
Pixels don’t care - dpearson
http://warpspire.com/posts/pixels-dont-care/
======
kneath
(Author here)

Just wanted to clarify, since it seems a lot of people seem to think I'm
frustrated with being discriminated against. I'm not. It's a fact of life. I
got over it pretty early in life. I love being short, it's fucking awesome. If
ever you meet me, you'd probably agree I don't have an issue with it.

I wrote this article to illustrate the power of the internet and this industry
we work in. I used two examples of actual stories that I've lived through to
show a dichotomy. This is not to say there were people set out on destroying
me because I was short. That's crazy. I wanted to point out an amazing thing
the internet has brought on, and especially how amazing it can be for people
who deal in pixels for a living.

That being said, if ever you find yourself telling someone who talks of
discrimination that it's _their_ problem, you should probably re-evaluate your
stance. This is why discrimination is so difficult to counteract — it's rarely
a conscious or malicious process. I discriminate against people every day, and
I'm discriminated against every day. To think otherwise is absurd.

~~~
sneak
I secretly cringed after that time we were in Berlin and I told that terrible
"Have you guys... SEEN KYLE??! (He's about this tall.)" joke.

(For those that don't know it, you extend your right arm out, palm down,
horizontally, while saying the last part loudly.)

It wasn't until after I'd said it that a) I realized that it was totally and
absolutely illegal to tell there and b) that I was calling attention to the
height of someone named Kyle.

Herpity derp.

~~~
anonymous
That's a common misconception. Making fun of nazism is allowed. Spreading
propaganda that nazism is the best thing since sliced bread is not.

~~~
tucson
> "Making fun of nazism is allowed."

Making jokes using the word "Nazi" is common in America and England but is not
well received by German people. I would recommend not making this type of
jokes in Germany.

~~~
bhaak
Depends on the German. I know Germans that are faster in telling Nazi jokes
than I am. :-)

Of course, only do that with those you know well enough. For the rest, the
Fawlty Towers advice is golden.

------
austenallred
I started out as a 13-year-old entrepreneur selling stuff on eBay (which was
pretty new at the time). There was a loophole when they first opened where you
could sign up under someone else's name and switch all of the records over to
your name; that way you didn't have to be 18 to register.

I first grew to love the Internet as the only real meritocracy I experienced
in life. No one knew I was 13. When I talked to people in person I would get a
pat on the head and a "you'll do great some day," but the little eBay company
I had started was taken very seriously. It's still around today, and it makes
just over $2 million/year in net profit (not on eBay any more).

While the Internet is no longer as anonymous, and I am no longer with the
aforementioned company, I believe product still speaks for itself. While it's
true that investors may be looking for a dropout Stanford grad student, if you
create something people love you can grow a company regardless of what anyone
thinks about you as a person. Hell, I raised half a million dollars as an
18-year-old kid, not because I looked or acted like the quintessential
entrepreneur, but because I could show numbers. If you can show someone,
"Here's a black box where you put in $1 and $10 comes out," finding money
isn't hard. Even if you're 18.

You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find me
on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the many
reasons) why I love the Internet.

~~~
chimeracoder
> While the Internet is no longer as anonymous

> You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find
> me on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the
> many reasons) why I love the Internet.

That's the one sad thing, though: as you yourself point out, the Internet is
moving in a direction where this concept of an anonymous meritocracy is
already becoming more and more difficult - and, eventually, likely impossible.

~~~
vidarh
It might become more difficult, but mostly because most of us don't _care_
enough about being hard to track down.

Piecing together most of my "online identity" for example is easy, because I
don't care. My id here is my first name and last initial. My name is all over
my blog which I've acknowledged ownership of in many contexts, even where I
use user names that does not match my name in any way, for example. But there
are the odd pieces you likely won't find, because I don't want you to find
them.

People just need to, and will, learn to curate their identity more.

Incidentally, things like Google's attempt at a real name policy for G+ in
some ways makes anonymity _easier_ : It makes people trust names that have not
been verified - just eyeballed for "looks like a real human name". Everyone
knows that "chimeracoder" is not likely to be your real name. But if you
posted as pjohnson (just to pick something at random), people would be likely
to assume it is your actual name and be none the wiser.

~~~
chimeracoder
> It might become more difficult, but mostly because most of us don't care
> enough about being hard to track down

I would argue that's already not possible anymore, with today's Internet.

Being completely anonymous, including to Google/Facebook/your ISP is much more
difficult than you think. You essentially have to write off large parts of the
web as unviewable, which to me only confirms that anonymity on the Internet is
all but a thing of the past.

------
JumpCrisscross
Silicon Valley has a strange fixation on age which waffles between
discrimination and fetishisation.

I started working as a trader at a Swiss bank in New York when I was 20. There
were lots of jokes cracked about "traders south of the drinking age" and the
number mattered more to some than others, but in the end it was meritocratic.

When I was 21 (after leaving the bank), I interviewed at a well-regarded Palo
Alto-based tech firm and painfully remember _every_ round of the interview
bringing up that I didn't go to a prestigious enough university and that I
looked "baby-faced". Granted, I look older in a suit, but it's a curiously
consistent cultural artefact. You don't find anyone lauding over 22-year old
hedge fund or energy venture founders as VCs do over over their 19-year old
"rock stars".

