Readers offer tales of Silicon Valley's ageism

http://www.sfgate.com/business/bottomline/article/Readers-offer-tales-of-Silicon-Valley-s-ageism-4758726.php

by auctiontheory • 13 years ago

55 67 13 years ago

nawitus• 13 years ago

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

I think that's what many young software engineers have to endure, therefore it's also the young who face ageism.

Anyway, if you can only get hired for less than you used to, then your effective market rate is actually lower than what it used. And that's "fine". Perhaps the market rate for a software engineer follows a kind of bell curve. That specific issue is not ageism.

auctiontheory3• 13 years ago

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

Anecdote: I recently learned that Facebook and Amazon have teams dedicated to rebooting crashed servers - it's cheaper and simpler than writing solid code. (As told to me by someone who does this as his full-time job.)

When "doing it right" no longer matters, because cheap hardware allows massive redundancy, maybe experience does become less important.

ringdabell• 13 years ago

It doesn't matter if you're building silly websites trying to get strangers to dine with each other.

If you're building anything at all complicated, a few years of web-dev work isn't going to cut it bro.

The benefit of experience is you gain a more holistic understanding of wtf is going on, so you're not writing code in a vacuum of ignorance.

ronilan• 13 years ago

Experiance, technical and other, is actually the only thing that is unique and can not be commoditized or automated.

Of the seven billion people living on this plant none has a set of experiences such as yours. In a world of mass produced everything, uniqueness as a property, is actually more valuable. Whether or not the all mighty market rewards you for such is another story.

cmbaus• 13 years ago

Somebody has to write the code that handles the failure. You don't get this for free. Creating a system that can handle outages of arbitrary nodes is not an easy task.

epo• 13 years ago

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

That's a nice anecdote. I'd hate to think it was actually true. There is potential loss of data to think about as much as anything.

lambdasquirrel2• 13 years ago

I've had mixed feelings on this issue for a while. On one hand, I think there's a real danger in hiring people who are like you. I'm frequently surprised how much people defend this practice in the name of having a cohesive company culture.

Would it be more nice to have a greater proportion of older folks? I think so. The problem isn't older folks per se. The problem is just people, period. Just as much as I'm surprised by cultural homogeneity, I'm surprised by how close-minded young grads are to things they weren't exposed to in school or in youth. It's kind of baffling that by 30, a lot of programmers act like they've seen it all and done it all, and then they start snarking out on the newer, unproven languages, frameworks and platforms. It gets worse as a programmer builds up more experience to back up his case. Case in point: you ever talk to an older Lisp guy? The ones who will rip into you just for using Clojure?

In a nutshell, I think that we do it to ourselves, and it is just a matter of time, before the current crop of "young" people turn into "old" people. Mental age does not correspond to physical age, but there is a correlation, and it would lend an appearance of ageism. The problem isn't one of age. The problem is close-mindedness, and you can pin that one on people regardless of age.

badman_ting2• 13 years ago

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

asdfdsa12345• 13 years ago

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

impendia• 13 years ago

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

asdfdsa12345• 13 years ago

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

muzz• 13 years ago

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

engineer404• 13 years ago

This is true, but one of the things I've observed about the hiring process for engineers over the past 25 years is this:

It's always sucked, and it's not getting better.

Example: Recruiters don't know anything about what it means to be a software developer, yet they feel they need to "weed out" the unqualified ones. So they do things like say "So, it says you know SQL, what database were they using at company X?" "OH, I'm sorry, this company is looking for Oracle SQL people, not Microsoft." --- in response to a job looking for Java developers who "know SQL". EG: You'd be writing code, probably dealing with an ORM, not writing too much SQL directly.

This problem has existed since the 1980s. Despite it creating massive inefficiencies in placement... the system hasn't (seemingly) gotten any better since then.

ryandrake• 13 years ago

This is a common argument used against workplace diversity of all kinds:

"If hiring [Minority A] provided some sustainable advantage, then someone would have started a company and simply hired loads of [Minority A] and kick ass in the market."

asdfdsa12345• 13 years ago

What is the counterargument?

badman_ting2• 13 years ago

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

My father (almost 60) doesn't work in tech, but had a very successful career until two years ago when he lost his job to workplace politics (ie, not his performance). Hasn't been able to find anything since, and eventually took a crap job at Lowe's to have something to do. It haunts me because I always saw him as resourceful and able to make things work, and now he just seems defeated.

pyre• 13 years ago

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

bennyg• 13 years ago

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

TheCoelacanth• 13 years ago

The only thing you really can do is to make sure to save up enough money that you can afford to retire in your mid fifties if you really have to. If you lose your job at that age, it can be very hard to find another one.

fingerprinter• 13 years ago

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

* below 30 yrs old, no kids * older than 30 yrs old or had kids.

