25 ms·

How Can We Achieve Age Diversity in Silicon Valley?

• pervycreeper 11y ago
  Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons are for preferring younger candidates over older ones, and then compare those same justifications transposed unto other well represented vs. underrepresented groups mutatis mutandis. If the reasoning is unacceptable in the latter case, why not the former?
  • hueving 11y ago
    >Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons are for preferring younger candidates over older ones Old people tend to not want shitty deals.
    • arethuza 11y ago
      I read a biography of Napoleon recently and it mentioned that he recognised that older more experienced troops tender to be much better at fighting but that they were also more cautious about picking their fights - younger inexperienced troops could actually be more useful in some circumstances in that they were more likely to rush in without any concerns for the risks in an, often vain, desire for glory.
      • TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Young devs today tend to be opinionated - you can't aim them at any random target. But in reality, that doesn't change much; just pick the devs with 'right' opinion and you get the same pattern of behaviour as with Napoleon's young soldiers. Opinion != experience.
        • arethuza 11y ago
          Young devs have, in my experience, have always been pretty opinionated.
      • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
        That was the preferred french tactic shock attack in column is much easier/cheaper to train as opposed to the well trained british musketry. It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits
        • arethuza 11y ago
          Interesting to see the requirements for the elite Old Guard unit of the Imperial Guards: - under 35 years of age at entry - at least 10 years' service - at least three campaigns (some had as many as 12 campaigns) - had to literally face enemy fire at the front and survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard I wonder what the tech equivalent is?
          • TeMPOraL 11y ago
            I'd guess some obscure teams of consultants that are known internally by big corporations, but otherwise unknown in the IT-showbusiness world. They show up where there is real work to be done, and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
          • pjc50 11y ago
            Most big organizations have a few of them. Sysadmins in particular tend to have operations "war stories", involving sorting out some incredibly stressful disaster. Servers on fire, company losing money by the second, that kind of thing. A lot of people found out on 2001-09-11 what "disaster recovery" meant. There are even literal combat sysadmins; I remember seeing a job advert for senior telecomms engineer in Iraq during the war, offering something like $100k/month. Programming involves less drama, but every now and again you need the services of someone who knows the system inside out and has a collection of weird tricks that will get you working again.
        • TeMPOraL 11y ago
          > It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits I think Al Qaeda uses suicide bombers mostly because they're hard to detect and let you strike a target with zero warning; it's an ultimate guerilla tactic. That young engineers tend to be particularly happy to wear the explosive vests seem to be incidental and not the reason for this tactic. I agree with your French/British example though.
    • michaelt 11y ago
      Right, but being unwillingly unemployed is the shittiest deal of all. If old people have a great deal from their current employer, they'll stay employed and the number of old people in the industry will remain constant. If old people find themselves unemployed due to a reorg or startup failure or whatever, they'll take the best deal on offer - and the number of old people in the industry will remain constant. If the number of old people in the industry is falling, I'd be interested in some statistics about where they're going.
      • scholia 11y ago
        Companies like IBM and HP are busy shedding experienced US-based staff and replacing them with relatively inexperienced but much cheaper workers in India. I don't know how many are getting jobs, but I'd guess that a lot are taking early retirement. If so, the number of older workers is falling....
    • noarchy 11y ago
      Older people don't want shitty deals, and they've seen it all. They've seen the latest fads in both the development sphere (every new framework under the sun), as well as management (think: Agile, Scrum, etc). They can smell the BS, and many have lost their inhibitions enough that they'll call out the BS. That gets them labelled as "toxic" or "not team players". Younger devs, meanwhile, will put in the overtime every two weeks when the latest, predictable "sprint" crisis occurs.
  • x5n1 11y ago
    Young people are easier to manipulate. Work harder. Are more agile. Are more inexperienced so less likely to judge your idiotic CEO mistakes. They keep working when an experienced person would have bailed ship long ago. They are also willing to learn the new fangdangled crap you have chosen to implement your app in that you will have to rewrite after round 3 of financing.
    • danellis 11y ago
      On what do you base your claim that young people work harder?
      • Jtsummers 11y ago
        They're more likely to put in the suicidal levels of overtime that many companies want to see in their employees. This isn't to say that older employees (including myself, almost, I guess I'm middle-aged in this discussion) don't work hard. But we're more likely to clock out at 5 to go see a kid's recital or to commit to non-work related plans and actually follow through instead of being intimidated into staying until 7 or 9 or 11 at night. We've been there, done that, and now we want to do something other than forfeit our lives to work.
      • logfromblammo 11y ago
        Working harder is immaterial. I don't subscribe to the labor theory of value, so I don't care how much you sweat while digging trenches with a teaspoon, if someone else can do it with a cool, dry brow from the air-conditioned control cabin of a deluxe hydraulic excavator. As a statistical aggregate, the amount of useful, valuable, monetizable work done by a human for a fixed quantity of effort positively correlates with the number of hours they have performed the same work over their lifetime. Even in tabletop RPGs, a level 20 character can soundly stomp a level 1 character of the same class. Why do so many people seem to think that experience only counts in games? If young people do indeed work harder, it is probably because they have not yet learned how to work smarter, and they still have to compete with older workers. They can work harder, accept lower pay, work more hours, produce less work-product, or some combination. Anecdotally, I know for a fact that I don't work anywhere near as hard as I did when I was younger. I don't need to.
  • yummyfajitas 11y ago
    I can think of at least 2. 1) A young company, light on technical background, has build a castle on webscale sand. A few of the smarter young folks have become experts in this system, and get a lot of clout by solving "difficult" problems. Suddenly an old guy comes along and says "lets just use MySQL and CREATE INDEX". Basically, he's been there, done that, and realized that J2EE + MySQL will get the job done with a minimum of fuss, or that the "simplification" that comes from denormalizing carries a huge maintenance penalty. This old guy threatens the young "experts" - if the system is rebuilt according to industry standards, suddenly they are just another dev. 2) The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc. You can't transpose these justifications onto non-Asian minorities, women, etc. A non-Asian minority or female 25 year old is fundamentally equivalent to a white/Asian 25 year old male. Nodejs is equally "close to the metal" regardless of your demographics. Tech in 1996 was radically different - a CD ROM filled with a small subset of wikipedia was actually a huge technical challenge. As a result the old guy really is different. On a personal note, at my current company I'm both the oldest techie and also the only techie who isn't a member of the majority ethnic group (sliced in US terms, at least). My age is a significant factor - I'm sometimes out of touch (I know fuckall about angular.js) and sometimes I'm the voice of experience (we should have a metrics server and use it for all the things). My ethnic diversity is completely irrelevant.
    • yodsanklai 11y ago
      > The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory Garbage collectors have been around since the 60s with LISP. I find it amusing to see that the first language I was taught in an academic setting in 1996, Caml Light (ancestor of OCaml), is still very relevant today!
      • arethuza 11y ago
        I had to write a garbage collector to get my SK combinator evaluator to run on a Unix mini (HLH Orion) in '88. Glad to see that functional languages eventually caught on though! I wish my application to Linn to work on the Rekursiv hardware had gone a bit further though...
  • karlkatzke 11y ago
    I'm not sure that's a good comparison. I can think of lots of cases where there isn't a comparison. For instance, "More experienced people are likely to look down their nose at company culture" doesn't really have a comparison with any other protected class.
