14 ms·

Silicon Valley ageism versus the productivity of famous inventors

86 points by dollar 12y ago

gmarx 12y ago
For Edison and Ford at least I guess a lot of those later patents were done by underlings and the boss man put hsi name on it. I couldn't tell if the analysis accounted for that
- jtbigwoo 12y ago
  You're probably right, but the articles I've read suggests that Ford and Edison continued tinkering and working right up to the end. Edison was in his 30's when he invented the light bulb and the phonograph. He was in his 40's when he invented the motion picture camera and made a bunch of improvements to battery technology. I've read stories that Ford was still tinkering with engine technology when he was in his 60's and 70's.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Edison didn't invent the lightbulb by any means. [1] In fact, the lightbulb didn't really have much of a singular inventor - it was a gradual and independent research process. Edison has the credit of addressing the shortcomings in previous lightbulb designs so as to make mass commercial production feasible. [1] http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx
    - cgh 12y ago
      Edison didn't invent the motion picture camera either: "The first motion-picture camera was invented by the Frenchman Louis Le Prince in the 1880s, while working in Leeds, England." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film_technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film_technology
    - saalweachter 12y ago
      I recently had the chance to view the exhibit on the light bulb in the Smithsonian, and learned something I hadn't known before: the big advance Edison made in light bulbs was a less bright light bulb. Previous electric lights were too blinding to use in most applications. Edison's light bulbs were easy on the eyes. When he helped wire up the Library of Congress, he insisted that all of the bulbs be left bare, so you could marvel in their non-blinding beauty.
    - snowwrestler 12y ago
      Well that's probably even more analogous to modern-day tech startups, few of which actually invent anything new themselves. The point is that Edison led hard, consequential engineering work well past his 20s and 30s.
      - CmonDev 12y ago
        By he also stole some patents from Tesla. Not every modern-day start-up is doing that.
- jpmattia 12y ago
  > For Edison and Ford at least I guess a lot of those later patents were done by underlings and the boss man put hsi name on it. In principle, the rules for inventorship for patents differ substantially from the rules for authorship in academic papers: Inventorship is determined by law, authorship is determined by, well, custom. eg: http://www.unemed.com/blog/how-to-determine-who-is-an-inventor-on-a-patent-unraveling-inventorship-vs-authorship http://www.unemed.com/blog/how-to-determine-who-is-an-invent...
oillio 12y ago
The cynic in me says that this may not be the point of SV ageism. Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. They don't have the proverbial family to feed, and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner. If you want even more cynicism, it is also possible that less scrupulous VCs find younger founders easier to manipulate, over promise, over work, and under deliver.
- zenogais 12y ago
  Sounds pretty reasonable rather than cynical to me.
- discardorama 12y ago
  > Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. ... and they're easier to take advantage of.
- Magi604 12y ago
  I actually have yet to read about that angle. Nice one! Maybe a little cynical, but also makes sense.
- jackgavigan 12y ago
  > Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. Also, they have a lot of energy and enthusiasm, so they work longer hours than older founders. > They don't have the proverbial family to feed... ..or distract them (e.g. "I want to be home in time to put the kids to bed." vs "I pulled an all-nighter and finally cracked that problem." > ..and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner. That lack of experience also means that they are less likely to reject an idea as too crazy/off-the-wall (which is what many people think the best ideas are, at first glance). Older founders are more likely to perceive the risks and downsides, and be more tentative and less aggressive as a result.
  - Swizec 12y ago
    As I like to say: I had my startup stint when I was 20/21. Now that I'm older (27), it's time to start a real business. The kind that takes 5 years to build, delivers solid value to customers, makes two or three people independently wealthy, and feeds twenty families. But no VC is ever going to fund that.
rayiner 12y ago
Relevant: http://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-genius-aging.html http://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-ge... ("By 2000, great work before age 30 almost never happened in any of the three fields. In physics, great achievements by age 40 occurred in only 19 percent of cases by the year 2000, and in chemistry, it almost never occurred.")
- NhanH 12y ago
  One thing comes right away to mind when reading those numbers: the average age for professor getting tenured is ~39. Is it really a creativity issue, or a more structural issue on process in university (ie you can't do great achievement before having your career settled).
  - HarryHirsch 12y ago
    You'd think it has to do with the amount of deep background knowledge required to come up with useful model systems. Chemistry and biology are messy subjects. Who again said that he wanted to do mathematics until the age of twenty, then physics until the age of 30, chemistry until 40, biology until 50, and the classics of the rest of his life?
- denom 12y ago
