8 ms·

What they say about age is true

56 points by st3fan 16y ago

skowmunk 16y ago
I agree, many people undervalue other's experience. I think its a treasure trove of information as to what worked and what didn't work, especially if one can cross apply those lessons across knowledge domains/areas of technology.
- _delirium 16y ago
  This is one area Google does things relatively well, I think. Especially when they branch out and design a new thing with heavy CS content, the lead designers are often in their 40s or 50s and have experience with significant past systems in related areas: Rob Pike, Lars Bak, Ken Thompson, Peter Norvig, etc. I think one reason is that people of that age are mostly the ones who even remember various useful solutions to problems and tradeoffs that have come up in the past. CS is strangely bad at digitizing its history: I can get a philosophy journal issue from 1890 on Jstor, but many CS journals and proceedings from as recently as 1980 are still dead-tree only. And many are still relevant, e.g. the V8 js engine is strongly based on 1980s Smalltalk compiler research. A handful of important papers (say, by Turing) have been piecemeal scanned and put online by interested people, and a handful of university classes cover historical aspects, but overall I don't think history transmission is taken particularly seriously in CS circles. So, it ends up being more of a living-memory sort of deal, where if you want knowledge from the 1970s/80s to influence your designs, you have to hire people who personally remember it.
hga 16y ago
"Facing facts, I've been sidelined in tech for quite a number of years. No one offers me a place in new startups. When I was younger things were a lot different." In a previous discussion I mentioned my first (and last) extremely unpleasant interaction with Dave Winer and someone mentioned I was a member of a large club (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...). That might have more than a little to do with his inability to get offers in new startups. I'll also note that anyone who says there's no difference between C and an OO language doesn't know what he's talking about. Or in this case C and a language that's largely Scheme semantics with a C style face. And then there's compilation vs. interpretation. Feh. But the OO part is a big deal (at least to the extent it is used by BrowserScript). Learning a new language is generally fast. Learning a new paradigm like OO or functional programming is generally not.
- tptacek 16y ago
  Sure, C is a language in which virtually everything is expressed using fixed-width integers, in which developers must choose and remember which region of memory every variable resides in, in which object lifetimes are of crucial import but left entirely to the devices of the programmer, and in which the programmer is addressing the hardware nearly directly, instead of an interpreter. And sure, Javascript is none of those things. But: both of them require semicolons at the ends of statements! Oh, wait.
  - Vivtek 16y ago
    Also, curly braces!
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Psst, the semicolon comment is funny because JavaScript doesn't actually require semicolons at the end of each line. It will automatically insert them for you if missing, which has led to a number of hard-to-find bugs. Its curly-brace behavior, however, is pretty much exactly like C.
      - Vivtek 16y ago
        Oh. I feel kind of stupid now.
        tptacek 16y ago
        You actually just lost 3 measurable IQ points by learning about semicolon insertion, so don't feel too bad.
pg 16y ago
Ironically while arguing one side of the case he becomes an example supporting the other. He sounds so grumpy and closed minded. Who'd want to hire him? His thesis that technology hasn't changed is false in any case. E.g. while the fundamentals of algorithms haven't changed, that sort of knowledge is less central than it used to be; for better or worse, software development seems to be evolving into something where you glue together building blocks made by other people rather than writing everything yourself.
- neilk 16y ago
  Could we use this to make a new heuristic for knowing when one is being closed-minded? You're good at coming up with those sorts of things. The "X is exactly the same as Y" is one, I think. I got in an argument with someone who asserted that Twitter was exactly the same as the old Unix utility 'talk'. Of course, how do you distinguish between obviously boring reinventions and stuff that really will have an impact?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    My Intro Philosophy professor phrased it like this: "If you want to sound smart in front of your friends, make a distinction." Our judgments of how intelligent people are usually come from how many relevant details they are able to see that we would otherwise have missed. So someone who asserts that Twitter is exactly the same as 'talk' is dumb. Someone who asserts that Twitter is exactly the same as 'talk', except that it's on the web, and it can broadcast to multiple people, and it's limited to 140 characters, and the social norms surrounding its use are different, and it's frequently used to share URLs that are automatically shortened, and that this practice is controversial because it breaks the decentralized nature of the web, sounds slightly more intelligent.
    - neilk 16y ago
      Yeah, but I think your philosophy prof was suggesting that useless distinctions are the stock in trade of tiny minds. For instance, a web client that allows you to use IRC protocol is generally Just-The-Same-As-IRC. Putting it on the web doesn't do anything really different, except maybe that one doesn't have the inconvenience of installing IRC software. But let's say that you had a really good help channel for your website, but that users of your website didn't typically find their way to IRC. Putting an IRC client right in the web page itself, configured to go straight to this help channel, is suddenly more of an innovation. I don't know how to phrase this right, but there is a knack of noticing material distinctions, rather than useless ones. Maybe it's in noticing when certain limitations have been removed or added. Maybe the real problem is that we're often unaware of how limited our world is, and what is doing the limiting. Perhaps the only way to notice when limitations have been removed is by sheer luck or that mysterious force called "creativity". You couldn't have a mind that was constantly probing every tool for every limitation. Could you?
henning 16y ago