~~~
blablabla123
Yes probably 25 is the perfect age -- and even then some (unprofessional)
professionals will still consider you too young to seriously talk to. But the
most amazing fact is this: these kind of people who do this discrimination
probably also discriminate against people who are older than themselves. And
one day chances are they will be discrimininated against for that.

This definitely must change, everywhere.

------
morisy
I had the totally same experience with early online communities (Everything2,
Slashdot), and for a long time made a conscious effort of keeping my avatar
off the Internet.

It's a little utopian, yes, but being able to deal with people based on their
ideas, ideals, and quality of work, and develop fast friendships without ever
being aware of so much (Great line: "How could the internet know you were gay?
80 years old? Hispanic? Transgender? Karl Rove? It just didn’t matter.") is
what made the pre-Facebook net magical for me and so many others, and what, in
many ways, makes the rash of so many social-mobile-local startups so boring:
They trade personal flare for personal expression, let users show off badges
instead of actual achievement.

~~~
mjn
One thing I'm not quite sure what to make of is that I felt a lot of that
aspect on the BBSs I started out on during high school, despite them being
more local. Since there was free local calling but long-distance cost money
(possibly a US-specific thing), I dialed up only local BBSs, which made for a
certain location specificity. I liked that to some extent, because it made the
local BBSs "special" in some way, kept the communities at a manageable size,
and made it easier to develop an "audience", so to speak, in a little niche
where you weren't competing with everyone on the whole planet for the same
audience, like you are in the flat geography of the internet. But, at least in
the circles I ended up in, nobody really tried to meet up, or wanted to know
much about who you were IRL. So it had this odd feeling of both very
cyberspacey, where you could be anyone you wanted online, but still a "clumpy"
cyberspace where the clumps were related to RL location.

~~~
pasbesoin
I was part of an Internet based, but highly topical, forum. The experience was
somewhat similar. Clumpy and fairly self-selecting. Some people did meet, out-
of-band and/or in real life. But the nature of the community, and the
worldwide physical dispersal, kept this rather limited.

Actually, while the forum had a very specific topic of focus, people there got
to know each other rather more generally.

It's the one place where I wore an avatar. One of the cartoon character
defaults.

The anonymity and strong community ethic of respect for privacy actually
facilitated communication.

I find the "real name" initiatives ("now with photos") trending to the same
sort of superficiality I run into "in real life".

"Brogramming" and a lot of the rest of the "current trends" also come to mind.

I think some of us are going to continue to look for those more intimate, even
while more anonymous, communities. HN used to be (more than) a bit that way,
before it exploded. (Where, too, people chose to reveal themselves to others,
but on an opt-in basis.)

------
alabut
Reminds me of the Malcolm Gladwell anecdote about how orchestra auditions are
usually biased unless they hide the musicians behind a screen, so that the
music is judged free from distraction.

You can see the same principle at work on a new TV show called The Taste,
where contestants cook up and serve a single bite of food that the judges eat
without knowing who the contestants are. So far the home cooks have been not
only holding their own but beating out the pro chefs.

~~~
B-Con
The reality TV show "The Voice" is similar. The on-TV auditions are done such
that the judges cannot see the performer and must select them for their
season-long team based purely on their voice. It's worked well.

------
robotresearcher
"For the first time in human history, it’s possible to be represented (almost)
solely through the merits of your work."

I enjoyed the piece, but this is overstated. Represented by an agent that
protects anonymity, or just working by correspondence only, writers have
enjoyed this ability for a long time.

George Eliot and J.K. Rowling obscured their gender and let the work speak for
itself.

~~~
eru
Nitpick: `J.K. Rowling' might be obscuring gender, but `George Eliot' isn't
just obfuscation.

~~~
robotresearcher
Yes it is. Mary Ann Eliot using George as a pen name obscured her gender. She
didn't claim to be a man: she hid the fact that she wasn't. George isn't a
uniquely masculine name and was more frequent for women in the past than it is
now.

<http://www.thinkbabynames.com/meaning/0/George>

~~~
eru
Thanks!

------
FireBeyond
What a strange claim. "Looking back", he can't help but feel discriminated
against due to his height.

It couldn't possibly be because of his "no formal eduction, no experience with
any big clients", could it?

~~~
delinka
If you have demonstrably great work, what does formal education do for you
that will affect your work for some company? Similarly, if this guy isn't the
one landing the client or dealing directly with them on a regular basis, how
can the pixels possibly care about for whom they are assembled?

I read these parts of his anecdotes as excuses concocted only after an in-
person meeting.

~~~
Retric
I have heard that people with formal education are less likely to flake out on
jobs. As in just stop showing up. Which is both important and independent of
the quality of your work. Granted it's anecdotal evidence, but hiring is far
from one dimensional.

------
kerryfalk
?

I, too, am short. I'm 5'6". I have always worked on teams with people much
older than me (seems like a 15-20 year average). When I was in my early 20s
and in sales selling high dollar value equipment I recognized that my age
wasn't going to help. It took a few moments to dispel that once I began
talking with someone as I just needed to overcome the view that I was
inexperienced (As that would be associated with my age). It definitely did not
hold me back and I'm fairly sure that if I lost a deal it was because of
something other than my height.

We all face challenges and each are unique to us.

I meet a lot of people and I don't know anyone who would actively discriminate
against someone short. I read through the article and based on it alone I got
the sense that these challenges my stem from within the author rather than
something external. I didn't read an examples of a situation that you'd reason
resulted due to his height. Just interpretations.

