfunctional aspects of the
Silicon Valley _culture_ but

(B) omits considerations much more important for the main goal of the Silicon
Valley culture or any such activity at all \-- business success.

Here I concentrate on this last, business success, i.e., making money with
computing, software, and the Internet.

=== New Technologies

In the sense of (A) above, it appears that the article wants to concentrate on
"new technologies" by which it likely means, say, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails,
Objective-C, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, mobile devices, etc.

Two problems:

(a) For a startup seeking the goal of business success, those _technologies_
are mostly just redundant alternative tools from which a given startup need
pick only a few.

Sure, a person with more _skills_ with more such tools can be useful quickly
in a larger collection of startups by others. So, by concentrating on
acquiring _skills_ with so many tools, the person is concentrating on being an
employee and at least partly neglecting picking a good project and startup for
the real goal of business success.

(b) The "new technologies", when and if really needed for the goal of business
success, are not just routine software, and the OP did not explain "new
technologies" that are needed or how to acquire them.

=== An Example

For my startup, two weeks a go or so, I got all the production software I
planned running.

In writing that software, I decided that my user interface (UI) would be just
a simple Web site, not an _app_ , and, for the _foundation_ for the software,
selected Windows, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET for developing the Web pages,
ADO.NET for interacting with SQL Server, and Visual Basic .NET (VB) for the
programming language.

My Web pages are so simple (i) I don't need to write or even read any
JavaScript and (ii) even for just my first all English language version, 2+
billion people around the world, eight years old or older, whether they know
English or not, should find the site easy to use right away or, in the case of
an eight year old without English, soon. So it's all just the simplest HTTP,
HTML, and CSS with just some one line text boxes and some links with no pop-
ups, pull-downs, or roll-overs. We're talking simple as in "Keep it simple,
stupid" (KISS).

My _mobile strategy_ is to have my Web pages quite usable even on nearly any
mobile device. E.g., each Web page is just 800 pixels wide with large fonts
and high contrast, and a window only 300 pixels wide should be wide enough.

Sure, Python has a lot of software libraries: So, if some such library has
some functionality I need that is not in .NET, that I can't find in open
source in C# or VB, and that I shouldn't just program myself, then maybe I'll
use some Python. Okay. So far, nope.

So far I don't need more of the OP's _technologies_ \-- Ruby, Rails, Python,
Django, JavaScript, Objective-C, etc. or whatever else the OP had in mind.

So, the OP's view of the role of _technologies_ is not good.

=== New Technology

The OP emphasized "new technology":

Okay, continuing my example, in my startup there is some _new technology_ \--
I created it. It's implemented in software, but just as software it is just
routine. The most _advanced_ code in the software I wrote is a use of the
classic heap data structure as a _priority queue_.

What's special is what came before the software. And that's not _computer
science_ , either.

Instead, my _new technology_ is some applied math I derived, yes, complete
with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced prerequisites -- I especially
thank A. Kolmogorov and J. von Neumann. Maybe these two guys are "new" to
Silicon Valley -- otherwise they go back nearly a century.

The Silicon Valley culture the OP is describing will have a tough time
duplicating or equaling my new _technology_.

So, for _new technology_ , I'm far ahead, not behind.

For the new technology I created, the OP's "The young understand new
technologies better than the old do" is exactly backwards.

Net, it appears that the OP believes that the keys to business success are
_new technologies_ such as Python. Nope!

Instead, Python is just yet another applications programming language that
permits writing routine code and is nothing like a step toward the _new
technologies_ important for the goal of business success. Similarly for Ruby,
JavaScript, Objective-C, C#, VB, etc.

=== Denouement

Why am I picking on Python?

From what I've read, Python, CPython, IronPython, etc. are fine, and some of
the libraries are terrific. Okay, so, there is yet another applications
programming language: It will likely have a good variety of elementary data
types, classes, allocate-free, If-Then-Else, Do-While, Call-Return, call by
value, call by reference (likely won't have call by name), file and console
reading and writing, access to TCP/IP, some means of exceptional condition
handling, e.g., Try-Catch, some facilities for multiple threads and locks,
etc. It might be compiled, interpretive, or run on a JVM. Okay.

Once I talked with some of the best technical support people at Andreessen-
Horowitz (A16Z). They wanted me to be using Python.

I told them that for my startup I had selected Visual Basic .NET (VB).

The A16Z people thought that VB was a toy (they were thinking about the old
version of Visual Basic), and I had to explain that (A) for serious production
computing on Windows what is crucial is the .NET Framework; (B) essentially
the most important language for such work is C#; (C) the .NET version of
Visual Basic is different from C# essentially only in a different flavor of
syntactic sugar; and (D) for several reasons I prefer the VB flavor.

The A16Z people missed another crucial point: I started with VB only with my
present project. Well, right away, less than a minute, I was able to read and
write VB. Then with the syntax lessons from just a few, simple code samples, I
could write VB right away -- no delay at all. The language was very much not
the challenge.