  In the arts there is almost a complete inversion of this observation, e.g. Wallace Stevens did his best work late in life, and many others perfected their aesthetic expression in advanced years. The work that software developers do is different than the work of top theoretical physicists. So it's hard to say what the advantage of youth is with regards to a holistic creativity.
- DocSavage 12y ago
  It's odd that math, physics, and chemistry breakthroughs are often brought forth in silicon valley ageism discussions. How often are the main problems in dot-coms solved with pure research as opposed to trying to creatively work with given building blocks to construct a potentially evolving gizmo? Creative writing might be more like software development (and entrepreneurship) than theoretical physics or pure math. Writers have a general objective that may evolve, an internal toolkit they've acquired over 10k+ hours of writing, and the task of building something where all the pieces work together to achieve the objective. And does anyone think writers in college are better than seasoned veterans that have been writing professionally for decades? Also, variation in skill level among people >> Variation of an individual's ability across her lifetime.
trhway 12y ago
the fact that at the age 42 i'd still need to be funded if i was doing startup tells a lot about my entrepreneurial abilities :)
- ojbyrne 12y ago
  Funding is about more than just the money. It brings credibility, connections and publicity.
- ProAm 12y ago
  That you started late?
peterwwillis 12y ago
What does filing patents have to do with productivity? Might as well title it "the smartest people in the entire world" and stack it next to lists of people who have filed the most patents. It does however follow that the older you are, the more time you have to file patents.
Multiplayer 12y ago
I can see this a few ways. I'm almost 50. I've had a couple of exits. I've retired and unretired. Being young can have 2 critical advantages: 1. Unlimited time, minimal financial needs. No kids. No spouse. No commitments. You can GRIND away at a problem. You can live on almost nothing. 2. Clean sheet perspective on technology, capabilities, costs, etc. My first T1 of bandwidth (1mbit roughly) to my colocated server cost me $3000 a month. It's hard for me to get my head around what's real now with the drag of so much accumulated experiential cruft. They are more likely to say, hey how about we do it this way, when I wouldn't bother because of outdated perspective on costs and capabilities. Now, I have a ton of experience on how the world really works, which is great. Especially people knowledge. But it's really hard to relate to how my kids see the world, having always been connected at high speeds, etc.
mmm123 12y ago
Has there been any stats on the funding rates of applicants by age? It could be that there are more young people applying for funding in general, causing this skew.
- michaelochurch 12y ago
  I think that this is probably right. There's some ageism in Silicon Valley, but probably not as much as the VCs are accused of (even if I like to bash the chickenhawks who fund talentless young zeroes like Lucas Duplan and Evan Spiegel). A lot of it, I'd imagine, is self-selection. At age 50, people who have their shit together don't want to deal with the humiliation of participating preferred, obscenely long deliberation periods before a funding decision, and investors who'll readily funnel your ideas (and your best people) to a competitor if they change their mind on you. They have other options, whereas the 23-year-olds often don't. In fact, that's one of the less-often-said (because, applied to individuals, it's still bigoted and obnoxious) matters in Silicon Valley. There is an adverse selection when it comes to age. Talented older people tend to have enough experience not to take the typical Silicon Valley deal (especially for startup employees) so what's left is a set of people who may be old or talented but aren't both (and, of course, most are neither, i.e. young and talentless). Most of the really good, 50+ programmers that I know either want to do real technology (not Snapchat bullshit) or have moved into finance. In fact, in those domains, you find that the older programmers are often the best ones by far. Some of the very good older programmers will look for funding, but they're more likely to go into consulting and bootstrap than deal with the 6-month job interview and aggressive (and typically illegal, in terms of what things are discussed) back-channel reference checking that seems to come with the VC territory.
jdawg77 12y ago
Interesting to see this and given I filed my first patent pending last month, thought I'd share my thoughts. I'm $100k+ in debt; I grew up poor. My parents live on a fixed income, I send them money every month and last year, in 2014, I made the least annual income I have made since 2003. As a divorced father of two, who was fired from his last full time job, and can't disclose due to NDA prior work, I've been self employed the majority of my adult life since 2006. Since September, I'm a former alcoholic, which is news to many - I had drank regularly since I was 18 and only recently realized I could correlate a bit of my drinking to early communication issues that resulted in the "low end," classes in my first years of education. I digress, though, as the first one in my family in three generations to receive a bachelor's degree, life in college and out is hard. In my family, during my "prime," my business expenses were over 100K per year in 2009 and 2010. However, things came crashing down and changed. It's a long, long story. Drinking helps zero. Now, my software is free, I filed a patent pending because I need credibility. The world is flat, as Thomas Friedman said, and growing more so. Ten years ago I spent $50K on my own tools. If I had known then that I'd need them in 2013, and 2014 again, I would have done what I'm doing now. Made them free. Open source. Given it away, hoping that with better tools, everybody benefits. That's the dream. We got rejected by Ycombinator. I've worked with guys in the news way way more than I'll ever be, and I tell a lot of stories, incidentally, most are true. Thanks for reading, I love this site and learn from it daily.