I have kids now. That is one of the major reasons I do not like SF anymore (mid 30s) but I did a decade ago. IMO, the entire SF/SV tech scene is built for young 20 somethings who want to live only to work.

When you reach a certain point in life, your priorities shift and you don't live to work anymore. If this happens to you, SF/SV is going to be an awful place to be, IMO.

Related to this article specifically, I have no doubt this is absolutely true. I've had interviews for jobs and while they don't ask questions about family or what not, they ask about "commitment" and "hours". Questions like "can you commit 100% to this job?" or "can you work 6 days a week or put in the hours necessary to do this job?". Those are questions asked to suss out if someone is going to basically live the job and push everything else away. They might ask that of everyone, but when asked to someone in their mid to late 30s it smacks of "hey, are you going to neglect your family for this job?".

mahyarm• 13 years ago

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

Younger people tend to live in SF because that is where the younger person lifestyle and people their age tend to be. After I am finished with my current company, one of my criteria will either be a company with a bus to the south bay, be located next to a caltrain station or to be located in SF or Berkeley. The iOS developer having a hard time in SF should try looking for a job in the south bay because he will find many companies comprised of people his age there.

engineer404• 13 years ago

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

I recently interviewed with one, which was supposed to be a "phone" interview. We did it over skype. No surprise, but the guy asked me to turn on video so we could have a video call. This really added nothing to the interview, was more a distraction than anything, but I got to see I was being interviewed by a 22 year old (with virtually no experience, I later discovered when I researched him online) and he could easily see my age.

The questions he asked were not discriminatory, but more along the lines of vague "technical" questions for which I would explain in detail ... detail that went over his head. Several times he assumed I got something wrong, mainly because of his lack of experience. For instance, explaining how to do something concurrently to someone who thinks in terms of threaded programming, they often don't see the issues, because they haven't done enough of it to see the terrible pain that can come with threaded solutions in certain situations.

In this case, I have been learning new things quite a bit. It's not a question of my skills being old, in fact, he asked me about a language I'd learned recently (I expect he thought this would trip me up), but I named one that I'm keen on, that has been in existence less time than the company I was interviewing with.

One of the great, fundamental problems of interviewing engineers is GIGGO-- if the interviewer is not a great engineer, and not a great interviewer, they will often presume an interview subject is not good based on their own ignorance. (ok engineers who are great interviewers don't suffer from this, of course.)

He also suffered from the problem of trying to ask the problem-solving questions, but describing the problem vaguely, or leaving key details out. OF course, in his mind, he knows the full problem, so he doesn't remember not telling me a key detail. In one case he asked me "how would you do X in Language Y"... to which I answered you couldn't, because the language didn't support it, but if you wanted to have a similar effect you could do this other thing, and here's the three things wrong, or dangerous about that approach. He then decided I'd gotten it wrong and told me how to do it in a whole other language than the one he specified in the question!

So, he's a poor interviewer, no doubt, but every single one of these questions, I'm sure, he assumed I got it wrong because I was older... it puts a spin on their perception of you completely.

Plus, I don't understand the contradiction that exists in startups-- they claim they want "great engineers", but they also want cheap engineers, and they also want young engineers.

One thing that makes me a good engineer is that I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and learned from them. I wouldn't discriminate against someone younger simply because they haven't made as many mistakes yet, but I don't discount the value of experience either.

It takes all kinds, and the monoculture that so many companies seem to seek is part of the movement to turn software development into an assembly line, and take it out of the realm of craftsmanship.

I think part of the cause of this is the easy funding for quick-to-flip ideas started by MBA types from Ivy League schools... that aren't really technology companies so much as a form of investor arbitrage. (EG: put money into an entity which uses the money to buy "traction" and then flip it to other investors or the M&A department at a large company using acquisitions as a way to hire.)

My conclusion is this: IF you're in your 30s, you can't just be an engineer anymore.

You need to start working into management, and become a manager if you want to work for others, or you need to become a founder.

Because by 40, you're on your own.

_random_5• 13 years ago

"You need to start working into management, and become a manager if you want to work for others, or you need to become a founder."

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

eugenejen2• 13 years ago

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

rpwilcox• 13 years ago

Plus, I don't understand the contradiction that exists in startups-- they claim they want "great engineers", but they also want cheap engineers, and they also want young engineers.

