7 ms·

This seems to come up a lot, and I agree that age discrimination is an issue. However, there are some obvious reasons for it outside of the the "we think older

This seems to come up a lot, and I agree that age discrimination is an issue. However, there are some obvious reasons for it outside of the the "we think older people are stupid" line. Younger people will often be willing to work more, for less pay, in more marginal conditions. (Witness the discussion a while back about whether ping pong tables and catered food was a perk or a red flag) Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc). We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension. Finally, tech startups today are largely focused on the "exit": it's not about building and maintaining a product in the long term. Older employees have the planning, analysis, and maintenance experience to establish a product vision for the next decade. But the startup founder (by and large) doesn't want to think of a product over a decade; it's all about MVP, pivots, and fast exits. Not that any of that is bad, it just doesn't fit well with the average older employee. I'll admit when hiring I have a little bit of the opposite bias. Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS". Hey man, we're still maintaining COBOL apps here, slow your roll. It's all about long term planning and maintenance for us.

Retric 13y ago
I find it odd when start-ups talk about the top recent grad vs the average older worker. The best experienced workers code circles around EVERYBODY else end of story. The only real issue for most startups is convincing them to actually work for you when they have seen enough BS that there harder to convince than most VS's.
- asciimo 13y ago
  If by "code circles around EVERYBODY" you're implying quality rather than quantity, then this is not valuable for most young companies. The quantity of atrocious code produced by some young developers is astounding. Often, that code "works," and the young company is pleased.
  - mtrimpe 13y ago
    Experience will also make you much smarter in knowing what you should (not) spend energy on. Startups don't die from producing too little code; they die from not writing enough code that really matters to the end user.
elmuchoprez 13y ago
"We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension." Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. If you solve our natural tendency to surround ourselves with people who look and act like us, you'll probably have solved racism, sexism, ageism and just about every other -ism. I' not saying we shouldn't challenge this instinct, but I also don't think we should be surprised that white, 25-year-old, male founders have a tendency to hire other white males in their mid-twenties.
- jtbigwoo 13y ago
  >> Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. It doesn't have to be an organized plot to be sinister. Thousands of people acting semi-independently can end up with a sinister outcome.
- RogerL 13y ago
  No one is expressing surprise. We are expressing reasons for why it needs to change.
sbarre 13y ago
It is the human equivalent of "right tool for the job" I would think.. Your point about homogeneity is an important one as well. In small organizations, cultural fit - opinions about that culture notwithstanding - is much more important than in larger ones, for the reasons you listed and more. That said, a wise co-worker once said "you can't have juniors without seniors". While younger workers can be a boon to startups from a price/performance point of view, it is important to also have experienced, if more expensive, employees who can provide guidance and direction to those juniors. Otherwise, you can find yourself a few years down the road to growth with massive technical debt and a naive technical platform that was built with good intentions but is now full of problems that are extremely hard to correct. Yup, I'm speaking from experience here. ;-)
alextingle 13y ago
You are talking rubbish. > Younger people will often be willing to work more... Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet. > Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms So, 1 year of "shiny new tech" > 1 year of "shiny new tech" + 20 years of other relevant experience? Riiiight. > homogeneity is valuable to an early startup Wow. Homogeneity is a killer for any team. The whole point of building a team is to find people who can work together, and become more than the sum of their parts. For that, you need people whose strengths cover for their team-mates' weaknesses... the very opposite of homogeneity. OK, it's not all rubbish. I agree with this... > Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS
- bilbo0s 13y ago
  "...> Younger people will often be willing to work more... Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet..." You conveniently glossed over his main point... that young people will work for less money. I think that's a HUGE selling point.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Young people work for less money because they are inexperienced. The older worker has to provide the same value for their higher pay via experience. And this is where the problem comes into play: the potential employer might not see the older worker as being worth it, especially if it doesn't appear that they can do more than the younger worker. They might also see potential (room for growth) in the younger candidate that they can't see in older ones. And this is all quite reasonable....also remember that most companies are pyramids, with lots of openings in the bottom and much fewer as you go up.... So you as the tech employee must be aware that your life is short if you don't continuously grow your skills so you don't become an unjustifiable expense later in life. Not only that, but you have to become an expert in marketing these skills.
    - Systemic33 13y ago
kiba 13y ago
Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc). They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. Older people just have more experience, more knowledge, just by the fact that they have more time to accumulate more knowledge, so they may often may be more productive than 2 or 3 youngsters combined and still have time for family and other hobbies. Of course, that's only true if the older technical folks don't coast and continue to learn since when they were young. (Yes I am a 22 years old who uses modern frameworks like ruby on rails and meteor. The exact profile that software firms want to hire.)
- nailer 13y ago
  > They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. I think you mean 'naive' or 'inexperienced'. Stupidity ('dumb' isn't PC, but nobody seems to care anyway) is generally thought of as something inherent.
  - VLM 13y ago
    Could be interpreted as a darwinian selection pressure such that there are smart and dumb noobs, but by the time they're old timers, only the smart ones remain. (Insert Peter principle jokes, who goes into management jokes, etc)
nailer 13y ago
> Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? The flipside: I'm old now, but can remember when I was young in the early 2000s. At the time I was in the Unix space. Older engineers were adamantly pushing Solaris 6 and 8 on incredibly overpriced, poorly performing UltraSPARC over Red Hat on Xeon, for the blindingly obvious reason than they didn't really like learning anything new. Of course, that was private: to anyone unfamiliar with the platform, they'd simply say that 'you couldn't get support for Linux'. They knew this was false - IBM and Red Hat were banging down their door to sell support contracts (still far cheaper than Sun's rubbish hardware + good support contracts), and Red Hat had hired a lot of Sun's staff - but if they made enough noise, they thought they could slow things down. It worked, for a couple of years. (Later on I realised that enterprise architecture purchasing choices are frequently based on dinners, golf tournaments, and straight up dropping cash into your account, but that's a separate story. ) Short version: older engineers can be overly change averse, much like younger engineers can be overly enthusiastic about change.
- malaporte 13y ago
  Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones. I've known some older engineers (older than me, heh) make crap decisions because they didn't like change. Then I've seen younger engineers completely mess up good, maintainable code because they think that knowing one language makes them masters of software development. I try not to hire any of those two persons. BUT, I've also seen young programmers completely fail because they couldn't adapt to a newer (or older...) technology. And I know some very much older programmers who are constantly reading up about new stuff, and loving it. Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are.
  - nailer 13y ago
    > Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones. I don't think we are. I for one judge individuals as individuals. That doesn't mean we can't observe the wider group and make observations. > Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are. Of course.
melling 13y ago
Laugh out loud funny. My first job out of school was doing NeXTstep on real next hardware (early 90's). Fast forward many years, and I'm hanging out on my couch working on my iOS app (i.e. essentially doing the same stuff as my first job). I don't have a plan other than to make something useful and hope it gains traction. I "release early, and release often", and I work on whatever I feel like doing on any given day. I've never been paid to write Fortran, and I've only ever seen Cobol once when some cute girl in my college lab needed help, so I gave it a shot.:-) Anyway, I'd say that you're wrong, but the one thing that I have learned over time, is that it would probably be a waste of time, my most precious resource, trying to convince you otherwise. Ok, back to work... By the way, if any of you kids want to help out an old man, here's my app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?... I've got Russian, Chinese, French, German, and Italian versions too. Like Elon says, seek negative feedback... http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/elon-musk-pay-attention-to-negative-feedback-and-solicit-it-particularly-from-friends_b33687 http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/elon-musk-pay-attention...
DanBC 13y ago
> We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension. I'm amazed this attitude has led to law suits. It feels like blatant, unapologetic, discrimination.
- DanBC 13y ago
  HASN'T, obviously.