I think he isn't offered opportunities in other people's startups because he doesn't seek them out. Does he expect the world to come banging down his door because he was an early blogger and blogging tool developer? Other early bloggers went on to command much greater audiences. Who in their right mind thinks JavaScript is a "gratuitous reinvention" of C? They're more different than they are alike. Maybe he should learn how to build LAMP server farms if he wants to work in startups doing them. There's no reason he can't start his own and work with people who aren't ageists.
frognibble 16y ago
I immediately thought "no hire" after reading the author's comment about Javascript and C. The rest of the paragraph strengthened my opinion. Age is not the issue here.
evo_9 16y ago
This is really a factor if you make a factor, or better yet - let it dictate who you are. If you think you are 'too old' then you probably are. But what if you don't think about age because it's silly and instead you continue to improve yourself, learn the latest tech and generally make yourself someone worthy of being in a startup? Granted there are other factors such as financial/family obligations (mortgage, college tuition for the kids, food on the table, etc) that might make not ideal for a start-up - but age shouldn't be something that enters the equations (well up until I point though I have no idea what that 'point' would be). I know I've thought that this ageism thing could be a factor. Hell I was nervous 'admitting' I am 43 in another post and when I signed up for the start-school (like it's wrong or something). But the thing is, because I don't think about age, and because I continue to learn and grow, it's never come up. It probably helps that I played a sport at a near pro level and know how to 'train' and consequently look 34 instead of 43; but the reality is we influence ourselves more than we realize (it's a internal mental game thing). Bottom line is if you want it bad enough you make it happen.
DanielBMarkham 16y ago
I think if you feel the need to defend your ability by blogging you've already lost the battle. Just go do it. Then the argument is moot. Startup entry costs get lower and lower everyday. All of those zillions of barely-useful web apps that everybody is funding provide a nifty base to launch and begin interacting with a market. It's really not the same business environment as it was just ten years ago. That's not meant as an argument for age discrimination, just an acknowledgment that things have changed. The best guy to find is some graybeard who kept the best of the old stuff and is also learning the new stuff. Unfortunately the temptation in tech is to rest on your laurels and try to coast on using natural intelligence as opposed to continuously learning new things. Sometimes this gets kids right out of college -- take the corporate 9-5 job and the punch-the-clock mentality. Sometimes it takes longer. But once this attitude begins the logical conclusion is blog articles like this.
rajbot 16y ago
Dave Winer is the guy that famously ranted he would never support the new JSON Facebook API: "To Facebook the answer must be no"! Then he when everyone laughed at him, he silently edited his rant to appear a bit more sane [1].. It's not that he wouldn't support the json api, it is that he couldn't, because the programming environment he wrote doesn't have a json library. It's 2010. Would you hire a programmer that who can't parse JSON? Edit: Even better.. would you hire a programmer who, when asked to design a json api, refused to do so and instead yelled at you about the superiority of XML-RPC? [1] http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/21/tofacebooktheanswermustben.html http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/21/tofacebooktheans...
bconway 16y ago
If you invest in tech companies, try bringing in some tech experience. It might push your comfort level. It also might make you much more competitive. Let me know when you're willing to take startup pay (real startup pay, not $100K instead of $130K). Most 50 year-olds that I talk to aren't.
- discreteevent 16y ago
  Ok but what if someone with talent and experience will deliver you value worth three times "startup pay" but only wants twice it. I'm sure you would have no argument about hiring them as the economics speak for themselves. So hiring people based on whether they will accept exactly 1 x startup pay is a limiting tactic unless you believe that its not possible that talent and experience will actually deliver that much extra value to you - in which case there is no argument.
- nir 16y ago
  If you're a startup with little cash looking for talent, you can either (a) offer co-founder level equity, (b) employ, perhaps remotely, people living where market rate is cheap or (c) hire someone at market rate for limited scope consulting work, hoping they produce enough value to be worth it. Unless your name is Steve Jobs, when you choose (d) hire someone for far below market and compensate them with employee level equity, you're basically looking for a sucker. Most engineers realize this way before they turn 50.
- maxawaytoolong 16y ago
  Since one can make 6 figs + equity at any of the hip startups in NYC, most 25 year olds won't, either... unless they are stupid.
tomjen3 16y ago
I call bullshit. If there where a systematic discrimination against any group of people, some startup could win big by hirering these people that are as good, but nobody seem to be willing to pay for. But since not a single one has done so (at least publically), something else must be stopping them.
- neilk 16y ago
  That argument is frequently made to deny the existence of any form of discrimination. Note that it would have applied to say, black people in the 1950s in the USA.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    Except one thing, you where likely to get into trouble if you had a black man hired to do what would have been considered a white mans job, so the black guy was strictly speaking not worth the same as a white man because he would (in directly, but pretty certainly) cause you problems with your customer. That is not true today in Silicon Wally, because nobody knows who wrote the code one is currently using.
erikstarck 16y ago