This reminds me of the project management triangle: do you want it cheap, fast or good? ;-)

asdfdsa12345• 13 years ago

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

fiatmoney• 13 years ago

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

In other words, is age discrimination more due to "hire people like me" bias, or "work 'em hard while they're too young to know better" bias?

engineer404• 13 years ago

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

I think it's common for youth not to trust older people, probably a byproduct of being raised by parents, and that combined with a desire to keep costs low and get maximum productivity (Eg: a deal in favor of the company at the engineers expense) go hand in hand to make hiring older people who would want a better deal less likely.

engineer404• 13 years ago

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

Bay Area Startups hire inexperienced people because they are cheaper, and more willing to take a bad deal. (Experienced people are more likely to know a bad deal.)

These inexperienced people are the ones doing the interviewing (and often the ones running the companies) and so experience is not valued.

mwfunk• 13 years ago

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

So, someone living in SF and looking for work there would be much more likely to look around and think that the entire job market is driven by startups populated by a bunch of hubristic guys in their 20s who expect everyone to work 80+ hours a week and are more likely to be (at least subconsciously) ageist and more prone to being discriminatory in hiring people who they don't personally relate to (age/cultural/background differences, etc.).

I live in SV and have lots of friends who live in SF and commute to SV, or live in SF and decided to get into a startup because they were sick of the commute and wanted to do something different. I really get the sense that the only reason there is any tech job market at all in SF is because SV draws so much engineering talent, and there's a large population of younger engineers who want to live in SF so bad that they're basically willing an SF tech scene into existence by setting up startups there, so they don't have commute anymore.

Older engineers looking for work in SV are likely running into different problems. I see it all the time and am always paranoid that I'm falling into the exact same trap (I'm 42 BTW). You get a good job someplace. You continue working at that job for 5, 10, or 20 years. You become more and more valuable because you end up with really specialized knowledge, and carve out a really customized niche for yourself. Also, you get a raise every year. The end result is that after 10 years (or whatever), you're making a really good salary, and likely have very deep (but not so broad) knowledge about whatever your niche is.

Then, something bad happens (or you just get sick of whatever you were doing), so you go looking for a new job. Your great salary was from a combination of longevity, and very specialized knowledge of a particular code base. Unfortunately, when looking for a new job, you have neither of those things going for you. You can only hope for a decent starting salary, not an "I've been here for 10 years" salary, and it'll be hard or impossible to find a job where 100% of your deep, specialized knowledge carries right over into the new position. I think that for a lot of people the best case scenario is one where they're a good fit, but they've got to take a little pay cut because they're starting fresh in a new organization. They'll get back to where they were before, but they've got to work their way back there over the next 2-3 years.

None of this is anyone's fault, it's just the nature of the beast. The only defense against it is to always make an effort to keep your skills fresh, and not get sucked into a mode where you are 100% focused on learning what you need to know for your job and nothing else. A lot of people get comfortable and stop learning altogether, which might make things tough if they want to find a new job for similar pay. There's definitely something to be said for age and experience and maturity, and I think employers appreciate that as well, but not to the extent that they're going to totally ignore the technical requirements when hiring for a position.

auctiontheory3• 13 years ago

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

richardjordan• 13 years ago

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

There are outliers to this. They tend to build very successful companies.

It's the same starting a company as an entrepreneur. A lot of angel investors who made their money through Facebook or Google or similar, who are still very young (not their fault, nothing wrong with that) are much more comfortable throwing some angel cash at folks younger than them who'll look up to them and listen to their 'advice'. This is understandable because everyone wants to think their money is smart money.

I hear a lot of older entrepreneurs complain about the latter, but my thought is quit bitching and show some results - you'll get funded if you get enough traction no matter how old you are.

jswinghammer• 13 years ago

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

- Can this person program a computer?

I always come back there because it's actually more rare than I would have guessed when I entered the industry. I have to ask if these people actually know what they're doing or if they're just getting turned down a lot and happen to be older. Given the number of tech firms in San Francisco I have to assume that at least one isn't making a stupid mistake based on age. How could it be that all of them are overlooking these awesome folks? Most companies typically have standing hiring requisitions open basically all the time for developers.

I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

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

You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.

and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.

When we see companies making very stupid decisions very often that seems more likely than not.

lutusp3• 13 years ago

You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.

Less responses? Do you mean physically smaller responses, on little note-cards instead of letter stock? Or did you perhaps mean fewer responses?

http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l...

riggins3• 13 years ago

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

1. workers who stop learning

2.a. workers who continue learning, and

2.b. workers who continue learning and also keep ratcheting up the difficulty ... learning harder and harder material.

