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Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

75 points by jrs235 11y ago

LoSboccacc 11y ago
silicon valley is plenty of dark or plain bad stuff https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-back-channel-culture-silicon-valleys-war-on-privacy-and-the-juvenility-of-all-of-this/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-back-cha...
- r0naa 11y ago
  I am an outsider, but this is true for pretty much anything in life. There is a always a "dark side" to things. Finger pointing SV as being the mother of all evils is a bit naive. "The grass is always greener..." :)
jv22222 11y ago
This topic keeps coming up. I think someone should start a community for older coders. A place to brainstorm and help each other out. Edit: SilverFox (and Foxess)
- gravity13 11y ago
  Is it really because they're old? Or because they've established they are one trick ponies? I've met young programmers who I wouldn't hire (were it up to me) for the exact same reasons most people wouldn't hire the stereotypical old programmer. 'Legacy' dudes from a time who seemed to understand bad code as a way to always retain a job because who else would understand the shit they do? And then I've also met (and worked with) older programmers who taught me about the almost repetitive cycle of trendy functional languages, the types where I can literally have a two hour long philosophical conversation about design, extremely smart people I would hire. I get the sense this is not entirely about ageism, but rather, the field itself has two different directions for growth.
  - rhaps0dy 11y ago
    >almost repetitive cycle of trendy functional languages This is interesting, please tell me more.
sigden 11y ago
I don't think this is much of a secret.
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
I wonder if there's a difference between the SF Bay Area and the rest of the country, as far as ageism is concerned in tech.
- vermooten 11y ago
  How about 'the rest of the world'?
  - gamesbrainiac 11y ago
    The "rest of the world" is probably happy to ride the hype the SF crowd are cooking. I know a bunch of companies here, who use python not because its a good choice, but its "hip" and they can appear cool and sophisticated.
- solve 11y ago
  Huge difference. CA companies and investors (e.g. YC) specifically require your age to the interviewers. Using YC as an example, many interviewers are happy to publicly boast about using age as primary factor - I can link to to some comments written here on HN. In some other places, e.g. NYC, this is all generally believed to be highly legally-risky and no respectable employer would ever consider doing it. Shame on you CA.
  - blisterpeanuts 11y ago
    Can you provide some links (other than chatboard comments) to substantiate this claim that "CA companies and investors require your age"? https://oag.ca.gov/publications/CRhandbook/ch2 https://oag.ca.gov/publications/CRhandbook/ch2
    - solve 11y ago
      Are you implying that YC doesn't require your age in the interview process? Have you ever even filled out the application form? Let's start with that.
bottled_poe 11y ago
Don't worry, I'm sure the union has your back. What's that? No union in the tech industry?
- nileshtrivedi 11y ago
  Why do we need unions when it's so easy to start a company? There is no monopoly on means of production when it comes to software.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    Sure would be nice to own my company's patent portfolio and to be able to rent it out to them.
  - seiji 11y ago
    The fun part about unions: when you see your company has $200 billion cash in the bank, the union gets together and says "we made that. everyone deserves a raise." If you're a programmer working at Apple or Google making less than ~$3 million per year (or any other large-scale, profitable firm), you're being taken advantage of.
    - michaelochurch 11y ago
      I laugh heartily when management types say they want someone to be "more of a team player". A team player-- that is, a unionist-- is the last thing that Silicon Valley investors and executives want.
PythonicAlpha 11y ago
I guess it is the same old fallacy that crept into some big software companies long time ago. The fallacy is called "speed": Some companies are just looking for young, smart people who can solve problems fast. This fallacy has some correct side: Software development is most of the time about solving problems and when you can solve them faster, you will have the software faster. The fallacy part is, that fast is the only quality you need. With many, smart and young developers right of the college, you can create a huge pile of software in short time ... but you can also create a huge pile of problems in a short time. That is the reason, there are so many quality problems and security troubles around. Those young, smart people just lack the experience to make good design decisions ... and those decisions do not end, when the rough design is done. Those people make fast decisions, but they just lack the experience to oversee the consequences of those decisions. Without also having experienced developers around, which can share their experiences and guide other people, many companies are doomed to have bad quality software also in the future.
- seiji 11y ago
  Some companies are just looking for young, smart people who can solve problems fast. When your company only exists for 6-18 months before being acquired at $2 million per developer, it's worth getting the build-big-who-cares-about-correctness drones in your hand. People with no experience have fewer reservations about being "led" a certain way or actually doing the wrong thing (because they may not have the real-world experience to say "nope, bad idea.") As a bonus, the uninitiated will probably believe well-spoken, optimistic lies about becoming a billion dollar company within a year, everybody gets a Tesla as a bonus next year, etc, to make them work harder for no tangible reward.
sv_muppets_ 11y ago
Let's see - you can get these experienced engineers, who will build a proper platform, a robust architecture, a decent code base, and given the fact they have delivered before, a solution that will provide what the customers want. Or You can have these wet behind the ears fuckers straight from college who will just download a metric shit ton of code via gem install and npm, and then rebuild several wheels in JS, whilst spending all their time on the company engineering blog wanking about how great they are? And the vcs choose youth over experience every time.
- outside1234 11y ago
  Youth also doesn't ask complicated questions, like why is the VC getting 10% and I'm getting 0.05% when I'm doing 10% of the work and the VC 0.05%.
  - blisterpeanuts 11y ago
    How is that complicated? Their game, their rules. You can start your own company and keep 100% of the profits -- your game, your rules.
    - cromulentarian 11y ago
      Or move to a different company that values their engineers more and listen to the others bitch and moan about the "lack of talent".
  - bottled_poe 11y ago
    In my mind, fair ownership is proportional to investment risk. Each owner invests some combination of time and capital. I assume you are an employee, so how much risk are you taking on?
    - zanny 11y ago
      If you aren't already wealthy, and its a startup - which means you pretty much selling you life to the thing - than everything you have. A VC might invest a million in ten different companies, but they often still have another 10 in traditional stocks to fall back on if all their ventures fail and they can continue to sit pretty. Their investment in the company is mathematically significantly larger than an employee, but that isn't how it feels when the business goes belly up. The VC writes off another failure, made another million somewhere else, and meanwhile the dev is distraught with blaming himself for basically his lifes work failing. Yes, there can be role reversal there, it is not absolute, but it is the average. Just because some have and some have not does not mean someone can not put in a lot more of themself into a project. There are enough VCs that got rich off of being the developer that they probably recognize the difference. And yes, that should hold weight when you only want to give the guy that makes the dream the reality .05% while a guy surfing waves after doing a VC round on a yacht providing the money to make it happen can expect incredible returns if the dream succeeds.
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
How is this a dark secret? This is true for almost all industries is it not? Most business want young hires because the work more (in quantity, not talking about quality here), and can be trained to fit the organization's needs.
- justincormack 11y ago
  No, in many industries experience is (or was) valued. People businesses are generally worse though, look at law firms where the idea is to exploit the young, overwork them, and if they survive that offer them a tiny chance of the huge profits that senior partners share. Apparently this is supposed to be motivational.
dpweb 11y ago