• eloy 11y ago
  Relevant article from a few years ago: http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-valley http://medriscoll.com/post/9117396231/the-guild-of-silicon-v... That blog was also the reason that someone started this Twitter account: https://twitter.com/neckbeardhacker https://twitter.com/neckbeardhacker
• uptownJimmy 11y ago
  I must admit that I feel myself to be in the monority of middle-aged people who are aging kinda/sorta gracefully. That's not to brag, rather to point out that I know a LOT of middle-aged people who don't seem full of vitality and vigor, usually because of self-indulgent habits with food and drink. I do wish that more of us were able to control our various appetites: the evidence that we might have a hard time doing so tends to accumultate with age.
  • mahouse 11y ago
    This is really important, must people overlook how eating healthy and doing exercise helps. And it even makes you look 15 years younger!
    • JohnBooty 11y ago
      Yes. 39 here and I feel better now than I did in my 20s, and I can run a mile faster now too so I at least have some objective evidence I'm not totally fooling myself. :) I'm far from svelte today but I've really improved my life by taking better care of my health. To everybody in their 20s: the health-related stuff you can get away with in your 20s (poor diet, no exercise) might be working for you now but it's not going to fly forever!
• TimMeade 11y ago
  As an upper 40ish something who has been coding since I was 10, this one made my day. So very very true.... but it's amazing how many 20 somethings are to narrow in their thinking or too lacking in medium to long term vision on projects and just hack together a bunch of web found code to make a non extendable solution. Then there are those who I call the 'google' generation, they just google the problem and proclaim the number one result as the solution without really understanding what and especially why the problem really is occurring. Every generation has it's exceptions, but also each has their share of averages. Great article, nice way to start Monday morning.
  • throwaway13337 11y ago
    I also developed before web framework proliferation and stackoverflow. I see most of these things as speed boosts. If you take the rose colored glasses off, in the old days - we simply worked slower on easier (though more interesting) problems. We didn't have to deal with so much damn integration and the mountain of spaghetti we've built! The non extendable solution gets the job done as well. No need to worry about 'technical debt' when the vast majority of your projects never see scale. Moving faster is better. When I see a developer wasting too much time on the above - not googling the solution, spending too much time overengineering, and not using the libraries available (not hacking together components)... well, I guess I'm disappointed. In the old days, I did think more in your terms. I changed to fit the needs of the time.
    • Jtsummers 11y ago
      Technical debt is not an issue, just, of scaling code (presumably you mean to large numbers of connections or database sizes or something). It's really an issue of maintenance. The more technical debt you have on a project, the longer any round of maintenance will take. Even simple tools that are just slapped together quickly might be easier to rewrite than modify, but rewriting them each time results in a different sort of technical debt. Implementation X has features used by user A, implantation Y has features used by user B, so now both tools have to be maintained or you try for Implementation Z that tries to pull it all back together (but probably fails, because you're still not properly budgeting time and engineers). Overengineering is still a problem, but underengineering is the one I run into more often.
• fmax30 11y ago
  It would be very interesting to see when the millennials, people born particularly in the 90's get to their 40s. One of the reasons for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975 haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in the 80s and 90s have. Sure there are exceptions, those exceptions are people who were directly working on technology. An alarming trend in our industry (at least in my part of the world) is that a lot of people stop directly working on technology by the time they are 30-35 and start going towards the managerial end of thing.
  • ianpurton 11y ago
    "One of the reason for the lack of diversity is that people born before 1975 haven't really experienced the internet revolution like those of us born in the 80s and 90s have." One reason for the lack of diversity is that people make generic assumptions like this.
    • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
      and some of us will have seen precursors to the internet do the same things eg Prestel/Videotext :-)
      • arethuza 11y ago
        I can remember reading the original news posting about NCSA Mosaic and wondering "that sounds great - but what's the fascination with loading documents over a network?" :-)
        • spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
          I can recall finding a text mode www on the ITU's gopher server and thinking interesting :-) And I can remember when you could quickly skim the whats interesting on the www today.
  • justincormack 11y ago
    Actually we experienced the internet revolution. You just had it presented to you on a plate.
• dear 11y ago
  Maybe start at YC first?
  • karlkatzke 11y ago
    Except that YC is a very particular style of incubator: They're a growth incubator that pushes companies to grow fast over growing well. On the contractor's triangle (good/fast/cheap, pick any two), they're all the way over on the fast/cheap line. More experienced people tend to see the value in growing well AND fast at the same time. So more experienced engineers (aka, older folks) tend to always push away from the cheap and towards the fast/good side of the line ... or if cheap is a mandate, then they push towards the good/cheap side of the line. None of that is what YC is about.
    • jegutman 11y ago
      "They're a growth incubator that pushes companies to grow fast over growing well." Any evidence for this comment? Any evidence that there's even a tradeoff you can make? Any evidence that your hypothesis (which seems to be that "growing well" is better) is supported at all? The reason (just guessing, not affiliated with YC) that YC feels like growing fast is best is that "growing well" might involve a greater investment before you've reached product-market fit. I will also add that age-diversity has almost nothing to do with founders. Founders are already slightly older on average. Plenty of companies founded by young founders have their average age go up quite a bit once they have found product-market fit and can hire more people.
  • peter303 11y ago
    YCs bootcamp style tends to select recent students without families. Older marrieds have made it through, but are not the majority. (Based on reading Stross's YC book.)
    • michaelZejoop 11y ago
      I am not familiar with Stross's book. If I remember correctly this subject is not part of the YC application (marital status, family...). I have applied three times including the latest for w2016. I have not been invited for an interview yet, so maybe it comes up in that context. For the record, I am single, no family, former aerospace engineer, laid off in my early to mid-fifties, several years ago. The topic of age diversity is of great interest to me. I believe there is a lot of engineering talent and experience laying dormant, waiting to be tapped - people laid off right before retirement. Adding to my defense systems engineering skills I've become a full stack developer for the project I am applying with, and I am ready to go! (edited for typo)
• jfmercer 11y ago
  I know a woman in her mid-60s who has been programming since the late 1960s. She's much more than an "experienced dev": she is a sage, a teacher, and a grand-master of the art of computer programming: a true engineer in the very core of her being. Yet she can't find steady employment. She believes that is because of age discrimination, and I cannot help but to agree with her.
  • hjnilsson 11y ago
    Don't know if this is the case in the US. But generally, mid-60s people are shied away from being hired because they will retire shortly. Investing in an employee that will be gone very soon is a thing few companies would do, and not unique to IT by any measure. The exception being when they have a need for her exact talent.
    • huac 11y ago
      Which will end first, the employee's career or the startup? Funny that this is a consideration given how short most runways seem to be.
      • nickpsecurity 11y ago
        That's a great point I haven't seen anyone else bring up. It's worth bringing up again in any discussion involving startups. Many barely last a few years. Who are they to talk about what an employee will do in the next 10 years lol? Answer: "If you're good and VC's like you, I'll be working with you on your third startup by then."
    • JonFish85 11y ago
      How long do younger people stay at a job, on average? I'd imagine it's 5 years or less. In fact, I'd argue that a person closer to retirement might be more likely to stay longer than someone just starting out. The younger person doesn't have kids, a mortgage or roots put down, so it's much easier for them to leave.
      • 11y ago
• rongenre 11y ago
  What I've noticed in tech is that the further you are from the [being polite] demographic core -- the better you need to be. In the context of this discussion, there's room for you as an older employee, but the way it seems to work is you need to be really really good at your jobs. Because when you make the inevitable human mistakes, the number of years you've been at it is always brought up.