I wouldn't hire Dave Winer in a startup because he is an internet legend and I would assume he was very expensive. Part of his salary would probably have to go on the marketing account but I'm sure there are wiser ways to spend that money in a startup. I would be more OK with having him in a technical advisory role or something similar. That would give me most of the publicity value at a much lower price. (I would then of course also make sure his experience was utilized to the fullest extent possible, probably as a mentor to the tech team.) Not sure he would like that, though.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mustpax 16y ago
If I can't get into the game, I can't imagine there's much chance for most other people in their 50's to play a role. The arrogance of this statement is just mind boggling. Why exactly does the author think he's orders of magnitude more employable than other engineers of his age group?
- dpritchett 16y ago
  If you want to parse that extra-pedantically it looks like Dave's just self-assessing himself as being in the 51st percentile of 50ish devs. I'm pretty sure everyone thinks they're above average.
  - mustpax 16y ago
    Please. He's saying that, if he can't do it, others of similar age must be hopeless. That simply means he believes he's at the top of his field, not just above average.
Tichy 16y ago
What about startups founded by "old" people? Wouldn't they like to work with people of their own age group? I think if I were 25 and launching a startup, hiring somebody twice my age really might feel a little bit weird. Maybe this alone could explain it - if people only like to hire people who are younger than themselves, there would be fewer places willing to hire the older you got.
- wccrawford 16y ago
  The owner of my company is a only few years younger than me and that feels -weird-. I suppose that when I'm 50, it won't feel quite as weird to work for people younger than me, but the bigger the gap, the weirder it's going to feel.
mikecane 16y ago
>>>No one offers me a place in new startups. Pretend this was not written by him, because I don't want this to come off as attacking anyone. Reading just that alone, my reaction is, "Well, why SHOULD they?" Isn't having coding skills the same as having made a living as a writer? I don't see novelists complaining that no one has "invited" them to write books. They do it without any money up front in the hopes someone will like it and publish it (some self-publish in e, these days). I thought being able to code was like a ticket to mint money, if you had a great idea and the willingness to push at it. Isn't that how everything on the Net came about? Maybe I'm just missing something here. But the fact remains if you sit around waiting for an "invite" to anything, you're bound to be waiting a very, very long time. I'd rather be doing something than waiting any day.
mechanical_fish 16y ago
I have a hypothesis: One secret to staying "young" in software is to avoid uttering statements of the form: we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so... These are gratuitous reinventions. Even when these statements seem to be true. Don't train yourself to think like this. It isn't going to help. Yes, people -- especially the young, but the old as well -- go over the same ground a lot in software. That's called practice. It's partly a generational thing: New generations need to learn from mistakes by making some of those mistakes; the process of having your elders lecture you about the mistakes is great, and can save you valuable time, but it is imperfect. Some things you just have to experience for yourself. But it's mostly an evolutionary thing. We reinvent because the environment keeps changing, especially in computing, which has been rocked by epochal changes over the course of the last forty years. (Take out your iPhone and compare it to the machines and networks in use in 1970. Then compare the owners of modern smartphones to the owners of machines and networks in 1970.) The reinvented thing never turns out quite the same as the original, and those differences -- many of which look like accidents, some of which are in fact accidents -- are usually where the progress can be found. The new tool fits the new problem better than the old tool because it evolved in the presence of the new problem.
- wccrawford 16y ago
  Or to put it in a car analogy: If we hadn't reinvented the wheel, we'd be using stone tires. Reinventing is not always a mistake... And sometimes you have to make a lot of mistakes to make progress.
nir 16y ago
A lot of people here seem to focus on reasons why startups won't hire Dave Winer, but the this isn't a Winer-specific situation. Startups aren't filled with personable JSON-loving 50 year olds, or even 40 year olds. One reason may be that most current web startups just don't do work that is difficult or innovative enough to warrant that level of experience/cost. You don't need 20 years' experience to create Reddit, for example, and even though a veteran team might have avoided pick the wrong language initially or storing users' passwords in plaintext, these didn't really hurt Reddit that much. There's also the employee's side. In my late thirties I already find it hard to get excited about self indulgent social-location-based-nano-blogging apps aspiring to get mentioned at Wired. When you look for something that's either really challenging or tries to solve a real problem, your range of choice is greatly limited.
frognibble 16y ago
I am a 50-something engineer who recently worked at a well known startup. I am planning a new startup now. I reviewed my contemporary connections on LinkedIn to see how many I'd consider for my startup. I did not find many. Many of my contemporaries have climbed the management or technical ladders to the point where they have not practiced the skills needed in a startup for years. They are managing fifty or more people. They are architects at large corporations. They are not designing products and writing code. A smaller group of my contemporaries are set for life financially. They are no longer working or are only pretending to work. Of those that are still actively working, I know that some of them have ratcheted up their lifestyle to match their high compensation. It would be a major adjustment for them to live on a startup salary. There might be ageism in the startup world, but I think it's definitely the case that the pool of eligible and interested 50-somethings is small. I personally have not experienced ageism. I was 20 years older than everybody else at my last startup.
hastydork 16y ago
You guys talk about ageism in a (mostly) ageist way and missed the point of the piece. It's about your attitudes, your negativeness. You're proving the authors point, but are too shallow and naive and inexperienced to see it.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