And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment Had to stop reading at this. Completely wrong. It's a move up or stay a programmer for 40 years career. You decide which appeals more to you. People forget that hiring and accessing talent is mostly done quite poorly. There are not many unemployed programmers and the reasons why they are unemployed could be many things.
11thEarlOfMar 11y ago
The issue is really more practical: Young engineers can afford to take more risk, particularly if they are not married. VCs want people who can go all in on an idea that looks like an obvious fail, because often enough, the young engineers who don't know better actually pull it off. These companies become high profile and their founders become famous for being young and wealthy. When VCs profile the successful investments, young, smart and driven all correlate. Experienced engineers with families can seldom afford take those risks.
- rayiner 11y ago
  I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious reasons.
  - jdhawk 11y ago
    Add dependents and things get more complicated.
  - adevine 11y ago
    As someone in a 14 year DINK relationship, I totally disagree with this. When you are in a relationship, decisions need to be collaborative - you can't just chase any opportunity that comes along without thinking about how it will affect your partner. Also, when I was single, I could spend the vast majority of my time working. In a relationship, not only CAN'T I do that (my partner would kill me), but I don't want to; I'd rather spend more time on what is truly important - my personal relationships.
    - rayiner 11y ago
      Even single people should be thinking through high risk decisions, so I don't really see your point there. A dual income couple has inherently more ability to make higher-risk decisions that have larger expected returns. As for time spent working, I'm a bit skeptical of that. It's not like single people don't have socialization needs that need to be met. My single friends spend a lot of time and effort on dating and trying to arrange opportunities to see friends.
SQL2219 11y ago
I see a contradiction in this article: "After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50." If 50 year old programmers are cheaper, why are they being discriminated against? see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689232
- jakeway 11y ago
  Thats what this whole article is about. Older people usually have less ability to take a higher risk, due to family concerns, or other reasons. It is classic supply and demand. Younger programmers are more sought after, therefore demand higher pay.
- adevine 11y ago
  "If 50 year old programmers are cheaper, why are they being discriminated against?" There are lots of other ways to interpret this data. Looking at the graph, note that salaries are actually lower for 20 and 30 somethings that 50+. It's possible that a majority of really good software developers get out of programming by the time they are 50, meaning the overall quality (and salaries) for the oldest developers is lower than average.
leaveyou 11y ago
I'm not "young" anymore and not "old" yet, but I'm quite saddened by this point of view: 'The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”'. Software business seems mostly about exploitation of the naivety of the youngsters and less about software and programming.
- eternalban 11y ago
  Yesterday: Finance ran the world and bankers still do. Today: Software runs the world but developers do not. Get the picture?
- felixgallo 11y ago
  yes, that part is unalloyed nonsense, a just-so story told by the nontechnical to justify ageism. I've got 30 years of experience at this point, and as a result, I grasp new technology faster than most; and the baggage of my years of hard lessons learned is of great worth to my team, employees and employers. As one might expect with any thinking profession.
- Udo 11y ago
  I'm definitely old - going on 40 this year - and I don't recognize myself in that argument either. I think the reason why these points sound like they're made up is because they are, in fact, made up to justify something that's already been decided based on feeling.
  - michaelochurch 11y ago
    31. The fact that 39 is "definitely old" is fucked up. Age discrimination isn't about competence (programmers peak much later than 40) but control. It exists because the VC man-child oligarchy (oddly enough, software inherits the age-discrimination culture from business-culture colonists who'd be "too old" to write code) thinks that people will work harder if this shitty, artificial time pressure is put on them. And, of course, much of the ageism and sexism is unintentional but still exclusionary. See: open-plan offices and the aggressive micromanagement of Scrum. I don't think Scrum and open-plan were devised with ageism in mind, but they contribute massively to the attrition. As people get older, they have less tolerance for macho-subordinate bullshit. This macho-subordinate culture that is imposed on software engineers needs to die. It drives out an incredible amount of talent, makes us an HR nightmare as far as diversity goes, and it has nothing to do with programming; in fact, it detracts from the quality of what is produced. We have to kill it at any cost and professionalize our industry because we can't trust our financial backers.
r0naa 11y ago
There is something I frankly don't understand. Why would anyone discriminate against older, more experienced engineers? Tech companies are spending millions of dollars on their offices and employee-perks to attract and retain talent and yet they discriminate against the category of people who has the most experience? It just boggles my mind. I have a very limited perspective, but come from a country where the ageism is reversed. It is really hard to find work as a new grad. I am now living in Waterloo where the situation seems to be more balanced. But seriously, I would kill for a job where I have the chance to work alongside experienced engineers that can see the "bigger picture" and know a thousand tricks! Could anyone explain where this obsession with youth is coming from? Is that a US or a SV thing?
- rshlo 11y ago
  It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.
  - michaelochurch 11y ago
    It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less. However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks. Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your people. Then you're striving for mediocrity and deserve to fail miserably.
    - r0naa 11y ago
      Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part? I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?
Filthy_casual 11y ago
As a newcomer in my 30's I can only hope that this won't be true in Europe.
- makeitsuckless 11y ago
  It is true in Europe. However, the effect is strongly dampened given all of the social and job protection legislation in most European countries. This means the extend to which an employer can profit from preferring younger employees is very much limited. Also, young people in Europe are generally less sensitive to promises of future riches because of both cultural differences and the fact that it's simply extremely rare that a European startup strikes gold. The agism is the same, but it's easier to overcome since there's less profit in it. There is a downside though: youth unemployment.
makeitsuckless 11y ago
The denialist culture in tech and especially Silicon Valley is so absurd. Even in this thread people are scrambling to come up with excuses. There are many industries around the world where agism is rampant, and there is only ever one excuse: money and control. Young people are cheaper and more gullible. It's not a secret, far from it, it's one of the few things for which the cliche "everybody knows" actually applies. Sure, many industries try to cover up this fact a bit, but only tech makes up such elaborate stories to pretend it isn't all about cold hard cash. Obviously, there is a reason for this beyond creating a flattering self-image: Most other industries that exploit the young and naive have plenty of supply. Good engineers however are rare at any age, so market forces aren't sufficient to maintain this exploitative relationship, it needs to be artificially enforced. Resulting for instance in the insane situation that many older engineers are unemployed whilst the industry is importing cheap young and easily abused engineers from abroad. (Full disclosure: I too used to believe the main cause for that was that these older engineers had outdated knowledge and no longer making the effort to learn anything new, until I became a hiring manager. And although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence (so has the other side btw), I will be so bold as to state that that is a big fat lie.)
- edc117 11y ago
  Speaking as someone in the middle (mid thirties, have my masters, led several teams as a technical lead/architect, been up and down the hiring process), I agree completely. I've met several older developers/engineers that I have the utmost respect for, and so much of this field seems to move in circles. Does anyone outside of SV/startups actually find this ageism nonsense to be anything but a convenient story? I can personally think of two excellent engineers that are 60+, and are some of the most amazingly detailed, experienced and all-around intelligent men I've ever met; age has not dulled them in the slightest.