  • amyjess 11y ago
    I have to wonder how much of that is discrimination and how much of that is salary mechanics. More experienced people demand higher salaries. When I apply for a new job, I expect a higher salary than my old job, and I'll use my experience to justify it. Typically, older people have more experience and thus ask for a salary to match. When you're asking for a high salary, companies generally want to know that you're good enough to justify that salary. Companies aren't going to put that kind of pressure on a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old because such a person is going to be working for peanuts.
    • aianus 11y ago
      > Companies aren't going to put that kind of pressure on a fresh-out-of-college 22-year-old because such a person is going to be working for peanuts. 22-year-olds don't work for peanuts in SV. They make double the median family income in the US before stock.
      • amyjess 11y ago
        Still, even with such an elevated baseline, I'd imagine that somebody with 10 years of experience can expect to make a lot more than somebody with no experience and that somebody with 20 years of experience can expect to make a lot more than somebody with 10 years of experience.
      • s73v3r 11y ago
        We're speaking relatively. In the context of the conversation, it makes absolutely no difference what someone working in a McDonalds in rural Wisconsin makes. We're talking about the cost of engineers. And compared to people who do have experience, they're working for cheap.
• littletimmy 11y ago
  I cannot help but think that companies dislike older people because they don't put up with that much bullshit. You can underpay a young (naive) person, make them work 12+ hours a day, if they get disgruntled pacify them with a nerf gun fight or catered lunch. Older people might not go for gimmicks and ask for appropriate working hours and reasonable vacation time etc. That puts off the corporate types.
  • techterrier 11y ago
    Completely agree. The infantilisation of the workplace is more of the more tiresome trends to come out of the startup scene.
    • sre_ops 11y ago
      In that case why do these people care that they dont get hired?
  • csixty4 11y ago
    And the yelling/bullying. What is it with managers at startups and yelling? I got enough of that growing up. I have zero patience for it from my boss.
    • amyjess 11y ago
      That was one of the bigger reasons I left my last job. Now, I work at a defense contractor that's been around for 20 years. It's still a small company, no bigger than the startup I worked for before, but it's a much saner, more stable company, and hearing my boss's voice doesn't make me physically flinch like it did at my last job.
    • MisterBastahrd 11y ago
      Yep, that I draw a paycheck from your company does not mean that I am paid to put up with your shit. I don't care that your wife is cheating on you, or your kid set your dog on fire, or your mom is dying of lupus. If you can't keep that shit at home where it belongs, then you need to stop trying to manage people because you can't even manage yourself.
• tatx 11y ago
  While most of us are pointing fingers at the fast-changing nature of and innovation-craziness in the tech industry, I think the core reason may be quite the opposite. It seems plausible that the tech industry, innovation-wise, is actually in a rut where companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less. The changes happening in the industry today are of a fickle and shallow kind, not fundamental and lasting. And in an evolution-like process the older amongst us, who are the only ones with enough experience to really innovate, are being driven out of the ecosystem and forced to disrupt an industry going stale.
  • pjc50 11y ago
    > companies are forced to cut costs and survive by hiring young people whom they have to pay less .. and yet still starts up in Silicon Valley, among the highest salaries and real-estate prices in the world.
    • kagamine 11y ago
      Silicon Valley startups are to investment what a day at the races is to a broker. You hope you'll pick a winner but ultimately those horses are not where the majority of the population's investment goes.
    • wellsjohnston 11y ago
      What's your point?
      • mikekchar 11y ago
        The salary for any given employee is not a limiting factor. I think this is true. Even when you have a very limited budget, many places will prefer to be under head count with a higher performing team. If you can get that guy who is going to let you avoid running down rabbit holes all day, every day, they are worth the extra bucks. I think the problem is that these people are hard to find -- whether young or old.
        • 11y ago
• smikhanov 11y ago
  It seems like ageism in tech is subject to a different dynamics compared to sexual or racial diversity. With age comes more work experience and most SV companies (even the unicorns) usually don't need it. Most of them is driven by pretty trivial tech anyways. As soon as you start looking into technically challenging fields, you see more and more older people: Sebastian Thrun is in his late 40s, Guido van Rossum is almost 60. People like Doug Lea, Lars Bak, Martin Odersky, Fabrice Bellard, Matthew Dilon, Simon Peyton-Jones etc are all well beyond their 20s. It makes perfect business sense. It's an overkill (and a recipe for disaster) to hire someone of that stature to build you a website. There's also nothing special about tech in this regard: if 90% of all legal work in the world could've been done by a paralegal, law firms would all be full of cheerful 20 somethings.
  • rmah 11y ago
    Hah, 90% of all legal work IS done by paralegals.
    • smikhanov 11y ago
      I actualy would agree with you and I should've said "99%" above.
  • bluetomcat 11y ago
    Exactly my thoughts. You don't see a lot of twenty-something hipster types writing memory allocators, device drivers, kernels and critical middleware. Yet, the industry nowadays is dominated by people who believe that cobbling together a single-page application using the latest, shiniest framework is at the edge of tech excellence.
    • steveklabnik 11y ago
      In my experience, a significant portion of the hobbyist operating systems community is highschool or college students, actually.
  • imh 11y ago
    But then why do we have such a strong culture around hiring the "10x" engineer?
• techterrier 11y ago
  Funnily enough, working 80 hour weeks for stock isn't really much of a winner if you have a mortgage to pay and or mouths to feed. The ping pong table doesn't make up for it either.
• lazyjones 11y ago
  It's all fine until you accidentally hire people whose age doesn't correlate with their experience and maturity. 2 years of getting by as a fine-tongued know-it-all impostor with mediocre technical skills is fixable with some effort, 25 years are not. That said, there are some extremely valuable older devs out there. It's a pity that most employers cannot afford paying them an appropriate salary.
  • marktangotango 11y ago
    I think this is a key insight; experience demands compensation. The question I have is; when is the experience really necessary? I took a job once, I was recommended by a former colleague to the dev maanger of a fast growing company. I was one of the best developers this person had ever known (I found out later this is how I was sold). I even flubbed a couple of the technical interview questions, but was still hired at my required salary. My work at this company consisted of maintaining an application written in framework X (where X had long since fallen out of favor). The idea was to rewrite, but due to business requirements this never happened. Had they done the rewrite, my salary and experience would have been justified, but doing maintenance on an old app? They could've gotten a green or junior dev to do that for half the price.
    • matwood 11y ago
      What lazyjones was alluding to is that time != experience. A 25 year dev veteran who has just done the same code over and over has very little experience. I've seen this while interviewing people. Person has 5 years experience on their resume, but it turns out they really have about 3 mos. experience. They got the job, learned it in about 3 mos. and just repeated it over over and with minor tweaks. Part of the blame is the company for no growth path and part is on the employee. To the original point. Where I work now only 2 of the 7 devs are under 30, and they will both be 30 soon. Having this level of experience lets us build things very quickly. It also lets the business side trust the dev team to usually make the right decisions on the fly.
      • pluma 11y ago
• DavidWoof 11y ago
  I'm in my 50s, and I used to say that I never saw age discrimination. Then a couple of weeks ago, I interviewed for an Internet company, and my age and experience was commented on by the majority of the interviewers. Which is fine, since most of the comments were positive (e.g., we need people with more experience because we have so many new graduates), but it was still a bit strange. Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism. As with all discrimination, the unnerving part is just not knowing. Was it really age discrimination? Or maybe I just looked like this guy's hated father or ex-boyfriend or something. Or maybe he's just a bad interviewer with low skills, and really didn't understand the stuff I was telling him (I usually sneak in a couple of technical questions for the interviewer and he blew those questions); that's hard to judge when there's no follow-up questions. Or maybe at the end of the day it was just money and the company didn't want to admit it. Who knows? I'll never know, and I suspect the company won't either.