56 points by st3fan 16y ago

I agree, many people undervalue other's experience. I think its a treasure trove of information as to what worked and what didn't work, especially if one can cross apply those lessons across knowledge domains/areas of technology.

_delirium 16y ago
This is one area Google does things relatively well, I think. Especially when they branch out and design a new thing with heavy CS content, the lead designers are often in their 40s or 50s and have experience with significant past systems in related areas: Rob Pike, Lars Bak, Ken Thompson, Peter Norvig, etc. I think one reason is that people of that age are mostly the ones who even remember various useful solutions to problems and tradeoffs that have come up in the past. CS is strangely bad at digitizing its history: I can get a philosophy journal issue from 1890 on Jstor, but many CS journals and proceedings from as recently as 1980 are still dead-tree only. And many are still relevant, e.g. the V8 js engine is strongly based on 1980s Smalltalk compiler research. A handful of important papers (say, by Turing) have been piecemeal scanned and put online by interested people, and a handful of university classes cover historical aspects, but overall I don't think history transmission is taken particularly seriously in CS circles. So, it ends up being more of a living-memory sort of deal, where if you want knowledge from the 1970s/80s to influence your designs, you have to hire people who personally remember it.

hga 16y ago

"Facing facts, I've been sidelined in tech for quite a number of years. No one offers me a place in new startups. When I was younger things were a lot different." In a previous discussion I mentioned my first (and last) extremely unpleasant interaction with Dave Winer and someone mentioned I was a member of a large club (http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer_number http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/04/21/whats_your_winer...). That might have more than a little to do with his inability to get offers in new startups. I'll also note that anyone who says there's no difference between C and an OO language doesn't know what he's talking about. Or in this case C and a language that's largely Scheme semantics with a C style face. And then there's compilation vs. interpretation. Feh. But the OO part is a big deal (at least to the extent it is used by BrowserScript). Learning a new language is generally fast. Learning a new paradigm like OO or functional programming is generally not.