dominotw 11y ago
It is definitely not a secret. Age bias is so obvious that its actually celebrated. Look at this example from Jetbrains Jobs page https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/ https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/ We offer: Fascinating work in a friendly, young team
- tarr11 11y ago
  Yikes. This needs to called out. They also offer bonuses tied to product releases. Seems like that will create some perverse incentives.
- serve_yay 11y ago
  Insane. This issue is unfortunately what gets me so down about the diversity efforts happening today. We seek to empower a new group of people, more broadly representative of humanity's rich spectrum, to be unhireable at 45.
  - LyndsySimon 11y ago
    Maybe this is just my bias as an anarcho-capitalist, but I don't think it's an issue. If we come to a place where there are scads of older-than-are-hireable-in-Silicon-Valley developers out there, then companies will hire them because they will be willing to work for less than their younger colleagues due to the glut in supply. Those companies will then be able to produce their products more cheaply, and the "young" companies won't be able to compete. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but the premise holds. According to TFA, the salaries for college grads tend to slow their growth over time, eventually contracting as workers near retirement age. That fits very well with my experience - in my 20s I was focused on developing skills and getting paid more. My family was growing and I had a never-ending supply of energy and a deep well of enthusiasm and motviation to keep me going. I'm now in th early 30s, and feel like I'm established in my career. I've made one cross-country move and have proven myself in a startup environment. I see a big difference between myself (at 31, married, with two children) and my colleagues (generally early- or mid-20s, single, no children) - I'm nowhere near as tolerant of long days and crunch times. I'm more than willing to work hard and make it happen when the situation warrants it, but I'm not willing to put in 60+ hour weeks indefinitely, and around the third release cycle that results in 12-hour days on the weekend to meet the deadline I lose patience with it. I don't see myself as valuable because of my ability to stay late, or even to crank out code at a rapid pace. I see myself as valuable because I'm at the point in my career where I am beginning to be able to predict when a "crunch time" is going to happen a couple of weeks in advance. I can use that foresight to organize a late-night hack session or maybe a mid-day sprint before the crunch happens - so that when many of our other developers are highly stressed and trying to make last-minute changes to meet deadlines, I tend to either have my things done or I have gone back to the people who make the decisions and gotten approval for a revised release timeline or feature set.
parasubvert 11y ago
First, Keep in mind this was written by Vivek Wadhwa, who has a history of attention-seeking articles and statements on social issues in tech. Second, while the startup scene may follow this trend, the larger employers of the SF Bay Area are not staffed with 20-somethings, they're staffed by all age groups.
- aaggarwal 11y ago
  Also, in the startup scene, since new upcoming startups are mostly headed by young newcomers, I guess they would prefer working with the same age people to avoid criticism from an experienced professional. An experienced guy would probably be not as easygoing as them. However, I think, in the end its their loss, one can always learn from others experience. I don't think experienced guys would find learning a new technologies hard, in the contrary it might be easier for them. The only point where the young people could be a better choice for a startup is the working hours. Assuming experienced professionals are married and settled, working at a startup might be difficult for them.
MPSimmons 11y ago
> Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives? Pretty clearly, there are tens of thousands of unqualified engineers. This is less about age, and more about whether you adapt with the times and changing technology. If you're a developer who grew up writing, say, COBOL, and you got REALLY GOOD at COBOL...I mean, just completely amazing at COBOL, so that you're in the top 1% of COBOL programmers in the world...where do you work in 2015? At one of the dozen or so banks that still uses COBOL. But what about the people in the top 10%? The people who still devoted their time to learning COBOL like no one's business? Where do they work in 2015? Wal-Mart. I hate to quote Seth Godin, but if you're going to devote yourself to being great at something, you need to absolutely be the best at it, or you're going to find yourself out of work whenever that thing isn't in vogue - and even then, it's a gamble.
gexla 11y ago
> The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters. Underpaid AND you have to pull all-nighters? No wonder software engineers are hard to come by. What are my other options? Is building forms in Rails really that difficult for older people? EDIT: Keeping in mind this article was from 2010.
puranjay 11y ago
In my line of work (digital marketing), I actually prefer slightly older people because they usually have a body of experience and data to rely on to make better decisions. Yes, young people know social media better, but that's a role I can easily get a couple of fresh college graduates for. For deep analysis and understanding of customer personas, messaging, etc. I feel older people do better.
JesperRavn 11y ago
Just a reminder that the following are inconsistent (and both views go basically unchallenged on HN) - Tech is exploitative, underpaying and overworking naive employees. - Tech is dominated by privileged White/Asian males who exclude women and minorities from what would otherwise be a great opportunity. (If you take a Marxist view that attaches a ridiculously high value to what an employee is worth, then these views can be consistent, in the sense that you can label almost any employment arrangement as exploitation. But I would guess most people on HN subscribe to the (correct) market oriented view which defines exploitation much more narrowly as getting a person to accept something worse than their outside options by the emotional appeal of the job. If startups were really duping White males into working for them instead of a better paid and lower stress banking job or whatever, someone who really cares about women and minorities would presumably tell them to steer clear of this exploitation).
chriscareycode 11y ago
On the flip side Netflix only hires "fully formed adults". No interns and no fresh college grads.
- hga 11y ago
  Netflix doesn't care all that much about the costs of their IT, because it's overwhelmed by the costs of licensing, and now I assume, creating content. Or so we're told in reference to their moving to AWS, they could be an exception that proves the rule.
karmazeroed 11y ago
Younger workers cost less, and work more. Ridiculous. Imagine the baking industry taking this approach - tell your three year old kid to go into the kitchen and bake a cake. Or how about toddlers running marathons - because they have to do a lot more running to get to the end.
niuzeta 11y ago
I just turned 27 and this perspective frightens me beyond I prefer to admit. I live in Toronto area, but want to work in Silicon Valley one day. One of my fears is that by the time I turn 29 or 30, I may be "too old" to attract employers enough to relocate me. Well, just the more motivation to work on my github account...
paulhauggis 11y ago
I am an experiences software developer and I won't break my back and work nights/weekends/12 hour days for any employer. I foolishly did this enough in my youth on many occasions and it's just not worth it because you are doing all of the work, your personal life is suffering, and in the end, the investors and owners get rich while you need to find another job when it goes under or is acquired (in rare cases, do you get to keep your job because usually the company acquiring you already has their own people). When I own > 50% of the company, it's a different story. At one of my last jobs (> 3 years ago), the boss would call us on holidays, weekends, and whenever else things were on fire and expected us to work. One guy even had to cancel his entire vacation because of a release which had the entire team working on New year's eve into New year's day. I just refused and wouldn't pick up my phone on the weekends or change my vacation schedule. I think the main issue with me was that the boss's poor management skills caused the delays and issues. Mainly, someone kept corrupting the git repo because they didn't know how to check-in code properly and it would re-introduce bugs we recently fixed and new bugs almost every week. It took her and the project manager 3 months to figure out who it was...and they weren't fired. I was let go after a little over a year working there and replaced with a remote developer from Mexico. In fact, everyone on the US team was replaced with remote workers because they could work on our holidays and had no problems working every day. The best part was that the owner gave me shares in the company, for every hour that I worked. I never actually received my share total on paper (besides a generic agreement when I was first employed) because the owner kept giving me a different excuse. About 6 weeks after I left, the owner dissolved the corporation and created a new one so he wouldn't have to pay anyone shares that were promised. This sort of behavior is common in the valley (re-incorporating to push undesirable people out) and playing semantic and number games on paper to liquidate employees shares. It's this sort of behavior that forces me to be unemployable as an experienced engineer.