"Ultimately, your greatest competition is yourself." - Guy Kawasaki

~~~
sharkweek
>We all face challenges and each are unique to us.

Completely random musing, but it reminded me of my height being
disadvantageous when in perspective:

I'm a pretty tall guy, a little above 6'4", and have an extremely large reach
--

Also a pretty avid rock climber. I can rarely climb at my gym without someone
commenting about how it must be so nice to be able to just "reach" for all the
holds. Ignoring the fact that I probably weigh 30 more pounds than my sub 6'
climber buddies, most route setters at our gym are probably closer to 5'10"
and set/grade the routes accordingly; I often end up using sub-optimal (and
tiring) form on the "crux" of the route as I end up cramped together
awkwardly.

~~~
darkarmani
Agreed. That nice rest everyone gets on a "perfect" knee bar, just doesn't
work for the taller people.

Rock climbing strength doesn't scale with weight. And tendon strength which is
so important develops so slow. After crimping on tiny holds so many times, I
don't really want to hear about how my height is an advantage in climbing.
Every once in a while you get to reach past the small holds to a nice big jug,
but the rest of the time you're carrying the extra weight.

------
danabramov
I started doing freelance work when I just turned 17 and learned just the
opposite thing:

“It's up to you to tell the story.”

I was able to turn my age into advantage, and the contrast between my
obviously teenage avatar and a convincing portfolio helped me distinguish
myself from most other freelancers.

It was the same with my first job: I just approached a guy after he gave a
lecture and asked him questions he found interesting. He was a CTO of an
outsourcing company, and I asked if they were looking for C# programmers. I
sent a very pompous resumé and got hired despite its silliness—it made them
curious enough to land me an interview where I was able to show I'm a normal
guy.

If you're seriously different from the rest, you can turn this into an
advantage as long as you stress this point and make it an integral part of
your story—not something you hide. People appreciate honesty and some humour
too, and that's especially true in freelancing.

Exposing your vulnerability (yes I'm young, yes I'm a minority, etc) while
showcasing your great work makes you look humane and more likely to be a great
person to work with. You'll attract better customers—I experienced this
myself. People you'll enjoy working for.

Your work speaks for yourself in either case, but in the end it's _how you
market your work_ that determines if the one evaluating you feels excitement
(“This guy's so young but his work kicks ass, he must be a real prodigy”) or
doubt (“This work is great but he's so young so we shouldn't hire him”).

Of course getting a _lot_ of signed positive reviews is important, and pricing
can be tricky too.

------
pizza
Late last year, an artist by the name of Captain Murphy dropped a mix tape,
"Duality". Duality had phenomenal production quality and very talented
rapping. Everyone from "future beats"-type listeners to gangsta-rap
afficionados wanted to know who Captain Murphy was.

Turns out, the biggest name in all of modern experimental hip hop, Flying
Lotus, was behind the project, along with a wealth of his friends. When asked
why he didn't release the music as Flying Lotus, he replied (paraphrased) that
he didn't want people to say, "Oh, he's rapping now", and he wanted to be
respected more for his talent than for his legacy, or who people thought he
was.

------
joshmlewis
I've always heard of this happening but I never really had a problem with it.
I thankfully learned early on about getting things in writing, agreements,
etc. after seeing people getting screwed over. I learned that if people didn't
want to work with you because of your age, you shouldn't want to work with
them either. I heard Zeldman say that he only works with clients that he
personally likes. Something to that effect, but it rang true for me even to
today. Only work with people you like. Don't get stuck in a crappy job like
OP. You can get out there and do it if you try hard enough.

I'm 19 now and it hardly affects me at all. In fact I feel behind. I am
cofounding a startup and working full time at another startup, and I still
haven't had my great succes yet. I work hard everyday and that's all that
matters. Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut. What really
inspirers me are the ones that have gone out there and just killed it at a
young age, it means that it is possible if you find the right way.

~~~
mpyne
> Work hard, meet the right people, and use your gut.

I've done that all, and been successful out of it. But at least in my case
there was one even larger element in play: Luck. And I can't even begin to
list all the different ways that I've been lucky (and unlucky), but I always
keep that in the back of my mind.

I could have born in Somalia, or a Brooklyn ghetto, I could have tried to make
my last career move a year earlier or later (when it would have been shot down
for sure), or any of 80,000 other reasons I could have failed despite hard
work, talking to the right people, and using my gut.

It's easy to say you won't get screwed if you're careful, but be very sure
that it isn't just that you've been lucky to interact with good people.

~~~
daeken
"I am a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have
of it." - Unknown (tons of attributions)

