When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Don’t Even Bother to Lie

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/when-comes-age-bias-tech-companies-dont-even-bother-lie-dan-lyons

by swamp40 • 10 years ago

248 189 10 years ago

PaulHoule2• 10 years ago

Young people are easier to control. (When the "charge of the light brigade" was first written is was seen as a beautiful thing that soldiers would match obediently to their deaths; maybe in software we will accept how tragic it is in 2050 or something.)

wnevets• 10 years ago

younger people are also more likely to work more hours for a lot less pay.

natch• 10 years ago

...and, due to inexperience, to do less effective work. Not saying this is a given; we are just talking about likelihoods here.

Esau• 10 years ago

I was under the impression that younger programmers are desired because they are perceived as being able to work a lot of hours and because they are less likely to have the family commitments that would prevent them from doing so.

sevensor• 10 years ago

was seen as a beautiful thing that soldiers would match obediently to their deaths

Poems are full of traps. I think you can read The Charge of the Light Brigade either way, or both ways at once. On the one hand, it calls on us to honor the heroism of the young cavalrymen. But on the other hand, "someone had blundered." Their heroism is futile. Tennyson had to be seen supporting the team, as it were, but when I read the poem, I see his reservations more than anything.

DavidAdams2• 10 years ago

We need more casual literary criticism here at HN. Thanks!

romanovcode• 10 years ago

This. It's easier to sell them bullshit about "disrupting" as well, make them work long-hours and so on..

chollida12• 10 years ago

I'm approaching 40 and this is something I think about a lot. In fact this is something that everyone should think about. Everyone, assuming you are lucky enough, will get older.

The person you reject because they are over 40 today will be you in 10 years. If you pass on someone due to their age you can't turn around and get mad when some other 20 year old does the same.

Whenever I interview someone I always ask myself, if I was the person across the table from me would I think I got a fair shot during this interview.

Having said that, this is a two way street. You need to be aware of what your skill set is. I took the Scott Adams career advice [0] to try and be in the top 25% in two areas. In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time.

[0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

akg_674• 10 years ago

In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time.

What are 40+ doing in your surrounding environment, your friend's and people like you? How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments? That should give you a clue what you most probably will be doing and what your "goal post" should be when you join 40+ group otherwise you are going to have bad time too.

chollida12• 10 years ago

How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments

All the 40+ crowd around me is doing math and programming, that's kind of the day to day job at a hedge fund:)

:) I'm sorry, I've read your comment 4 times and I still can't make sense of it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me?

Could you please try and restate your opinion to be clearer?

jazzdog3• 10 years ago

Is your point that 40+ aren't doing Math and Programming, so one should not aspire to be doing that at 40+? But why aren't 40+ doing Math and Programming? Because they've moved on to other challenges, or because they are being replaced? Aren't we back to the original point?

mbrutsch• 10 years ago

I'm early 50s, and I've "learned and discarded" several decades of skills: 8/16-bit assemblers, the entire DEC range of computers, MUMPS and the VA ecosystem, the Perl craze of the early 2000s; I'm in an Oracle/Ruby shop now, and I suspect I'll be learning something new in a few years. Only way to keep up in this field, throw out the details, keep the concepts, gird the loins and hit the books. Well google, no one uses dead trees anymore. I have almost 100 lbs of "replaced by google" books sitting under my carport waiting to be recycled, becuse even schools don't want them.

dboreham• 10 years ago

I loaded up my truck with the books a couple of years ago and took them to the dump (no recycling of bound paper here).

I still have my Vax though, and copies of Knuth, K&R, ...

jazzdog3• 10 years ago

I have been programming since the late 70s. I will say, some folks my age should be discarded, not because they're old, but because they've refused to keep up their skill sets. Many of my friends, whom I worked with in the 80s, are still scrounging around for whatever RPG AS/400 jobs are left. I shake my head. I'm having more fun than ever developing these days. Angular and Typescript of late. And it'll be some new framework in a year and a half. Other folks I talk to complain that they've been replaced by outsourced Indians. A little bit further probing reveals that "well they moved it to Java, and I'm a Cobal programmer, I don't want to learn Java". I shake my head some more. I'm not helping the cause here, I guess. Just some random observations.

debacle• 10 years ago

If your skillset is FoxPro DB support, as long as you're willing to move around, you can make good money. Being really good at old technology is a good way to make a lot of money.

Just try not to only be good at FoxPro DB support, forever.

gedy• 10 years ago

Frankly, what I've seen is less about older people stale skills as it is people having a family and a life outside of the office after 5PM. Many, many places implicitly reward long hours of (inefficient) desk time, and equate that with "hard work".

Probably also big part of women leaving the workplace after having kids.

akg_674• 10 years ago

Yep, one of my 55+ friend was laid off last month by a startup. While 20-25 year old coworkers in his group were being fed free pizza and Redbull to encourage working late in the night, he had to go to his family in the evening.

ojbyrne2• 10 years ago

So I started reading this book, and the immediate thing that strikes me is the obvious age bias (against young people) of the author. It's full of phrases like "just out of high school," (about a director:) "looked like an intern." If you're going to throw rocks, etc.

And for the record, I'm 55, work in tech, and yes, ageism is a problem, but this book doesn't seem like its going to help.

danielschonfeld• 10 years ago

Agism exists in every sector, at every age group. Have encountered the reverse myself. Happens every time one generations steps on the other's turf.

amscanne3• 10 years ago

Or the implication that young founders are somehow in need of "adult supervision".