- treyfitty 12y ago
  Fascinating. Mind chatting more about it? I'm genuinely interested how you dealt with all that. My email is in my profile
  - jdawg77 12y ago
    Actually, your email isn't (that I could see) in your profile. Odds are good, "Low karma." Geniuses built hacker news so that spammers like I used to be couldn't alter the system, have too much influence and more. So no, I can't see your email, I can't mentally parse it from your username, etc. My contact info is in my profile - eg, if you know I'm Jeremy Goodrich, I'm not too hard to find. All too easy, in fact. I'm the only one of the sixty to one hundred folks with the same name who's been in digital marketing & search / information retrieval since finished college at University of Oregon. Feel free to write, I like chatting with people. Thanks for reading, listening and here's to a fun conversation.
ryandrake 12y ago
I'm not sure I get how "number of patents" qualifies as a measure of (or even a proxy for) productivity. In most companies I've worked, those quarterly patent award ceremonies were where they trotted out all those folks who either had nothing else to do besides filing patents, or managers who put their names on the vague ideas their directs were working on. The rest of us were busy actually making the products. I guess this also means those of us who refuse to participate in the patent system on ethical grounds are the least productive people in the world?
empressplay 12y ago
There isn't any ageism in Silicon Valley. Younger people are just more willing and capable of filling the required roles. Besides, there are plenty of older people in SV. I see them all the time! This article is just yet another slander to find controversy when there is none. If you're older and you're not doing well in SV you should take a look at yourself. Maybe you just don't have good ideas anymore. Maybe you just don't cut it, and should find a place somewhere else. There are plenty of other careers you could switch to that happily accept older people. But there is no ageism in Silicon Valley. Anyone who says there is is just trying to start trouble. (Paraphrasing arguments made against the suggestion of sexism in SV on HN yesterday. Hurts when you're on the receiving end, no?)
- empressplay 12y ago
  Down-modding this into oblivion just proves my point =)
  - venantius 12y ago
    From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
  - dannyr 12y ago
    People probably just didn't notice that you're being sarcastic.
    - empressplay 12y ago
      Yes I was. Lamenting bias when it's applied negatively to you is all well and good but when you're happy to ignore it when it's applied to someone else is self-centred. If there are biases in SV that need to be dealt with so that _everyone_ succeeds or fails purely based on _merit_ they all need to be dealt with, not just "whatever affects me".
empressplay 12y ago
So let me get this straight: if you can't get VC funding and you're a woman it's not because of your gender, but because of your (perceived lack of) competency; however, if you can't get VC funding and you're an older man it's because of unfair ageism? You folks really don't see a double-standard here? Please feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong here.
- nl 12y ago
  Using the term "you folks" implies that HN has a consensus view on these topics. It doesn't. Looking at the recent "What Silicon Valley thinks of Women" story[1] it's easy to see the deep chains of discussion because of the opposing viewpoints. Accusations of double standards need to be made against individual commentators. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8963658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8963658
astrocyte 12y ago
Ageism, Sexism, Racism ... When people want to solve a problem, the problem gets solved. There's no proof for the money/power men that solving (ageism,sexism,and racism) increases profits. So, it takes a back seat. The brightest minds in the world are centered on how to manipulate the weakest among us. Sounds like a young uncultured/unlearned man's testosterone fueled dream. High cost of living/High tax narrowing focus even further. The crucible . Why do the most significant discoveries center around the age of 30? Because, by then, you've participated in the rat race long enough to understand there is slim to no value in it or the majority of products pushed out of it. You've seen failures. You lived through enough specific experiences to be able to generalize. In your higher order representations of the world you've built, you grasp a deeper meaning to life, society, and knowledge and are truly able to give birth to an idea that serves to truly, deeply, and positively impact the world. So, what happened to equality/diversity/society? Profits (A short sighted focus that is most easily ingrained in young males who have been taught that the pinnacle of life is carving out a little empire for yourself) .. 'Some' older men figure out the folly in this pursuit as they do/don't achieve this goal in a timely fashion. 30 sounds about that age when that happens. Of course, there are some of us who never grow up. Story of the world.
rdl 12y ago
I don't think SV is ageist so much as "anti people who were working before the Internet" -- people like Vint Cerf are respected (was on the Internet from early), but the random MBAs who joined/founded startups in the late 1990s with no tech experience were pretty useless.

