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I worked at an electric autonomous car company in the Bay Area (not that one) that was crawling with 22 year olds slinging code every which way. Periodically a

• api 5y ago
  I've seen this too, and I really wonder why there is such an age bias toward straight out of college kids. Having some is fine but the whole industry seems heavily biased in that direction. I suspect it's rooted in the historic youth of computer aficionados back during the early-mid PC era in the 1970s and 1980s, and a cargo cult idea that youth was the ingredient that made this stuff happen. Instead it was the other way around. The youth of the participants was a product of all this stuff being so new. Now that the PC revolution is almost 50 years old there are tons of people who know computers very well in all age groups.
  • klardotsh 5y ago
    I'd venture a guess that (especially in SV/venture tech startups in general) that bias also comes from young folks not having many/any external commitments, so may be easier to get to work longer hours - someone with a family probably can't pull a 60 hour week as easily as someone living in a microstudio with few other cares in the world, yeah?
    • gabereiser 5y ago
      Absolutely this. It's easier to force younger coders into a slave-like work environment, complete with beer on tap, foosball tables, and other amenities to get them to live at the office to constantly work on the product(s). I can't say it's like that everywhere, but most startups are _designed_ to take advantage of their workforce to quickly "move fast and break things" looking for their market fit.
      • cjohnson318 5y ago
        I'd like to see numbers on how many companies actually have beer on tap, or foosball/ping-pong tables at work in 2021. I worked at a place with a foosball and ping-pong table in 2018, but they were infrequently used, and when they were in use, it was always the same three guys.
        • pengaru 5y ago
          > they were infrequently used, and when they were in use, it was always the same three guys. Incidentally most startups I've been part of, there were just a few guys doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting while the rest treated it as just another 9-5.
          • echelon 5y ago
            > Incidentally most startups I've been part of, there were just a few guys doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting Is there a way to identify that talent and pay them more? Or find them and poach them?
            • pengaru 5y ago
              Troll public git repositories for committers with the greatest number of hours having commits, then audit for quality? I assumed this was the kind of thing Microsoft was already doing with both github and linkedin under their belt, either for bolstering their own ranks or as a paid service to offer recruiters.
              • echelon 5y ago
                Nadella is a genius. He made the biggest land grab for developer and engineer mindshare in history, and Microsoft will be able to turn that into advantages across so many different efforts. They're playing at the next level. Google, sigh...
                • 5y ago
    • quantified 5y ago
      Sure, and yet for the experienced devs that make fewer mistakes and things that can be iterated on more easily, they get the same amount done in less than 60 hours. Also, once the dev's kids are in college, their time frees up tremendously. I'm not sure that's recognized.
      • webmaven 5y ago
        Yeah, but you aren't allowed to ask about a candidate's marital or parental status, and age (at the crude not-a-20-something level) is usually apparent without having to ask.
        • quantified 5y ago
          Yep, true. Having a resume that stretches back to when the recruiter was watching Teletubbies makes it super apparent.
    • webmaven 5y ago
      Even absent external commitments (which, BTW, also biases towards men), older folks are often more resistant to 60 hour weeks since they've either observed or experienced burnout and understand that these unsustainable death marches typically result in lower productivity, more bugs, bad code, and mounds of technical debt.
      • MomoXenosaga 5y ago
        I generalize of course but I think older people realize there's more to life than the office and career. Takeaway pizza behind a laptop feels less glamorous at age 40.
        • webmaven 5y ago
          Sure, the "you can't pay me enough to have me sacrifice my life outside of work" POV dovetails perfectly with the "a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine", "you can't pay me enough to sacrifice my physical or mental health", and "why would I join a company that can't figure out how to work sustainably" ones.
        • cudgy 5y ago
          Was hoping that millennials and now Gen Z were seeing this sooner than the previous generations. Which gen are you from?