yuhong 11y ago
I am thinking of ditching anti-discrimination laws and instead allow EEOC, anti-trust, or other regulatory agencies to impose anti-discrimination conditions on companies as necessary, which hopefully will be a last resort.
graycat 11y ago
=== Summary It seems to me that the article: (A) is a reasonably correct description of some dysfunctional aspects of the Silicon Valley culture but (B) omits considerations much more important for the main goal of the Silicon Valley culture or any such activity at all -- business success. Here I concentrate on this last, business success, i.e., making money with computing, software, and the Internet. === New Technologies In the sense of (A) above, it appears that the article wants to concentrate on "new technologies" by which it likely means, say, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, Objective-C, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, mobile devices, etc. Two problems: (a) For a startup seeking the goal of business success, those technologies are mostly just redundant alternative tools from which a given startup need pick only a few. Sure, a person with more skills with more such tools can be useful quickly in a larger collection of startups by others. So, by concentrating on acquiring skills with so many tools, the person is concentrating on being an employee and at least partly neglecting picking a good project and startup for the real goal of business success. (b) The "new technologies", when and if really needed for the goal of business success, are not just routine software, and the OP did not explain "new technologies" that are needed or how to acquire them. === An Example For my startup, two weeks a go or so, I got all the production software I planned running. In writing that software, I decided that my user interface (UI) would be just a simple Web site, not an app, and, for the foundation for the software, selected Windows, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET for developing the Web pages, ADO.NET for interacting with SQL Server, and Visual Basic .NET (VB) for the programming language. My Web pages are so simple (i) I don't need to write or even read any JavaScript and (ii) even for just my first all English language version, 2+ billion people around the world, eight years old or older, whether they know English or not, should find the site easy to use right away or, in the case of an eight year old without English, soon. So it's all just the simplest HTTP, HTML, and CSS with just some one line text boxes and some links with no pop-ups, pull-downs, or roll-overs. We're talking simple as in "Keep it simple, stupid" (KISS). My mobile strategy is to have my Web pages quite usable even on nearly any mobile device. E.g., each Web page is just 800 pixels wide with large fonts and high contrast, and a window only 300 pixels wide should be wide enough. Sure, Python has a lot of software libraries: So, if some such library has some functionality I need that is not in .NET, that I can't find in open source in C# or VB, and that I shouldn't just program myself, then maybe I'll use some Python. Okay. So far, nope. So far I don't need more of the OP's technologies -- Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, JavaScript, Objective-C, etc. or whatever else the OP had in mind. So, the OP's view of the role of technologies is not good. === New Technology The OP emphasized "new technology": Okay, continuing my example, in my startup there is some new technology -- I created it. It's implemented in software, but just as software it is just routine. The most advanced code in the software I wrote is a use of the classic heap data structure as a priority queue. What's special is what came before the software. And that's not computer science, either. Instead, my new technology is some applied math I derived, yes, complete with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced prerequisites -- I especially thank A. Kolmogorov and J. von Neumann. Maybe these two guys are "new" to Silicon Valley -- otherwise they go back nearly a century. The Silicon Valley culture the OP is describing will have a tough time duplicating or equaling my new technology. So, for new technology, I'm far ahead, not behind. For the new technology I created, the OP's "The young understand new technologies better than the old do" is exactly backwards. Net, it appears that the OP believes that the keys to business success are new technologies such as Python. Nope! Instead, Python is just yet another applications programming language that permits writing routine code and is nothing like a step toward the new technologies important for the goal of business success. Similarly for Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C, C#, VB, etc. === Denouement Why am I picking on Python? From what I've read, Python, CPython, IronPython, etc. are fine, and some of the libraries are terrific. Okay, so, there is yet another applications programming language: It will likely have a good variety of elementary data types, classes, allocate-free, If-Then-Else, Do-While, Call-Return, call by value, call by reference (likely won't have call by name), file and console reading and writing, access to TCP/IP, some means of exceptional condition handling, e.g., Try-Catch, some facilities for multiple threads and locks, etc. It might be compiled, interpretive, or run on a JVM. Okay. Once I talked with some of the best technical support people at Andreessen-Horowitz (A16Z). They wanted me to be using Python. I told them that for my startup I had selected Visual Basic .NET (VB). The A16Z people thought that VB was a toy (they were thinking about the old version of Visual Basic), and I had to explain that (A) for serious production computing on Windows what is crucial is the .NET Framework; (B) essentially the most important language for such work is C#; (C) the .NET version of Visual Basic is different from C# essentially only in a different flavor of syntactic sugar; and (D) for several reasons I prefer the VB flavor. The A16Z people missed another crucial point: I started with VB only with my present project. Well, right away, less than a minute, I was able to read and write VB. Then with the syntax lessons from just a few, simple code samples, I could write VB right away -- no delay at all. The language was very much not the challenge. There was a challenge -- the .NET Framework with however many classes and thousands of Web pages of documentation; for serious production software on Windows, .NET is just crucial. The A16Z people didn't understand that. C#? The syntax looks a lot like that of C so is familiar enough. Of course, I don't like the C syntax -- never did. Used it? Yes. Liked it? No. Lesson: Even among the best technical support staff at A16Z, the understanding of "new technology" is not good. For the business goal, this lesson and that of the OP are essentially inevitable: In anything like the present context, the coveted unicorns are rare and need not fit simplistic patterns. So, much consensus on creating unicorns would contradict that the unicorns are rare.
S4M 11y ago
The elephant in the room is that most of SV companies don't do anything technologically sophisticated, so for them it's simpler to take the latest technologies and hire young people who will work without counting their time. Were they working on more complicated problem, they would require more experience.
liquidcool 11y ago
Last year I went to a talk by VC Mark Suster.[1] He addressed age discrimination and how he doesn't participate in it and is actively against it. Why do other VC's do this? It’s their goal: a billion dollar company. That takes 8-11 years to build, going at a full startup pace. A lot of life changes can happen in that time. You sure aren’t getting more energetic as the years go by. Your personal and financial responsibility is probably increasing over time. While he isn’t an ageist, he does say that the earlier you can do this, the better. That explains VC's and startups active age discrimination. For non-startups, it seems more centered around a salary cap that is unattractive to experienced engineers. (Not to say that ageism doesn't exist there, and for the record, I am "plus-aged" myself.) 1. http://philip.yurchuk.com/career/mark-suster-talks-startups-innovate-pasadena/ http://philip.yurchuk.com/career/mark-suster-talks-startups-...