86 points by dollar 12y ago

gmarx 12y ago

For Edison and Ford at least I guess a lot of those later patents were done by underlings and the boss man put hsi name on it. I couldn't tell if the analysis accounted for that

jtbigwoo 12y ago
You're probably right, but the articles I've read suggests that Ford and Edison continued tinkering and working right up to the end. Edison was in his 30's when he invented the light bulb and the phonograph. He was in his 40's when he invented the motion picture camera and made a bunch of improvements to battery technology. I've read stories that Ford was still tinkering with engine technology when he was in his 60's and 70's.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Edison didn't invent the lightbulb by any means. [1] In fact, the lightbulb didn't really have much of a singular inventor - it was a gradual and independent research process. Edison has the credit of addressing the shortcomings in previous lightbulb designs so as to make mass commercial production feasible. [1] http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx http://www.bulbs.com/learning/history.aspx
  - cgh 12y ago
    Edison didn't invent the motion picture camera either: "The first motion-picture camera was invented by the Frenchman Louis Le Prince in the 1880s, while working in Leeds, England." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film_technology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film_technology
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    I recently had the chance to view the exhibit on the light bulb in the Smithsonian, and learned something I hadn't known before: the big advance Edison made in light bulbs was a less bright light bulb. Previous electric lights were too blinding to use in most applications. Edison's light bulbs were easy on the eyes. When he helped wire up the Library of Congress, he insisted that all of the bulbs be left bare, so you could marvel in their non-blinding beauty.
  - snowwrestler 12y ago
    Well that's probably even more analogous to modern-day tech startups, few of which actually invent anything new themselves. The point is that Edison led hard, consequential engineering work well past his 20s and 30s.
    - CmonDev 12y ago
      By he also stole some patents from Tesla. Not every modern-day start-up is doing that.
jpmattia 12y ago
> For Edison and Ford at least I guess a lot of those later patents were done by underlings and the boss man put hsi name on it. In principle, the rules for inventorship for patents differ substantially from the rules for authorship in academic papers: Inventorship is determined by law, authorship is determined by, well, custom. eg: http://www.unemed.com/blog/how-to-determine-who-is-an-inventor-on-a-patent-unraveling-inventorship-vs-authorship http://www.unemed.com/blog/how-to-determine-who-is-an-invent...