While some things are just random chance -- who your parents are, where you're
born, etc -- but most things in life don't come from luck, much as we like to
ascribe things to it. Most of the time it comes from hard work and -- probably
more importantly -- tenacity. I've been "lucky" in a lot of ways, namely who
has seen my work and decided to write about it, who's decided to hire me
because of it, etc, but at the end of the day there were a dozen failures for
every success. If I hadn't stuck at it, I never would've "gotten lucky".

~~~
mpyne
I do believe that it's possible to "help luck along" (kind of the same theme
as how "planning is indispensable, but plans are useless"). So I'm not saying
this to say "Don't try", but rather to try to counter a bit the idea that
"working hard" implies success. It's usually necessary, but not always
sufficient.

------
mnicole
Echoing the article and everyone else that this was an issue for me as well. I
had an interview at a small-town agency once with the two owners. They talked
to me for awhile, and then walked out of the room to speak privately. When
they came back, one of them said he loved my work and he'd hire me today, but
his co-founder wasn't comfortable with hiring someone "so young without any
formal education" and wanted me to come back after I'd done so (haha, right).
They actually bickered quite a bit between themselves on the issue right in
front of me (which made me feel good), but settled on not giving me the gig. I
went about my way, happier that I didn't have to put up with someone who cared
more about paperwork than work on paper.

A few years later I was working at another agency where my art director was
pleading with me _not_ to go to college and to stay with the company (which,
honestly I would have had it not been for the keylogger I found implemented by
another manager). "School is a waste of time for talent," he said, "You'll be
miserable. Stay here and do real work." Feeling like I'd rather see for myself
than regret the opportunity, I went. It wasn't the private art schools I
wanted (I couldn't afford something like that), so I ran into nothing but
mediocrity and decade-old lesson plans. Underwhelmed, pissed, and broke, I
went back to working.

Meanwhile, a girl I know that spent the better part of 10 years receiving
design/multimedia degrees has little to show for it by way of skills. While
she acquires jobs easily, she doesn't keep them for very long as her talents
are so many years behind what people are expecting that she can't do what she
wants to/what her degree seemed to "promise" her.

These days you'll see portfolios splattered with "~young designer~" or
"~budding developer & entrepreneur~" and it completely goes against the spirit
of being merited on your strengths rather than your accomplishments-by-age
(ironically, I enjoy when kids/younger teens post their age in the titles of
their ShowHNs). While it might make the kid feel more competent, acknowledging
it is just asking to be underpaid because they know you won't know any better
or inherently believe you aren't worth it.

~~~
corporalagumbo
Or perhaps instead of trying to fight their age to project a defensive false
equivalence with older workers, these kids are embracing and flaunting their
age as a virtue - their precocity, enthusiasm, even naivety. You said it
yourself - you look kindly on young kids with the balls to show off something
cool they've made on HN. It's natural as an older person to feel charitable
towards earnest kids, so what's wrong with leveraging that?

I'm still pretty young and I often either genuinely come across as or play up
a little an appearance of being incompetent and bewildered when I'm
interacting with older, female shop assistants and office clerks in retail or
bureaucratic environments. They like it, though they wouldn't necessarily
admit it, and I get treated with faux-grumpy generosity. Works for me!

~~~
mnicole
My issue isn't with their passion or desire; that's great. But I'm hiring
people based on talent, not age or even enthusiasm, and I question the
intent/presumption in citing that attribute alone before even seeing their
work. It's the same argument about the worth of college [in certain fields];
does it really matter in the context of the role?

I've also seen 25 year olds use it to describe themselves, so at what point
are you still "young"?

I'd assume this is the same reason people don't like seeing ages in ShowHNs,
because it implies that it's some sort of _accomplishment_ rather than simply
a fact. I enjoy seeing pet projects "kids" do, and a lot of ShowHNs are really
just advertising and attempts to get some users, when usually most of the
younger audience is just getting their work in front of real developers to get
a feel for the quality, usefulness and receive general advice on how to do
better. It boils down to - are you being sold on a product or are you being
asked for a critique?

My opinion only comes from my experience; I started working at 15 when my
vocational school realized that I was beyond their training and put me up for
work-based learning. Most of the adults I interacted with in the spaces I
worked in (both design and development) did not take me seriously despite my
work ethic, my skills, and my enthusiasm. I begged to be in client meetings
and was denied because "they wanted the clients to take them seriously", I
offered faster solutions to the roundabout ways we were doing certain things
and was patted on the head and told to stick to my duties. My genuine interest
into the sales and communication sides of the businesseses were brushed off.

I didn't mention it in the previous post, but I would also say my gender had a
lot to do with it. While I couldn't be in client meetings, I was asked to come
in an hour early to make the 'boys' coffee. I wouldn't be interacting with
clients at all, but I was expected to wear skirts.

There's also a lot of kids that dial it in, so it's tough to tell someone that
they should hire more fresh faces when you've gotta weigh who is there for the
experience vs. who is there for the paycheck.

~~~
corporalagumbo
Sounds like you worked for idiots. Better employees would have noticed your
seriousness and helped you develop your interest in the work I think.

~~~
mnicole
These idiots are widespread throughout business. And with younger employees,
it is often assumed they will not stick around (no family to support,
incentives to travel) so how much of your time do you want to devote to
building them up if they're just going to take that knowledge elsewhere?

------
pnathan
This is one of the most transformative things of the Internet. It is also one
of the most definite things I dislike about, say, the post 2005 closed web.
Age/gender matters so much to people, even hackery types. It didn't seem to
matter as much.

------
twodayslate
Good for him. My brother had a similar experience selling things online. If
you are able to write professionally, people are more willing to trust you -
even if you are 13.

~~~
robotmay
Back when I was 14 I played quite a lot of Phantasy Star Online on the Xbox
(which had a very small community). My voice broke a year or two beforehand,
and I was pretty respectful and eloquent. I had people constantly looking to
me for advice and help, under the assumption I was significantly older (I have
a pretty low voice). It was quite nice being treated as an adult years before
people would treat me the same in person.

------
kevin_rubyhouse
Kinda crazy to think about, but when China gets up to speed and communications
between our countries are open, the scale of what he mentioned at the end will
be huge. Today, you could be one of the most sought out programmers in the
west. Imagine competing against another intelligent millions of programmers
from the east too. I can't wait.

