14 ms·

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

248 points by swamp40 11y ago

PaulHoule 11y ago
Young people are easier to control. (When the "charge of the light brigade" was first written is was seen as a beautiful thing that soldiers would match obediently to their deaths; maybe in software we will accept how tragic it is in 2050 or something.)
- romanovcode 11y ago
  This. It's easier to sell them bullshit about "disrupting" as well, make them work long-hours and so on..
- wnevets 11y ago
  younger people are also more likely to work more hours for a lot less pay.
  - natch 11y ago
    ...and, due to inexperience, to do less effective work. Not saying this is a given; we are just talking about likelihoods here.
    - PaulHoule 11y ago
      Ideally you put together a team of young and old where you get something more than the sum of the parts.
- Esau 11y ago
  I was under the impression that younger programmers are desired because they are perceived as being able to work a lot of hours and because they are less likely to have the family commitments that would prevent them from doing so.
- sevensor 11y ago
  > was seen as a beautiful thing that soldiers would match obediently to their deaths Poems are full of traps. I think you can read The Charge of the Light Brigade either way, or both ways at once. On the one hand, it calls on us to honor the heroism of the young cavalrymen. But on the other hand, "someone had blundered." Their heroism is futile. Tennyson had to be seen supporting the team, as it were, but when I read the poem, I see his reservations more than anything.
  - DavidAdams 11y ago
    We need more casual literary criticism here at HN. Thanks!
chollida1 11y ago
I'm approaching 40 and this is something I think about a lot. In fact this is something that everyone should think about. Everyone, assuming you are lucky enough, will get older. The person you reject because they are over 40 today will be you in 10 years. If you pass on someone due to their age you can't turn around and get mad when some other 20 year old does the same. Whenever I interview someone I always ask myself, if I was the person across the table from me would I think I got a fair shot during this interview. Having said that, this is a two way street. You need to be aware of what your skill set is. I took the Scott Adams career advice [0] to try and be in the top 25% in two areas. In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. [0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...
- debacle 11y ago
  If your skillset is FoxPro DB support, as long as you're willing to move around, you can make good money. Being really good at old technology is a good way to make a lot of money. Just try not to only be good at FoxPro DB support, forever.
- akg_67 11y ago
  > In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. What are 40+ doing in your surrounding environment, your friend's and people like you? How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments? That should give you a clue what you most probably will be doing and what your "goal post" should be when you join 40+ group otherwise you are going to have bad time too.
  - chollida1 11y ago
    > How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments All the 40+ crowd around me is doing math and programming, that's kind of the day to day job at a hedge fund:) :) I'm sorry, I've read your comment 4 times and I still can't make sense of it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Could you please try and restate your opinion to be clearer?
ojbyrne 11y ago
So I started reading this book, and the immediate thing that strikes me is the obvious age bias (against young people) of the author. It's full of phrases like "just out of high school," (about a director:) "looked like an intern." If you're going to throw rocks, etc. And for the record, I'm 55, work in tech, and yes, ageism is a problem, but this book doesn't seem like its going to help.
- danielschonfeld 11y ago
  Agism exists in every sector, at every age group. Have encountered the reverse myself. Happens every time one generations steps on the other's turf.
- amscanne 11y ago
  Or the implication that young founders are somehow in need of "adult supervision". This idea is alive and well in Canada (a more conservative culture generally); their tech scene hasn't exactly exploded as a result. This is a pet peeve of mine, and exactly the same ageism the author is complaining about. All of these things mean that you're not getting the best people for the job, both ways.
  - pmalynin 11y ago
    This has been one of the worst things in being a founded in Edmonton. Also exacerbated by us getting shafted by oil, lack of interest in tech, essentially creates an environment where any decent developer / founder tries to gtfo to Vancouver or SF as fast as possible.
    - NovaS1X 11y ago
      >essentially creates an environment where any decent developer / founder tries to gtfo to Vancouver or SF as fast as possible. And then the environment and expense of Vancouver makes most gtfo to Toronto or SF (like they wanted to in the first place).
      - 11y ago
tsunamifury 11y ago
It's wrong that a CEO would make such a statement, and it's downright tragic no one would call him on it. Age is not a hiring factor that is good for your company, you miss out on a lot of people who have energy, are curious and creative, and can get things done. I've had the pleasure of working with 50+ who are as energetic as 22 year olds but 100x more effective. Good work knows no age.
- adrianN 11y ago
  But they most likely also want proper compensation.
  - blakesterz 11y ago
    But they most likely also will settle for far less.
- jonesb6 11y ago
  Energetic. Productive. Cheap. They want all three. Easier to get that when you target college students.
  - hobs 11y ago
    Productive? On the surface maybe, but any product with any lifespan will trend towards ball of mud very quickly if you only have greenhorn devs.
    - collyw 11y ago
      That's what I am thinking. Its taken me my fair share of making crappy choices in the past to know how to make better ones now.
    - tankerdude 11y ago
      Exactly! Or even people who just haven't learned a whole lot in terms of engineering practices. This seems to be especially true in Ruby, where "it works" is good enough to go out into production. There is no programming, reliability, stability, or scale. Most greener engineers program mostly for the sunny day scenario, which is the crux of the problem. They can't see race conditions and timing problems like someone how have spent years doing that. I see other people's code and quickly understand that they're doing really cost prohibitive queries while others who are green will never notice it.
atomic77 11y ago
I suspect that ageism in tech also contributes to higher levels of risk taking - if we know or believe we will be put out to pasture at 40, it makes it more urgent to get a big payout at some point along the way.
- imh 11y ago
  I would have thought the opposite. The more attempts I can make, the more I can play the odds, regardless of risk. If I only have a few tries, I'm going to want to take a less risky position.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    My guess is that the original poster's point is: Take two workers whose goal is a comfortable retirement. One of them knows their career will be 20 years long, the other one knows their career will be 50 years long. The one with the longer career can take a less risky path and "milk it" for half a century, whereas the one with only a few chances needs to take a risk and go for the higher payout since he has 30 fewer years to save. I look at it this way. Everyone's career is a baseball game. Most workers get 5 or 6 at-bats throughout their lives, and can afford to just go for base hits. A tech worker gets 1 or 2 at-bats so he has to swing for the home run if he wants to score.
    - atomic77 11y ago
      Pretty much exactly what I was intending (except I'd have used a hockey analogy instead of baseball :) Notice that many of the arguments presented here about why younger workers are favored would equally apply in more conservative professional fields, like law - it's certainly not the 50y old partners doing all-nighters on a regular basis. But there does seem to be a certain level of inter-generational respect among lawyers that is absent in tech. Why, I don't know.
typetypetype 11y ago
I think this happens in more subtle ways too. For instance, workplace perks for many companies seem to be happy hours, socializing, and workdays that start at 10am. In my single days, all that stuff would have sounded great. In my married-with-children days, I am much more interested in perks like flextime (come in early, leave early) and good family health insurance.
tomtomAmazon 11y ago
You don't need a PhD to understand that young people (what we call millennials this generation) are easy to manipulate. Their lack of experience makes then ripe to work for startups. Hiring 'older' workers will only bring more challenges since they are more likely to question and challenge false idols. There are exceptions of course, having older folks who also believe the hype and feed it to the younger kids works great to produce the startup echo chamber. Once the leadership is in place you want to recruit people who are more likely to drink the Kool aid. This is not rocket science. A prime example is the military.