75 points by jrs235 11y ago

silicon valley is plenty of dark or plain bad stuff https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-back-channel-culture-silicon-valleys-war-on-privacy-and-the-juvenility-of-all-of-this/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/11/05/the-back-cha...

r0naa 11y ago
I am an outsider, but this is true for pretty much anything in life. There is a always a "dark side" to things. Finger pointing SV as being the mother of all evils is a bit naive. "The grass is always greener..." :)

jv22222 11y ago

This topic keeps coming up. I think someone should start a community for older coders. A place to brainstorm and help each other out. Edit: SilverFox (and Foxess)

gravity13 11y ago
Is it really because they're old? Or because they've established they are one trick ponies? I've met young programmers who I wouldn't hire (were it up to me) for the exact same reasons most people wouldn't hire the stereotypical old programmer. 'Legacy' dudes from a time who seemed to understand bad code as a way to always retain a job because who else would understand the shit they do? And then I've also met (and worked with) older programmers who taught me about the almost repetitive cycle of trendy functional languages, the types where I can literally have a two hour long philosophical conversation about design, extremely smart people I would hire. I get the sense this is not entirely about ageism, but rather, the field itself has two different directions for growth.
- rhaps0dy 11y ago
  >almost repetitive cycle of trendy functional languages This is interesting, please tell me more.

sigden 11y ago

I don't think this is much of a secret.

ZanyProgrammer 11y ago

I wonder if there's a difference between the SF Bay Area and the rest of the country, as far as ageism is concerned in tech.

vermooten 11y ago
How about 'the rest of the world'?
- gamesbrainiac 11y ago
  The "rest of the world" is probably happy to ride the hype the SF crowd are cooking. I know a bunch of companies here, who use python not because its a good choice, but its "hip" and they can appear cool and sophisticated.
solve 11y ago
Huge difference. CA companies and investors (e.g. YC) specifically require your age to the interviewers. Using YC as an example, many interviewers are happy to publicly boast about using age as primary factor - I can link to to some comments written here on HN. In some other places, e.g. NYC, this is all generally believed to be highly legally-risky and no respectable employer would ever consider doing it. Shame on you CA.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  Can you provide some links (other than chatboard comments) to substantiate this claim that "CA companies and investors require your age"? https://oag.ca.gov/publications/CRhandbook/ch2 https://oag.ca.gov/publications/CRhandbook/ch2
  - solve 11y ago
    Are you implying that YC doesn't require your age in the interview process? Have you ever even filled out the application form? Let's start with that.

bottled_poe 11y ago

Don't worry, I'm sure the union has your back. What's that? No union in the tech industry?

nileshtrivedi 11y ago
Why do we need unions when it's so easy to start a company? There is no monopoly on means of production when it comes to software.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  Sure would be nice to own my company's patent portfolio and to be able to rent it out to them.
- seiji 11y ago
  The fun part about unions: when you see your company has $200 billion cash in the bank, the union gets together and says "we made that. everyone deserves a raise." If you're a programmer working at Apple or Google making less than ~$3 million per year (or any other large-scale, profitable firm), you're being taken advantage of.
  - michaelochurch 11y ago
    I laugh heartily when management types say they want someone to be "more of a team player". A team player-- that is, a unionist-- is the last thing that Silicon Valley investors and executives want.

PythonicAlpha 11y ago

I guess it is the same old fallacy that crept into some big software companies long time ago. The fallacy is called "speed": Some companies are just looking for young, smart people who can solve problems fast. This fallacy has some correct side: Software development is most of the time about solving problems and when you can solve them faster, you will have the software faster. The fallacy part is, that fast is the only quality you need. With many, smart and young developers right of the college, you can create a huge pile of software in short time ... but you can also create a huge pile of problems in a short time. That is the reason, there are so many quality problems and security troubles around. Those young, smart people just lack the experience to make good design decisions ... and those decisions do not end, when the rough design is done. Those people make fast decisions, but they just lack the experience to oversee the consequences of those decisions. Without also having experienced developers around, which can share their experiences and guide other people, many companies are doomed to have bad quality software also in the future.

seiji 11y ago
Some companies are just looking for young, smart people who can solve problems fast. When your company only exists for 6-18 months before being acquired at $2 million per developer, it's worth getting the build-big-who-cares-about-correctness drones in your hand. People with no experience have fewer reservations about being "led" a certain way or actually doing the wrong thing (because they may not have the real-world experience to say "nope, bad idea.") As a bonus, the uninitiated will probably believe well-spoken, optimistic lies about becoming a billion dollar company within a year, everybody gets a Tesla as a bonus next year, etc, to make them work harder for no tangible reward.

sv_muppets_ 11y ago

Let's see - you can get these experienced engineers, who will build a proper platform, a robust architecture, a decent code base, and given the fact they have delivered before, a solution that will provide what the customers want. Or You can have these wet behind the ears fuckers straight from college who will just download a metric shit ton of code via gem install and npm, and then rebuild several wheels in JS, whilst spending all their time on the company engineering blog wanking about how great they are? And the vcs choose youth over experience every time.

outside1234 11y ago
Youth also doesn't ask complicated questions, like why is the VC getting 10% and I'm getting 0.05% when I'm doing 10% of the work and the VC 0.05%.
- blisterpeanuts 11y ago
  How is that complicated? Their game, their rules. You can start your own company and keep 100% of the profits -- your game, your rules.
  - cromulentarian 11y ago
    Or move to a different company that values their engineers more and listen to the others bitch and moan about the "lack of talent".
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  In my mind, fair ownership is proportional to investment risk. Each owner invests some combination of time and capital. I assume you are an employee, so how much risk are you taking on?
  - zanny 11y ago
    If you aren't already wealthy, and its a startup - which means you pretty much selling you life to the thing - than everything you have. A VC might invest a million in ten different companies, but they often still have another 10 in traditional stocks to fall back on if all their ventures fail and they can continue to sit pretty. Their investment in the company is mathematically significantly larger than an employee, but that isn't how it feels when the business goes belly up. The VC writes off another failure, made another million somewhere else, and meanwhile the dev is distraught with blaming himself for basically his lifes work failing. Yes, there can be role reversal there, it is not absolute, but it is the average. Just because some have and some have not does not mean someone can not put in a lot more of themself into a project. There are enough VCs that got rich off of being the developer that they probably recognize the difference. And yes, that should hold weight when you only want to give the guy that makes the dream the reality .05% while a guy surfing waves after doing a VC round on a yacht providing the money to make it happen can expect incredible returns if the dream succeeds.

gamesbrainiac 11y ago

How is this a dark secret? This is true for almost all industries is it not? Most business want young hires because the work more (in quantity, not talking about quality here), and can be trained to fit the organization's needs.

justincormack 11y ago
No, in many industries experience is (or was) valued. People businesses are generally worse though, look at law firms where the idea is to exploit the young, overwork them, and if they survive that offer them a tiny chance of the huge profits that senior partners share. Apparently this is supposed to be motivational.

dpweb 11y ago

And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment Had to stop reading at this. Completely wrong. It's a move up or stay a programmer for 40 years career. You decide which appeals more to you. People forget that hiring and accessing talent is mostly done quite poorly. There are not many unemployed programmers and the reasons why they are unemployed could be many things.