I suspect category 2.a will encounter little ageism and 2.b will be in high demand.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

Apply your idea to any other group facing discrimination.

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

asdfdsa12345• 13 years ago

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

_random_5• 13 years ago

Your general learning capabilities decline with ageing. Also it's not about learning nowadays. It's about switching. Switching between similar technologies. Using NoSQL/Node.js/FancyMvc.js is not learning - it's same ol' deep inside. Reading about quantum computing is learning.

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

30. Supposedly way past my peak. Haven't felt it. Actually, it seems to be the reverse. When I was 10 years younger, I'd think I understood a topic with only a superficial knowledge. Now, I'm older and I'm better at learning, but I also know what I don't know.

My clock speed is probably 5 to 10% slower than at peak (mid-teens) and will probably slow by another ~2-5% each decade, but software quality keeps going up and, as you probably know, clock speed isn't the most important factor when it only varies by a few percent.

hga3• 13 years ago

Your suspicion turns out to be wrong in practice. It's a nice idea, it should be the way things work, but it demonstrably isn't.

riggins3• 13 years ago

Do you have a source for that?

A study that has somehow controlled for continued learning? I'm interested because I'd be genuinely surprised if that's the case.

mililani2• 13 years ago

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

filereaper• 13 years ago

Thank you for your comment.

I would like to add that not everybody at IBM is like that just to prevent HN from forming the wrong image.

Since client/server has been around the 60's from System 360 its hard to find a grey-beard who isn't familiar with the concept.

Although the grey-beards may not know the new upcoming frameworks such as node.js et al... they're worth every penny when it comes to design and architecture of large software systems, its usually the foresight of what will work and fail which matters the most.

Many wisened gray-beards still code everyday but they do approach us wet-behind-the-ears on simple day-to-day details.

hga3• 13 years ago

"Since client/server has been around the 60's from System 360...."

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

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

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

I tend to think there's an XKCD 385 (http://xkcd.com/385/) thing going on with this idea that older programmers are more resistant to change or somehow inferior. There are plenty of young programmers who can't/won't learn anything except what they were explicitly taught, have a shitty attitude, and generally fight anything different from what they're comfortable with... but it's never attributed to their age.

Anti-intellectualism is a problem all throughout the software world. It may be that a certain late-career decline is one symptom of it, but I've seen it manifest just as badly in young people.

eugenejen2• 13 years ago

My old boss who is working for google now knows ssh. He is 60. But maybe due to he is a member of IETF so he gets updates. I don't think he is in trench. But I think what you described is related to company culture.

mililani2• 13 years ago

Well, to be fair, this guy we're referring to DID come to IBM from the CrossWorlds acquisition. Which, at the time, was a start up. So, I really don't know.

nilkn• 13 years ago

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

The terrible irony of it is that the over-abundance of high salaries has led to those salaries meaning practically nothing; there have been plenty of threads here on how people can barely afford 1br apartments in San Francisco while still saving for retirement and living a comfortable life, etc. Salaries for very senior folks become so massively inflated due to the cost of living--sometimes in the $200k+ range--that very few startups can afford to hire even just a few of these guys. If they were in a cheaper area where a top salary, rather than a starting salary, was $120k, though, then they'd be in a much better position to hire a range of employees in terms of experience and age.

seivan• 13 years ago

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

The last interview I had, I asked if they had people with kids. They had and they were on parental - no problem.

I'm 24 and will never have kids, but I do give a shit if they treat parents or engineers older than me like shit.

_random_5• 13 years ago

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

od2m• 13 years ago

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

michaelochurch4• 13 years ago

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

There is, actually, a fair amount of age discrimination, but most of that seems to be in companies where I wouldn't want to work anyway.

On the other hand, I think that Silicon Valley and New York, because they are so expensive, have created a culture where it's socially unacceptable not to be a manager or founder by 35 (unless you've had an exit). There really aren't many good exemplars for older (50+) programmers in those places because everyone but the managers and investors leaves shortly after having a kid or two.

smurph• 13 years ago

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

Now I work with an engineer in his 50s who did not know what a VM was before working with me and still writes everything in procedural C. Our product still has a serial port on it because of this guy. So it goes both ways.

I would say hiring a bad older engineer is actually more harmful than hiring a bad younger engineer because your team might subconsciously give the older person more benefit of doubt, and go along with more of their bad decisions. The solution is to not hire bad engineers or to fire them quickly.

Readers offer tales of Silicon Valley's ageism

Related Stories