  • herval 5y ago
    Younger people have more to prove, have nothing to lose, have no understanding of the politics of work - all that makes it easier to "extract more" from them - in particular new grads, who are "blank slates" you can train to your culture very easily. This may sound very cynical, but it's literally how big consultancies (not only in tech) define their hiring strategies - PwC being one of the prime examples, where new hires already come in expecting to have a bad and underpaid experience, in exchange for a strong label in the CV
    • AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      That may all be true, but (at least some) older people have more to extract.
      • pengaru 5y ago
        > That may all be true, but (at least some) older people have more to extract. Not when multiplied by number of hours foolishly spent on employer interests while caught up in the competitive frenzy with effectively zero other obligations.
        • irrational 5y ago
          I have far fewer obligations in my 50s than I did in my 30s. Kids are gone, I’m happily married and not in the dating scene, I am settled in a home. Other than work and hanging out with my wife, I don’t have anything else going on. But back when I was dating and then had young kids and then even older kids (with all of their activities) I had a ton more obligations outside of work. It started going down in my mid 40s and now I’m totally free. I don’t intend to retire for 15-20 more years, that is a lot of years of zero obligations someone could get out of me.
          • pengaru 5y ago
            Allow me to count the number of over 50 year olds I crossed paths with while burning the midnight oil Getting Shit Done crunching at the office... The only time those offices had lights on after hours were when the cleaning people occupied them. My assumption has been even after the nest empties these folks have better things to do like relaxing in their preferred home(s), eating their preferred meals, sleeping in their preferred bed, all accompanied by their preferred people. They have substantial obligations to self, and feel entitled to that having put in their time in years past. Young people suck at setting boundaries let alone enforcing them. Older people generally take better care of themselves and don't fall for the infantilizing exploits of "startup culture".
  • fossuser 5y ago
    I think it might be simpler - it's a lot easier to hire straight out of college kids that have no other obligations. You go to Stanford and MIT (already pre-filtered) and find kids that are really good. You don't have to overcome existing job obligations, etc. Then this cascades with referrals from this group. A lot of software/silicon valley companies haven't been around that long so people haven't had time to work there for decades and become older.
    • Dhirvish 5y ago
      Right, but you realize that's only a few thousand people produced per year right from the Ivy League? We're a country of 350+M and there are 10s of thousands of small to mid sized businesses that need the help too. The entire HR industry is setting up a false system that is completely unsustainable and just yelling out: "Those people don't exist", when they do, you're just not approaching it correctly.
      • fossuser 5y ago
        My comment was about why competitive Silicon Valley companies skew young and out of college, not about anything beyond that. Silicon Valley has an advantage (fame, high pay) that makes it easier for them to focus recruitment on highly selective schools. This creates knock on effects. I’m just describing what I think is happening, nothing else.
  • pandaman 5y ago
    Most likely it's the way the fresh grads get hired: they go through internships either in the same company or in the direct competition and this largely increases their perceived value. It's as same as people normally returning to the same shops/services and following referrals of their acquittances, "a devil you know" etc.
  • reaperducer 5y ago
    why there is such an age bias toward straight out of college kids Follow the money. College kids are cheap. Someone who's been coding for 40 years knows what he's worth and won't fall for vaporware stock options instead of proper health insurance.
  • suchire 5y ago
    A large part of it is ease of hiring. In 80% of cases, new grads are relatively simple to hire; you go to campus recruiting fairs, get bundles of resumes, and since new grads don’t usually have specialized skills, you can do bulk filtering by things like GPA or simple coding exercises. There are a lot of negative consequences of this sort of “factory hiring” mentality (for one, you exclude huge numbers of some groups of people because everything is one size fits all), but if you contrast with hiring experienced folks, it’s way more streamlined. You don’t have to do sourcing, figure out location/geography, match up skill sets and team fit, deal with expectations around title/role, etc. A lot of people mention salary and hours worked, but I suspect the real limiting factor in hiring at fast growing companies is time and staffing to do hiring, and if all you care about is the number of people typing code, you get new grads being overrepresented
  • bsder 5y ago
    VCs want people "plugged in" to the latest social fads--that's young folks. That's where the quick money is--go big or go bankrupt. Profitable companies, however, tend to have older folks as they understand their industry and understand how to extract money from it.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    Inexperienced people are just cheaper. There are two types of young software companies: - Some companies hire a smaller amount of experienced people who really know what they're doing, know what they're worth, and compensates them appropriately. - Other companies hire a larger amount of bright, motivated young people that don't know how to do anything, trains them up quickly, then tries to milk them for 1-3 years until they smarten up enough to leave. I don't think it's as exploitive as it sounds. The young people get a slingshot early in their career and a good bullet point on their resume, and they're free to leave whenever they want. And most do leave in due time to do bigger and better things.