11thEarlOfMar 11y ago

The issue is really more practical: Young engineers can afford to take more risk, particularly if they are not married. VCs want people who can go all in on an idea that looks like an obvious fail, because often enough, the young engineers who don't know better actually pull it off. These companies become high profile and their founders become famous for being young and wealthy. When VCs profile the successful investments, young, smart and driven all correlate. Experienced engineers with families can seldom afford take those risks.

rayiner 11y ago
I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious reasons.
- jdhawk 11y ago
  Add dependents and things get more complicated.
- adevine 11y ago
  As someone in a 14 year DINK relationship, I totally disagree with this. When you are in a relationship, decisions need to be collaborative - you can't just chase any opportunity that comes along without thinking about how it will affect your partner. Also, when I was single, I could spend the vast majority of my time working. In a relationship, not only CAN'T I do that (my partner would kill me), but I don't want to; I'd rather spend more time on what is truly important - my personal relationships.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Even single people should be thinking through high risk decisions, so I don't really see your point there. A dual income couple has inherently more ability to make higher-risk decisions that have larger expected returns. As for time spent working, I'm a bit skeptical of that. It's not like single people don't have socialization needs that need to be met. My single friends spend a lot of time and effort on dating and trying to arrange opportunities to see friends.

SQL2219 11y ago

I see a contradiction in this article: "After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50." If 50 year old programmers are cheaper, why are they being discriminated against? see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689232 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9689232

jakeway 11y ago
Thats what this whole article is about. Older people usually have less ability to take a higher risk, due to family concerns, or other reasons. It is classic supply and demand. Younger programmers are more sought after, therefore demand higher pay.
adevine 11y ago
"If 50 year old programmers are cheaper, why are they being discriminated against?" There are lots of other ways to interpret this data. Looking at the graph, note that salaries are actually lower for 20 and 30 somethings that 50+. It's possible that a majority of really good software developers get out of programming by the time they are 50, meaning the overall quality (and salaries) for the oldest developers is lower than average.

leaveyou 11y ago

I'm not "young" anymore and not "old" yet, but I'm quite saddened by this point of view: 'The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”'. Software business seems mostly about exploitation of the naivety of the youngsters and less about software and programming.

eternalban 11y ago
Yesterday: Finance ran the world and bankers still do. Today: Software runs the world but developers do not. Get the picture?
felixgallo 11y ago
yes, that part is unalloyed nonsense, a just-so story told by the nontechnical to justify ageism. I've got 30 years of experience at this point, and as a result, I grasp new technology faster than most; and the baggage of my years of hard lessons learned is of great worth to my team, employees and employers. As one might expect with any thinking profession.
Udo 11y ago
I'm definitely old - going on 40 this year - and I don't recognize myself in that argument either. I think the reason why these points sound like they're made up is because they are, in fact, made up to justify something that's already been decided based on feeling.
- michaelochurch 11y ago
  31. The fact that 39 is "definitely old" is fucked up. Age discrimination isn't about competence (programmers peak much later than 40) but control. It exists because the VC man-child oligarchy (oddly enough, software inherits the age-discrimination culture from business-culture colonists who'd be "too old" to write code) thinks that people will work harder if this shitty, artificial time pressure is put on them. And, of course, much of the ageism and sexism is unintentional but still exclusionary. See: open-plan offices and the aggressive micromanagement of Scrum. I don't think Scrum and open-plan were devised with ageism in mind, but they contribute massively to the attrition. As people get older, they have less tolerance for macho-subordinate bullshit. This macho-subordinate culture that is imposed on software engineers needs to die. It drives out an incredible amount of talent, makes us an HR nightmare as far as diversity goes, and it has nothing to do with programming; in fact, it detracts from the quality of what is produced. We have to kill it at any cost and professionalize our industry because we can't trust our financial backers.

r0naa 11y ago

There is something I frankly don't understand. Why would anyone discriminate against older, more experienced engineers? Tech companies are spending millions of dollars on their offices and employee-perks to attract and retain talent and yet they discriminate against the category of people who has the most experience? It just boggles my mind. I have a very limited perspective, but come from a country where the ageism is reversed. It is really hard to find work as a new grad. I am now living in Waterloo where the situation seems to be more balanced. But seriously, I would kill for a job where I have the chance to work alongside experienced engineers that can see the "bigger picture" and know a thousand tricks! Could anyone explain where this obsession with youth is coming from? Is that a US or a SV thing?

rshlo 11y ago
It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.
- michaelochurch 11y ago
  It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less. However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks. Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your people. Then you're striving for mediocrity and deserve to fail miserably.
  - r0naa 11y ago
    Could you elaborate on the "Scrum" compliant part? I am not super well versed in software development methodologies but the company I am interning at is using Scrum and I have come to appreciate the fact that it helps me "focus" on something and provide fast iteration for the product. Why is do you think it's bad and what are some alternatives?

Filthy_casual 11y ago

As a newcomer in my 30's I can only hope that this won't be true in Europe.

makeitsuckless 11y ago
It is true in Europe. However, the effect is strongly dampened given all of the social and job protection legislation in most European countries. This means the extend to which an employer can profit from preferring younger employees is very much limited. Also, young people in Europe are generally less sensitive to promises of future riches because of both cultural differences and the fact that it's simply extremely rare that a European startup strikes gold. The agism is the same, but it's easier to overcome since there's less profit in it. There is a downside though: youth unemployment.

makeitsuckless 11y ago

The denialist culture in tech and especially Silicon Valley is so absurd. Even in this thread people are scrambling to come up with excuses. There are many industries around the world where agism is rampant, and there is only ever one excuse: money and control. Young people are cheaper and more gullible. It's not a secret, far from it, it's one of the few things for which the cliche "everybody knows" actually applies. Sure, many industries try to cover up this fact a bit, but only tech makes up such elaborate stories to pretend it isn't all about cold hard cash. Obviously, there is a reason for this beyond creating a flattering self-image: Most other industries that exploit the young and naive have plenty of supply. Good engineers however are rare at any age, so market forces aren't sufficient to maintain this exploitative relationship, it needs to be artificially enforced. Resulting for instance in the insane situation that many older engineers are unemployed whilst the industry is importing cheap young and easily abused engineers from abroad. (Full disclosure: I too used to believe the main cause for that was that these older engineers had outdated knowledge and no longer making the effort to learn anything new, until I became a hiring manager. And although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence (so has the other side btw), I will be so bold as to state that that is a big fat lie.)

edc117 11y ago
Speaking as someone in the middle (mid thirties, have my masters, led several teams as a technical lead/architect, been up and down the hiring process), I agree completely. I've met several older developers/engineers that I have the utmost respect for, and so much of this field seems to move in circles. Does anyone outside of SV/startups actually find this ageism nonsense to be anything but a convenient story? I can personally think of two excellent engineers that are 60+, and are some of the most amazingly detailed, experienced and all-around intelligent men I've ever met; age has not dulled them in the slightest.