This idea is alive and well in Canada (a more conservative culture generally); their tech scene hasn't exactly exploded as a result.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and exactly the same ageism the author is complaining about. All of these things mean that you're not getting the best people for the job, both ways.

pmalynin• 10 years ago

This has been one of the worst things in being a founded in Edmonton. Also exacerbated by us getting shafted by oil, lack of interest in tech, essentially creates an environment where any decent developer / founder tries to gtfo to Vancouver or SF as fast as possible.

spacecowboy_lon3• 10 years ago

Adult supervision doens't necessarily mean grey hairs it means having common sense and Emotional Inteligence - look at the new MS CEO badly screwing up answering a softball q at an internal company meeting.

I bet after that MS share holders though damn we should have hired Mulally.

serge2k5• 10 years ago

This idea is alive and well in Canada (a more conservative culture generally); their tech scene hasn't exactly exploded as a result.

That is far down the list of reasons why Canada's tech scene is weak.

More conservative generally?

atom-morgan• 10 years ago

I've now seen multiple people mention the author's own age bias. At this point I wonder if he's oblivious to it or genuinely views it as a different perspective.

ojbyrne2• 10 years ago

Really seems to be casting things in an "us vs. them" light, which is just bad.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

I would have liked to see if he was similarly ageist before his employment experience.

DavidAdams2• 10 years ago

My guess is that the "ageist" tone of his memoir it's savvy marketing. Who's going to be most interested in a memoir of a middle aged guy witnessing the horrors of working for a rich bro tech company? Who's going to buy a book, full stop? Other middle aged people who have looked at young idiots getting rich in Silicon Valley while their career prospects dwindle, that's who. So the tone of this and other articles he's written to promote the book are of course going to play up the culture clash and take sides with the older generation. Older people with wisdom and marketing experience understand these things (I kid!).

jkot• 10 years ago

People can go to high school and become interns at their 50-ties.

coldtea4• 10 years ago

Yeah, and a woman can have genetic modification to share some genes with canines, it's technically possible.

But when someone calls someone a "bitch" it doesn't make much sense to assume they meant that.

It's 99.99999% more likely that he said those things pointing out their age.

coldtea4• 10 years ago

It's full of phrases like "just out of high school," (about a director:) "looked like an intern."

Well, there is a thing as experience and immaturity.

And someone looking "just out of high school", or an executive being "like an intern" could be legitimate concerns -- if he doesn't say those things as his sole arguments, but proceeds to describe how (in his opinion) these people fared badly due to their inexperience.

dikdik• 10 years ago

How people look is a pretty poor indicator of their performance. If the people being referenced actually lack maturity, then provide statements to support that.

When people don't have any actual evidence to support their claims, they use bullshit phrases designed to push emotion over facts.

tsunamifury• 10 years ago

It's wrong that a CEO would make such a statement, and it's downright tragic no one would call him on it. Age is not a hiring factor that is good for your company, you miss out on a lot of people who have energy, are curious and creative, and can get things done. I've had the pleasure of working with 50+ who are as energetic as 22 year olds but 100x more effective.

Good work knows no age.

adrianN• 10 years ago

But they most likely also want proper compensation.

blakesterz• 10 years ago

But they most likely also will settle for far less.

jonesb62• 10 years ago

Energetic. Productive. Cheap. They want all three. Easier to get that when you target college students.

hobs• 10 years ago

Productive? On the surface maybe, but any product with any lifespan will trend towards ball of mud very quickly if you only have greenhorn devs.

Retric• 10 years ago

Collage graduates even at big name schools are rarely productive.

zamalek• 10 years ago

Indeed. The cheapness comes from inexperience, though. These fresh graduates have also not learned the dangers of overworking themselves (both to themselves and their employers), so everyone is very willing to continue this grand delusion.

mooreds4• 10 years ago

Cheap

For some definition of cheap. If you look at $/hour, no question they are cheaper. If you look at $/amount of value created (which is far harder to capture, but worth it), I don't think it is a slam dunk.

draw_down• 10 years ago

People say this constantly. It shouldn't matter your age, race, gender, etc., all that matters is the work. And yet, and yet.

Seems like it does matter.

atomic772• 10 years ago

I suspect that ageism in tech also contributes to higher levels of risk taking - if we know or believe we will be put out to pasture at 40, it makes it more urgent to get a big payout at some point along the way.

imh• 10 years ago

I would have thought the opposite. The more attempts I can make, the more I can play the odds, regardless of risk. If I only have a few tries, I'm going to want to take a less risky position.

ryandrake2• 10 years ago

My guess is that the original poster's point is: Take two workers whose goal is a comfortable retirement. One of them knows their career will be 20 years long, the other one knows their career will be 50 years long. The one with the longer career can take a less risky path and "milk it" for half a century, whereas the one with only a few chances needs to take a risk and go for the higher payout since he has 30 fewer years to save.