  • sre_ops 11y ago
    > Then the technical interview came, and one of the interviewers was instantly hostile as soon as he saw me. It was weird. Weird to the point where the other tech interviewer started playing good cop, saying things like "he just covered that" and "no, that's true". Whiteboard coding is strange enough, but doing it with zero feedback and a hostile interviewer who keeps trying to push you in bad directions (inheritance over composition, singletons, etc.) is, well, interesting. The application came back with the inevitable "good skills but bad culture fit" euphemism. Wait, you think the companies that have to move fast have the coddling environment?
  • kagamine 11y ago
    Sounds like a similar experince to one I had where interviewer nr2 clearly had made made up their mind before walking into the room. So 30 mins into an interview that was going swimmingly - in comes sour face and contradicts everything I say. It wasn't a "strategy", it was just some $$$$ in a bad mood who didn't like my name? age? some other factor? I hope I can just roll with it next time but I got really pissed at the time as I knew I was suited to the job, but wasn't given a fair chance. It gets you down when you are 'between jobs'. Funnily enough, I now work in a different division of the same company and this person was brought in on a project I was on. I don't think I was remembered and thankfully I had recovered my professional composure so I didn't mention our first meeting.
• Fradow 11y ago
  No one seems to talk about the elephant in the room: salary. Isn't a more experienced person going to cost more? Are you going to feel comfortable offering them a low salary (relative to their experience), because that's all you got to offer? And the other way around, even if you would love to have an experienced developer, what do you do if for the same salary you can get an average developer (who will get the job done, because you already have experienced enough people to help), and another profile (sales for exemple)? This is especially true at small companies, where there just isn't that much latitude to adjust the salary.
  • rmah 11y ago
    Perhaps, but it's not like you have to pay 2x or 3x more to hire a programmer in their 50's. More like 20% or 30% more. For 200% to 300% more experience. That's a deal, in my book.
    • throwaway101916 11y ago
      It depends. It's possible to find a younger programmer who is less confident in their skills or vastly underestimates his net worth. This tends to normalize with age and experience, so an older programmer with the same skillset is likely going to be more expensive simply because they know how much they can ask for. Similar to the effect of women being paid less because they are less likely to ask for raises.
  • vellum 11y ago
    >Isn't a more experienced person going to cost more? Sure. But everyone's looking for senior developers. And salary tends to top out for senior devs, so it's not like salary scales linearly with age.
  • jasonlotito 11y ago
    > No one seems to talk about the elephant in the room: salary. This is not true at any company that "hires the best." If it is, they don't "hire the best." They hire the best they can con into accepting a competitive/artificially-low salary.
  • 11y ago
• sjclemmy 11y ago
  I am a member of the early 40s club. I've had what you call an interesting career. I have delivered technology solutions wherever I have worked and they have on the whole been pretty successful. One of my dreams is to work in Silicon Valley and I have no doubt that I could be successful. However, it's not a goal I am pursuing for various reasons, one of those reasons is the perceived age bias that exists there.
• ThomPete 11y ago
  You can look at this from a slightly different angle: "...It is often said that “Youth is wasted on the young”. Based on my little spare time study, in this context, it seems truer than ever. The youth have all the energy and time to spend, no obligations and no financial worries. But they have very little life experience and exposure to these hidden problems. So what they end up solving are the kind of problems primarily young people have. This certainly makes for some very amazing products, but I can’t help feeling a little disillusioned. The amount of time and energy that goes into fun, but ultimately useless ideas, rather than fixing some of these hidden problems is mind-numbing. On the other hand, the older generations are exposed (aware or unaware) to a lot of these hidden problems. They have experience on how to solve them because they understand them. Yet by that time, most of them have to provide for a family, pay of their mortgage, tuition fees, healthcare, yearly vacations and the 3 cars. They also often lack the imagination on how to solve things in a new technological paradigm. So I now realized that there is a potential goldmine of problems we simply don’t know of, because the people who are exposed to them aren’t connected with the people who have the opportunity and creativity and energy to solve them. Which begs the question: Are the old and young generations wildly underutilizing each other as resources? ..." http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems http://000fff.org/the-problem-with-problems
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    That's... a pretty insightful observation. I suppose if you'd create a company that tried to exploit the comparative advantages of young and old staff, you'd face problems of leadership - who should run the show? The young, or the old? But I think it could be worth trying out in Hackerspace context. I'm adding to my TODO list to try and encourage some 50+ people to hang out in our space; maybe they could contribute some important problems and good insights that the regular young crowd could tackle with the energy we have. Thank you for sharing that quote.
    • ThomPete 11y ago
      Thanks. And yes there is all sorts of issues that could arise for sure. I have been thinking about ways to force out these hidden problems from people with more experience. Perhaps just doing a bunch of interviews and writing a book/blog about them. Another idea I have is to try make a podcast where we invite people in with experience from industries and then try and figure out what problems hide inside the organizations that we are not aware of. It all came from an ASK HN i did a while back where I asked "What problem in your industry is a potential startup" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9799007 The answers there were mind-numbing to me cause it showed me how much insight is actually needed not just to solve a problem but also to find it to begin with.
• datashovel 11y ago
  I have been brought in, as an independent contractor, at the tail end of enough projects to "salvage" them to have a somewhat cynical point of view on this. In all of the worst cases the projects probably had no one over 25 working on them. I'd figure eventually enough money will have been lost on such failed projects for tech companies to change their minds on this.
  • chipsy 11y ago
    As long as the industry keeps growing quickly, we'll keep seeing teams that consist entirely of inexperienced youth. I think the only thing that distinguishes now from previous periods in the software industry is that there is less of a engineering-driven culture in the companies - product and sales more frequently take a leading role, and the technology used is cheap and accessible enough that bad developers can still make a go of it, get the business through launch and into profitability(albeit with catastrophic bugs, no security, no backups, etc.).
• edw519 11y ago
  60+, programming for 44 years, triumphed over adversity more times than I can recall, wimpy looking nerd discounted by almost everyone I ever met. Hardly ever got the girl, got to be on the team, got the part, or got the job. I'm a programmer because I can code, and at the end of the day, that's all that really matters. You can hate on another person because they're too old or too ugly or too nerdy or too black or too female or too gay or too anything else, but the real beauty of our field is that success is binary and relatively easy to measure: 1. Can you build it? 2. Does what you build matter to someone else? I've always considered rejection for any reason a self solving problem: if you're too stupid to accept me (whether you're in Silicon Valley or not), then I would have never wanted to work with you anyway. I'll find someone else who understands the value I produce and can provide the environment in which I can thrive. Life is unfair, especially in Silicon Valley. It's not about the unfairness, it's about our response to the unfairness. There has never been a better time and a better way to succeed than building software today. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're at, what you're like, what you have, or who you're with. 95% of the battle is what you can do. So go do it.
  • onion2k 11y ago
    95% of the battle is what you can do. If you're in a minority group that suffers discrimination then that discrimination skews the balance away from being 95% what you can do to more like 50% what you can do and 50% what colour/gender/sexuality/age/etc you are. And a big chunk of the 50% that's discrimination is the fact that people outside of your minority grossly underestimate how much of an issue discrimination is. If you see something that's unfair it's not especially reasonable to just ignore it with a "Life is unfair" line.