- chillingeffect 11y ago
  Underrated post. Additionally, younger people have fewer familial commitments, less to lose, fewer mortgages, so outrageous overtime is easier to extract.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    I considered spending time writing an app to help startup workers report labor abuse (excessive unpaid overtime, etc), but then realized it'd be a waste due to what I'd consider Stockholm syndrome ("you want me to report someone changing the world? Helping me get rich??").
- leroy_masochist 11y ago
  FWIW, most of my lance corporals when I was a platoon commander in the Marines (average age ~20) were more inquisitive and freer thinkers than the engineers at the tech unicorn where I used to work (average age ~25). That's just one data point though. YMMV.
  - spitfire 11y ago
    They were trained to be inquisitive. Silicon valley socializes to not rock the boat. Boyd FTW.
  - logingone 11y ago
    Makes sense. These days the inquisitive hacker stereotype is no longer relevant, diluted by the masses flocking to the tech fad ("hacker" now redefined to replace "code monkey", so cool) which in turn results in the tech industry having more fads as it comprises mostly people with a tendency to jump on a fad.
erichocean 11y ago
One issue, at least at my company, is that we just don't need as many experienced people. We have some uber-experienced developers who do architecture and coding for everything "hard", and then a mostly-interchangeable pool of young people who do the easy—but bulky and non-automatable (yet)—stuff. Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult. And they're filled with young people that can build on the hard work done by (now older) people on cloud platforms, with frameworks, tooling, etc. So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option.
- mooreds 11y ago
  > So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option. That's an interesting bifurcation that mirrors what's happening in broader society (plenty of both low and high end jobs, and a hollowing out of the middle). I wrote an essay a decade ago about how you get senior folks if you outsource all the junior work. I wonder the same thing in this situation--if you don't have a middle tier of developers, how do senior developers develop out of junior/entry level devs?
  - dionidium 11y ago
    In the context of the larger society, those lower-end programming jobs pretty obviously are the middle
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  That's probably true, though I'd argue that experienced developers tend to produce more maintainable code even on easier projects. Perhaps that's not enough to convince business folks though, who tend not to value maintainability highly.
- spicytunacone 11y ago
  >Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult. What do you consider difficult? Maybe it is because I am just a fresh-faced new grad, but I think there's a lot out there I would find hard to do, even with languages and frameworks aside, unless I trivialize it by thinking "oh that's just an application of solved problem X" or "it's just a lot of statistical plug-n-chug".
dommer 11y ago
If a company looks like it would hire based on age, best to look elsewhere and put it down to "their loss." There are, I believe, many companies that do hire responsibly. Disclosure. [mid 40s; with children;]
koolba 11y ago
> One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that older people simply can’t keep up. Veteran coders don’t know the latest programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. There’s no reason why a 50-year-old engineer can’t learn a new programming language. And frankly, most coding work isn’t rocket science. There's plenty of reason why it'd be more difficult for a 50-year to learn a new programming language, here's a big one: time As people get older they have more time constraints and generally have "better (or just other) things to do". This is true for 30 vs 20, 40 vs 30, and probably 50 vs 40 (you could argue that as your kids get older you have more free time but then again people have kids at an older age now). A young person is more likely to be able to forgo those other things and learn the latest transpile-to-js-lang-of-the-week (v2.x). Sure, people need to be evaluated individually but if I interview 100 people I'd bet dollars to donuts that the older crowd would have less free time than the youngins.
- kabouseng 11y ago
  Sure, but generally the older have more experience, so a lot of the concepts they need to learn is just a rehash of the same concepts in a different paradigm. So it takes people with more experience less time to learn a new technology / language / domain.
- TillE 11y ago
  These are just lazy assumptions. Plenty of 20-somethings have young kids (the most time-consuming phase), and plenty of older people will never have children.
- jventura 11y ago
  Yes, but older experienced developers will not need that much free time to relearn how to do an if or a for loop in that new language. The older you get, the more you go to the point, so your argument is not quite good..
- fecak 11y ago
  Let's concede that older programmers in their 50s may have less free time to learn new technologies than a 20-something. Shouldn't we also consider how much less time it will take an experienced dev (who has perhaps already learned several new languages and frameworks over their career) to learn something new when compared to the 20-something who is learning their first or second one? The number of hours required to learn a second language or framework - which may rely on entirely unfamiliar paradigms and principles - may be much higher than the time required by someone who has already learned several over many years. When considering the learning ability of any developer, free time is only one consideration. Past experience learning has to be another.
trevor-e 11y ago
Somehow I knew this would be about Hubspot.
mooreds 11y ago
"I suspect the truth is that tech startups prefer young workers because they will work longer hours and can be paid less." Really? What capitalist wouldn't want this, especially if the quality of the work wasn't "good enough"? I'm no fan of age discrimination, but I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality).
- protomyth 11y ago
  The capitalist who knows that those hours (particularly the ones over 40 and especially over 60) are not as productive and will actually cost money in the long run. > I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality) I agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality. It is factory thinking where they need to be thinking like a film producer. This is a creative endeavor and not a widget factory. You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently.
  - mooreds 11y ago
    > You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently. Agreed. And in the long run I believe the companies that accept this will win.
  - djrogers 11y ago
    > agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality The entire premise of the article is about illegal age discrimination- a criminal act, not one of poor judgement. Making bad decisions is not necessarily a crime.
    - protomyth 11y ago
      Makings poor decisions that lead to illegal acts make you a criminal.
    - yuhong 11y ago
      I am not a fan of anti-discrimination laws though. I suggested a compromise to limit them to certain kinds of jobs like manual labor for which they are originally designed for.
leothekim 11y ago
Relatedly, I'm curious if Mark Zuckerberg still believes his comments about young people being smarter: http://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smarter/ http://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smar... which were made 9 years ago.
- arcanus 11y ago
  I doubt it, given the average age of the ML team at FB.
tim333 11y ago
An alternative view on Lyons and Hubspot http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/
- motdiem 11y ago
  I had missed that - interesting counterpoint - thanks for sharing it.
- Cd00d 11y ago
  I'm just now trying to figure out what HubSpot does, and what 'inbound marketing' even is, but from my naive and ignorant perspective on a new subject: isn't this post the same as their product?
  - wott 11y ago
    You're too old to understand: she calls herself an "idea generator" (sic).
xiphias 11y ago
What I found is that startups have different requirements to big established companies. As the business is not yet stable enough, it's better to write lots of hacked together lower quality code to get to product-market fit. Experienced programmers can't help too much with that part. But experience helps tremendously when you are working with complex system that needs to be scaled and maintained efficiently. Also as an older person: why work for cheaper in a startup when you can have a higher salary at a big company? You should already know that it's not worth the effort for the stock options for an employee.
- im_down_w_otp 11y ago