I look at it this way. Everyone's career is a baseball game. Most workers get 5 or 6 at-bats throughout their lives, and can afford to just go for base hits. A tech worker gets 1 or 2 at-bats so he has to swing for the home run if he wants to score.

typetypetype• 10 years ago

I think this happens in more subtle ways too. For instance, workplace perks for many companies seem to be happy hours, socializing, and workdays that start at 10am. In my single days, all that stuff would have sounded great. In my married-with-children days, I am much more interested in perks like flextime (come in early, leave early) and good family health insurance.

tomtomAmazon• 10 years ago

You don't need a PhD to understand that young people (what we call millennials this generation) are easy to manipulate. Their lack of experience makes then ripe to work for startups. Hiring 'older' workers will only bring more challenges since they are more likely to question and challenge false idols. There are exceptions of course, having older folks who also believe the hype and feed it to the younger kids works great to produce the startup echo chamber. Once the leadership is in place you want to recruit people who are more likely to drink the Kool aid. This is not rocket science. A prime example is the military.

chillingeffect• 10 years ago

Underrated post.

Additionally, younger people have fewer familial commitments, less to lose, fewer mortgages, so outrageous overtime is easier to extract.

toomuchtodo4• 10 years ago

I considered spending time writing an app to help startup workers report labor abuse (excessive unpaid overtime, etc), but then realized it'd be a waste due to what I'd consider Stockholm syndrome ("you want me to report someone changing the world? Helping me get rich??").

leroy_masochist• 10 years ago

FWIW, most of my lance corporals when I was a platoon commander in the Marines (average age ~20) were more inquisitive and freer thinkers than the engineers at the tech unicorn where I used to work (average age ~25).

That's just one data point though. YMMV.

spitfire• 10 years ago

They were trained to be inquisitive. Silicon valley socializes to not rock the boat.

Boyd FTW.

logingone• 10 years ago

Makes sense. These days the inquisitive hacker stereotype is no longer relevant, diluted by the masses flocking to the tech fad ("hacker" now redefined to replace "code monkey", so cool) which in turn results in the tech industry having more fads as it comprises mostly people with a tendency to jump on a fad.

huherto• 10 years ago

Perhaps if you have a solid business model you don't need them to drink the Kool aid ? Is hype an indication of that?

erichocean4• 10 years ago

One issue, at least at my company, is that we just don't need as many experienced people. We have some uber-experienced developers who do architecture and coding for everything "hard", and then a mostly-interchangeable pool of young people who do the easy—but bulky and non-automatable (yet)—stuff.

Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult. And they're filled with young people that can build on the hard work done by (now older) people on cloud platforms, with frameworks, tooling, etc.

So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option.

mooreds4• 10 years ago

So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option.

That's an interesting bifurcation that mirrors what's happening in broader society (plenty of both low and high end jobs, and a hollowing out of the middle).

I wrote an essay a decade ago about how you get senior folks if you outsource all the junior work. I wonder the same thing in this situation--if you don't have a middle tier of developers, how do senior developers develop out of junior/entry level devs?

dionidium• 10 years ago

In the context of the larger society, those lower-end programming jobs pretty obviously are the middle

mixmastamyk2• 10 years ago

That's probably true, though I'd argue that experienced developers tend to produce more maintainable code even on easier projects. Perhaps that's not enough to convince business folks though, who tend not to value maintainability highly.

spicytunacone• 10 years ago

Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult.

What do you consider difficult? Maybe it is because I am just a fresh-faced new grad, but I think there's a lot out there I would find hard to do, even with languages and frameworks aside, unless I trivialize it by thinking "oh that's just an application of solved problem X" or "it's just a lot of statistical plug-n-chug".

dommer• 10 years ago

If a company looks like it would hire based on age, best to look elsewhere and put it down to "their loss."

There are, I believe, many companies that do hire responsibly.

Disclosure. [mid 40s; with children;]

koolba• 10 years ago

One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that older people simply can’t keep up. Veteran coders don’t know the latest programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. There’s no reason why a 50-year-old engineer can’t learn a new programming language. And frankly, most coding work isn’t rocket science.

There's plenty of reason why it'd be more difficult for a 50-year to learn a new programming language, here's a big one: time

As people get older they have more time constraints and generally have "better (or just other) things to do". This is true for 30 vs 20, 40 vs 30, and probably 50 vs 40 (you could argue that as your kids get older you have more free time but then again people have kids at an older age now). A young person is more likely to be able to forgo those other things and learn the latest transpile-to-js-lang-of-the-week (v2.x).

Sure, people need to be evaluated individually but if I interview 100 people I'd bet dollars to donuts that the older crowd would have less free time than the youngins.

kabouseng• 10 years ago

Sure, but generally the older have more experience, so a lot of the concepts they need to learn is just a rehash of the same concepts in a different paradigm. So it takes people with more experience less time to learn a new technology / language / domain.

TillE• 10 years ago

These are just lazy assumptions. Plenty of 20-somethings have young kids (the most time-consuming phase), and plenty of older people will never have children.

jventura• 10 years ago

Yes, but older experienced developers will not need that much free time to relearn how to do an if or a for loop in that new language. The older you get, the more you go to the point, so your argument is not quite good..

fecak• 10 years ago

Let's concede that older programmers in their 50s may have less free time to learn new technologies than a 20-something. Shouldn't we also consider how much less time it will take an experienced dev (who has perhaps already learned several new languages and frameworks over their career) to learn something new when compared to the 20-something who is learning their first or second one?

The number of hours required to learn a second language or framework - which may rely on entirely unfamiliar paradigms and principles - may be much higher than the time required by someone who has already learned several over many years.

When considering the learning ability of any developer, free time is only one consideration. Past experience learning has to be another.

VLM• 10 years ago

"Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt

I don't even know if that quote is true. I suppose it doesn't matter.