dominotw 11y ago

It is definitely not a secret. Age bias is so obvious that its actually celebrated. Look at this example from Jetbrains Jobs page https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/ https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/ We offer: Fascinating work in a friendly, young team

tarr11 11y ago
Yikes. This needs to called out. They also offer bonuses tied to product releases. Seems like that will create some perverse incentives.
serve_yay 11y ago
Insane. This issue is unfortunately what gets me so down about the diversity efforts happening today. We seek to empower a new group of people, more broadly representative of humanity's rich spectrum, to be unhireable at 45.
- LyndsySimon 11y ago
  Maybe this is just my bias as an anarcho-capitalist, but I don't think it's an issue. If we come to a place where there are scads of older-than-are-hireable-in-Silicon-Valley developers out there, then companies will hire them because they will be willing to work for less than their younger colleagues due to the glut in supply. Those companies will then be able to produce their products more cheaply, and the "young" companies won't be able to compete. Obviously this is an oversimplification, but the premise holds. According to TFA, the salaries for college grads tend to slow their growth over time, eventually contracting as workers near retirement age. That fits very well with my experience - in my 20s I was focused on developing skills and getting paid more. My family was growing and I had a never-ending supply of energy and a deep well of enthusiasm and motviation to keep me going. I'm now in th early 30s, and feel like I'm established in my career. I've made one cross-country move and have proven myself in a startup environment. I see a big difference between myself (at 31, married, with two children) and my colleagues (generally early- or mid-20s, single, no children) - I'm nowhere near as tolerant of long days and crunch times. I'm more than willing to work hard and make it happen when the situation warrants it, but I'm not willing to put in 60+ hour weeks indefinitely, and around the third release cycle that results in 12-hour days on the weekend to meet the deadline I lose patience with it. I don't see myself as valuable because of my ability to stay late, or even to crank out code at a rapid pace. I see myself as valuable because I'm at the point in my career where I am beginning to be able to predict when a "crunch time" is going to happen a couple of weeks in advance. I can use that foresight to organize a late-night hack session or maybe a mid-day sprint before the crunch happens - so that when many of our other developers are highly stressed and trying to make last-minute changes to meet deadlines, I tend to either have my things done or I have gone back to the people who make the decisions and gotten approval for a revised release timeline or feature set.

parasubvert 11y ago

First, Keep in mind this was written by Vivek Wadhwa, who has a history of attention-seeking articles and statements on social issues in tech. Second, while the startup scene may follow this trend, the larger employers of the SF Bay Area are not staffed with 20-somethings, they're staffed by all age groups.

aaggarwal 11y ago
Also, in the startup scene, since new upcoming startups are mostly headed by young newcomers, I guess they would prefer working with the same age people to avoid criticism from an experienced professional. An experienced guy would probably be not as easygoing as them. However, I think, in the end its their loss, one can always learn from others experience. I don't think experienced guys would find learning a new technologies hard, in the contrary it might be easier for them. The only point where the young people could be a better choice for a startup is the working hours. Assuming experienced professionals are married and settled, working at a startup might be difficult for them.

MPSimmons 11y ago

> Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives? Pretty clearly, there are tens of thousands of unqualified engineers. This is less about age, and more about whether you adapt with the times and changing technology. If you're a developer who grew up writing, say, COBOL, and you got REALLY GOOD at COBOL...I mean, just completely amazing at COBOL, so that you're in the top 1% of COBOL programmers in the world...where do you work in 2015? At one of the dozen or so banks that still uses COBOL. But what about the people in the top 10%? The people who still devoted their time to learning COBOL like no one's business? Where do they work in 2015? Wal-Mart. I hate to quote Seth Godin, but if you're going to devote yourself to being great at something, you need to absolutely be the best at it, or you're going to find yourself out of work whenever that thing isn't in vogue - and even then, it's a gamble.

gexla 11y ago

> The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters. Underpaid AND you have to pull all-nighters? No wonder software engineers are hard to come by. What are my other options? Is building forms in Rails really that difficult for older people? EDIT: Keeping in mind this article was from 2010.

puranjay 11y ago

In my line of work (digital marketing), I actually prefer slightly older people because they usually have a body of experience and data to rely on to make better decisions. Yes, young people know social media better, but that's a role I can easily get a couple of fresh college graduates for. For deep analysis and understanding of customer personas, messaging, etc. I feel older people do better.

JesperRavn 11y ago

Just a reminder that the following are inconsistent (and both views go basically unchallenged on HN) - Tech is exploitative, underpaying and overworking naive employees. - Tech is dominated by privileged White/Asian males who exclude women and minorities from what would otherwise be a great opportunity. (If you take a Marxist view that attaches a ridiculously high value to what an employee is worth, then these views can be consistent, in the sense that you can label almost any employment arrangement as exploitation. But I would guess most people on HN subscribe to the (correct) market oriented view which defines exploitation much more narrowly as getting a person to accept something worse than their outside options by the emotional appeal of the job. If startups were really duping White males into working for them instead of a better paid and lower stress banking job or whatever, someone who really cares about women and minorities would presumably tell them to steer clear of this exploitation).

chriscareycode 11y ago

On the flip side Netflix only hires "fully formed adults". No interns and no fresh college grads.

hga 11y ago
Netflix doesn't care all that much about the costs of their IT, because it's overwhelmed by the costs of licensing, and now I assume, creating content. Or so we're told in reference to their moving to AWS, they could be an exception that proves the rule.

karmazeroed 11y ago

Younger workers cost less, and work more. Ridiculous. Imagine the baking industry taking this approach - tell your three year old kid to go into the kitchen and bake a cake. Or how about toddlers running marathons - because they have to do a lot more running to get to the end.

niuzeta 11y ago

I just turned 27 and this perspective frightens me beyond I prefer to admit. I live in Toronto area, but want to work in Silicon Valley one day. One of my fears is that by the time I turn 29 or 30, I may be "too old" to attract employers enough to relocate me. Well, just the more motivation to work on my github account...

paulhauggis 11y ago

I am an experiences software developer and I won't break my back and work nights/weekends/12 hour days for any employer. I foolishly did this enough in my youth on many occasions and it's just not worth it because you are doing all of the work, your personal life is suffering, and in the end, the investors and owners get rich while you need to find another job when it goes under or is acquired (in rare cases, do you get to keep your job because usually the company acquiring you already has their own people). When I own > 50% of the company, it's a different story. At one of my last jobs (> 3 years ago), the boss would call us on holidays, weekends, and whenever else things were on fire and expected us to work. One guy even had to cancel his entire vacation because of a release which had the entire team working on New year's eve into New year's day. I just refused and wouldn't pick up my phone on the weekends or change my vacation schedule. I think the main issue with me was that the boss's poor management skills caused the delays and issues. Mainly, someone kept corrupting the git repo because they didn't know how to check-in code properly and it would re-introduce bugs we recently fixed and new bugs almost every week. It took her and the project manager 3 months to figure out who it was...and they weren't fired. I was let go after a little over a year working there and replaced with a remote developer from Mexico. In fact, everyone on the US team was replaced with remote workers because they could work on our holidays and had no problems working every day. The best part was that the owner gave me shares in the company, for every hour that I worked. I never actually received my share total on paper (besides a generic agreement when I was first employed) because the owner kept giving me a different excuse. About 6 weeks after I left, the owner dissolved the corporation and created a new one so he wouldn't have to pay anyone shares that were promised. This sort of behavior is common in the valley (re-incorporating to push undesirable people out) and playing semantic and number games on paper to liquidate employees shares. It's this sort of behavior that forces me to be unemployable as an experienced engineer.