  You shouldn't be writing a bunch of crap demoware to find "product-market fit" after you've already setup the business. That never seems to stop anybody from doing it, nor feckless funds from throwing money at those ventures. But you don't start a business and then hung for a product. You start a business because you have a product you intend to try to sell.
protomyth 11y ago
According to the FBI, which investigated, these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. No criminal charges have been filed, but the hacking, extortion, and ensuing cover-up raised questions about HubSpot’s culture and the trustworthiness of its leadership. HubSpot's board fired the CMO, and sanctioned Halligan, the CEO. A vice president resigned before the board could decide whether to terminate him. The board still won't tell me what happened. That's some HP board level disfunction and paranoia. I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass.
- evook 11y ago
  > I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass. Like completely lacking a useful product and halfway down the road grasping that fact? 22 grands ea month for a little SEO and marketing-analytics of the shelf. Is there anybody who wants to work with professionals left today?
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Yes the chair or senior non exec should have fired HP CEO and directors should have been fired instantly over that - they where hacking into telco exectutives phones FFS.
askyourmother 11y ago
Lots of polarised views here. I think of it this way: if I am young and fresh from studying the latest woodworking theory from university, degree in hand, I probably think I am the shit compared to all the grandads out there who older than 35, why some even have kids! How can they keep abreast of the latest wood trends - us younger pups publish our one or two line theories on wood-npm! But.... My hands would be soft, inexperienced, and have no knowledge of actually working with real wood. If you bet your company on me, alone with other soft handed individuals, without older individuals whose hands show and have the real experience, you are screwed. Rights of passage, and all that.
jlebar 11y ago
Let's take this in context? Here's what he said in the interview. I have a lot of confidence in young people, and I have a lot of confidence in everyone’s ability to do more than they think they can do. I have very high expectations for people, and I push people to reach even higher. I take these young kids at HubSpot and I give them huge responsibility. Sometimes they mess it up, but more often than not they get it right. I think, at least in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated. I think my gray hair is overrated. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/brian-halligan-chief-of-hubspot-on-the-value-of-naps.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/brian-halligan-ch... Maybe I'll have a different perspective when I'm older, but this doesn't sound like outrageous age bias to me. He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated". That's not the same thing as saying that he won't hire "old" people, or that given an "old" person whom he thinks will perform better than a young person at the same salary, he'd prefer the young person. Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim. Reading TFA, the author comes across as pretty entitled. His argument is that older people are better than younger people, and he's upset that this CEO doesn't get it. Over time, most people get better at what they do. They become wiser, calmer, more self-aware. They’ve also put in the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell says are required to become expert in a skill. Why would companies not want employees who have gained that expertise? I dunno why, maybe this CEO is an idiot. Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  > Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune. If you manage to start a company that could make a fortune, then you don't have to hire people the market is overlooking - everyone will want to work for you. You're putting the cart before the horse.
  - nailer 11y ago
    All companies 'could make a fortune' Actually making one is not a sudden event, but a slow one. Absolutely: hire for skill, and there's a shit tonne of it being ignored outside young men in Silicon Valley.
sysreader2016 11y ago
I think that the younger workers in their 20's to 30's, especially the new tech workers, are really doing it because it's fun. So, working 12 hours a day 6-7 days a week isn't a big deal. Whereas the older crowd, the 40+'ers, want the same pay (or more) for 'work-life balance'. I've been told 'work-life balance' means up to 8 hours a day and up to 5 days a week, and after hours is for spending time with family and friends. I've encountered plently of 40+'ers who discourage learning new skills during free time, programming on the weekends, hackathons, and the like. Simply because that stuff goes against work-life balance. It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  Typically when developers have to work overtime, it's due to a bad business plan or bad project management. Experienced developers insisting on a sane work/life balance (without getting into numbers) is a way to insist that management is accountable for its decisions. Otherwise, the individual contributors pay the price, typically the most talented, nicest, and most eager-to-please. And, yes, those contributors often skew younger because they haven't gone through that exact song-and-dance before. Spending the nights and weekends learning is sort of another subject. I would rather employers spend more resources training employees during business hours, especially for enterprise and industry-specific technology, but that's an entirely different subject.
- dominotw 11y ago
  >It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers. It might be true. But punishing everyone over 40 based on this stereotype is wrong.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Why does ambition somehow now mean you have to WANT to do your job for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week? Do you think surgeons spend their days off at home practicing surgery on their pets as a hobby? Don't get me wrong--everyone should always be learning. But in what other profession is it expected that you continue doing your work "for fun" after hours?
deleted 11y ago
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tschellenbach 11y ago
This guy is just promoting his book. Second time it's on hackernews. Can you please stop upvoting this garbage?
Balgair 11y ago
Some of the comments here are missing the goals of the organization, I believe. What is the 'end-game' for HubSpot and companies like them? What do they hope to accomplish? Tear away all the fuzzball tables and kindergarten colors[0], does the business have solvency without the VC ecosystem? I don't know the interior of those business, but they all seem to be angling for 1 thing: a buy-out.[1] Commenters here, rightfully, say that experience matters in producing a good product that sells and makes a gross profit. That 3 greybeards are worth 10 fuzzfaces. I think they are right. But that is not the objective for so many of these places. The idea is to 'grow', show this to other VCs or the NASDAQ (maybe) so that they will want to buy your company. Then the board and c-suite get something of a return on the time and money, while the employees get less of a return than having worked at Boeing for those years. Again, ageism is fine, because the point is not to have a sustainable business with a good product, the point is to grow and sell. This is slash-and-burn ranching not sustainable farming. [0] Those are VERY important to signal to the outside world and to potential employees though. It makes the company seem 'techy' and 'googlish', which is thought to translate into dollars. Still the decor means nothing in the end. [1] Do you feel like you have no idea what is going on? That you sometimes have imposter syndrome? Most people, including VCs and C*Os have this too. No-one know what the hell is going on, and if they say they do, they are ignorant or lying. Mostly.
AndrewKemendo 11y ago
Are there any really hard technology companies that have the same problem? My guess is no. Our company is almost completely people with background in computer vision, AI and 3D rendering and our youngest employee is 31. My guess is that "trendy" startups have this problem, not ones building hard technology.
- cgh 11y ago
  I believe you are correct. Where I work, basic webapp crud and ui-type stuff are handled by younger, inexperienced people because these are easy things. For the more complicated problems, ones that tend to require deep knowledge of eg service provider networks, the teams are almost uniformly 35-50+.
edw519 11y ago
“in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said. I guess once Halligan gets a little gray hair and experience, he'll realize how absurd this statement is and will regret ever saying it.
- AndrewKemendo 11y ago
  He's 48.
- mdpopescu 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure he's quoted as saying "my gray hair is overrated", or something like that.
butler14 11y ago