    • Dhirvish 5y ago
      Right, but what about us 43 year olds in the middle? There's a couple 10s of millions of us. I'm trying to move into the tech field, have a decade of migrating paper documents for law firms into databases & doing other simple ETL, but that is disappearing. I saw it coming years ago and am almost done with my masters in data analytics, but all of those jobs pay $10-20k less than what I was making before. There is no where for me to transition into because I don't have 5 years of DBA experience and am not willing to work for $40k just spewing out simple code for 3 years, not that anyone would hire me for it anyway. I'm a member of Mensa, skipped 3 grades of math when I was younger, am almost done with my 4th degree, and nobody wants me because I'm not in either of those two groups. 2-3k resumes, 4 interviews made it past the initial phase for Analyst/PM positions. It's a problem, trust me.
      • mriet 5y ago
        Quick tip: leave Mensa off of your resume. I skip any resume that I see where someone "brags" about how smart they are -- I care about teamwork and how open to new or different ideas someone is, and both of those are orthogonal axes to "intelligence" in my experience. It's ludicrous for you not to accept a pay cut if 10-20k given your lack of experience. Get off your high horse!
  • topkai22 5y ago
    Part of it is just demographics- there are just massively more people getting trained in CS/programming then they are old timers out there. I graduated a decade and a half ago and the size of the computer science department has tripled. Then there really is a tendancy of software engineers to exit the profession in the 35-45 time frame. I actually ran data from the bureau of labor statistics and found that effect to be true- the number of 35-45 year old programmers/software engineers in 2010 was noticeable large than the number of 45-55 year old programmers in 2020.* Those things combined make software developers still trend very young. * Yes, they may be dropping out due to ageism, but I also suspect that many burn out and move to adjacent roles. Ageism and barriers to entry are more interesting in explaining on why we don't see more older people entering the profession
    • ornornor 5y ago
      > Then there really is a tendancy of software engineers to exit the profession in the 35-45 time frame. Where do they go?? I’m tired of the daily BS I have to put up with as a developer but don’t know where else to go. I don’t want to be any kind of manager (double and triple booked meetings aren’t my thing).
  • rlboston 5y ago
    My perception, I came to the game late, is it's SOOOO much cheaper to hire right out of school. Experience is expensive. I graduated in 2000 and there were 250,000 open entry-level positions promptly filled byu 250,000 H1B visas.
  • ritchie1270 5y ago
    I know this is a cynical take, but I think a big part of the youth focus is how easy it is to take advantage of the young. I'm a bit over 50. I have a wife, child, house, and obligations outside work. I'll put in 40 - 45 hours a week and I'll go home. When I was 22, I had some weeks when I put in over 100 hours. There's no scenario where that happens today.
• e40 5y ago
  and then yell at all the kids in the room The idea of that is just so hilarious to me, but I totally get it. When you have groups of 20 somethings without any older leadership, they can obvious do really amazing things. But, sometimes you get a group of them that just have no clue about things they will learn in the coming decades. When I started in the 80's, there were older, more experienced people around. I felt it was my job to hoover up all the wisdom and knowledge they had. I watched Bill Joy and Sam Leffler pour over just acquired code from BBN. That code? TCP/IP that would be merged into Berkeley UNIX. There are so many times I peered over shoulders just to watch something I barely understood. I hope this sort of thing happens today. I just never read about it (and I might not be looking in the right places).