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Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

reuters.com

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Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#41

Post by azakai »

potatolicious wrote: post #27
azakai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California != Silicon Valley, though. It also includes the LA area, for example.

I'm not sure how scientific we really need to get about this. Go to San Francisco, go to Palo Alto, go to Mountain View and hang out with startup people. You will see this multiple times a day, and it will pervade your entire impression of the industry. This phenomenon is not a secret, nor is it obscure.

Oh, I am not disagreeing at all that this is a fact.

Just that the numbers they used to support it are a little weak (LA likely has worse age discrimination for example). It would have been better to not state numbers at all and stick to the rest of the details in the story.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#42

Post by smacktoward »

seiji wrote: post #20
holograham wrote: post #2

would love to hear pg weigh in on this...

Let me ragechannel pg for a minute: People are not created equal. Some are much smarter and much more capable than others. Once you reach a certain age, if you haven't "made it," you aren't one of the smarter and much more capable people. Being younger, you both don't know what you don't know and you haven't become set in unchangeable broken ways yet. Google likes to hire young so they can brainwash you into being "g…

Google likes to hire young so they can brainwash you into being "googly." Same with other companies. Once your brain thinks you need six TPS reports every day, it's not worth fixing you when we can hire younger, unbroken people. VCs love 'em young. Sequoia bluntly states they prefer to fund two guys working from a dorm room.

The flip side of this analysis would be: YC and Sequoia prefer to fund kids because kids are easier to manipulate. Kids don't know how to read a contract or a term sheet. Kids don't know how to protect their own interests in their business when accepting funding. Kids don't know how to play hardball in negotiations.

Kids, in other words, are very easy to use as disposable resources.

(Indeed, with appropriate conditioning you can even convince them to believe that becoming a disposable resource is a sign of their Epic Founderhood.)

Someone who's seen peers get screwed over in previous gigs, or who's been screwed over themselves, is going to have learned a few things about how not to get screwed over the next time. So it's more profitable to deal with people who haven't learned those lessons yet. And once they have learned those lessons, you throw them overboard and replace them with the next batch of dewey-eyed innocents.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#43

Post by eshvk »

I completely agree with the thesis of the article but I want to nitpick with the first few lines: I am not sure whether the converse/shaving your head off thing is helping is due to the perception of being more in tune with your coworkers or whether it is because of the person appearing younger.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#44

Post by codewright »

krakensden wrote: post #40
codewright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the value of experience because I know what my code looked like 5 and 10 years ago. I also know how incredibly poor my judgment was back then compared to now. I can only imagine what 20 years will do for me. That's why I actively seek out more experience in candidates because I believe it'll make them more competent and sharp at what they do. Somebody with battle-scars is something a startup could really use.…

I've worked with developers in their fifties- they're scary good.

As have I, but only when I was a contractor. I always looked forward to pairing up with the experienced engineers. I learned the most on those days.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#45

Post by jpdoctor »

LastManStanding wrote: post #19

They are calling this "a secret"? - more like overt bigotry from what I have seen. Isn't Y-Combinator one of the worst offenders? From what I have read Paul Graham brags actually about his age discrimination.

Eventually, some enterprising law firm is going to make a bundle. The legal culture in SV (WSGR and their ilk) are not steeped in class-action suits, several folks are going to get their asses kicked from the legal defense, if nothing else.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#46

Post by southphillyman »

Is this essentially a Web 2.0/Bay Area issue? I recently went to a Java User Group meeting on the east coast where the presenter and about 60% of the audience....had grey hair. I think I may have been the 2nd or 3rd youngest person at the meeting and I'm 30.... I'm the 2nd youngest person at my current place of employment in the finance domain. I'm hoping that means by 40 yrs old there will be lot's of work and I can contract for $150/hr or whatever by then as a lot of the brick and mortars are heavily entrenched in the JEE stack and if this board is any indication there will be a dearth of JEE talent . Even in the Java space I can’t say I’ve seen too many 80yr old developers. But at least your career is not dead at 40. I’ve developed in Python professionally in the past and am teaching myself RoR now for both personal use and I have to admit I like writing in those languages more. But after reading articles like this and going out to San Francisco seeing the environment first hand I have to be honest when saying that I would be a little tentative jumping out there feet first.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#47

Post by ksaitor »

mattdeboard wrote: post #21
jiggy2011 wrote: post #12

Isn't this partly because SV is most interested in developing social apps for hip teenagers? It's probably difficult for a 40 something year old to know how to design an application for this crowd.

This line of thought doesn't make sense to me, because marketers are in the same business of getting into the heads of the 18-25 demographic and they seem to do pretty well at it despite not being 18-25-year-olds themselves.

Where did you get the stats that majority of successful marketers are not within 18-25 age range?

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#48

Post by [deleted] »

sdoowpilihp wrote: post #23
michaelochurch wrote: post #14

My first thought: narcissism . Narcissists hate being around older people because it reminds them that, some day, they'll be old and unable to do the sorts of things that narcissists tend to do on the weekend. I don't think that all founders are narcissists, but if you want to be able to hire narcissists (which 75% of execs are, let's be honest) then ageism becomes practical, sadly. Then again, I think some of it is…

What kind of things do narcissists do on the weekend that would be specifically limited by age?

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#49

Post by chubot »

seiji wrote: post #20
holograham wrote: post #2

would love to hear pg weigh in on this...

Let me ragechannel pg for a minute: People are not created equal. Some are much smarter and much more capable than others. Once you reach a certain age, if you haven't "made it," you aren't one of the smarter and much more capable people. Being younger, you both don't know what you don't know and you haven't become set in unchangeable broken ways yet. Google likes to hire young so they can brainwash you into being "g…

So I'm not a fan of ageism and I wouldn't ascribe it to pg without evidence...

But given the "startup = growth" essay, where he says that only 1 company per cycle makes any difference to YC's returns, I can see the logic behind ageism.

Young people (I'm not one of them anymore) just have more unpredictable outcomes. They are the Black Swans.

The Black Swan theory is that the outliers shape our world. And that has been true in tech for sure -- Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are all anomalies. These companies grew enormously quickly and were all started by very young and inexperienced men. The two YC success stories that get pointed to -- AirBNB and DropBox -- were also started by the very young and inexperienced.

Older people are perhaps more likely to be successful. But there is less variance in their outcomes. There's the logic in investing -- once you're making money, you're less valuable. Because people know what you're worth. Before you make any money, people can ascribe crazy valuations to you. It will be wrong a lot of the time, but it doesn't matter because the one Black Swan event is what you're looking for. You only have to be right once.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#50

Post by seiji »

kami8845 wrote: post #31
holograham wrote: post #2

would love to hear pg weigh in on this...

He probably doesn't have an opinion on this. Then if you accuse him of being ageist he will just push the problem to his applicant pool like he did with women. That's perfectly fine, I just don't think this is a very interesting issue to discuss with him.

It's pretty evident from His recent writings. The pg's opinions on the matter used to be more subtle, but I think in the recent few writings it's more overt. At one point, saying "young, unattached people are better than old people at technology startups" went from a What You Can't Say to something you can wink wink nudge nudge we all know it's true.
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