Saying something is overrated isn't necessarily saying it's inferior to alternatives, just that it has too much importance placed on it relatively speaking. Seems like his ego got hurt and he's out for revenge. He also seems to be blind to the fact that ageism works both ways. Some of his comments, and those on the linkedin post in question, are far more worrying than those of HubSpot's CEO.
xenadu02 11y ago
I think this stereotype comes from an earlier (and slower moving) era where programmers expected to learn COBOL or 4/GL and retire doing the same sort of work they learned in the beginning. I grew up when the Internet became a thing. I've never had that expectation. I'm still learning new languages and frameworks at 34 and have no intention of slowing down. Oh and pro tip to founders out there: if your competitors aren't recruiting middle age or older people (or black people or women), that's an untapped market! Take advantage of the things your less hungry competitors won't!
daemonk 11y ago
I think the stereotypical thinking is that younger people tend to buy into the culture. Older people tend to not drink the kool-aid. Does the expertise/experience of older people win over younger people who are willing to work 80 hour weeks? I don't know if there are really any data to say one way or another. But I think the expectation that hiring younger people mean you can get more productivity out of them due to their non-jaded enthusiasm is awful.
siberianbear 11y ago
I worked as a manager of a group of 10-15 software engineers at a major semiconductor company for about ten years. I interviewed over a thousand candidates and gave out about 60 full-time job offers over that time. I hired engineers aged from 21 to about 60. Of course, I also worked with lots of engineers from other groups. My conclusion on this topic is that there is no problem with age itself. The problem is that some older people lose interest and just coast on their skill set which becomes stale over time. Not all older people are like that. I had engineers in their 40s and 50s who read programming blogs, learned new languages in their spare time, tinkered with their pet projects in the lab, etc. They were passionate about engineering. THOSE guys were never a problem. They were awesome. I mean, if Bob Pease [1] were still alive, I'd hire him in a minute. The mistake is to jump from "some fraction of older engineers are in the former group" to thinking all older engineers are like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease
Overtonwindow 11y ago
At 33 I think we definitely have an age problem, but not just in tech. I think all of America has an age problem in wanting to hire younger people who will work harder, longer hours, cost less, potentially use less resources such as health care, and can be disposed of for even younger workers down the line. Older workers are perceived as wanting more money, and will not meld with a younger workforce. I've seen this constantly. Six years with a major defense contractor. Any time my group manager would hire, he would shred anyone who graduated from college before 2000. I think the tech industry exacerbates the perception of younger over better, but it's a nationwide problem.
0xCMP 11y ago
HA. Excuse my language: but what the fuck? They literally tried to hack his computer to get his manuscript? Like what were they thinking?? Hopefully that was the craziest story or else that book is gonna wreck them.
mindcrime 11y ago
When I was 26, I'm sure I would have said "grey hair and experience are over-rated". Now, at 42, I realize how much more effective I am now, compared to when I was younger - due to the additional knowledge and experience I have. The thing is, "you don't know what you don't know". All of that said, I agree with the sentiment that a good team should be made up of a mixture of people of different ages and experience levels.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
If you're not interested in management, don't have a four year degree, and not good on-the-spot/whiteboard etc, you're in for a hard time getting hired as an aging developer, even if up to date technically. Don't let it happen to you. Choose one or two of those to focus on and change.
haberman 11y ago
Wow -- the author, Dan Lyons, has quite a background including Senior Editor at Forbes magazine, "Fake Steve Jobs", and writing an episode of Silicon Valley. He also wrote strongly in favor of SCO in its legal battle against IBM, only to admit later that he had been "profoundly wrong." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lyons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lyons
makeitsuckless 11y ago
Let's not kid ourselves. This is not about energy, creativity, flexibility and all that shit. It's about two things, young people are a) cheap and b) gullible and easy to manipulate. The latter is probably the most important. I'm in a situation that is a typical example of how that gets abused: company needs to downsize (funding dried up), and wants most of the team to sign a piece of paper and go away. The salespitch is that it's for mutual benefit, but in reality it's 100% for the company's benefit. The employees would sign away their rights, including at least 2 months pay and in some cases get screwed on their visa. Also, be complicit in forgery, since the dates on the paperwork are false. The younger employees would probably have been railroaded and screwed hard if it wasn't for the more experienced members of the team. Tech companies want young people as cheap guinea pigs, to try out all kinds of "entrepreneurial" ideas without having to pay the price. Pure and simple.
erichocean 11y ago
tl;dr; Hiring young people increase headcount faster because they are cheaper and less productive, and headcount is an important metric in SV that correlates strongly with the ability to raise funding, and the ability to have a successful exit later on. ---- One unmentioned thing, which is weird until you've seen it first hand, is that it's easier to sell and finance a bigger startup, and by "bigger", I mean: higher headcount. Obviously, in general, older people are more experienced and cost more, and also do more. However, this is a net-negative because you have a (potentially much) lower headcount. Another poster commented on how he'd take proverbial three LISPers over 20 NOOBS. (I have no doubt he's telling the truth.) Quick test: If I tell you startup A has 8 developers, and start up B has 80 developers, which startup seems "more successful" to you? Which seems likely to have had more funding? More market share? Is more stable? Better managed? Which seems likely to have an exit (esp. acquisition) in the future? It's little comfort knowing that startup A has 8 LISPers coding circles around the 80 devs at startup B struggling to make Grunt work and keep MongoDB from crashing. Politically, startup B is a much bigger success—at least in SV today. Startup B is what SV optimizes for and funds, and that leads very naturally to hiring young people—all else being equal.
- collyw 11y ago
  Whatsapp is often held up as example of a very successful company that has a handful of developers.
  - erichocean 11y ago
    Yes, because they're the exception that proves the rule. That's why people talk about it so much. :)
jlos 11y ago
Perhaps what's significant about the age bias in the tech industry is that its the first time the age bias has worked in favour of younger employee's. I suspect age bias' exists in many industries that prefer more 'mature' employees. >> these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. The problems of this company, if the allegations are true, stem more from a lack of character, which can be found across the entire age spectrum. I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here. In general, I think that age brings experience and wisdom.
- erichocean 11y ago
  > Perhaps what's significant about the age bias in the tech industry is that its the first time the age bias has worked in favour of younger employee's. Maybe you don't consider the military "industry", but they tend to recruit primarily from the young (and AFAICT, always have).
dante1 11y ago
From a personal standpoint I can honestly say that I am far more competent at what I do now then when I was younger. That's not to say that younger people aren't as capable, it's just that through many years of working in different market sectors and with diverse companies and groups of people, the breadth of understanding that it imparts truly helps to fine tune one's business acumen, something that is hard to replicate if one is just out of university or college.
bootload 11y ago
Reading this article is a bit lopsided. An excerpt from the book gives a clearer picture. [0] Firstly the company is in tech-marketing space and the company appears to be less about engineering than selling. The observations in this extract appear to be about company culture and selling. "Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language" [0] A reference to Lord of the Flies. If you read Lord of the Flies, the disfunction runs along the lines of "insider" and "outsiders" resulting in the ritual killing of the outsiders. The observations of bias against certain outsiders in this context are valid. The bigger question is why and who is driving this behaviour, the VC/finance industry seeking to maximise profit regardless of the externalities? [0] "My Year in Startup Hell" ~ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...