oillio 12y ago

The cynic in me says that this may not be the point of SV ageism. Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. They don't have the proverbial family to feed, and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner. If you want even more cynicism, it is also possible that less scrupulous VCs find younger founders easier to manipulate, over promise, over work, and under deliver.

zenogais 12y ago
Sounds pretty reasonable rather than cynical to me.
discardorama 12y ago
> Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. ... and they're easier to take advantage of.
Magi604 12y ago
I actually have yet to read about that angle. Nice one! Maybe a little cynical, but also makes sense.
jackgavigan 12y ago
> Maybe young founders are preferred because they are cheap and they fail fast. Also, they have a lot of energy and enthusiasm, so they work longer hours than older founders. > They don't have the proverbial family to feed... ..or distract them (e.g. "I want to be home in time to put the kids to bed." vs "I pulled an all-nighter and finally cracked that problem." > ..and they don't have enough life experience to worry about going head first in a direction that may contain a blind corner. That lack of experience also means that they are less likely to reject an idea as too crazy/off-the-wall (which is what many people think the best ideas are, at first glance). Older founders are more likely to perceive the risks and downsides, and be more tentative and less aggressive as a result.
- Swizec 12y ago
  As I like to say: I had my startup stint when I was 20/21. Now that I'm older (27), it's time to start a real business. The kind that takes 5 years to build, delivers solid value to customers, makes two or three people independently wealthy, and feeds twenty families. But no VC is ever going to fund that.

rayiner 12y ago

Relevant: http://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-genius-aging.html http://www.livescience.com/16911-scientific-breakthroughs-ge... ("By 2000, great work before age 30 almost never happened in any of the three fields. In physics, great achievements by age 40 occurred in only 19 percent of cases by the year 2000, and in chemistry, it almost never occurred.")

NhanH 12y ago
One thing comes right away to mind when reading those numbers: the average age for professor getting tenured is ~39. Is it really a creativity issue, or a more structural issue on process in university (ie you can't do great achievement before having your career settled).
- HarryHirsch 12y ago
  You'd think it has to do with the amount of deep background knowledge required to come up with useful model systems. Chemistry and biology are messy subjects. Who again said that he wanted to do mathematics until the age of twenty, then physics until the age of 30, chemistry until 40, biology until 50, and the classics of the rest of his life?
denom 12y ago
In the arts there is almost a complete inversion of this observation, e.g. Wallace Stevens did his best work late in life, and many others perfected their aesthetic expression in advanced years. The work that software developers do is different than the work of top theoretical physicists. So it's hard to say what the advantage of youth is with regards to a holistic creativity.
DocSavage 12y ago
It's odd that math, physics, and chemistry breakthroughs are often brought forth in silicon valley ageism discussions. How often are the main problems in dot-coms solved with pure research as opposed to trying to creatively work with given building blocks to construct a potentially evolving gizmo? Creative writing might be more like software development (and entrepreneurship) than theoretical physics or pure math. Writers have a general objective that may evolve, an internal toolkit they've acquired over 10k+ hours of writing, and the task of building something where all the pieces work together to achieve the objective. And does anyone think writers in college are better than seasoned veterans that have been writing professionally for decades? Also, variation in skill level among people >> Variation of an individual's ability across her lifetime.

trhway 12y ago

the fact that at the age 42 i'd still need to be funded if i was doing startup tells a lot about my entrepreneurial abilities :)

ojbyrne 12y ago
Funding is about more than just the money. It brings credibility, connections and publicity.
ProAm 12y ago
That you started late?

peterwwillis 12y ago

What does filing patents have to do with productivity? Might as well title it "the smartest people in the entire world" and stack it next to lists of people who have filed the most patents. It does however follow that the older you are, the more time you have to file patents.