------
javajosh
What a beautiful blog post. I think too often we lament the anonymity of the
internet without understanding that there are some serious upsides, too.

It's almost like a social Turing test: A good person is someone you identify
as such based purely on messages written on slips of paper and passed under a
door.

------
dhaivatpandya
I totally agree with the "too young" thing. I'm 15 and been freelancing since
I was 12, and this gets in the way _all the time_. People try to take
advantage of you once they realize that you're young(er) than most in the
field.

~~~
geon
Unless you are a prodigy, you simply haven't had the _time_ yet to become
really good at anything. Supposedly it takes 10.000 hours or so of exercise,
which would be 9 years at 3 hours daily.

I'm not trying to push you down, and anyone not paying you what your work is
_worth_ is definitely taking advantage of you.

~~~
dhaivatpandya
Very true. But, I don't think that applies to everything. I don't think it
takes 10,000 hours of practice to design a decent Wordpress theme. In fact, I
would say that most college graduates (even from top universities) would still
be quite far away from 10,000 hours in a specific domain of CS/SE, yet,
companies do hire them.

~~~
geon
> But, I don't think that applies to everything. I don't think it takes 10,000
> hours of practice to design a decent Wordpress theme.

Well it does, but you obviously benefit from all relevant experiences. Any
kind of design, even print or illustration, is relevant. Obviously all
programming, not only PHP/Javascript is relevant.

------
aaronbasssett
I know some incredibly talented younger people. People who without a doubt
will be brilliant developers, much better than me I am sure. Would I hire them
into a senior position right now, no chance.

Sometimes being good or even gifted is simply not enough. You need to know
when to be pragmatic. When to let someone else win. When to look at
everything, not just the lines of code or the pixels but the commercial
implications of your decisions.

For example:

> For every hour I worked, the agency billed my time out at a 2,083% markup.
> To the client (who couldn’t see my height), my time was worth over 20x the
> amount I was worth to the agency.

That's because they're not just billing for your time. They're billing for the
time of the sales person who chased the lead, the time of the team who read
the brief and developed the proposal, the time of the people who travelled to
the client to deliver the presentation, the time of the secretary who handled
the callback and the time of all the people who did all the same things the
half a dozen other times where you DIDN'T get the job.

------
MattyRad
I know how it feels... I'm 22, 5'4", and look like I'm 17. This post reminds
me of the Hacker Manifesto, by The Mentor: we exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias.

~~~
dbattaglia
I'm 32 and look like I'm 22 to most people. Trust me you start appreciating it
more the older you get. :)

------
hjay
I had more or less the same experience doing freelance work early on.

Clients who judge you based on your age, instead of the value you provide to
their business. Clients who are uncomfortable taking suggestions from a 20
year old, and instead, would rather get lower quality work from someone older,
and more "experienced".

Glad to hear you're doing well now, keep it up!

------
RandallBrown
I had a similar experience when I bought my first new car. I was 23 at the
time, but could have passed for younger.

I went into the dealership and waited around until FINALLY someone came and
talked to me. I talked a little, asked some questions and eventually got to do
some test drives. I was already pretty sold on a certain car, but they didn't
have any on the lot in the color I wanted. So I ask about it, the salesman
tells me that what they have on the lot is all that's available (shipments
were delayed by the tsunami in Japan) and that was that. I didn't buy a car
that day.

Now, at that point I was borrowing my parents car, and would need to return
them the car at some point. Luckily the dealership in my parents town had the
car in the right color (according to their website) so I called them up and
said I wanted it.

Unfortunately for me, it was already gone. But the guy bent over backwards for
me trying to find a new one at other dealerships in the state that matched
what I wanted and he eventually found one.

I always wonder how the second dealer would have treated me if he would have
seen me before we made the deal.

~~~
cgmorton
Or, one was a good salesman and the other was not. Or maybe the second one was
strapped for cash and really needed the sale.

I'd rather not theorize until we get some more data points.

------
mikecane
>>>For the first time in human history, it’s possible to be represented
(almost) solely through the merits of your work.

I don't want to detract from what he went through -- god knows short people
and other physical "non-conformists" are too often treated differently (for
bad _and_ good) -- but Andrew Carnegie was short too. What we're all suffering
under is image indoctrination from mass media, from magazines, movies, TV.
Every time I hear someone say something like, "S/he _looks_ the part," I want
to reach for an imaginary gun. Life is not effin _Central Casting._ And it's
all gotten worse in just the past 10-20 years, with everyone on mass screens
seemingly all having the same damn jaws and jawlines, looking like they all
came from the same limited gene pool. It didn't used to be that way. Anyway,
Napoleon was also short. Don't let anyone push you around.

EDIT: After reading a sales-related comment here, I was reminded that Ross
Perot is also short. He made out OK.

~~~
upquark
I'm not sure it's gotten worse in every aspect, particularly in terms of
acceptance of foreign ethnicities and races. People do have an unrealistic
model of the real world, and that model is being currently skewed by mass
media, etc, but previously it was skewed by local cultural attitudes,
religious doctrine, etc. I don't think people were ever objective in judging
each other based on merits vs appearance.