I'd propose in software development the bottom tier is languages and frameworks, mid tier is paradigms, and top tier is algos architecture and debugging war stories. Plenty of room for alternate interpretations. I'd accept an argument that algos or debugging are mere mid-tier.

Anyway the world is full of ditches that need digging so don't be surprised if when you interview, you interview at a ditch digging company, and furthermore they have a laser like focus on shoveling, when you thought you'd be talking about civil engineering finite element analysis of bridge girders. Well, they shovel, thats what they do, best you find out now rather than after starting work there. And there's nothing wrong with the world being full of diggable ditches, other than the general population on average being massively too intelligent, over educated, and over experienced to spend their lives digging ditches, and the world having a distinct shortage of bridge girders needing a finite element analysis vs the number of people who can do it.

fshaun• 10 years ago

Ignoring your age generalization, the amount of free time should not be a hiring consideration. The only question is "can you meet our expectation of working X amount of time." Of course, some workers are more willing to work more hours uncompensated, but ethical companies shouldn't exploit this and pragmatic companies realize that long hours aren't productive anyway.

trevor-e• 10 years ago

Somehow I knew this would be about Hubspot.

mooreds4• 10 years ago

"I suspect the truth is that tech startups prefer young workers because they will work longer hours and can be paid less."

Really? What capitalist wouldn't want this, especially if the quality of the work wasn't "good enough"?

I'm no fan of age discrimination, but I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality).

protomyth3• 10 years ago

The capitalist who knows that those hours (particularly the ones over 40 and especially over 60) are not as productive and will actually cost money in the long run.

I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality)

I agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality. It is factory thinking where they need to be thinking like a film producer. This is a creative endeavor and not a widget factory. You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently.

mooreds4• 10 years ago

You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently.

Agreed. And in the long run I believe the companies that accept this will win.

djrogers• 10 years ago

agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality

The entire premise of the article is about illegal age discrimination- a criminal act, not one of poor judgement. Making bad decisions is not necessarily a crime.

leothekim• 10 years ago

Relatedly, I'm curious if Mark Zuckerberg still believes his comments about young people being smarter:

http://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smar...

which were made 9 years ago.

arcanus• 10 years ago

I doubt it, given the average age of the ML team at FB.

tim333• 10 years ago

An alternative view on Lyons and Hubspot

http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/

motdiem• 10 years ago

I had missed that - interesting counterpoint - thanks for sharing it.

Cd00d• 10 years ago

I'm just now trying to figure out what HubSpot does, and what 'inbound marketing' even is, but from my naive and ignorant perspective on a new subject: isn't this post the same as their product?

wott2• 10 years ago

You're too old to understand: she calls herself an "idea generator" (sic).

xiphias• 10 years ago

What I found is that startups have different requirements to big established companies. As the business is not yet stable enough, it's better to write lots of hacked together lower quality code to get to product-market fit. Experienced programmers can't help too much with that part.

But experience helps tremendously when you are working with complex system that needs to be scaled and maintained efficiently. Also as an older person: why work for cheaper in a startup when you can have a higher salary at a big company? You should already know that it's not worth the effort for the stock options for an employee.

im_down_w_otp• 10 years ago

You shouldn't be writing a bunch of crap demoware to find "product-market fit" after you've already setup the business.

That never seems to stop anybody from doing it, nor feckless funds from throwing money at those ventures. But you don't start a business and then hung for a product. You start a business because you have a product you intend to try to sell.

protomyth3• 10 years ago

According to the FBI, which investigated, these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. No criminal charges have been filed, but the hacking, extortion, and ensuing cover-up raised questions about HubSpot’s culture and the trustworthiness of its leadership. HubSpot's board fired the CMO, and sanctioned Halligan, the CEO. A vice president resigned before the board could decide whether to terminate him. The board still won't tell me what happened.

That's some HP board level disfunction and paranoia. I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass.

evook• 10 years ago

I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass.

Like completely lacking a useful product and halfway down the road grasping that fact? 22 grands ea month for a little SEO and marketing-analytics of the shelf. Is there anybody who wants to work with professionals left today?

spacecowboy_lon3• 10 years ago

Yes the chair or senior non exec should have fired HP CEO and directors should have been fired instantly over that - they where hacking into telco exectutives phones FFS.

askyourmother• 10 years ago

Lots of polarised views here. I think of it this way: if I am young and fresh from studying the latest woodworking theory from university, degree in hand, I probably think I am the shit compared to all the grandads out there who older than 35, why some even have kids! How can they keep abreast of the latest wood trends - us younger pups publish our one or two line theories on wood-npm! But.... My hands would be soft, inexperienced, and have no knowledge of actually working with real wood. If you bet your company on me, alone with other soft handed individuals, without older individuals whose hands show and have the real experience, you are screwed.

Rights of passage, and all that.

jlebar5• 10 years ago

Let's take this in context? Here's what he said in the interview.

I have a lot of confidence in young people, and I have a lot of confidence in everyone’s ability to do more than they think they can do. I have very high expectations for people, and I push people to reach even higher.

I take these young kids at HubSpot and I give them huge responsibility. Sometimes they mess it up, but more often than not they get it right. I think, at least in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated. I think my gray hair is overrated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/brian-halligan-ch...

Maybe I'll have a different perspective when I'm older, but this doesn't sound like outrageous age bias to me. He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated". That's not the same thing as saying that he won't hire "old" people, or that given an "old" person whom he thinks will perform better than a young person at the same salary, he'd prefer the young person.

Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim.

Reading TFA, the author comes across as pretty entitled. His argument is that older people are better than younger people, and he's upset that this CEO doesn't get it.

Over time, most people get better at what they do. They become wiser, calmer, more self-aware. They’ve also put in the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell says are required to become expert in a skill. Why would companies not want employees who have gained that expertise?

I dunno why, maybe this CEO is an idiot. Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune.

w1ntermute2• 10 years ago

Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune.

If you manage to start a company that could make a fortune, then you don't have to hire people the market is overlooking - everyone will want to work for you. You're putting the cart before the horse.

nailer2• 10 years ago

All companies 'could make a fortune' Actually making one is not a sudden event, but a slow one.

Absolutely: hire for skill, and there's a shit tonne of it being ignored outside young men in Silicon Valley.

mikestew3• 10 years ago

He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated".

And he's right, if his claims are prefaced with "can be". Kids "can be" capable of more than the credit given. No one is a whiz kid just because they're young. In fact, most aren't. Most are wet-behind-the-ears welps that can do go work with a little guidance. Experience "can be" really overrated. As I told a former manager of mine who was tasked with managing my test team because he'd done it before, "just because you've done something doesn't mean you did it well". [0] And twenty years of doing CRUD in COBOL with no source control probably won't give you a huge leg up in a Django shop talking to a MongoDB data store using git to keep it all sane.

[0] (Lest you think me rude, this was after the umpteenth jillion time he'd remind me that he'd "managed test teams before", and role he proved time and again he didn't have the first clue about.)

kafkaesq6• 10 years ago

And twenty years of doing CRUD in COBOL with no source control

Just curious, are bringing up the 20 years of COBOL with no source control because that was your manager's background?

Or is that your impression is of what the typical older tech worker has under their belt?

brightsize2• 10 years ago

This has to be about the jillionth time, here in HN comments to ageism-related stories, that I've seen it either asserted, implied, or tangentially-suggested that older developers have most likely spent their prior years working mostly in COBOL or with similar outdated technologies. Their experience will almost certainly be at megacorps ("culture" mismatch!) and they've been avoiding new technologies and approaches because they're either pleased with COBOL or content to sit fat and happy and collect a paycheck like drones. They can safely be assumed to be stagnating because an older person is after all unlikely to care about their craft after some point in their careers.

The assertion/implication/suggestion is absurd and only perpetuates the stereotype that competence and relevance and value are inversely correlated with age. I'm not exactly young, have very little experience working at megacorps, and have a lot of experience working at startups and at very small companies. I do consulting (no, not COBOL, not at megacorps), am constantly learning, and do a lot of coding for fun, both on side-projects and in the course of volunteer hacking. I don't have any reason to believe, none, that I'm not representative of most technical workers my age. No reason, that is, other than reading suggestions to the contrary here on HN.

Edit: grammar, content

xiaoma2• 10 years ago

Yes, let's take it in context:

Brian Halligan, explained to the New York Times that this age imbalance was not something he wanted to remedy, but in fact something he had actively cultivated. HubSpot was “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” because, “in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said.

Had he said that he'd actively cultivated a race imbalance and was "trying to build a culture specifically to attract and maintain white and Asian employees", would you still be cool with that? This seems pretty open and shut to me and it's pretty discouraging to see people defend an openly bigoted statement.

marcosdumay• 10 years ago

That phrase literally means "I think younger people are discriminated against, so I'm making a company that hires them at bargaining prices".

That may be true or not, but is not discriminatory by itself.

nashequilibrium• 10 years ago

I literally just finished reading an article on Hubspot by Dan Lyons: My Year In Startup Hell

" Another reason to hire young people is that they’re cheap. HubSpot runs at a loss, but it is labor-intensive. How can you get hundreds of people to work in sales and marketing for the lowest possible wages? One way is to hire people who are right out of college and make work seem fun. You give them free beer and foosball tables. You decorate the place like a cross between a kindergarten and a frat house. You throw parties. Do that, and you can find an endless supply of bros who will toil away in the spider monkey room for $35,000 a year. "

http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...

jlebar5• 10 years ago

You and I may choose not to work at such a place, but is it morally wrong? Is designing your business in this way equivalent to racism, as the author explicitly claims?

Floegipoky• 10 years ago

I used to work at HubSpot. The company isn't perfect, for instance the lack of diversity is a huge problem. Taken in isolation, there's nothing in the article that's wrong, but the overall picture he paints here is wildly inaccurate. HubSpot is full of incredibly intelligent and capable people, including some of the most talented engineers I've ever worked with. I had the opportunity to meet and speak with every executive during my time there, I've even been to Halligan's apartment. The fact that he managed to find something negative to say about Dave, one of the most genuine people I've ever met, tells me all I need to know- the reason Lyons didn't fit in at HubSpot has nothing to do with his age, it's because he's an asshole.

anexprogrammer• 10 years ago

and that experience is "really overrated". That's not the same thing as saying that he won't hire "old" people, or that given an "old" person whom he thinks will perform better than a young person at the same salary, he'd prefer the young person

Why would any sane CEO prefer young, or old at the same salary?

I can understand reluctance with someone a year or two off retirement - extra recruiting costs on the horizon, but...

If it were me employing say 10 people on identical salary I'd want as diverse a mix of age, gender, race, background and interests as I could manage.