248 points by swamp40 11y ago

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

romanovcode 11y ago
This. It's easier to sell them bullshit about "disrupting" as well, make them work long-hours and so on..
wnevets 11y ago
younger people are also more likely to work more hours for a lot less pay.
- natch 11y ago
  ...and, due to inexperience, to do less effective work. Not saying this is a given; we are just talking about likelihoods here.
  - PaulHoule 11y ago
    Ideally you put together a team of young and old where you get something more than the sum of the parts.
Esau 11y ago
I was under the impression that younger programmers are desired because they are perceived as being able to work a lot of hours and because they are less likely to have the family commitments that would prevent them from doing so.
sevensor 11y ago
> was seen as a beautiful thing that soldiers would match obediently to their deaths Poems are full of traps. I think you can read The Charge of the Light Brigade either way, or both ways at once. On the one hand, it calls on us to honor the heroism of the young cavalrymen. But on the other hand, "someone had blundered." Their heroism is futile. Tennyson had to be seen supporting the team, as it were, but when I read the poem, I see his reservations more than anything.
- DavidAdams 11y ago
  We need more casual literary criticism here at HN. Thanks!

chollida1 11y ago

I'm approaching 40 and this is something I think about a lot. In fact this is something that everyone should think about. Everyone, assuming you are lucky enough, will get older. The person you reject because they are over 40 today will be you in 10 years. If you pass on someone due to their age you can't turn around and get mad when some other 20 year old does the same. Whenever I interview someone I always ask myself, if I was the person across the table from me would I think I got a fair shot during this interview. Having said that, this is a two way street. You need to be aware of what your skill set is. I took the Scott Adams career advice [0] to try and be in the top 25% in two areas. In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. [0] http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/career-advice.html http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/care...

debacle 11y ago
If your skillset is FoxPro DB support, as long as you're willing to move around, you can make good money. Being really good at old technology is a good way to make a lot of money. Just try not to only be good at FoxPro DB support, forever.
akg_67 11y ago
> In my case its Math and programming. If your skill set is FoxPro DB support then, as the kids say these days, you're going to have a bad time. What are 40+ doing in your surrounding environment, your friend's and people like you? How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments? That should give you a clue what you most probably will be doing and what your "goal post" should be when you join 40+ group otherwise you are going to have bad time too.
- chollida1 11y ago
  > How many 40+ are still doing Math and Programming in such environments All the 40+ crowd around me is doing math and programming, that's kind of the day to day job at a hedge fund:) :) I'm sorry, I've read your comment 4 times and I still can't make sense of it. Are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? Could you please try and restate your opinion to be clearer?

ojbyrne 11y ago

So I started reading this book, and the immediate thing that strikes me is the obvious age bias (against young people) of the author. It's full of phrases like "just out of high school," (about a director:) "looked like an intern." If you're going to throw rocks, etc. And for the record, I'm 55, work in tech, and yes, ageism is a problem, but this book doesn't seem like its going to help.

danielschonfeld 11y ago
Agism exists in every sector, at every age group. Have encountered the reverse myself. Happens every time one generations steps on the other's turf.
amscanne 11y ago
Or the implication that young founders are somehow in need of "adult supervision". This idea is alive and well in Canada (a more conservative culture generally); their tech scene hasn't exactly exploded as a result. This is a pet peeve of mine, and exactly the same ageism the author is complaining about. All of these things mean that you're not getting the best people for the job, both ways.
- pmalynin 11y ago
  This has been one of the worst things in being a founded in Edmonton. Also exacerbated by us getting shafted by oil, lack of interest in tech, essentially creates an environment where any decent developer / founder tries to gtfo to Vancouver or SF as fast as possible.
  - NovaS1X 11y ago
    >essentially creates an environment where any decent developer / founder tries to gtfo to Vancouver or SF as fast as possible. And then the environment and expense of Vancouver makes most gtfo to Toronto or SF (like they wanted to in the first place).
    - 11y ago

tsunamifury 11y ago

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

adrianN 11y ago
But they most likely also want proper compensation.
- blakesterz 11y ago
  But they most likely also will settle for far less.
jonesb6 11y ago
Energetic. Productive. Cheap. They want all three. Easier to get that when you target college students.
- hobs 11y ago
  Productive? On the surface maybe, but any product with any lifespan will trend towards ball of mud very quickly if you only have greenhorn devs.
  - collyw 11y ago
    That's what I am thinking. Its taken me my fair share of making crappy choices in the past to know how to make better ones now.
  - tankerdude 11y ago
    Exactly! Or even people who just haven't learned a whole lot in terms of engineering practices. This seems to be especially true in Ruby, where "it works" is good enough to go out into production. There is no programming, reliability, stability, or scale. Most greener engineers program mostly for the sunny day scenario, which is the crux of the problem. They can't see race conditions and timing problems like someone how have spent years doing that. I see other people's code and quickly understand that they're doing really cost prohibitive queries while others who are green will never notice it.

atomic77 11y ago

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

imh 11y ago
I would have thought the opposite. The more attempts I can make, the more I can play the odds, regardless of risk. If I only have a few tries, I'm going to want to take a less risky position.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  My guess is that the original poster's point is: Take two workers whose goal is a comfortable retirement. One of them knows their career will be 20 years long, the other one knows their career will be 50 years long. The one with the longer career can take a less risky path and "milk it" for half a century, whereas the one with only a few chances needs to take a risk and go for the higher payout since he has 30 fewer years to save. I look at it this way. Everyone's career is a baseball game. Most workers get 5 or 6 at-bats throughout their lives, and can afford to just go for base hits. A tech worker gets 1 or 2 at-bats so he has to swing for the home run if he wants to score.
  - atomic77 11y ago
    Pretty much exactly what I was intending (except I'd have used a hockey analogy instead of baseball :) Notice that many of the arguments presented here about why younger workers are favored would equally apply in more conservative professional fields, like law - it's certainly not the 50y old partners doing all-nighters on a regular basis. But there does seem to be a certain level of inter-generational respect among lawyers that is absent in tech. Why, I don't know.