    • Jhsto 11y ago
      I think what he is trying to say that it is possible to publish an app or service online and gain momentum completely by marketing it on the web. In such case, I do not see how your color/gender/sexuality/age/etc would matter. You could hide yourself behind a domain and nobody would ever care who runs or maintains the thing.
• mikekchar 11y ago
  There seems to be some assumptions that companies prefer to hire younger people. I have yet to see that, myself (getting close to 50). When I was interviewing people, I was looking for older people with good transferable skills. We just couldn't find anyone. However, I think that there are some caveats. When people are young, you tend to cut them some slack. You don't really know how they are going to turn out in a few years. You hire someone with the hope that they will improve quickly over the short term. When people are older, you have a track record to look at. Sometimes it is very obvious that they have had a hard time of it in their career. The end result is not that people prefer younger people to older people, it's that they prefer unknown quantities to known, poorly performing quantities. If there is someone with an exceptionally good track record over a long period of time and who can do a good interview -- my experience is that they will be snapped up quickly. I don't really buy the idea that length of employment is a serious issue either. Attrition in IT is huge and I never assume that anyone is going to last more than 2 or 3 years.
• cousin_it 11y ago
  Discussions of workplace diversity try to answer the question "Should Alice or Bob get the job?" That doesn't sound like the right question to me, because one of them is still left without a job. Instead of 30%/70% unemployment, you've achieved 50%/50%. That's nice, but... I think we should try to create a baseline of happiness that no one can ever fall beneath. Universal basic income might be a good step in that direction, though I don't expect it to solve all the problems.
  • TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I agree with you that what you say should be the main goal, but I suppose it's also worth to redirect some spare energy to optimize the current state of affairs (as long as it doesn't go against the main goal you mentioned).
    • deleted 11y ago
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  • pc86 11y ago
    > Giving good jobs to everyone Whether they're qualified or not, right? Because there are not enough jobs for everyone, and most people are not qualified for most jobs.
    • deleted 11y ago
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    • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Everyone slaving away is not anybody's idea of Utopia. Once upon a time, we thought robots would take the yoke from our shoulders and leave us all more creative and happy. Automation is fast approaching something like that vision. But now any time we talk about universal income or other such programs, it turns instantly to make-work projects. How can we keep the slaves working? Because, if I work, everybody has to work.
      • 11y ago
• jegutman 11y ago
  It seems like the biggest issue here is the compensation structure of startups. People who have been working for a long time are those least likely to take a huge pay cut for upside even if they're the people who are often well-suited for that risk.
• techterrier 11y ago
  I wonder if the technical interview process can feed into this too. Particularly the questions straight out of the final year of a computer science degree. It'll be decades since senior engineers left university and they reasonably wont have held on to the knowledge that they haven't used.
• DrNuke 11y ago
  Let's go the the very core of this: smart old people are massively more productive than fresher minds. They know the fundamentals and they know the tricks, they also know themselves and their needs. They can tell youngsters that you are wasting your time and they are right. Point is: youngsters need to waste their time in order to learn life, the trade and -in this environment- in order to get something really new out of their own evolving needs in an evolving world. A corollary is that domain-specific applied problems are probably better suited to older people but unpredictable ways are easier to come from fresher minds.
• nashashmi 11y ago
  I would like to take this as an opportunity to ask: Why is diversity important? e.g. in age, gender, race, ?profession? ... etc. Isn't the business built on the advantage of particular "group"? And that skill becomes be-all, end-all (e.g. important) to the success of the company?
  • asmithmd1 11y ago
    If you develop a product in a monoculture you are at risk of getting wiped out by a product that has features that appeal to people other than your minority. This summer the US Census published that there are 50.2% children under 5 years old who are minorities. Diversity is it's own reward because no matter how smart you are someone with a different background than yours will bring solutions to problems you would never have thought of.
  • logfromblammo 11y ago
    When all your constituents are the same size and aligned in the same direction, your aggregate material becomes very strong, and hard, but it also becomes brittle. Diamond is 100% carbon, all bonded via identical sp3 hybrid orbitals. It is very hard (10 on Mohs scale), but it also has perfect cleavage in 4 directions. You can cut a diamond in half with a light tap in just the right spot. Diamond cannot be effectively carved, it can only be cut into faceted gems. If you incorporate materials of different sizes and orient them in different directions, your aggregate material becomes very resilient. Nephrite has many interlocking fibers of tremolite and actinolite, like the hairs in felt. Nephrite jade can be carved with exceptional detail. A nephrite bell or war club is reasonable, whereas trying for the same with diamond would be insane. When your workforce lacks diversity, you are counting on its resulting strength to accomplish some goal before an unexpected shock shatters the organization. Or perhaps you can look to the banana. Most bananas in cultivation are clones from the same stock. Nowadays, the variety is the "Cavendish". But the banana on store shelves used to be the "Gros Michel". Panama disease wiped them all out, because they were all the same plant. No diversity means less resistance to external hardships. Cheetahs are so similar in genetics that regardless of numbers, they are just one disease away from extinction. So while similarity does produce better focus on positive goals, diversity is what insulates you from negative shocks. So the natural conclusion that you an I may reach is that companies which lack diversity are looking to grow as quickly as possible and seek a fast exit before their first crisis hits, whereas those that hire more broadly are in it for the long haul, being more able to weather unexpected adversity.
• wyldfire 11y ago
  > In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon Valley/Internet firms. Maybe this could be explained by younger folks, not bound to a family's worth of obligations, moving to California in droves from places all over the world? So maybe we should normalize the data based on the age distribution in silicon valley.
• leroy_masochist 11y ago
  A few comments here saying that salary is the elephant in the room, which is a valid point, but I think the biggest elephant is the insecurity which lurks in the heart of every entrepreneur. Co-founder/C_O types in their early 20s are often intimidated by people 35 and older, especially when those people have a long record of working in tech and all the war stories to prove it. The thought of hiring such a person, even when they are superbly qualified for the job and amenable to the compensation package, makes young entrepreneurs a bit uncomfortable. I think there are two specific fears that drive this feeling of discomfort. First is the fear that older employees might see right through the fact that they have no idea what they're doing and call them out on it. Second is the fear that older people will destroy the culture through their relative lack of enthusiasm and exuberance. In young founders' minds, it's better to hire someone who's been drinking legally for all of 18 months and who can be counted on to nod earnestly when you talk about "our mission" at the all-hands.
  • compostor42 11y ago
    Never thought about it this way but there is probably a lot of truth to it. Older people have had people trying to feed them bullshit for much longer. They know what it tastes like. They can smell it coming. Of all the software places near me, the ones that are known for 60+ hour weeks exclusively target young, fresh out of school candidates who don't have the experience to know they are being treated like crap.
  • BinaryIdiot 11y ago
    > First is the fear that older employees might see right through the fact that they have no idea what they're doing and call them out on it. I think your comment is pretty fair. For this specific point it's helped me greatly over the years to realize that, honestly, no one knows what they're doing. Entirely, anyway. People in the industry have more experience so they can make better decisions (theoretically) but much of the technology used today was created within the past few years which is an awesome equalizer.
  • WalterBright 11y ago
    Reminds me of when I was told years ago that the army likes to get recruits at 17, because a 17 year old will buy into the indoctrination. An 18 year old will just go through the motions.