The young un will perhaps have fresh new ideas; some stupid, some naive, some hopefully genuinely fresh and exciting.

The old git will have seen it all before and perhaps can warn why doing it that way is a silly idea, maybe you should try this first. Maybe they have a bit of business or other non-tech in their history so can bring other relevant knowledge to bear.

Of course some older folks can be set in their ways. So can freshly minted degree holders. Some 23 year olds think they know everything. It's later you realise you don't. It is the tendency of youth after all. I may have experienced this too. ;)

Of course both age groups can repeatedly tell you how great they are at something. So can CEOs. They can all be lying/deluding themselves about this.

OK, sweeping generalisations time.

The CEO perhaps prefers young people because they're still wet behind the ears and believe "Just another push this weekend" (the 10th this year) "and we'll see you right come end of year/IPO/share options".

Or he just wants folks that do what he says, however stupid. With the terrifying ex-designer produced PHP codebase with copy/pasta where functions should live. Old fart might point out how shite/insecure/slow/whatever the code is.

freshhawk• 10 years ago

If it were me employing say 10 people on identical salary I'd want as diverse a mix of age, gender, race, background and interests as I could manage.

Dead on, especially if you are relying on creative solutions to anything at all.

The CEO perhaps prefers young people because they're still wet behind the ears and believe "Just another push this weekend" (the 10th this year) "and we'll see you right come end of year/IPO/share options".

Nailed it. Another factor is the behaviour of homogeneous groups, often you want groupthink to occur if you need work pushed along a fairly static assembly line. And homogenous groups get along and cooperate with much less work, it's a quick way to get to a local maxima.

The bias against people who are different from you is, unfortunately, present in everyone to some degree. Left unevaluated that means a lot of well meaning people can be very racist/sexist/ageist/etc and feel like all they are doing is building an agreeable, likeable, cooperating team.

kafkaesq6• 10 years ago

Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim.

If you reduce everything that Lyons is saying that that one quote from the CEO, perhaps the evidence is slim. But if you take the observations he's making together, as a whole, a different picture emerges:

The place was like a frat house, with refrigerators stocked with cases of beer and telemarketing sales “bros” drinking at their desks while hammering away on the phones. Thirty-something employees were considered “old people.”

And of course the quote about HubSpot “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” also attributed to the CEO.

jlebar5• 10 years ago

I guess I don't see the fact that there's beer in the fridge or that people drink at work as evidence of the CEO's ageism. It seems to be evidence of a relaxed attitude towards alcohol.

Similarly, calling thirty-somethings "old" is...maybe insensitive? I dunno, maybe it's ageist. I'd think it would be hard to say without being there.

Clearly the author feels discriminated against, because his CEO doesn't see how amazing he is at his job. It's definitely his right to feel that way, and who knows, maybe he's right, but in any case I'm not inclined to take his observations as direct evidence of discrimination.

cylinder2• 10 years ago

I am so tired of grown, 20 something adults being called "kids" in American culture. Why so much infantilization?

p4wnc64• 10 years ago

Well, as a cohort, this group (to which I belong) seems extremely willing to let employers infantilize them and happy to be seen that way.

- They agree to work in open-plan surveillance offices with maybe 2 lateral feet of personal space and no privacy.

- They seem to care more about office trendiness, amenities like roof deck, climbing wall, ping pong tables, than about adequate working conditions.

- They allow paternalistic ideas like "unlimited vacation" [0] instead of demanding such things as stated, negotiated, and protected parts of an employment agreements.

- They are willing to devalue their labor to accept start-up wages and worthless equity to obtain the above items, mostly so they can pursue social status, particularly tied to living in certain special places.

I don't think this is necessarily my generation's fault as much as it has been a concerted effort on the part of organizations like YC to actively influence naive young people to believe they must value these things.

But whatever the cause may be, I think it's quite reasonable for people outside of my generation to view us as hilariously infantile for essentially trading away all possible negotiation power for a craft beer at work and the chance to buy $7 coffee.

[0] < http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlimited-vacation-onl... >

trav42254• 10 years ago

I can see how the hyperbole can get old after a while. However, in defense of that position, it's because a painfully high proportion of younger people indeed seem to behave like children.

sysreader20162• 10 years ago

I think that the younger workers in their 20's to 30's, especially the new tech workers, are really doing it because it's fun. So, working 12 hours a day 6-7 days a week isn't a big deal. Whereas the older crowd, the 40+'ers, want the same pay (or more) for 'work-life balance'. I've been told 'work-life balance' means up to 8 hours a day and up to 5 days a week, and after hours is for spending time with family and friends.

I've encountered plently of 40+'ers who discourage learning new skills during free time, programming on the weekends, hackathons, and the like. Simply because that stuff goes against work-life balance.

It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers.

humanrebar• 10 years ago

Typically when developers have to work overtime, it's due to a bad business plan or bad project management. Experienced developers insisting on a sane work/life balance (without getting into numbers) is a way to insist that management is accountable for its decisions. Otherwise, the individual contributors pay the price, typically the most talented, nicest, and most eager-to-please. And, yes, those contributors often skew younger because they haven't gone through that exact song-and-dance before.

Spending the nights and weekends learning is sort of another subject. I would rather employers spend more resources training employees during business hours, especially for enterprise and industry-specific technology, but that's an entirely different subject.

dominotw• 10 years ago

It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers.