tptacek 16y ago
Sure, C is a language in which virtually everything is expressed using fixed-width integers, in which developers must choose and remember which region of memory every variable resides in, in which object lifetimes are of crucial import but left entirely to the devices of the programmer, and in which the programmer is addressing the hardware nearly directly, instead of an interpreter. And sure, Javascript is none of those things. But: both of them require semicolons at the ends of statements! Oh, wait.
- Vivtek 16y ago
  Also, curly braces!
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Psst, the semicolon comment is funny because JavaScript doesn't actually require semicolons at the end of each line. It will automatically insert them for you if missing, which has led to a number of hard-to-find bugs. Its curly-brace behavior, however, is pretty much exactly like C.
    - Vivtek 16y ago
      Oh. I feel kind of stupid now.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        You actually just lost 3 measurable IQ points by learning about semicolon insertion, so don't feel too bad.

pg 16y ago

Ironically while arguing one side of the case he becomes an example supporting the other. He sounds so grumpy and closed minded. Who'd want to hire him? His thesis that technology hasn't changed is false in any case. E.g. while the fundamentals of algorithms haven't changed, that sort of knowledge is less central than it used to be; for better or worse, software development seems to be evolving into something where you glue together building blocks made by other people rather than writing everything yourself.

neilk 16y ago
Could we use this to make a new heuristic for knowing when one is being closed-minded? You're good at coming up with those sorts of things. The "X is exactly the same as Y" is one, I think. I got in an argument with someone who asserted that Twitter was exactly the same as the old Unix utility 'talk'. Of course, how do you distinguish between obviously boring reinventions and stuff that really will have an impact?
- nostrademons 16y ago
  My Intro Philosophy professor phrased it like this: "If you want to sound smart in front of your friends, make a distinction." Our judgments of how intelligent people are usually come from how many relevant details they are able to see that we would otherwise have missed. So someone who asserts that Twitter is exactly the same as 'talk' is dumb. Someone who asserts that Twitter is exactly the same as 'talk', except that it's on the web, and it can broadcast to multiple people, and it's limited to 140 characters, and the social norms surrounding its use are different, and it's frequently used to share URLs that are automatically shortened, and that this practice is controversial because it breaks the decentralized nature of the web, sounds slightly more intelligent.
  - neilk 16y ago
    Yeah, but I think your philosophy prof was suggesting that useless distinctions are the stock in trade of tiny minds. For instance, a web client that allows you to use IRC protocol is generally Just-The-Same-As-IRC. Putting it on the web doesn't do anything really different, except maybe that one doesn't have the inconvenience of installing IRC software. But let's say that you had a really good help channel for your website, but that users of your website didn't typically find their way to IRC. Putting an IRC client right in the web page itself, configured to go straight to this help channel, is suddenly more of an innovation. I don't know how to phrase this right, but there is a knack of noticing material distinctions, rather than useless ones. Maybe it's in noticing when certain limitations have been removed or added. Maybe the real problem is that we're often unaware of how limited our world is, and what is doing the limiting. Perhaps the only way to notice when limitations have been removed is by sheer luck or that mysterious force called "creativity". You couldn't have a mind that was constantly probing every tool for every limitation. Could you?

henning 16y ago

I think he isn't offered opportunities in other people's startups because he doesn't seek them out. Does he expect the world to come banging down his door because he was an early blogger and blogging tool developer? Other early bloggers went on to command much greater audiences. Who in their right mind thinks JavaScript is a "gratuitous reinvention" of C? They're more different than they are alike. Maybe he should learn how to build LAMP server farms if he wants to work in startups doing them. There's no reason he can't start his own and work with people who aren't ageists.

frognibble 16y ago

I immediately thought "no hire" after reading the author's comment about Javascript and C. The rest of the paragraph strengthened my opinion. Age is not the issue here.

evo_9 16y ago

This is really a factor if you make a factor, or better yet - let it dictate who you are. If you think you are 'too old' then you probably are. But what if you don't think about age because it's silly and instead you continue to improve yourself, learn the latest tech and generally make yourself someone worthy of being in a startup? Granted there are other factors such as financial/family obligations (mortgage, college tuition for the kids, food on the table, etc) that might make not ideal for a start-up - but age shouldn't be something that enters the equations (well up until I point though I have no idea what that 'point' would be). I know I've thought that this ageism thing could be a factor. Hell I was nervous 'admitting' I am 43 in another post and when I signed up for the start-school (like it's wrong or something). But the thing is, because I don't think about age, and because I continue to learn and grow, it's never come up. It probably helps that I played a sport at a near pro level and know how to 'train' and consequently look 34 instead of 43; but the reality is we influence ourselves more than we realize (it's a internal mental game thing). Bottom line is if you want it bad enough you make it happen.