• donatj 11y ago
  This is my biggest fear as I enter my 30s in a number of months. I've been programming professionally since I was 20 and for fun since 10 - I can't imagine having to do something else, it's what I was born to do. I'm still relatively young but I just got married and the long hours and complete commitment I used to wear as a badge of honor no longer seems appealing. Am I going to be able to do this for the rest of my career? I honestly doubt it, but I have no idea what I would do instead. My father was a draftsman for years and made good money but the market for draftsmen completely dropped out and he spent the last fifteen years of his career unlocking doors at a school. I have such a strong desire to stay relevant but I can't spend nearly as much time studying as I used to even a year or two ago. Sigh.
  • agentultra 11y ago
    You'll be fine. I'm a few years ahead of you. I had the same fears. I was newly married and didn't feel like I was ahead of the game. I'm now 33 and have a house and two kids. It's a trip but I'm still a programmer somehow. Companies come and go. They go on huge hiring sprees and then either go under or layoff people in a few years. Few, if any, will invest in you long-term or care about the stability of your family. So don't count on having a career path the resembles anything like what your parents or grandparents enjoyed. "Retirement," doesn't seem like something on the menu for people in our generation or the ones to come. So plan for it yourself. Education is your best, first defense. Study the right things (Maths should be the top of the list IMO). Next plan to save everything you can and spread it out into investments in a good balance of stocks and bonds. If you decide to have kids start an education fund right away and look into any grants or assistance you can get from your local government to kick-start it; if they do better than you in life then chances are your retirement will be fairly comfortable. You can still stay sharp. You just have to change the yardstick. My young friends always talk about the latest languages or frameworks but it always comes back to data structures and transformations. I've just learned to be more picky about how I spend my time because once we started having kids I've had far less of it to waste.
    • fohara 11y ago
      I think this is solid advice. I continue learning by picking problems/inconveniences I encounter while working during the day, and then doing whatever research is required to make those things less inconvenient. In the process of researching the problem space, I'm often introduced to new programming concepts and tools that I would have otherwise never known about. Overall, I find it easier to learn new things if I have a real problem I'm trying to solve.
• deleted 11y ago
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• dalacv 11y ago
  I'm in an industry where most of the analysts are 40+ and many are in their 50s and 60s because the clients only want experienced developers / business analysts. It's a niche market that a new-hire would have a tough time getting into. It works both ways sometimes.
• tamaatar 11y ago
  I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience. For older people, who have experience building stuff,e.g-software developers who have done some development in their life- they are worth their weight in gold. BUT most older people I work or have worked with, they are not all developers. People like sysadmins,IT people, sharepoint admins, automation managers,DBAs,Managers some system architects etc- I have seen some common traits- 1) They have no enthusiasm for work. Work is not even secondary for them. Its the last thing 2) They either think they are doing hard work or act like they work hard. Exaggerate all issues or whatever work they did even if its just an installation 3) No passion for technology 4) Do not want to learn anything new 5) Don't care about above, because its time for their retirement and so they don't care what others think Given this, if I were building a team, I would lean towards the younger crowd. Unless the older person has experience building stuff.
  • brlewis 11y ago
    >I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience. Yes, you are going to get a lot of flak. I'll start. Yes, it's your personal experience. Personal experience is where prejudice usually comes from. If you get beat up by 3 people in green tee shirts, you're going to cross the street to avoid people in green tee shirts. That's the way our brains are wired. It's natural. It's instinct. It's also natural to pee on the sidewalk when we feel the urge. But we suppress that instinct because society functions better when we do. Similarly, society functions better when we suppress our natural prejudices while interviewing. We use our intellect to remind ourselves that there are people who don't fit the mold of our personal experience, and force ourselves to interview one person the same as anybody else. And you keep doing it even after interviewing several people who do fit the pattern you've seen previously.
  • harmegido 11y ago
    You should get flak for this. If you were building a team, you would be judging a person based on a group they belong to, not the person. You would also be doing something illegal (assuming you are in the US and the person is over 40).
• oldmanjay 11y ago
  it just goes to show, everyone will whine when they see people getting things they want.
  • Apocryphon 11y ago
    Will you do any less when it's your demographic's turn to be deprived?
• WalterBright 11y ago
  I wouldn't join any club that would have me as a member. -- Groucho Marx
• marknutter 11y ago
  Let companies avoid older programmers at their peril. The companies that do hire them will do much better by avoiding reinventing wheels, repeating the mistakes of the past, and losing valuable tribal knowledge due to high turnover rates. I firmly believe that nothing "needs to be done" about lack of diversity in work places because the penalty for avoiding candidates based on gender or ethnicity will levied slowly over time. Interviews should be conducted online without any indication what race or gender the applicant is. Their work and expertise should speak for itself. I also think trying to find people who "fit the culture" is a terrible way to hire. On the surface it seems to make sense because interpersonal communication is half the battle, but it's usually code for "hire people like us" so even though you may try to hire more diverse people on a visual basis, you'll end up hiring less diverse people on a personality basis which can be just as bad.
• tlogan 11y ago
  One of my friends commented on this like this: My friend: "You know, majority of actresses in porn are young so it make sense that it same for Silicon Valley start ups". Me: "Start ups are not porn" My friend: "Yes they are" Me: ... thinking... "Yes..."
• throwaway101916 11y ago
  I run a design/development agency in Europe. I'm the only male (of <10 employees). We had an applicant for a development job who said he was 50+ and had been self-employed several times. In the end we decided not to hire him. The age was a factor, but not in the way you'd think. The primary reason was that he proved himself to be a very bad fit for the team and the kind of clients we work with. He attempted to dominate every conversation to prove his seniority (or assert his potential if it was on a subject he had no prior experience with). I'd like to think his age wasn't a factor at all and most of his behaviour can instead be attributed to his prior experience being self-employed, but I'm not sure whether this is true or not. I don't think age is a valid argument any more than race or gender but I'd like to think that these are just unfortunate proxies for the actual reasons companies don't want to hire candidates. I've turned down a lot of "foreigners" because their language skills were insufficient for the requirements of the job. I've turned down "men" because of their macho-like behaviour towards the women on the team and I've turned down "old people" because they treated younger team members less respectfully. None of these traits are representative of all potential candidates in each group, but they tend to be common enough that you tend to become more sensitive to them, especially when hiring people from that group. This leads to unfair bias, but short of anonymizing CVs (which can be extremely difficult) I don't see any fool-proof way of avoiding that. There's a very thin line between due dilligence and unfair bias.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Discrimination is so popular because it works so well. As mentioned, there are cultural values that you can quite often predict just from {being a woman/black/old}. A primary mechanism to combat this is, to get folks to evaluate each person as a person. To do this, an effort has to be made to recognize and cancel out any preconceived notions may have been formed from incidental cues like age. I'm glad to see anecdotally that candidates were turned down for real reasons, at least so far. I'd advice being very diligent at continuing to require real criterion in hiring decisions. For instance, anonymizing CVs is not at all hard - why consider it a last resort? E.g. put a piece of tape over the name when reading a pile of them.
    • 11y ago
• kelukelugames 11y ago
  I've noticed young people are very biased when interviewing older candidates. It's kind of sad. On the other hand, older interviewers are used to hiring college grads.
• SCAQTony 11y ago
  YMMV, I am 58 and I am a UI designer. In my 30's I thought I would be unemployable by 40-years-old due to exceptional "kids" in their 20's who were either as good as me but less expensive or who were better, more current, and available for the same price. This paranoia has kept me employable. My experience is that your rate has to match the quality of your work not your experience or names of the NASDAQ 100 companies you worked for. If you are simply equal to the competition then you drop your rate. If you're better you match the rate.