It might be true. But punishing everyone over 40 based on this stereotype is wrong.

ryandrake2• 10 years ago

Why does ambition somehow now mean you have to WANT to do your job for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week? Do you think surgeons spend their days off at home practicing surgery on their pets as a hobby? Don't get me wrong--everyone should always be learning. But in what other profession is it expected that you continue doing your work "for fun" after hours?

collyw3• 10 years ago

To be fair I guess surgeons read plenty of medical papers out of work hours. I am not working on my time off, but I am keeping up to date.

sysreader20162• 10 years ago

I'm just saying that I think a lot of young people in the tech industry don't care about work-life balance. And those same young people wouldn't have a problem working 12 hours a day to complete a project.

Secondly, highly talented professionals do spend free time practicing their skills. Idk anything about surgeons.

I'm in tech because I think the work is fun. I'm typically on my computers up to 18 hours a day. As you can imagine I would have no problem doing some r&d after hours for fun.

Who cares what other professions are doing? I'm in tech because I'm a builder and that's what I care about.

tschellenbach• 10 years ago

This guy is just promoting his book. Second time it's on hackernews. Can you please stop upvoting this garbage?

Balgair• 10 years ago

Some of the comments here are missing the goals of the organization, I believe. What is the 'end-game' for HubSpot and companies like them? What do they hope to accomplish? Tear away all the fuzzball tables and kindergarten colors[0], does the business have solvency without the VC ecosystem? I don't know the interior of those business, but they all seem to be angling for 1 thing: a buy-out.[1]

Commenters here, rightfully, say that experience matters in producing a good product that sells and makes a gross profit. That 3 greybeards are worth 10 fuzzfaces. I think they are right. But that is not the objective for so many of these places. The idea is to 'grow', show this to other VCs or the NASDAQ (maybe) so that they will want to buy your company. Then the board and c-suite get something of a return on the time and money, while the employees get less of a return than having worked at Boeing for those years.

Again, ageism is fine, because the point is not to have a sustainable business with a good product, the point is to grow and sell. This is slash-and-burn ranching not sustainable farming.

[0] Those are VERY important to signal to the outside world and to potential employees though. It makes the company seem 'techy' and 'googlish', which is thought to translate into dollars. Still the decor means nothing in the end.

[1] Do you feel like you have no idea what is going on? That you sometimes have imposter syndrome? Most people, including VCs and C*Os have this too. No-one know what the hell is going on, and if they say they do, they are ignorant or lying. Mostly.

AndrewKemendo2• 10 years ago

Are there any really hard technology companies that have the same problem?

My guess is no.

Our company is almost completely people with background in computer vision, AI and 3D rendering and our youngest employee is 31.

My guess is that "trendy" startups have this problem, not ones building hard technology.

cgh• 10 years ago

I believe you are correct. Where I work, basic webapp crud and ui-type stuff are handled by younger, inexperienced people because these are easy things. For the more complicated problems, ones that tend to require deep knowledge of eg service provider networks, the teams are almost uniformly 35-50+.

edw519• 10 years ago

“in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said.

I guess once Halligan gets a little gray hair and experience, he'll realize how absurd this statement is and will regret ever saying it.

AndrewKemendo2• 10 years ago

He's 48.

mdpopescu• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure he's quoted as saying "my gray hair is overrated", or something like that.

butler14• 10 years ago

Saying something is overrated isn't necessarily saying it's inferior to alternatives, just that it has too much importance placed on it relatively speaking.

Seems like his ego got hurt and he's out for revenge. He also seems to be blind to the fact that ageism works both ways. Some of his comments, and those on the linkedin post in question, are far more worrying than those of HubSpot's CEO.

xenadu02• 10 years ago

I think this stereotype comes from an earlier (and slower moving) era where programmers expected to learn COBOL or 4/GL and retire doing the same sort of work they learned in the beginning.

I grew up when the Internet became a thing. I've never had that expectation. I'm still learning new languages and frameworks at 34 and have no intention of slowing down.

Oh and pro tip to founders out there: if your competitors aren't recruiting middle age or older people (or black people or women), that's an untapped market! Take advantage of the things your less hungry competitors won't!

daemonk• 10 years ago

I think the stereotypical thinking is that younger people tend to buy into the culture. Older people tend to not drink the kool-aid. Does the expertise/experience of older people win over younger people who are willing to work 80 hour weeks? I don't know if there are really any data to say one way or another. But I think the expectation that hiring younger people mean you can get more productivity out of them due to their non-jaded enthusiasm is awful.

siberianbear• 10 years ago

I worked as a manager of a group of 10-15 software engineers at a major semiconductor company for about ten years. I interviewed over a thousand candidates and gave out about 60 full-time job offers over that time. I hired engineers aged from 21 to about 60. Of course, I also worked with lots of engineers from other groups.

My conclusion on this topic is that there is no problem with age itself. The problem is that some older people lose interest and just coast on their skill set which becomes stale over time.

Not all older people are like that. I had engineers in their 40s and 50s who read programming blogs, learned new languages in their spare time, tinkered with their pet projects in the lab, etc. They were passionate about engineering. THOSE guys were never a problem. They were awesome. I mean, if Bob Pease [1] were still alive, I'd hire him in a minute.