DanielBMarkham 16y ago

I think if you feel the need to defend your ability by blogging you've already lost the battle. Just go do it. Then the argument is moot. Startup entry costs get lower and lower everyday. All of those zillions of barely-useful web apps that everybody is funding provide a nifty base to launch and begin interacting with a market. It's really not the same business environment as it was just ten years ago. That's not meant as an argument for age discrimination, just an acknowledgment that things have changed. The best guy to find is some graybeard who kept the best of the old stuff and is also learning the new stuff. Unfortunately the temptation in tech is to rest on your laurels and try to coast on using natural intelligence as opposed to continuously learning new things. Sometimes this gets kids right out of college -- take the corporate 9-5 job and the punch-the-clock mentality. Sometimes it takes longer. But once this attitude begins the logical conclusion is blog articles like this.

rajbot 16y ago

Dave Winer is the guy that famously ranted he would never support the new JSON Facebook API: "To Facebook the answer must be no"! Then he when everyone laughed at him, he silently edited his rant to appear a bit more sane [1].. It's not that he wouldn't support the json api, it is that he couldn't, because the programming environment he wrote doesn't have a json library. It's 2010. Would you hire a programmer that who can't parse JSON? Edit: Even better.. would you hire a programmer who, when asked to design a json api, refused to do so and instead yelled at you about the superiority of XML-RPC? [1] http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/21/tofacebooktheanswermustben.html http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/04/21/tofacebooktheans...

bconway 16y ago

If you invest in tech companies, try bringing in some tech experience. It might push your comfort level. It also might make you much more competitive. Let me know when you're willing to take startup pay (real startup pay, not $100K instead of $130K). Most 50 year-olds that I talk to aren't.

discreteevent 16y ago
Ok but what if someone with talent and experience will deliver you value worth three times "startup pay" but only wants twice it. I'm sure you would have no argument about hiring them as the economics speak for themselves. So hiring people based on whether they will accept exactly 1 x startup pay is a limiting tactic unless you believe that its not possible that talent and experience will actually deliver that much extra value to you - in which case there is no argument.
nir 16y ago
If you're a startup with little cash looking for talent, you can either (a) offer co-founder level equity, (b) employ, perhaps remotely, people living where market rate is cheap or (c) hire someone at market rate for limited scope consulting work, hoping they produce enough value to be worth it. Unless your name is Steve Jobs, when you choose (d) hire someone for far below market and compensate them with employee level equity, you're basically looking for a sucker. Most engineers realize this way before they turn 50.
maxawaytoolong 16y ago
Since one can make 6 figs + equity at any of the hip startups in NYC, most 25 year olds won't, either... unless they are stupid.

tomjen3 16y ago

I call bullshit. If there where a systematic discrimination against any group of people, some startup could win big by hirering these people that are as good, but nobody seem to be willing to pay for. But since not a single one has done so (at least publically), something else must be stopping them.

neilk 16y ago
That argument is frequently made to deny the existence of any form of discrimination. Note that it would have applied to say, black people in the 1950s in the USA.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Except one thing, you where likely to get into trouble if you had a black man hired to do what would have been considered a white mans job, so the black guy was strictly speaking not worth the same as a white man because he would (in directly, but pretty certainly) cause you problems with your customer. That is not true today in Silicon Wally, because nobody knows who wrote the code one is currently using.

erikstarck 16y ago

I wouldn't hire Dave Winer in a startup because he is an internet legend and I would assume he was very expensive. Part of his salary would probably have to go on the marketing account but I'm sure there are wiser ways to spend that money in a startup. I would be more OK with having him in a technical advisory role or something similar. That would give me most of the publicity value at a much lower price. (I would then of course also make sure his experience was utilized to the fullest extent possible, probably as a mentor to the tech team.) Not sure he would like that, though.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mustpax 16y ago

If I can't get into the game, I can't imagine there's much chance for most other people in their 50's to play a role. The arrogance of this statement is just mind boggling. Why exactly does the author think he's orders of magnitude more employable than other engineers of his age group?

dpritchett 16y ago
If you want to parse that extra-pedantically it looks like Dave's just self-assessing himself as being in the 51st percentile of 50ish devs. I'm pretty sure everyone thinks they're above average.
- mustpax 16y ago
  Please. He's saying that, if he can't do it, others of similar age must be hopeless. That simply means he believes he's at the top of his field, not just above average.