typetypetype 11y ago

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

tomtomAmazon 11y ago

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

chillingeffect 11y ago
Underrated post. Additionally, younger people have fewer familial commitments, less to lose, fewer mortgages, so outrageous overtime is easier to extract.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  I considered spending time writing an app to help startup workers report labor abuse (excessive unpaid overtime, etc), but then realized it'd be a waste due to what I'd consider Stockholm syndrome ("you want me to report someone changing the world? Helping me get rich??").
leroy_masochist 11y ago
FWIW, most of my lance corporals when I was a platoon commander in the Marines (average age ~20) were more inquisitive and freer thinkers than the engineers at the tech unicorn where I used to work (average age ~25). That's just one data point though. YMMV.
- spitfire 11y ago
  They were trained to be inquisitive. Silicon valley socializes to not rock the boat. Boyd FTW.
- logingone 11y ago
  Makes sense. These days the inquisitive hacker stereotype is no longer relevant, diluted by the masses flocking to the tech fad ("hacker" now redefined to replace "code monkey", so cool) which in turn results in the tech industry having more fads as it comprises mostly people with a tendency to jump on a fad.

erichocean 11y ago

One issue, at least at my company, is that we just don't need as many experienced people. We have some uber-experienced developers who do architecture and coding for everything "hard", and then a mostly-interchangeable pool of young people who do the easy—but bulky and non-automatable (yet)—stuff. Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult. And they're filled with young people that can build on the hard work done by (now older) people on cloud platforms, with frameworks, tooling, etc. So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option.

mooreds 11y ago
> So on the one hand, yeah, we (seemingly) don't need as many older developers. OTOH, when we do need them, young people aren't even an option. That's an interesting bifurcation that mirrors what's happening in broader society (plenty of both low and high end jobs, and a hollowing out of the middle). I wrote an essay a decade ago about how you get senior folks if you outsource all the junior work. I wonder the same thing in this situation--if you don't have a middle tier of developers, how do senior developers develop out of junior/entry level devs?
- dionidium 11y ago
  In the context of the larger society, those lower-end programming jobs pretty obviously are the middle
mixmastamyk 11y ago
That's probably true, though I'd argue that experienced developers tend to produce more maintainable code even on easier projects. Perhaps that's not enough to convince business folks though, who tend not to value maintainability highly.
spicytunacone 11y ago
>Honestly, when you look at a lot of startups, nothing they do is even remotely difficult. What do you consider difficult? Maybe it is because I am just a fresh-faced new grad, but I think there's a lot out there I would find hard to do, even with languages and frameworks aside, unless I trivialize it by thinking "oh that's just an application of solved problem X" or "it's just a lot of statistical plug-n-chug".

dommer 11y ago

If a company looks like it would hire based on age, best to look elsewhere and put it down to "their loss." There are, I believe, many companies that do hire responsibly. Disclosure. [mid 40s; with children;]

koolba 11y ago

> One excuse for pushing out older workers is that technology changes so fast that older people simply can’t keep up. Veteran coders don’t know the latest programming languages, but young ones do. This is bunk. There’s no reason why a 50-year-old engineer can’t learn a new programming language. And frankly, most coding work isn’t rocket science. There's plenty of reason why it'd be more difficult for a 50-year to learn a new programming language, here's a big one: time As people get older they have more time constraints and generally have "better (or just other) things to do". This is true for 30 vs 20, 40 vs 30, and probably 50 vs 40 (you could argue that as your kids get older you have more free time but then again people have kids at an older age now). A young person is more likely to be able to forgo those other things and learn the latest transpile-to-js-lang-of-the-week (v2.x). Sure, people need to be evaluated individually but if I interview 100 people I'd bet dollars to donuts that the older crowd would have less free time than the youngins.

kabouseng 11y ago
Sure, but generally the older have more experience, so a lot of the concepts they need to learn is just a rehash of the same concepts in a different paradigm. So it takes people with more experience less time to learn a new technology / language / domain.
TillE 11y ago
These are just lazy assumptions. Plenty of 20-somethings have young kids (the most time-consuming phase), and plenty of older people will never have children.
jventura 11y ago
Yes, but older experienced developers will not need that much free time to relearn how to do an if or a for loop in that new language. The older you get, the more you go to the point, so your argument is not quite good..
fecak 11y ago
Let's concede that older programmers in their 50s may have less free time to learn new technologies than a 20-something. Shouldn't we also consider how much less time it will take an experienced dev (who has perhaps already learned several new languages and frameworks over their career) to learn something new when compared to the 20-something who is learning their first or second one? The number of hours required to learn a second language or framework - which may rely on entirely unfamiliar paradigms and principles - may be much higher than the time required by someone who has already learned several over many years. When considering the learning ability of any developer, free time is only one consideration. Past experience learning has to be another.

trevor-e 11y ago

Somehow I knew this would be about Hubspot.

mooreds 11y ago

"I suspect the truth is that tech startups prefer young workers because they will work longer hours and can be paid less." Really? What capitalist wouldn't want this, especially if the quality of the work wasn't "good enough"? I'm no fan of age discrimination, but I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality).

protomyth 11y ago
The capitalist who knows that those hours (particularly the ones over 40 and especially over 60) are not as productive and will actually cost money in the long run. > I don't think it is an crime to choose the cheapest labor (for a given level of quality) I agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality. It is factory thinking where they need to be thinking like a film producer. This is a creative endeavor and not a widget factory. You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently.
- mooreds 11y ago
  > You need youth and you need age and you need people who think differently. Agreed. And in the long run I believe the companies that accept this will win.
- djrogers 11y ago
  > agree with this, but I think they are not making a wise choice on the level of quality The entire premise of the article is about illegal age discrimination- a criminal act, not one of poor judgement. Making bad decisions is not necessarily a crime.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    Makings poor decisions that lead to illegal acts make you a criminal.
  - yuhong 11y ago
    I am not a fan of anti-discrimination laws though. I suggested a compromise to limit them to certain kinds of jobs like manual labor for which they are originally designed for.

leothekim 11y ago

Relatedly, I'm curious if Mark Zuckerberg still believes his comments about young people being smarter: http://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smarter/ http://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smar... which were made 9 years ago.

arcanus 11y ago
I doubt it, given the average age of the ML team at FB.