Multiplayer 12y ago

I can see this a few ways. I'm almost 50. I've had a couple of exits. I've retired and unretired. Being young can have 2 critical advantages: 1. Unlimited time, minimal financial needs. No kids. No spouse. No commitments. You can GRIND away at a problem. You can live on almost nothing. 2. Clean sheet perspective on technology, capabilities, costs, etc. My first T1 of bandwidth (1mbit roughly) to my colocated server cost me $3000 a month. It's hard for me to get my head around what's real now with the drag of so much accumulated experiential cruft. They are more likely to say, hey how about we do it this way, when I wouldn't bother because of outdated perspective on costs and capabilities. Now, I have a ton of experience on how the world really works, which is great. Especially people knowledge. But it's really hard to relate to how my kids see the world, having always been connected at high speeds, etc.

mmm123 12y ago

Has there been any stats on the funding rates of applicants by age? It could be that there are more young people applying for funding in general, causing this skew.

michaelochurch 12y ago
I think that this is probably right. There's some ageism in Silicon Valley, but probably not as much as the VCs are accused of (even if I like to bash the chickenhawks who fund talentless young zeroes like Lucas Duplan and Evan Spiegel). A lot of it, I'd imagine, is self-selection. At age 50, people who have their shit together don't want to deal with the humiliation of participating preferred, obscenely long deliberation periods before a funding decision, and investors who'll readily funnel your ideas (and your best people) to a competitor if they change their mind on you. They have other options, whereas the 23-year-olds often don't. In fact, that's one of the less-often-said (because, applied to individuals, it's still bigoted and obnoxious) matters in Silicon Valley. There is an adverse selection when it comes to age. Talented older people tend to have enough experience not to take the typical Silicon Valley deal (especially for startup employees) so what's left is a set of people who may be old or talented but aren't both (and, of course, most are neither, i.e. young and talentless). Most of the really good, 50+ programmers that I know either want to do real technology (not Snapchat bullshit) or have moved into finance. In fact, in those domains, you find that the older programmers are often the best ones by far. Some of the very good older programmers will look for funding, but they're more likely to go into consulting and bootstrap than deal with the 6-month job interview and aggressive (and typically illegal, in terms of what things are discussed) back-channel reference checking that seems to come with the VC territory.

jdawg77 12y ago

Interesting to see this and given I filed my first patent pending last month, thought I'd share my thoughts. I'm $100k+ in debt; I grew up poor. My parents live on a fixed income, I send them money every month and last year, in 2014, I made the least annual income I have made since 2003. As a divorced father of two, who was fired from his last full time job, and can't disclose due to NDA prior work, I've been self employed the majority of my adult life since 2006. Since September, I'm a former alcoholic, which is news to many - I had drank regularly since I was 18 and only recently realized I could correlate a bit of my drinking to early communication issues that resulted in the "low end," classes in my first years of education. I digress, though, as the first one in my family in three generations to receive a bachelor's degree, life in college and out is hard. In my family, during my "prime," my business expenses were over 100K per year in 2009 and 2010. However, things came crashing down and changed. It's a long, long story. Drinking helps zero. Now, my software is free, I filed a patent pending because I need credibility. The world is flat, as Thomas Friedman said, and growing more so. Ten years ago I spent $50K on my own tools. If I had known then that I'd need them in 2013, and 2014 again, I would have done what I'm doing now. Made them free. Open source. Given it away, hoping that with better tools, everybody benefits. That's the dream. We got rejected by Ycombinator. I've worked with guys in the news way way more than I'll ever be, and I tell a lot of stories, incidentally, most are true. Thanks for reading, I love this site and learn from it daily.