Tichy 16y ago

What about startups founded by "old" people? Wouldn't they like to work with people of their own age group? I think if I were 25 and launching a startup, hiring somebody twice my age really might feel a little bit weird. Maybe this alone could explain it - if people only like to hire people who are younger than themselves, there would be fewer places willing to hire the older you got.

wccrawford 16y ago
The owner of my company is a only few years younger than me and that feels -weird-. I suppose that when I'm 50, it won't feel quite as weird to work for people younger than me, but the bigger the gap, the weirder it's going to feel.

mikecane 16y ago

>>>No one offers me a place in new startups. Pretend this was not written by him, because I don't want this to come off as attacking anyone. Reading just that alone, my reaction is, "Well, why SHOULD they?" Isn't having coding skills the same as having made a living as a writer? I don't see novelists complaining that no one has "invited" them to write books. They do it without any money up front in the hopes someone will like it and publish it (some self-publish in e, these days). I thought being able to code was like a ticket to mint money, if you had a great idea and the willingness to push at it. Isn't that how everything on the Net came about? Maybe I'm just missing something here. But the fact remains if you sit around waiting for an "invite" to anything, you're bound to be waiting a very, very long time. I'd rather be doing something than waiting any day.

mechanical_fish 16y ago

I have a hypothesis: One secret to staying "young" in software is to avoid uttering statements of the form: we chuck our experience, wholesale, every ten years or so... These are gratuitous reinventions. Even when these statements seem to be true. Don't train yourself to think like this. It isn't going to help. Yes, people -- especially the young, but the old as well -- go over the same ground a lot in software. That's called practice. It's partly a generational thing: New generations need to learn from mistakes by making some of those mistakes; the process of having your elders lecture you about the mistakes is great, and can save you valuable time, but it is imperfect. Some things you just have to experience for yourself. But it's mostly an evolutionary thing. We reinvent because the environment keeps changing, especially in computing, which has been rocked by epochal changes over the course of the last forty years. (Take out your iPhone and compare it to the machines and networks in use in 1970. Then compare the owners of modern smartphones to the owners of machines and networks in 1970.) The reinvented thing never turns out quite the same as the original, and those differences -- many of which look like accidents, some of which are in fact accidents -- are usually where the progress can be found. The new tool fits the new problem better than the old tool because it evolved in the presence of the new problem.

wccrawford 16y ago
Or to put it in a car analogy: If we hadn't reinvented the wheel, we'd be using stone tires. Reinventing is not always a mistake... And sometimes you have to make a lot of mistakes to make progress.

nir 16y ago

A lot of people here seem to focus on reasons why startups won't hire Dave Winer, but the this isn't a Winer-specific situation. Startups aren't filled with personable JSON-loving 50 year olds, or even 40 year olds. One reason may be that most current web startups just don't do work that is difficult or innovative enough to warrant that level of experience/cost. You don't need 20 years' experience to create Reddit, for example, and even though a veteran team might have avoided pick the wrong language initially or storing users' passwords in plaintext, these didn't really hurt Reddit that much. There's also the employee's side. In my late thirties I already find it hard to get excited about self indulgent social-location-based-nano-blogging apps aspiring to get mentioned at Wired. When you look for something that's either really challenging or tries to solve a real problem, your range of choice is greatly limited.

frognibble 16y ago

I am a 50-something engineer who recently worked at a well known startup. I am planning a new startup now. I reviewed my contemporary connections on LinkedIn to see how many I'd consider for my startup. I did not find many. Many of my contemporaries have climbed the management or technical ladders to the point where they have not practiced the skills needed in a startup for years. They are managing fifty or more people. They are architects at large corporations. They are not designing products and writing code. A smaller group of my contemporaries are set for life financially. They are no longer working or are only pretending to work. Of those that are still actively working, I know that some of them have ratcheted up their lifestyle to match their high compensation. It would be a major adjustment for them to live on a startup salary. There might be ageism in the startup world, but I think it's definitely the case that the pool of eligible and interested 50-somethings is small. I personally have not experienced ageism. I was 20 years older than everybody else at my last startup.

hastydork 16y ago

You guys talk about ageism in a (mostly) ageist way and missed the point of the piece. It's about your attitudes, your negativeness. You're proving the authors point, but are too shallow and naive and inexperienced to see it.

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