tim333 11y ago

An alternative view on Lyons and Hubspot http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/30/hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/

motdiem 11y ago
I had missed that - interesting counterpoint - thanks for sharing it.
Cd00d 11y ago
I'm just now trying to figure out what HubSpot does, and what 'inbound marketing' even is, but from my naive and ignorant perspective on a new subject: isn't this post the same as their product?
- wott 11y ago
  You're too old to understand: she calls herself an "idea generator" (sic).

xiphias 11y ago

What I found is that startups have different requirements to big established companies. As the business is not yet stable enough, it's better to write lots of hacked together lower quality code to get to product-market fit. Experienced programmers can't help too much with that part. But experience helps tremendously when you are working with complex system that needs to be scaled and maintained efficiently. Also as an older person: why work for cheaper in a startup when you can have a higher salary at a big company? You should already know that it's not worth the effort for the stock options for an employee.

im_down_w_otp 11y ago
You shouldn't be writing a bunch of crap demoware to find "product-market fit" after you've already setup the business. That never seems to stop anybody from doing it, nor feckless funds from throwing money at those ventures. But you don't start a business and then hung for a product. You start a business because you have a product you intend to try to sell.

protomyth 11y ago

According to the FBI, which investigated, these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. No criminal charges have been filed, but the hacking, extortion, and ensuing cover-up raised questions about HubSpot’s culture and the trustworthiness of its leadership. HubSpot's board fired the CMO, and sanctioned Halligan, the CEO. A vice president resigned before the board could decide whether to terminate him. The board still won't tell me what happened. That's some HP board level disfunction and paranoia. I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass.

evook 11y ago
> I think there is bit more wrong then their age bias, as they lack a moral compass. Like completely lacking a useful product and halfway down the road grasping that fact? 22 grands ea month for a little SEO and marketing-analytics of the shelf. Is there anybody who wants to work with professionals left today?
spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
Yes the chair or senior non exec should have fired HP CEO and directors should have been fired instantly over that - they where hacking into telco exectutives phones FFS.

askyourmother 11y ago

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

jlebar 11y ago

Let's take this in context? Here's what he said in the interview. I have a lot of confidence in young people, and I have a lot of confidence in everyone’s ability to do more than they think they can do. I have very high expectations for people, and I push people to reach even higher. I take these young kids at HubSpot and I give them huge responsibility. Sometimes they mess it up, but more often than not they get it right. I think, at least in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated. I think my gray hair is overrated. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/brian-halligan-chief-of-hubspot-on-the-value-of-naps.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/business/brian-halligan-ch... Maybe I'll have a different perspective when I'm older, but this doesn't sound like outrageous age bias to me. He's saying that these "kids" are capable of more than others give them credit for, and that experience is "really overrated". That's not the same thing as saying that he won't hire "old" people, or that given an "old" person whom he thinks will perform better than a young person at the same salary, he'd prefer the young person. Maybe this CEO really is biased against older people, but the evidence provided is pretty slim. Reading TFA, the author comes across as pretty entitled. His argument is that older people are better than younger people, and he's upset that this CEO doesn't get it. Over time, most people get better at what they do. They become wiser, calmer, more self-aware. They’ve also put in the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell says are required to become expert in a skill. Why would companies not want employees who have gained that expertise? I dunno why, maybe this CEO is an idiot. Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune.

w1ntermute 11y ago
> Sounds like a great opportunity to start your own company, hire the people the market is overlooking, and make a fortune. If you manage to start a company that could make a fortune, then you don't have to hire people the market is overlooking - everyone will want to work for you. You're putting the cart before the horse.
- nailer 11y ago
  All companies 'could make a fortune' Actually making one is not a sudden event, but a slow one. Absolutely: hire for skill, and there's a shit tonne of it being ignored outside young men in Silicon Valley.

sysreader2016 11y ago

I think that the younger workers in their 20's to 30's, especially the new tech workers, are really doing it because it's fun. So, working 12 hours a day 6-7 days a week isn't a big deal. Whereas the older crowd, the 40+'ers, want the same pay (or more) for 'work-life balance'. I've been told 'work-life balance' means up to 8 hours a day and up to 5 days a week, and after hours is for spending time with family and friends. I've encountered plently of 40+'ers who discourage learning new skills during free time, programming on the weekends, hackathons, and the like. Simply because that stuff goes against work-life balance. It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers.

humanrebar 11y ago
Typically when developers have to work overtime, it's due to a bad business plan or bad project management. Experienced developers insisting on a sane work/life balance (without getting into numbers) is a way to insist that management is accountable for its decisions. Otherwise, the individual contributors pay the price, typically the most talented, nicest, and most eager-to-please. And, yes, those contributors often skew younger because they haven't gone through that exact song-and-dance before. Spending the nights and weekends learning is sort of another subject. I would rather employers spend more resources training employees during business hours, especially for enterprise and industry-specific technology, but that's an entirely different subject.
dominotw 11y ago
>It's hard for me to believe that the 40+'ers are as ambitious as younger tech workers. It might be true. But punishing everyone over 40 based on this stereotype is wrong.
ryandrake 11y ago
Why does ambition somehow now mean you have to WANT to do your job for 12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week? Do you think surgeons spend their days off at home practicing surgery on their pets as a hobby? Don't get me wrong--everyone should always be learning. But in what other profession is it expected that you continue doing your work "for fun" after hours?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tschellenbach 11y ago

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

Balgair 11y ago

Some of the comments here are missing the goals of the organization, I believe. What is the 'end-game' for HubSpot and companies like them? What do they hope to accomplish? Tear away all the fuzzball tables and kindergarten colors[0], does the business have solvency without the VC ecosystem? I don't know the interior of those business, but they all seem to be angling for 1 thing: a buy-out.[1] Commenters here, rightfully, say that experience matters in producing a good product that sells and makes a gross profit. That 3 greybeards are worth 10 fuzzfaces. I think they are right. But that is not the objective for so many of these places. The idea is to 'grow', show this to other VCs or the NASDAQ (maybe) so that they will want to buy your company. Then the board and c-suite get something of a return on the time and money, while the employees get less of a return than having worked at Boeing for those years. Again, ageism is fine, because the point is not to have a sustainable business with a good product, the point is to grow and sell. This is slash-and-burn ranching not sustainable farming. [0] Those are VERY important to signal to the outside world and to potential employees though. It makes the company seem 'techy' and 'googlish', which is thought to translate into dollars. Still the decor means nothing in the end. [1] Do you feel like you have no idea what is going on? That you sometimes have imposter syndrome? Most people, including VCs and C*Os have this too. No-one know what the hell is going on, and if they say they do, they are ignorant or lying. Mostly.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago

Are there any really hard technology companies that have the same problem? My guess is no. Our company is almost completely people with background in computer vision, AI and 3D rendering and our youngest employee is 31. My guess is that "trendy" startups have this problem, not ones building hard technology.

cgh 11y ago
I believe you are correct. Where I work, basic webapp crud and ui-type stuff are handled by younger, inexperienced people because these are easy things. For the more complicated problems, ones that tend to require deep knowledge of eg service provider networks, the teams are almost uniformly 35-50+.

edw519 11y ago

“in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said. I guess once Halligan gets a little gray hair and experience, he'll realize how absurd this statement is and will regret ever saying it.