------
mjs
This is an argument that there's no discrimination in tech? Or less
discrimination than in other industries?

~~~
kevingadd
I think the suggestion is much simpler: That when everything happens
electronically, it is less likely that discrimination will happen because
people aren't even given an opportunity to apply their biases and stereotypes
to you because they've never seen you in person, just read your text (or
perhaps spoken with you over the phone/skype).

In my experience this is true, even if it doesn't wholly eliminate
discrimination.

------
hexonexxon
This is not news to me as I've had jobs offered by simply posting to debian
and *bsd mailing lists from out of the blue once they read my posts on hunting
kernel bugs. Mailing lists are still a secret gold mine for employment. I also
didn't have to send a resume or anything was hired right away each time

Also +1 for IRC. Thankfully something social still exists where you don't have
forced real identities, a whole profile of bullshit musical interests nobody
cares about (i don't care that you love obscure hipster sweater and beard
acoustic), or forum circle jerking and post count worshipping.

Plus it isn't monitored by your employers looking to fire somebody for slight
twitter or fb breaches of conduct, and best of all the media and oprah have no
idea what IRC is

------
kysol
Being self-taught, I too have had to deal with the lower than everyone else
wage. It's hard work on a daily basis when you spend a portion of your time
helping out other "learned" members of the team by fixing mistakes that you
/facepalm at.

What is worse are the ones that use your lack of a degree as evidence that you
don't know what you're talking about... it usually comes back to bite them in
the ass when their systems collapse due to the issues raised months prior, you
know the ones they never listened to you about.

If and when I get around to hiring my own staff, I will be doing it based on
what they have done, not what they can do (on paper).

------
jwarkentin
I've felt the same way for years. When I was younger I was on IRC all the
time. I remember spending a bunch of time helping people out with Gentoo, and
occasionally other code issues. It was funny one day after I helped a 35 year
old guy out with a Javascript problem he was having for work, when he found
out that I was 14. Haha, age has always felt like my biggest hurdle with my
career, but it's not too bad, I'm far better off than others my age. I have
always wished people would judge me more for my knowledge and abilities than
for my age.

------
sliverstorm
I'm going to hazard that they didn't pay you less because you were young- they
paid you less knowing that, because you were young, that was your market
value. In other words, they paid you a rate competitive with what they thought
you could get elsewhere, which tends to be lower when you are younger.

I'm still debating this in my head, whether it is discrimination or not if
they are saying "This guy is young, his market rate is lower". (Rather than
"This guy is young, he must be no good") Because it generally _is_ an accurate
assessment.

~~~
cheapsteak
'Market value' does not exclude discrimination if most players in the market
are ageist, sexist, or racist

What would stop a company from framing any kind of discrimination as an
argument from 'market value'?

~~~
sliverstorm
_What would stop a company from framing any kind of discrimination as an
argument from 'market value'_

Well, in theory the part where the employee goes somewhere else for a much
better rate.

 _'Market value' does not exclude discrimination if most players in the market
are ageist, sexist, or racist_

Basically my argument is that in that case it is the job market that is
racist; individual employers don't have to be racist to match market rates,
even if the market is racist. Or at least that's what I'm mulling over.

------
corporalagumbo
It's a perspective thing. I think he missed an alternate reaction to his
position. He could have been pleased with the money he was paid, honoured by
the responsibility he was given, and driven to do the best he could. Instead
he spent most of his time feeling hard done by. That's the kind of attitude
problem that people pick up on when they consider people for a position - will
this guy work his ass off for me? Oh, he thinks too much of himself? No
thanks.

~~~
treerock
This is an attitude that employers work hard to cultivate. I don't think it's
healthy for workers to 'work his ass off' for a company that isn't willing to
reward those efforts. It's a weakness and employers will take advantage.

~~~
corporalagumbo
But he was being rewarded, no? And I imagine at a pretty damn good pay rate
for someone so young and untested. and he was given a fantastic door into a
high-power field. But he had to fixate on the fact that he was "only" getting
X rather than Y. He had an opportunity to be thankful for what he _was_
getting, but he chose to focus on the negative instead.

 _a company that isn't willing to reward those efforts._

What I'm talking about is not some sort of self-sacrifice, selling yourself
into corporate slavery. It's the basics of what I would look for in an
employee - is he going to work hard, do it without complaining - is he going
to make my life easier or harder? Unfortunately people with a notably entitled
what's-in-it-for-me attitude only make employer's lives more difficult.

Not saying that that's for sure what this guy was like btw, but that's the
impression I get.

------
Heliosmaster
This is a great article.

As a student of mathematics about to finish his studies and looking
potentially at a job in software development, this gave me a boost in
confidence, reminding me that I should not be afraid too much on competition
from people that have the proper academic background (although one might say
that I'm not that in a disadvantaged position, I do know a lot less about the
technical core stuff of computing).

Everything is still possible!

------
cale
In interviews with agencies I've been told "You're not a designer" and "I hate
personnel." In many cases the old agency curmudgeons are threatened by younger
people with talent. This sounds like a similar example.

On the up side, this is an excellent indicator that you don't want to work for
these people. There's always a better option.

------
sergiotapia
Good for him that he managed to get around that.

But personal, face to face interactions are much better are gauging how a
person is going to be when joining a team. Any sort of team.

People on paper sound nice, but when you meet them they are a bit off. I have
a scary knack for this and can call out caustic people after the initial
interaction.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I may be wrong but I think you missed the point. If "working together" is code
for "we both have commit access to the same repo and the same functional test
criteria and same target ship date" then it really doesn't matter at all if
the person likes to work in their underwear and tell cat jokes since you're
only interaction with them is going be through commits.

In a strangely wonderful way, people who have conditions that would make their
'productive' work in an office impossible have found work and even success as
a remote team member on the other side of an email alias and irc channel.

That said, _managers_ are more comfortable when the know their folks a bit
more, but they generally are watching for things to go off the rails and head
that off rather than whether or not the code is up to standard.