yuhong 11y ago

I am thinking of ditching anti-discrimination laws and instead allow EEOC, anti-trust, or other regulatory agencies to impose anti-discrimination conditions on companies as necessary, which hopefully will be a last resort.

graycat 11y ago

=== Summary It seems to me that the article: (A) is a reasonably correct description of some dysfunctional aspects of the Silicon Valley culture but (B) omits considerations much more important for the main goal of the Silicon Valley culture or any such activity at all -- business success. Here I concentrate on this last, business success, i.e., making money with computing, software, and the Internet. === New Technologies In the sense of (A) above, it appears that the article wants to concentrate on "new technologies" by which it likely means, say, Python, Django, Ruby, Rails, Objective-C, JavaScript, jQuery, Node.js, mobile devices, etc. Two problems: (a) For a startup seeking the goal of business success, those technologies are mostly just redundant alternative tools from which a given startup need pick only a few. Sure, a person with more skills with more such tools can be useful quickly in a larger collection of startups by others. So, by concentrating on acquiring skills with so many tools, the person is concentrating on being an employee and at least partly neglecting picking a good project and startup for the real goal of business success. (b) The "new technologies", when and if really needed for the goal of business success, are not just routine software, and the OP did not explain "new technologies" that are needed or how to acquire them. === An Example For my startup, two weeks a go or so, I got all the production software I planned running. In writing that software, I decided that my user interface (UI) would be just a simple Web site, not an app, and, for the foundation for the software, selected Windows, the .NET Framework, ASP.NET for developing the Web pages, ADO.NET for interacting with SQL Server, and Visual Basic .NET (VB) for the programming language. My Web pages are so simple (i) I don't need to write or even read any JavaScript and (ii) even for just my first all English language version, 2+ billion people around the world, eight years old or older, whether they know English or not, should find the site easy to use right away or, in the case of an eight year old without English, soon. So it's all just the simplest HTTP, HTML, and CSS with just some one line text boxes and some links with no pop-ups, pull-downs, or roll-overs. We're talking simple as in "Keep it simple, stupid" (KISS). My mobile strategy is to have my Web pages quite usable even on nearly any mobile device. E.g., each Web page is just 800 pixels wide with large fonts and high contrast, and a window only 300 pixels wide should be wide enough. Sure, Python has a lot of software libraries: So, if some such library has some functionality I need that is not in .NET, that I can't find in open source in C# or VB, and that I shouldn't just program myself, then maybe I'll use some Python. Okay. So far, nope. So far I don't need more of the OP's technologies -- Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, JavaScript, Objective-C, etc. or whatever else the OP had in mind. So, the OP's view of the role of technologies is not good. === New Technology The OP emphasized "new technology": Okay, continuing my example, in my startup there is some new technology -- I created it. It's implemented in software, but just as software it is just routine. The most advanced code in the software I wrote is a use of the classic heap data structure as a priority queue. What's special is what came before the software. And that's not computer science, either. Instead, my new technology is some applied math I derived, yes, complete with theorems and proofs, based on some advanced prerequisites -- I especially thank A. Kolmogorov and J. von Neumann. Maybe these two guys are "new" to Silicon Valley -- otherwise they go back nearly a century. The Silicon Valley culture the OP is describing will have a tough time duplicating or equaling my new technology. So, for new technology, I'm far ahead, not behind. For the new technology I created, the OP's "The young understand new technologies better than the old do" is exactly backwards. Net, it appears that the OP believes that the keys to business success are new technologies such as Python. Nope! Instead, Python is just yet another applications programming language that permits writing routine code and is nothing like a step toward the new technologies important for the goal of business success. Similarly for Ruby, JavaScript, Objective-C, C#, VB, etc. === Denouement Why am I picking on Python? From what I've read, Python, CPython, IronPython, etc. are fine, and some of the libraries are terrific. Okay, so, there is yet another applications programming language: It will likely have a good variety of elementary data types, classes, allocate-free, If-Then-Else, Do-While, Call-Return, call by value, call by reference (likely won't have call by name), file and console reading and writing, access to TCP/IP, some means of exceptional condition handling, e.g., Try-Catch, some facilities for multiple threads and locks, etc. It might be compiled, interpretive, or run on a JVM. Okay. Once I talked with some of the best technical support people at Andreessen-Horowitz (A16Z). They wanted me to be using Python. I told them that for my startup I had selected Visual Basic .NET (VB). The A16Z people thought that VB was a toy (they were thinking about the old version of Visual Basic), and I had to explain that (A) for serious production computing on Windows what is crucial is the .NET Framework; (B) essentially the most important language for such work is C#; (C) the .NET version of Visual Basic is different from C# essentially only in a different flavor of syntactic sugar; and (D) for several reasons I prefer the VB flavor. The A16Z people missed another crucial point: I started with VB only with my present project. Well, right away, less than a minute, I was able to read and write VB. Then with the syntax lessons from just a few, simple code samples, I could write VB right away -- no delay at all. The language was very much not the challenge. There was a challenge -- the .NET Framework with however many classes and thousands of Web pages of documentation; for serious production software on Windows, .NET is just crucial. The A16Z people didn't understand that. C#? The syntax looks a lot like that of C so is familiar enough. Of course, I don't like the C syntax -- never did. Used it? Yes. Liked it? No. Lesson: Even among the best technical support staff at A16Z, the understanding of "new technology" is not good. For the business goal, this lesson and that of the OP are essentially inevitable: In anything like the present context, the coveted unicorns are rare and need not fit simplistic patterns. So, much consensus on creating unicorns would contradict that the unicorns are rare.

S4M 11y ago

The elephant in the room is that most of SV companies don't do anything technologically sophisticated, so for them it's simpler to take the latest technologies and hire young people who will work without counting their time. Were they working on more complicated problem, they would require more experience.

liquidcool 11y ago

Last year I went to a talk by VC Mark Suster.[1] He addressed age discrimination and how he doesn't participate in it and is actively against it. Why do other VC's do this? It’s their goal: a billion dollar company. That takes 8-11 years to build, going at a full startup pace. A lot of life changes can happen in that time. You sure aren’t getting more energetic as the years go by. Your personal and financial responsibility is probably increasing over time. While he isn’t an ageist, he does say that the earlier you can do this, the better. That explains VC's and startups active age discrimination. For non-startups, it seems more centered around a salary cap that is unattractive to experienced engineers. (Not to say that ageism doesn't exist there, and for the record, I am "plus-aged" myself.) 1. http://philip.yurchuk.com/career/mark-suster-talks-startups-innovate-pasadena/ http://philip.yurchuk.com/career/mark-suster-talks-startups-...