treyfitty 12y ago
Fascinating. Mind chatting more about it? I'm genuinely interested how you dealt with all that. My email is in my profile
- jdawg77 12y ago
  Actually, your email isn't (that I could see) in your profile. Odds are good, "Low karma." Geniuses built hacker news so that spammers like I used to be couldn't alter the system, have too much influence and more. So no, I can't see your email, I can't mentally parse it from your username, etc. My contact info is in my profile - eg, if you know I'm Jeremy Goodrich, I'm not too hard to find. All too easy, in fact. I'm the only one of the sixty to one hundred folks with the same name who's been in digital marketing & search / information retrieval since finished college at University of Oregon. Feel free to write, I like chatting with people. Thanks for reading, listening and here's to a fun conversation.

ryandrake 12y ago

I'm not sure I get how "number of patents" qualifies as a measure of (or even a proxy for) productivity. In most companies I've worked, those quarterly patent award ceremonies were where they trotted out all those folks who either had nothing else to do besides filing patents, or managers who put their names on the vague ideas their directs were working on. The rest of us were busy actually making the products. I guess this also means those of us who refuse to participate in the patent system on ethical grounds are the least productive people in the world?

empressplay 12y ago

There isn't any ageism in Silicon Valley. Younger people are just more willing and capable of filling the required roles. Besides, there are plenty of older people in SV. I see them all the time! This article is just yet another slander to find controversy when there is none. If you're older and you're not doing well in SV you should take a look at yourself. Maybe you just don't have good ideas anymore. Maybe you just don't cut it, and should find a place somewhere else. There are plenty of other careers you could switch to that happily accept older people. But there is no ageism in Silicon Valley. Anyone who says there is is just trying to start trouble. (Paraphrasing arguments made against the suggestion of sexism in SV on HN yesterday. Hurts when you're on the receiving end, no?)

empressplay 12y ago
Down-modding this into oblivion just proves my point =)
- venantius 12y ago
  From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."
- dannyr 12y ago
  People probably just didn't notice that you're being sarcastic.
  - empressplay 12y ago
    Yes I was. Lamenting bias when it's applied negatively to you is all well and good but when you're happy to ignore it when it's applied to someone else is self-centred. If there are biases in SV that need to be dealt with so that _everyone_ succeeds or fails purely based on _merit_ they all need to be dealt with, not just "whatever affects me".

empressplay 12y ago

So let me get this straight: if you can't get VC funding and you're a woman it's not because of your gender, but because of your (perceived lack of) competency; however, if you can't get VC funding and you're an older man it's because of unfair ageism? You folks really don't see a double-standard here? Please feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong here.

nl 12y ago
Using the term "you folks" implies that HN has a consensus view on these topics. It doesn't. Looking at the recent "What Silicon Valley thinks of Women" story[1] it's easy to see the deep chains of discussion because of the opposing viewpoints. Accusations of double standards need to be made against individual commentators. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8963658 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8963658

astrocyte 12y ago

Ageism, Sexism, Racism ... When people want to solve a problem, the problem gets solved. There's no proof for the money/power men that solving (ageism,sexism,and racism) increases profits. So, it takes a back seat. The brightest minds in the world are centered on how to manipulate the weakest among us. Sounds like a young uncultured/unlearned man's testosterone fueled dream. High cost of living/High tax narrowing focus even further. The crucible . Why do the most significant discoveries center around the age of 30? Because, by then, you've participated in the rat race long enough to understand there is slim to no value in it or the majority of products pushed out of it. You've seen failures. You lived through enough specific experiences to be able to generalize. In your higher order representations of the world you've built, you grasp a deeper meaning to life, society, and knowledge and are truly able to give birth to an idea that serves to truly, deeply, and positively impact the world. So, what happened to equality/diversity/society? Profits (A short sighted focus that is most easily ingrained in young males who have been taught that the pinnacle of life is carving out a little empire for yourself) .. 'Some' older men figure out the folly in this pursuit as they do/don't achieve this goal in a timely fashion. 30 sounds about that age when that happens. Of course, there are some of us who never grow up. Story of the world.

rdl 12y ago

I don't think SV is ageist so much as "anti people who were working before the Internet" -- people like Vint Cerf are respected (was on the Internet from early), but the random MBAs who joined/founded startups in the late 1990s with no tech experience were pretty useless.