~~~
potatolicious
> _"since you're only interaction with them is going be through commits."_

I have had many jobs. I have never had one where the sole (or vast majority)
of my interactions with people were via commits.

I've even worked remotely, and Skype, IRC, IM were all critical. Personality
and communication skills matter, even if you never see someone's face in
person.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I'm not disagreeing, I'm saying that if you've never met someone face to face
but you've worked successfully with them using IRC/IM/Email/Some-source-code-
revision-system as your communication tool (as the original article Author
implies) then meeting 'face to face' to get to know them may not be necessary.

------
E_Carefree
Daniel Suarez is this awesome writer who wrote "Dameon" which predicts a new
form of government and organization that exemplifies this idea.

In a type of augmented reality where you are no longer seen as a person with
an age or skin tone, but rather a person with a simple feedback rating based
on your previous interactions.

------
mduvall
I'm lost - where in the post is the discrimination for being short, and not
just having the proper credentials?

------
spot
it's great that this guy got his job and all but let's not pretend it's just
about the quality of his work. he was hanging out in a chat room with these
people. plenty of personality shows through.

------
Stefan_H
If I read this correctly, the main negative point was that the author was not
paid as much as his colleagues, though he did get the position. The author
suggests this is because of his height. To me (a young professional in the
software development industry) that screams that the author did not know his
own worth and therefore did not negotiate a high enough pay. I'm young for the
positions I have held, and am roughly of average height, but you can be sure
that I will get paid the same or more than my colleagues, because I understand
how much I am worth and I am willing to say as much.

------
ycuser
sometimes age is on your side and sometimes not. If one thinks they are worth
more than what they are getting they should go get their worth, period. You
have to trust your ability and back it up with unflinching guts. We live in
fabulous times where showcasing your work is easier and the reach global.

------
ajsharp
Well put kneath, well fucking put :)

------
mvleming
If you look to history, you can see overtime we acquire new ways of changing
ourselves. There was a time when there wasn't makeup, but nowadays people can
use makeup and change their appearance. Same thing with dying your hair,
getting a plastic surgery, or arguably even body building: by getting this
down to a science, we can figure out how to best change our physique. But
really, all of these methods are crude, really crude.

But I'm super excited about what the next of couple of decades will do change
this. I think we're on the verge of being able to completely define ourselves,
and I don't just mean in the sense of designer children, i.e. genetics. I'm
also thinking more along the lines of augmented reality and new bionic bodies.

Even today, there is a woman, Aimee Mullins, who has prosthetic legs. In her
TED talk
([http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics...](http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html)),
she talked about how she could redesign her legs however she wanted. For
example, she could be 6 inches taller, or when she did a fashion shoot, she
could have cheetah legs:
[http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/b/3/17/452/1745283...](http://img0.liveinternet.ru/images/attach/b/3/17/452/17452836_cheetah.jpg).
(NSFW?) At one point in the talk, a person from the audience shouted out "It's
not fair!"

And this is epochal, right? This is just a sign of what's to come. You look at
Second Life and you see these avatars people have designed for themselves,
they have control over how big their chest is, what skin colour they are,
height, whatever. I can't help but dream of that being extrapolated to the
real world, where we have complete control over how we express ourselves
physically. Everybody would feel comfortable in their skin, everybody would
look super-sexy, and we would find radical new ways of expressing ourselves
(personally I would love blue fur).

Now I know what some of you are thinking right now, isn't this really
superficial? In Second Life we already see huge tits and perfect abs. In one
sense, culture becomes magnified tremendously. The body almost becomes a blank
canvas to extrapolate the mind onto. But also, it's not superficial at all,
it's exactly the opposite.

Let me explain it by posing you this question: what defines you? I've thought
long and hard about this, and I've come to the answer: you are defined by what
you can't change. When OP can't change how tall he is, he's defined by that,
especially so in his workplace. On the flip side, when you can change
something about yourself, that is a means of expressing who you are. We can
change the style and the colour of our hair, and this is a huge part of
culture: just look at all those hair magazines.

So what we have here is you are defined by what you can't change and what you
can change is a means of expressing who you are. But, and this is the point
I'm trying to get at, when you can change something that you couldn't change
before, what defines you becomes smaller. So when in the next couple of
decades, when we can change our sex, skin colour, physique, species?, what
will truly define us becomes an interesting question.

And it is in this sense how it is exactly the opposite of superficial.

There's a Buddha saying: "You are not your thoughts." And you are not your
body either.

~~~
pnathan
The weird thing is, I've been in some of those avatar worlds, and people still
want to look humanoidish, often outlandishly 'supermodel'. Almost no one
actually experiments beyond that. It's weird when I recall cyberpunk short
stories from the 80s where people had all these radically weird and different
avatars. Why should we be confined by our minds to looking like supermodels,
why shouldn't we look like some sort of... alien thing in cyber reality?

Not sure. But it'd be an interesting study.