• felixgallo 11y ago
  My very favorite interview question ever, from when I was 41, posed by a fresh UCLA grad: "do you think a gentleman of your age can interact with programmers today?"
• api 11y ago
  This issue is intimately bound up with the workaholic culture issue. Older people often have families and lives and aren't interested in 80 hour work weeks, and they've also kind of wised up to the fact that someone demanding an 80 hour work week with the promise of (unspecified) riches is just using you. SV's 80 hour work week culture is about exploiting naive young people and burning them out. If we can do something about that, then some companies might realize that someone who's been coding for 35 years actually might know more than someone who's been coding for 5.
• hwstar 11y ago
  1. From the article: Age discrimination is one of the last places left where employers can discriminate. This sounds to me like we need to reform some discrimination laws at the federal level. 2. I think that we need to go to a single-payer health insurance system and get employers out of the business of providing health insurance. If this were done, more employers would consider people over 50. The ACA helps in some ways, but is an incomplete solution as the employer still has to offer and pay up for health insurance, and older engineers are going to cost more in premiums.
  • tomsthumb 11y ago
    > I think that we need to go to a single-payer health insurance system and get employers out of the business of providing health insurance. If this were done, more employers would consider people over 50. I've always wondered if small businesses would be more interested in hiring women in their 20's and early 30's if single-payer was a thing. The difference in health insurance costs is non-trivial because of possible maternity costs.
• brogrammer90 11y ago
  As a person on the wrong side of 30, how can you live with yourself pandering to 20 somethings? I've watched over the years my 40 something coworker do this and it's the most pathetic existence I can think of. It's no surprise he sees a therapist weekly. And yes ladies he's single and ready to mingle.
  • enraged_camel 11y ago
    I think there's a difference between "pandering to" and "relating to". The former refers to artificially trying to fit into and build trust with a group, usually with an ulterior motive (e.g. you want their votes). The latter refers to the ability to take yourself out of your own "box" and make an effort to understand them and find some common ground with them. And guess what: the attitude you demonstrated is the exact same attitude you blame young people for: you're refusing to adapt to them because they don't fit your own age-defined tastes and characteristics.
  • amyjess 11y ago
    I'm 30. I'm also happily single and childfree, and a lot of my hobbies are more common among young people. I watch the same movies, TV shows, etc. as people in their teens and twenties. I voraciously read comic books. I don't expect any of that to ever change. In a decade, I'm going to be consuming the same kind of media in my 40s that I consumed in my 20s and am now consuming in my 30s. Being childfree is never going to change (especially considering I voluntarily sterilized myself), and I'm mentally incapable of feeling romantic attraction to anyone, so I'm going to be single for the rest of my life. It's not pandering: it's simply be being the kind of person I am, which happens to mean that, on average, I relate more towards people younger than me than to people my age, and that discrepancy is only going to get larger as time goes on (mind you, the "on average" is key because I've met and get along with some fellow outliers, not just my age but also older than me).
    • magic_beans 11y ago
      Oh my :/ I don't know you, but this sounds grim.
• yuhong 11y ago
  As a side note, I do dislike anti-discrimination laws. As an example, one of the ways to enforce it is via statistical analysis. I have a feeling this probably works for certain kinds of jobs but not for others.
• devereaux 11y ago
  There are many interesting comments, but they neglect the intersections of discrimination. To put that simply: a) it's hard for a >30 yo white male b) it's hard for a >30 yo white female c) it's hard for a >30 yo black female a, b and c are correct -- but it's several times harder for c that for b than for a.
• alecco 11y ago
  It's too late and too hard to change SV/YC cultre. The Zuckerberg-wannabes have a mantra that after 30 you get slow and incompetent. The only realistic path is by making new startups like the WhatsApp guys did and then the Zuckerbergs need to eat their words and shed some of their hard earned billions or get stomped by some old programmers.
• netcan 11y ago
  I think some, perhaps most of this effect is related to the growth of the industry. Far fewer 25 year olds started a career in coding in 1990 than 2015. Fewer 25 year old coders in 1990, fewer 50 year olds in 2015. That dynamic has existed for a while. When Gates' & Wozniak's generation started coding it was an unusual pursuit. Age gaps became part of the demographics. Like everything else, being common translates into being normal. Other than that, I think there is a little more attrition in coding. Experience is important, but current knowledge is too. SV startups are riskier, so more appealing more to younger people. They use new technology, so less of a comparative advantage for old skills. I'm not saying discrimination doesn't exist, I'm just saying that demographics play a big role explaining the average age. Some of the discrimination that does exist likely comes from simple human pattern matching. That's not what a coder looks like. All the coders I know are 25-40. If I'm right, time will fix this.
  • ASinclair 11y ago
    A relatively well known 60+ dev would agree with you: http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html
    • edc117 11y ago
      This is an underrated comment. The data is right there; even if you disagree with the author's conclusions, it's pretty hard to argue he's incorrect about the correlation between knowledge and age. Here's to hoping I'll be one of those older programmers in 15 years.
• davidw 11y ago
  Do something about housing costs? Living there with a family is an extremely expensive proposition. I suspect a lot of people my age (40) simply don't want to be there. Here in Bend, I live 10 minutes from work by bike, have all kinds of great outdoor activities year round, have good schools for my kids, and the median price for a house is 350K - which is actually kind of expensive for Oregon.
• wahsd 11y ago
  Age diversity will be "achieved" when young developers start valuing themselves properly, i.e., never. That whole nonsense of "culture fit" is really just a euphemism for won't fit into a culture of exploitation and extraction. You would also get a "not a good culture fit" if you had young devs who respected their time and drew limits. That's the thing about the abusive environment in the tech sector, you are only valuable if you are willing to do the modern equivalent of back breaking work to the point of exhaustion. Sure, it pays off for some ... usually the founders ... but for the vast majority it will not pay off and they will simply be left with having spent their young years hunched over laptops day in and day out in order to make others rich. It's the modern equivalent of the gold rush and young devs are the mules and hard laborers.
• deleted 11y ago
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• Randgalt 11y ago
  I'm 51 and have never had trouble finding work. Stay current, relevant and, most importantly, specialize.
• theworstshill 11y ago
  Don't want to step on toes, but in short - you can't. Part of the problem is the age genius/criminal curve which shows you the productivity of a typical male, another part is that as you age there is only so much more bandwidth left for grinding shitty jobs and boilerplate code. The only solution is to own a dev shop by that age, otherwise you're f, excuse my bluntness.
• oberstein 11y ago
  Zuckerberg saying "Young people are just smarter" seems like an instance of https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-law/ https://antidem.wordpress.com/2015/03/31/glantons-law/ Age discrimination exists because most of us have direct experience with family members who diminish as they age, especially when these family members didn't keep up a habit of doing intellectual intense things they did when they were younger and instead spend increasing amounts of time watching sports and doing crosswords. It's possible to be a badass programmer in your 80s, Knuth will be one soon, but it's very rare. We thus shouldn't expect to have an equal distribution of old people and young people, regardless of whether that's desirable or not.