The mistake is to jump from "some fraction of older engineers are in the former group" to thinking all older engineers are like that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease

Overtonwindow• 10 years ago

At 33 I think we definitely have an age problem, but not just in tech. I think all of America has an age problem in wanting to hire younger people who will work harder, longer hours, cost less, potentially use less resources such as health care, and can be disposed of for even younger workers down the line. Older workers are perceived as wanting more money, and will not meld with a younger workforce. I've seen this constantly. Six years with a major defense contractor. Any time my group manager would hire, he would shred anyone who graduated from college before 2000. I think the tech industry exacerbates the perception of younger over better, but it's a nationwide problem.

0xCMP• 10 years ago

HA. Excuse my language: but what the fuck? They literally tried to hack his computer to get his manuscript? Like what were they thinking??

Hopefully that was the craziest story or else that book is gonna wreck them.

mindcrime• 10 years ago

When I was 26, I'm sure I would have said "grey hair and experience are over-rated". Now, at 42, I realize how much more effective I am now, compared to when I was younger - due to the additional knowledge and experience I have. The thing is, "you don't know what you don't know".

All of that said, I agree with the sentiment that a good team should be made up of a mixture of people of different ages and experience levels.

mixmastamyk2• 10 years ago

If you're not interested in management, don't have a four year degree, and not good on-the-spot/whiteboard etc, you're in for a hard time getting hired as an aging developer, even if up to date technically.

Don't let it happen to you. Choose one or two of those to focus on and change.

haberman• 10 years ago

Wow -- the author, Dan Lyons, has quite a background including Senior Editor at Forbes magazine, "Fake Steve Jobs", and writing an episode of Silicon Valley. He also wrote strongly in favor of SCO in its legal battle against IBM, only to admit later that he had been "profoundly wrong."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lyons

makeitsuckless• 10 years ago

Let's not kid ourselves. This is not about energy, creativity, flexibility and all that shit. It's about two things, young people are a) cheap and b) gullible and easy to manipulate.

The latter is probably the most important. I'm in a situation that is a typical example of how that gets abused: company needs to downsize (funding dried up), and wants most of the team to sign a piece of paper and go away. The salespitch is that it's for mutual benefit, but in reality it's 100% for the company's benefit. The employees would sign away their rights, including at least 2 months pay and in some cases get screwed on their visa. Also, be complicit in forgery, since the dates on the paperwork are false. The younger employees would probably have been railroaded and screwed hard if it wasn't for the more experienced members of the team.

Tech companies want young people as cheap guinea pigs, to try out all kinds of "entrepreneurial" ideas without having to pay the price. Pure and simple.

erichocean4• 10 years ago

tl;dr; Hiring young people increase headcount faster because they are cheaper and less productive, and headcount is an important metric in SV that correlates strongly with the ability to raise funding, and the ability to have a successful exit later on.

----

One unmentioned thing, which is weird until you've seen it first hand, is that it's easier to sell and finance a bigger startup, and by "bigger", I mean: higher headcount.

Obviously, in general, older people are more experienced and cost more, and also do more. However, this is a net-negative because you have a (potentially much) lower headcount. Another poster commented on how he'd take proverbial three LISPers over 20 NOOBS. (I have no doubt he's telling the truth.)

Quick test: If I tell you startup A has 8 developers, and start up B has 80 developers, which startup seems "more successful" to you? Which seems likely to have had more funding? More market share? Is more stable? Better managed? Which seems likely to have an exit (esp. acquisition) in the future?

It's little comfort knowing that startup A has 8 LISPers coding circles around the 80 devs at startup B struggling to make Grunt work and keep MongoDB from crashing. Politically, startup B is a much bigger success—at least in SV today.

Startup B is what SV optimizes for and funds, and that leads very naturally to hiring young people—all else being equal.

collyw3• 10 years ago

Whatsapp is often held up as example of a very successful company that has a handful of developers.

erichocean4• 10 years ago

Yes, because they're the exception that proves the rule. That's why people talk about it so much. :)

jlos• 10 years ago

Perhaps what's significant about the age bias in the tech industry is that its the first time the age bias has worked in favour of younger employee's. I suspect age bias' exists in many industries that prefer more 'mature' employees.

> these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion.

The problems of this company, if the allegations are true, stem more from a lack of character, which can be found across the entire age spectrum.

I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here. In general, I think that age brings experience and wisdom.

erichocean4• 10 years ago

Perhaps what's significant about the age bias in the tech industry is that its the first time the age bias has worked in favour of younger employee's.

Maybe you don't consider the military "industry", but they tend to recruit primarily from the young (and AFAICT, always have).

dante1• 10 years ago

From a personal standpoint I can honestly say that I am far more competent at what I do now then when I was younger. That's not to say that younger people aren't as capable, it's just that through many years of working in different market sectors and with diverse companies and groups of people, the breadth of understanding that it imparts truly helps to fine tune one's business acumen, something that is hard to replicate if one is just out of university or college.

bootload4• 10 years ago

Reading this article is a bit lopsided. An excerpt from the book gives a clearer picture. [0] Firstly the company is in tech-marketing space and the company appears to be less about engineering than selling. The observations in this extract appear to be about company culture and selling.

"Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language" [0]

A reference to Lord of the Flies. If you read Lord of the Flies, the disfunction runs along the lines of "insider" and "outsiders" resulting in the ritual killing of the outsiders.

The observations of bias against certain outsiders in this context are valid. The bigger question is why and who is driving this behaviour, the VC/finance industry seeking to maximise profit regardless of the externalities?

[0] "My Year in Startup Hell" ~ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...

When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Don’t Even Bother to Lie

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