AndrewKemendo 11y ago
He's 48.
mdpopescu 11y ago
I'm pretty sure he's quoted as saying "my gray hair is overrated", or something like that.

butler14 11y ago

Saying something is overrated isn't necessarily saying it's inferior to alternatives, just that it has too much importance placed on it relatively speaking. Seems like his ego got hurt and he's out for revenge. He also seems to be blind to the fact that ageism works both ways. Some of his comments, and those on the linkedin post in question, are far more worrying than those of HubSpot's CEO.

xenadu02 11y ago

I think this stereotype comes from an earlier (and slower moving) era where programmers expected to learn COBOL or 4/GL and retire doing the same sort of work they learned in the beginning. I grew up when the Internet became a thing. I've never had that expectation. I'm still learning new languages and frameworks at 34 and have no intention of slowing down. Oh and pro tip to founders out there: if your competitors aren't recruiting middle age or older people (or black people or women), that's an untapped market! Take advantage of the things your less hungry competitors won't!

daemonk 11y ago

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

siberianbear 11y ago

I worked as a manager of a group of 10-15 software engineers at a major semiconductor company for about ten years. I interviewed over a thousand candidates and gave out about 60 full-time job offers over that time. I hired engineers aged from 21 to about 60. Of course, I also worked with lots of engineers from other groups. My conclusion on this topic is that there is no problem with age itself. The problem is that some older people lose interest and just coast on their skill set which becomes stale over time. Not all older people are like that. I had engineers in their 40s and 50s who read programming blogs, learned new languages in their spare time, tinkered with their pet projects in the lab, etc. They were passionate about engineering. THOSE guys were never a problem. They were awesome. I mean, if Bob Pease [1] were still alive, I'd hire him in a minute. The mistake is to jump from "some fraction of older engineers are in the former group" to thinking all older engineers are like that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Pease

Overtonwindow 11y ago

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

0xCMP 11y ago

HA. Excuse my language: but what the fuck? They literally tried to hack his computer to get his manuscript? Like what were they thinking?? Hopefully that was the craziest story or else that book is gonna wreck them.

mindcrime 11y ago

When I was 26, I'm sure I would have said "grey hair and experience are over-rated". Now, at 42, I realize how much more effective I am now, compared to when I was younger - due to the additional knowledge and experience I have. The thing is, "you don't know what you don't know". All of that said, I agree with the sentiment that a good team should be made up of a mixture of people of different ages and experience levels.

mixmastamyk 11y ago

If you're not interested in management, don't have a four year degree, and not good on-the-spot/whiteboard etc, you're in for a hard time getting hired as an aging developer, even if up to date technically. Don't let it happen to you. Choose one or two of those to focus on and change.

haberman 11y ago

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

makeitsuckless 11y ago

Let's not kid ourselves. This is not about energy, creativity, flexibility and all that shit. It's about two things, young people are a) cheap and b) gullible and easy to manipulate. The latter is probably the most important. I'm in a situation that is a typical example of how that gets abused: company needs to downsize (funding dried up), and wants most of the team to sign a piece of paper and go away. The salespitch is that it's for mutual benefit, but in reality it's 100% for the company's benefit. The employees would sign away their rights, including at least 2 months pay and in some cases get screwed on their visa. Also, be complicit in forgery, since the dates on the paperwork are false. The younger employees would probably have been railroaded and screwed hard if it wasn't for the more experienced members of the team. Tech companies want young people as cheap guinea pigs, to try out all kinds of "entrepreneurial" ideas without having to pay the price. Pure and simple.

erichocean 11y ago

tl;dr; Hiring young people increase headcount faster because they are cheaper and less productive, and headcount is an important metric in SV that correlates strongly with the ability to raise funding, and the ability to have a successful exit later on. ---- One unmentioned thing, which is weird until you've seen it first hand, is that it's easier to sell and finance a bigger startup, and by "bigger", I mean: higher headcount. Obviously, in general, older people are more experienced and cost more, and also do more. However, this is a net-negative because you have a (potentially much) lower headcount. Another poster commented on how he'd take proverbial three LISPers over 20 NOOBS. (I have no doubt he's telling the truth.) Quick test: If I tell you startup A has 8 developers, and start up B has 80 developers, which startup seems "more successful" to you? Which seems likely to have had more funding? More market share? Is more stable? Better managed? Which seems likely to have an exit (esp. acquisition) in the future? It's little comfort knowing that startup A has 8 LISPers coding circles around the 80 devs at startup B struggling to make Grunt work and keep MongoDB from crashing. Politically, startup B is a much bigger success—at least in SV today. Startup B is what SV optimizes for and funds, and that leads very naturally to hiring young people—all else being equal.

collyw 11y ago
Whatsapp is often held up as example of a very successful company that has a handful of developers.
- erichocean 11y ago
  Yes, because they're the exception that proves the rule. That's why people talk about it so much. :)

jlos 11y ago

Perhaps what's significant about the age bias in the tech industry is that its the first time the age bias has worked in favour of younger employee's. I suspect age bias' exists in many industries that prefer more 'mature' employees. >> these executives tried to hack into computers to steal the manuscript, and also tried to prevent publication of the book by engaging in extortion. The problems of this company, if the allegations are true, stem more from a lack of character, which can be found across the entire age spectrum. I'm playing devil's advocate a bit here. In general, I think that age brings experience and wisdom.

erichocean 11y ago
> Perhaps what's significant about the age bias in the tech industry is that its the first time the age bias has worked in favour of younger employee's. Maybe you don't consider the military "industry", but they tend to recruit primarily from the young (and AFAICT, always have).

dante1 11y ago

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

bootload 11y ago

Reading this article is a bit lopsided. An excerpt from the book gives a clearer picture. [0] Firstly the company is in tech-marketing space and the company appears to be less about engineering than selling. The observations in this extract appear to be about company culture and selling. "Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language" [0] A reference to Lord of the Flies. If you read Lord of the Flies, the disfunction runs along the lines of "insider" and "outsiders" resulting in the ritual killing of the outsiders. The observations of bias against certain outsiders in this context are valid. The bigger question is why and who is driving this behaviour, the VC/finance industry seeking to maximise profit regardless of the externalities? [0] "My Year in Startup Hell" ~ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyons/ http://fortune.com/disrupted-excerpt-hubspot-startup-dan-lyo...