Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 261 posts

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#91

Post by radicalbyte »

embwbam wrote: post #79
samspot wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm hearing from many posters in these comments is my level of fashion-conciousness indicates how innovative I am. I think it's a big mistake to judge a candidate's aptitude for the work by how hip they look. This is the last industry I thought we'd have to face this kind of thing in.

Well, wait. I've always said this too: it shouldn't matter how I dress. But the truth is that dress is very frequently an indicator of how aware one is. It's a social consciousness that is sometimes reflected in other things (like being able to adapt to a new technology). Look at this comic: http://xkcd.com/1139/ - the playground jerks call the guy a loser because he isn't playing the social game. They are right that…

Exactly, it's an indicator.

At the CEO level, I'd argue that you must look for people who understand the value of understanding their target audience ("customer") and taking the low cost / low friction action required.

Or, put simply, spend a couple of hours and $200 on cloths to look the part.

What, exactly, do you think would happen to a 24 year old hotshot banker who goes to an interview at, say, Goldman Sachs wearing Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt?

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#92

Post by xanados »

chc wrote: post #57
aaronblohowiak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most states' (and federal) law protects older, not younger, workers... in many jurisdictions that means being over 40.

Are the laws really that specific? I thought the way it generally worked was that discrimination based on age was illegal, but being young is viewed as a proxy for inexperience, so discriminating on that basis is OK. I didn't know there was generally a specific cutoff.

Under U.S. federal law, age discrimination not only protects exclusively the old against the young, it also protects only those over 40.[1] Discrimination in the workplace and in public policy against the young is a big problem (in the moral sense, perhaps not an economic sense) that really has, as far as I can tell, political recognition among essentially no one.

1: http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#93

Post by klochner »

The flip side is that you can out-compete by hiring the underpriced developers with experience.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, hiring for experience doesn't make as much sense if your company is the next iteration on mobile/social with an uncertain business plan.

In the B2B/enterprise space this makes more sense, and anecdotally I've heard of great results from hiring people over 40 that can crank out tons of high-quality code while working sane hours.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#95

Post by robomartin »

Tough topic. Experience vs. Youth.

Does bias exist? Absolutely.

I often tell people that being an engineer in certain fields (like software) can be very much like being a supermodel. Not one of them will reach fifty and stay in the Victoria's Secret catalog. In fact, when it comes to VS, 30-something and you are pushing it.

Is this wise? (back to CS now, not VS). Nope. People should be hired based on what they are able to do. What they can contribute to the company's mission. Often-times a more experienced developer just knows the path to a solution, if I may say, instinctively. And, yes, it is about making a bunch of mistakes and learning from them.

This, in my eyes at least, is no different than gender discrimination which also exists in CS.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#96

Post by kemiller »

gfodor wrote: post #53

When you get older, several things work against you to jump into SV culture: - You are not as easily impressed by or eager to try new technologies. (many of which are new spins on old ideas you've seen before.) - You fail to see the appeal of the types of technology younger people are using. Or, you see the switching costs as too high to move away from what you are using now. - Your lack of ignorance leads you to (of…

So my question is: why is this industry so prone to chips on shoulders? Might there not be a better way?

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#97

Post by michaelochurch »

chubot wrote: post #49
seiji wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

Older people are perhaps more likely to be successful. But there is less variance in their outcomes.

We learn how to control our variance as we get older. (I'm 29, so I have no idea if I'm "young" or "old" by SV standards.) High-variance life isn't fun unless you hit an early home run. Otherwise, it's stressful and shitty. Experiences like getting fired because you were better than your CTO's-friend manager and made him insecure are pretty damaging, and they lead to self-filtering and variance-reduction as a survival strategy.

Give us an R&D environment that doesn't beat the shit out of high-variance people for 20 years, and you'll see a world where experience doesn't reduce variance so sharply, but delivers increases on the whole distribution.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#98

Post by moocow01 »

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…

There is also a story that goes the other way... that as you grow older you realize its not worth working with those types of people. The last place I want to work personally is at a place stacked with narcissists all trying to figure out how they can prop up their own egos (while this does not define many startups it also unfortunately from my experience does define quite a few).

Life is too short to not be working with decent people.

That being said if you have the opportunity to work with some people who have been in tech for 20 or 30 years - become their buddy - you're more than likely to find out they are some of the smartest out there. When I was first out of college I worked at a place where the 2 guys I sat next to were 40 and 50 years old - they still are the best mentors/collaborators Ive ever had.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#99

Post by nugget »

seiji wrote: post #50
kami8845 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In fairness I think he'd also say he's excited to find exceptions to the rule and would encourage any older entrepreneurs to prove him wrong. You can acknowledge certain market realities and still support and maintain a strong meritocracy that doesn't discriminate against outliers.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#100

Post by eshvk »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #73
eshvk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not convinced that there is something inherently special with the ways young people consume technology that only other young people have mystical insight towards. There are people in their fifties on HN, tweeting away before twitter was cool and avidly using Pinterest. I think it is more about what you find interesting rather than how old you are. After all, I would think that 80-90% of toys are designed by peop…

Well the canonical example would be facebook, designed by a young guy specifically for young people. I'm not sure what the mean age of the early adopters of stuff like pinterest is but I'm guessing under 30.

Those two statements might be completely valid but don't necessarily disprove my point. :-)

I am sure there are old people who suck at this stuff, as are there young people who are great at this. The point here is that you can't sweep people with a broad brush using one parameter. You get to know the people and figure out whether they would be the right people to build your team without going by silly filters like age or sex or whatever.

Post reply on HN