There was a challenge -- the .NET Framework with however many classes and
thousands of Web pages of documentation; for serious production software on
Windows, .NET is just crucial. The A16Z people didn't understand that.

C#? The syntax looks a lot like that of C so is familiar enough. Of course, I
don't like the C syntax -- never did. Used it? Yes. Liked it? No.

Lesson: Even among the best technical support staff at A16Z, the understanding
of "new technology" is not good.

For the business goal, this lesson and that of the OP are essentially
inevitable: In anything like the present context, the coveted _unicorns_ are
rare and need not fit simplistic patterns. So, much consensus on creating
unicorns would contradict that the unicorns are rare.

------
paulhauggis
I am an experiences software developer and I won't break my back and work
nights/weekends/12 hour days for any employer. I foolishly did this enough in
my youth on many occasions and it's just not worth it because you are doing
all of the work, your personal life is suffering, and in the end, the
investors and owners get rich while you need to find another job when it goes
under or is acquired (in rare cases, do you get to keep your job because
usually the company acquiring you already has their own people).

When I own > 50% of the company, it's a different story.

At one of my last jobs (> 3 years ago), the boss would call us on holidays,
weekends, and whenever else things were on fire and expected us to work. One
guy even had to cancel his entire vacation because of a release which had the
entire team working on New year's eve into New year's day.

I just refused and wouldn't pick up my phone on the weekends or change my
vacation schedule. I think the main issue with me was that the boss's poor
management skills caused the delays and issues. Mainly, someone kept
corrupting the git repo because they didn't know how to check-in code properly
and it would re-introduce bugs we recently fixed and new bugs almost every
week. It took her and the project manager 3 months to figure out who it
was...and they weren't fired.

I was let go after a little over a year working there and replaced with a
remote developer from Mexico. In fact, everyone on the US team was replaced
with remote workers because they could work on our holidays and had no
problems working every day.

The best part was that the owner gave me shares in the company, for every hour
that I worked. I never actually received my share total on paper (besides a
generic agreement when I was first employed) because the owner kept giving me
a different excuse. About 6 weeks after I left, the owner dissolved the
corporation and created a new one so he wouldn't have to pay anyone shares
that were promised.

This sort of behavior is common in the valley (re-incorporating to push
undesirable people out) and playing semantic and number games on paper to
liquidate employees shares.

It's this sort of behavior that forces me to be unemployable as an experienced
engineer.

------
sv_muppets_
Let's see - you can get these experienced engineers, who will build a proper
platform, a robust architecture, a decent code base, and given the fact they
have delivered before, a solution that will provide what the customers want.
Or You can have these wet behind the ears fuckers straight from college who
will just download a metric shit ton of code via gem install and npm, and then
rebuild several wheels in JS, whilst spending all their time on the company
engineering blog wanking about how great they are? And the vcs choose youth
over experience every time.

~~~
outside1234
Youth also doesn't ask complicated questions, like why is the VC getting 10%
and I'm getting 0.05% when I'm doing 10% of the work and the VC 0.05%.

~~~
bottled_poe
In my mind, fair ownership is proportional to investment risk. Each owner
invests some combination of time and capital. I assume you are an employee, so
how much risk are you taking on?

~~~
zanny
If you aren't already wealthy, and its a startup - which means you pretty much
selling you life to the thing - than _everything you have_.

A VC might invest a million in ten different companies, but they often still
have another 10 in traditional stocks to fall back on if all their ventures
fail and they can continue to sit pretty. Their investment in the company is
mathematically significantly larger than an employee, but that isn't how it
feels when the business goes belly up. The VC writes off another failure, made
another million somewhere else, and meanwhile the dev is distraught with
blaming himself for basically his lifes work failing.

Yes, there can be role reversal there, it is not absolute, but it is the
average. Just because some have and some have not does not mean someone can
not put in a lot more of themself into a project. There are enough VCs that
got rich off of being the developer that they probably recognize the
difference.

And yes, that should hold weight when you only want to give the guy that makes
the dream the reality .05% while a guy surfing waves after doing a VC round on
a yacht providing the money to make it happen can expect incredible returns if
the dream succeeds.

------
karmazeroed
Younger workers cost less, and work more.

Ridiculous. Imagine the baking industry taking this approach - tell your three
year old kid to go into the kitchen and bake a cake. Or how about toddlers
running marathons - because they have to do a lot more running to get to the
end.

------
LoSboccacc
silicon valley is plenty of dark or plain bad stuff
[https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-back-
cha...](https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-back-channel-
culture-silicon-valleys-war-on-privacy-and-the-juvenility-of-all-of-this/)

~~~
r0naa
I am an outsider, but this is true for pretty much anything in life. There is
a always a "dark side" to things. Finger pointing SV as being the mother of
all evils is a bit naive.

"The grass is always greener..." :)