• codeonfire 11y ago
  I recently went through a job search and began writing off companies that were all 20-somethings who obviously didn't have a lot of interviewing skill. I would say bias against older interviewees is 100% politics. Many of these interviewers were not experienced. They knew they wanted to be top dog in their respective department,s and thought that it was in their best interest to keep experienced people out. It's not until they go through a few cycles of pain and disappointment do developers start to want to work with experienced people. It's not out of respect. It's because they now understand that they are only hurting themselves and want someone to relieve their workload. Mid-tier and experienced interviewers loved me. Early career people tried very hard to throw their best curve-balls, but I had already spent a week working problems. In the end, one company in particular, Facebook, simply just said that I answered correctly but answered too 'slowly.' I knew they had cracked when I heard that word.
  • raincom 11y ago
    'Slowly' is another thing going on in the industry, not just facebook. They want 'speed' with 'correctness'. I don't know where this leads to.
    • codeonfire 11y ago
      It leads to interview arms race. People will try to find ways around any sort of objective measure devised. Soon we'll have sexiness! "Your code works. You were fast and correct but just not sexy enough. Thanks for stopping in."
• Frondo 11y ago
  What's most interesting to me is, after reading the comments on this article, very few people are coming back with "but why do we need age diversity? What if old people just aren't interested in working in tech?" Swap out gender for age, and you'd see a whole different weight on the spectrum of replies.
  • jongraehl 11y ago
    In my company, it seems we are (slightly) biased toward female programmer/researcher candidates (that is, a female will get hired more eagerly, all else equal).
• ori_b 11y ago
  I don't think this is possible in the short term. There is probably age discrimination, sure, but to a large degree the problem is that programming is a very young field. It has been growing at a rapid exponential pace for decades, which means that the vast majority of people in the field have been in it for less than a decade. The only way to increase the stock of older programmers in the short term is to convince people who are fairly far along in their careers to jump ship to a new field, and start off from scratch. Daunting, and likely a step back careerwise. In the long term, the problem will likely solve itself. Assuming that you actually consider it a problem.
• agentgt 11y ago
  I have noticed in other industries they at least try to come up with stupid rationalizations why there is age discrimination and gender pay gap. The reasons stated being older people raise the price of benefits and are closer to leaving workforce. Females may leave the workforce to have children. But in the tech industry we give reasons like old people are slow/stupid and chicks just don't understand computers like males... seriously I have actually heard that come out of people's mouths. Its completely disgusting.
• Justsignedup 11y ago
  I was looking over resumes 2 years ago. We saw a guy in his 50s. My boss's immediate reaction was "he's 50?! wtf? so old!" Ageism is real folks.
• gyardley 11y ago
  There's certainly ageism in Silicon Valley, but if we magically got rid of it tomorrow it's not like startups would suddenly be flooded by applicants my age and older. Most older people select themselves out of Silicon Valley because most older people have lives outside of work, and they're not going to put up with the inefficient and pointless lets-all-work-twelve-hours-a-day bullshit you so often get from entrepreneurs and coworkers in their mid-twenties. If we really wanted to achieve age diversity in Silicon Valley, we'd not just have to get rid of ageism, we'd have to change the work culture to something a wee bit more rational - and that's just not going to happen as long as all the major institutions glorify overwork to the point of burnout.
• fleventynine 11y ago
  I wonder how much of this discrimination is due to housing inequality. I suspect many young programmers resent paying $3500 a month rent to a landlord who bought their property for 75k 20 years ago. Denying jobs to that generation might be their way of fighting the perceived injustice.
• j45 11y ago
  Lack of diversity, measured in any way, is often tied to folks laden with insecurity or a lack of empathy, ending up in a position to impose their lens over others, to the point where it becomes systemic. At least changes for the better are needed. Defining what good citizenship is for everyone in tech, and through it, expecting diversity from management first, then downward. - Diversity is bullshit if it's not reflected and practiced from the very top management to the bottom. When people wax diversity I check the management and it tells me everything I need to know. You put up, or shut up. I applaud guys like Eric Ries for doing the uncomfortable and succeeding. Diversity needs to rise to the levels of decision making, and replacing them with standards of good citizenship that applies to all is what's needed. - Being a good citizen in technology community needs to be the core of being in the tech community. Maybe this is missing in tech culture, presumably because it's so new. What will happen to the young people who look down on others? They're screwed because the hurt train they build is coming their way in 10 years. Transforming into a culture where standards of good citizenship apply to everyone, will need everyone to be equally comfortable and fluent in having open minded conversations about diversity that might need us to look at ourselves in the mirror. Then, with awareness, disrupting the lack of diversity, breaking cycles of discrimination. In my experience of being a member of multiple minority groups in tech, I have learnt and try to remember: - People who don't want to work with you will find any reason. That's what's important to focus on, not the reason. You got every shot to make something better to make jerks into dinosaurs. It's good to flush the turds out into the sunlight whenever possible, good citizens will always be supportive of this for the greater good. - Innovation doesn't live in a mindset of doubts and seeking permission from others. You're not an entrepreneur until you stop asking permission and validation. People who are givers and truly focus on adding value will do it unconditionally, as long as you focus on being someone who focuses on adding value. - Rather than become radicalized and negative, you may have no choice but to become 8x as good as the average Joe. Your perceived gatekeepers can become your slaves by pushing you to push yourself. If you feel you have to be 2x as good to get half the respect, 4x as good to get equal respect, and 8x too good to be ignored, you get to write more of the script. It's not fair. Nothing worthwhile seems to be. I measure equality in society by what the average joe can access, so by that definition this point fails, but I've selected pursuing improving my abilities beyond what others can squeak by with in the hopes that the future will have more diversity minded people at the top. Many do not practice discrimination, but benefit from an existing benefit of being a demographic that systemizes it. Becoming aware of the things you never notice is the first step. Thing you can do nothing about, your age, gender, the family you're born into, where you are born, the color of your skin shouldn't define your opportunities, potential or abilities. It starts with the majority of people on this site and in our community. What do you commit to do to become a better citizen of the tech community for diversity? I know I'm sure as hell doing everything I can because I'm on the other end of it far too often.
• ldpg 11y ago
  Management will always want to hire the young ones simply because they are easier to control and have lower salaries. It would be great if this starts to change as the swell of tech workers hired to work on internet and mobile products in the past 2 decades starts age into their 30's / 40's / 50's.
• wellsjohnston 11y ago
  Won't this happen naturally as millennials get older? More people are studying CS and going into tech these days.
• jongraehl 11y ago
  I'm not a fan of "protected category" hiring rules in any case. If good old people are underpaid, then let your company profit by hiring them. I suppose a tempting compromise is to not allow companies to solicit disclosure of age etc (so people can leave the year off their degree, show only most recent experience, etc), but honestly I think it might be better if those companies that really will only hire young would advertise the fact and save everyone some time. Starting from only a very small real disadvantage in ability, any externally distinctive group can quickly seem a 'market for lemons' - for example, maybe the oldsters you've seen so far across the interview table are unrepresentatively bad, because the good ones are working and not interviewing. So don't think because you've seen 4 weak candidates of 50+ years old that it's not worth looking at the next.
• speby 11y ago
  Does anyone know of any statistics that show people in the tech industry by age? In other words, I wonder if the sheer number of older people "in tech" is just dwarfed by young people who have been in it all along (As opposed to a career change by a mid-career older person). Also, since the tech industry has grown so exponentially, the number people in the industry in and of itself has expanded to greatly include younger people (versus existing, older people who choose to switch into the field). This is to say that I wonder if people older than 40 or older than 50 are truly underrepresented in tech because of age discrimination or is it because there is, quite literally, not that many of them in tech to begin with?
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