Retric 13y ago

I find it odd when start-ups talk about the top recent grad vs the average older worker. The best experienced workers code circles around EVERYBODY else end of story. The only real issue for most startups is convincing them to actually work for you when they have seen enough BS that there harder to convince than most VS's.

asciimo 13y ago
If by "code circles around EVERYBODY" you're implying quality rather than quantity, then this is not valuable for most young companies. The quantity of atrocious code produced by some young developers is astounding. Often, that code "works," and the young company is pleased.
- mtrimpe 13y ago
  Experience will also make you much smarter in knowing what you should (not) spend energy on. Startups don't die from producing too little code; they die from not writing enough code that really matters to the end user.

elmuchoprez 13y ago

"We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension." Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. If you solve our natural tendency to surround ourselves with people who look and act like us, you'll probably have solved racism, sexism, ageism and just about every other -ism. I' not saying we shouldn't challenge this instinct, but I also don't think we should be surprised that white, 25-year-old, male founders have a tendency to hire other white males in their mid-twenties.

jtbigwoo 13y ago
>> Homogeneity is also the natural state for human beings and not necessarily a sinister plot. It doesn't have to be an organized plot to be sinister. Thousands of people acting semi-independently can end up with a sinister outcome.
RogerL 13y ago
No one is expressing surprise. We are expressing reasons for why it needs to change.

sbarre 13y ago

It is the human equivalent of "right tool for the job" I would think.. Your point about homogeneity is an important one as well. In small organizations, cultural fit - opinions about that culture notwithstanding - is much more important than in larger ones, for the reasons you listed and more. That said, a wise co-worker once said "you can't have juniors without seniors". While younger workers can be a boon to startups from a price/performance point of view, it is important to also have experienced, if more expensive, employees who can provide guidance and direction to those juniors. Otherwise, you can find yourself a few years down the road to growth with massive technical debt and a naive technical platform that was built with good intentions but is now full of problems that are extremely hard to correct. Yup, I'm speaking from experience here. ;-)

alextingle 13y ago

You are talking rubbish. > Younger people will often be willing to work more... Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet. > Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms So, 1 year of "shiny new tech" > 1 year of "shiny new tech" + 20 years of other relevant experience? Riiiight. > homogeneity is valuable to an early startup Wow. Homogeneity is a killer for any team. The whole point of building a team is to find people who can work together, and become more than the sum of their parts. For that, you need people whose strengths cover for their team-mates' weaknesses... the very opposite of homogeneity. OK, it's not all rubbish. I agree with this... > Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? we should rewrite it all in RoR and JS