~~~
mvleming
I never thought about it in that way, and that is interesting. It's like the
more we have the opportunity to not look human, we take that opportunity to
look more human. But, thinking about it, it makes sense. It's personifying
what society has deemed as the perfect image. In response to your comment, I
think you just need to give culture time to experiment with new ideas when new
opportunities rise up. I've actually never played in an avatar world, but I
imagine, for example in Second Life, new styles or physiques. Maybe you could
tell me?

~~~
corporalagumbo
>personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image.

Ugh, social construction theory.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_aesthetics>

~~~
mvleming
You think the duckface is an aesthetic quality we've evolved to have a taste
for?

~~~
corporalagumbo
What? No. I think the aesthetic features which most accurately signal good
health, strength and fertility, which humans throughout history have
consistently opted for in mate selection, are what we have evolved tastes for.
I.e. we have evolved aesthetic preferences which have consistently construed
reproductive benefits.

~~~
mvleming
I agree with you. I've read about how a curvy figure (a high hip-to-waist
ratio) is more attractive to males because it means offspring are more likely
to survive when they pop out of the woman (small hips and big brains don't go
well together).

The point I was trying to make though is there are some aesthetic qualities we
like that are not evolutionary products, the example I gave was the duckface.
Another example is women in China bind their feet
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding>), or yet another is Kayan women
elongate their necks
([http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ak1yxTngxW4/Tnen0_FXpgI/AAAAAAAAAW...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ak1yxTngxW4/Tnen0_FXpgI/AAAAAAAAAWg/T-qLjMFrITI/s1600/2083485999_3742694857.jpg)).

I believe what aesthetic qualities we like are the result of our nature _and_
our nurture, and it is in this way I believe society does create a perfect
image.

~~~
corporalagumbo
The point I was making is, and the reason I dislike SCT, is that there is a
very strong and relatively stable genetically-determined set of aesthetic
preferences found in all cultures. There are no cultures where diseased and
ulcerated skin on the face is considered sexy. "But of course" you might say -
but that's the point, we take the real commonalities for granted.

And then, yes, on top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different
desirable appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person,
driven by all the complexities of interacting human beings. But those factors
can be boiled down to some fairly simple drives which have all emerged for one
reason: to maximise reproductive success.

Which is all what you would expect from the result of selection pressures
acting across tens of thousands of successful generations of descendants of
ancient DNA-replicating machines.

Another way to say this is that it is in our nature to be highly responsive to
environmental conditions, i.e. nurture. Nature builds the platform and tools
needed for nurture to occur - but just because we are plastic in the face of
nurture does not mean nurture negates or transcends the principles of nature
(at least not so far, I believe.) If individuals had arisen in which this was
so, they would have been selected against. You should read The Language
Instinct, Steven Pinker makes this point about people who try and argue that
the brain is effectively infinitely plastic and comes with no built-in
"software" for processing and generating language.

(PS The main complication in trying to read human behaviour for evolutionary
logic is that selection principles do not act upon individuals solely, because
humans are all integrated into often multiple kin and common-identity networks
of greater or lesser complexity. Evolutionary logic resolves at the level of
these more-complicated networks.)

(PPS I believe that the head size-hip ratio theory is erroneous. Read
[http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/08/timing-
of-c...](http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/08/timing-of-
childbirth-evolved-to-match-womens-energy-limits/))

~~~
mvleming
I haven't read about SCT, but in the wikipedia article about social
constructionism I read: "When we say that something is socially constructed,
we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves
rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself." You said: "on
top of those there is a whole conflicting mess of different desirable
appearances which depend upon the period, culture, and person, driven by all
the complexities of interacting human beings." At first I thought are "the
period, culture, and person" not "contingent variables of our social selves"?
But you went on to say "those factors can be boiled down to some fairly simple
drives which have all emerged for one reason: to maximise reproductive
success." In other words, you're saying those factors can be boiled down to
something that is an inherent quality that we possess in ourselves, which is
we maximise reproductive success.

Does this make sense? I dislike SCT too now but I wasn't trying to imply the
perfect image society creates is socially constructed when I said
"personifying what society has deemed as the perfect image." I meant
regardless of whether society is socially constructed or not, this system that
I'm referring to as "society" creates an ideal image of what a human being
should look like. If society is not socially constructed, and is in fact
defined by our biology, then that would mean this ideal image also originates
from our biology. Regardless of all this, there is a perfect image we strive
for.

I feel like we're on the same page, and I totally relate to your view that,
and I'm going to paraphrase you: "it is in our nature to be highly responsive
to our nurture." Our nurture is not an individual entity from the system, our
nurture is grounded by our biology.

~~~
corporalagumbo
1) I just called it "SCT" as shorthand, not to imply that it's a coherent
theory. I don't think it's particularly coherent - from what I know it's one
of the many parts of modern cultural theory, stemming from sociology,
anthropology, and history, among others, which in modern times have become
extremely theoretical and disconnected from reality, and tend to say very
little with a lot of very complicated words.

2) Ultimately everything, including human behaviour, boils down to the
principles of fundamental physics. Human behaviour is just the most complex
expresion of these principles of which we are aware.

3) I mostly jumped on the hint of social constructionism because I absolutely
hate it when people try to argue that beauty and aesthetic standards are
purely constructed and hence artifical or arbitrary, which is patently not
true. It's driven by a misguided desire to defend ugly people or something, I
don't know, anyone it's stupid. Again I recommend Steven Pinker, his book The
Blank Slate also touches on this I believe.

4) Mostly though I wanted to offer some logical reasons why people on online
games might tend to wish to present themselves as, for men, muscular, strong,
dominant figures, and for women, attractive, assertive, desirable figures.