bilbo0s 13y ago
"...> Younger people will often be willing to work more... Younger people have to work more, because they don't have enough experience to work efficiently, yet..." You conveniently glossed over his main point... that young people will work for less money. I think that's a HUGE selling point.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Young people work for less money because they are inexperienced. The older worker has to provide the same value for their higher pay via experience. And this is where the problem comes into play: the potential employer might not see the older worker as being worth it, especially if it doesn't appear that they can do more than the younger worker. They might also see potential (room for growth) in the younger candidate that they can't see in older ones. And this is all quite reasonable....also remember that most companies are pyramids, with lots of openings in the bottom and much fewer as you go up.... So you as the tech employee must be aware that your life is short if you don't continuously grow your skills so you don't become an unjustifiable expense later in life. Not only that, but you have to become an expert in marketing these skills.
  - Systemic33 13y ago

kiba 13y ago

Young people have a greater percent of their experience on the most modern platforms and are unlikely to "write FORTRAN in any language" (JS, Ruby, etc). They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. Older people just have more experience, more knowledge, just by the fact that they have more time to accumulate more knowledge, so they may often may be more productive than 2 or 3 youngsters combined and still have time for family and other hobbies. Of course, that's only true if the older technical folks don't coast and continue to learn since when they were young. (Yes I am a 22 years old who uses modern frameworks like ruby on rails and meteor. The exact profile that software firms want to hire.)

nailer 13y ago
> They are also more likely to be dumber and lacking in versatility. I think you mean 'naive' or 'inexperienced'. Stupidity ('dumb' isn't PC, but nobody seems to care anyway) is generally thought of as something inherent.
- VLM 13y ago
  Could be interpreted as a darwinian selection pressure such that there are smart and dumb noobs, but by the time they're old timers, only the smart ones remain. (Insert Peter principle jokes, who goes into management jokes, etc)

nailer 13y ago

> Very young employees can sometimes be too aggressive about "what is this legacy garbage? The flipside: I'm old now, but can remember when I was young in the early 2000s. At the time I was in the Unix space. Older engineers were adamantly pushing Solaris 6 and 8 on incredibly overpriced, poorly performing UltraSPARC over Red Hat on Xeon, for the blindingly obvious reason than they didn't really like learning anything new. Of course, that was private: to anyone unfamiliar with the platform, they'd simply say that 'you couldn't get support for Linux'. They knew this was false - IBM and Red Hat were banging down their door to sell support contracts (still far cheaper than Sun's rubbish hardware + good support contracts), and Red Hat had hired a lot of Sun's staff - but if they made enough noise, they thought they could slow things down. It worked, for a couple of years. (Later on I realised that enterprise architecture purchasing choices are frequently based on dinners, golf tournaments, and straight up dropping cash into your account, but that's a separate story. ) Short version: older engineers can be overly change averse, much like younger engineers can be overly enthusiastic about change.

malaporte 13y ago
Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones. I've known some older engineers (older than me, heh) make crap decisions because they didn't like change. Then I've seen younger engineers completely mess up good, maintainable code because they think that knowing one language makes them masters of software development. I try not to hire any of those two persons. BUT, I've also seen young programmers completely fail because they couldn't adapt to a newer (or older...) technology. And I know some very much older programmers who are constantly reading up about new stuff, and loving it. Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are.
- nailer 13y ago
  > Maybe we should stop putting all older engineers in the same basket, and same thing goes for the younger ones. I don't think we are. I for one judge individuals as individuals. That doesn't mean we can't observe the wider group and make observations. > Bottom line, look at who you're hiring, not only how old they are. Of course.

melling 13y ago

Laugh out loud funny. My first job out of school was doing NeXTstep on real next hardware (early 90's). Fast forward many years, and I'm hanging out on my couch working on my iOS app (i.e. essentially doing the same stuff as my first job). I don't have a plan other than to make something useful and hope it gains traction. I "release early, and release often", and I work on whatever I feel like doing on any given day. I've never been paid to write Fortran, and I've only ever seen Cobol once when some cute girl in my college lab needed help, so I gave it a shot.:-) Anyway, I'd say that you're wrong, but the one thing that I have learned over time, is that it would probably be a waste of time, my most precious resource, trying to convince you otherwise. Ok, back to work... By the way, if any of you kids want to help out an old man, here's my app: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?... I've got Russian, Chinese, French, German, and Italian versions too. Like Elon says, seek negative feedback... http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/elon-musk-pay-attention-to-negative-feedback-and-solicit-it-particularly-from-friends_b33687 http://www.mediabistro.com/appnewser/elon-musk-pay-attention...

DanBC 13y ago

> We've also discussed how homogeneity is valuable to an early startup. Having everyone be culturally similar may allow faster pivoting and interpersonal comprehension. I'm amazed this attitude has led to law suits. It feels like blatant, unapologetic, discrimination.

DanBC 13y ago
HASN'T, obviously.