Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

There are two countervailing trends here: one is the increasing level of experience and the other is the decreasing level of hipness (hear me out, please). As an older engineer (early 40's), I speak from experience.

When I was young, I thought my designs were excellent, because they were the best things I had done so far. I was able to look around at amazing code (NT kernel, for example; open source was much less prevalent back then) so I realized there was a continuum of excellence. After five years, I looked back as some of my earlier code and it looked bad. I did the same five years later and had a similar experience. After that, improvement came by degrees and was more related to breadth of experience in different domains. So it's clear to me that "older" people, in my profession, at least, are usually more capable than a younger person at this particular skill.

That said, there is the "hipness" factor, for lack of a better word, and it's very real. Older people tend to get set in their ways and do what they do. If they like watching TV, they'll keep up with their favorite shows. If they like sports, they'll keep up with their teams. They are unlikely to know the hottest bands or Internet memes. They just don't keep up with current culture, which happens to be largely youth culture. They might like their iPhone or Android and know how to use it. But the fact is, that most older people merely use technology. They don't bury themselves in it every day. So when they talk to someone younger about culture or technology, they seem out of touch.

As someone who follows technology, it's pretty lonely in my cohort. There's literally nothing to talk about in the area that holds a large part of my interest.

I think the people under consideration here are biasing against the experience factor in favor of the hipness factor because it's just so apparent. It literally takes a couple of minutes of conversation before determining that the older person is "clueless".

If a person want's to work in technology (e.g., in a Bay Area startup) and they don't keep up with technology and/or culture, they are going to have a hard time.

I've been telling people this for years. It needs to be cut out of the SV culture because if not most of us young guys (27 here) will be suffering from it on the backend of our careers.

I'm in the same category. I don't enjoy drinking and I hate most video games, especially console ones and especially FPSes. The SV frat culture is such a turnoff.

> Just think of the number of people on HN who have posted about how they don't understand Facebook, Twitter, or shoot down some whiz bang new technology. I've done it sometimes myself. Engineers are naturally skeptical, but this skepticism can grow out of control. It's fine in moderation but there's a tendency for this type of perspective to grow with age naturally, and that can ultimately undermine your ability to recognize and execute on genuinely novel, good ideas.

This is so very true. I was pretty young when twitter first came but remember being incredibly skeptical about the idea. Although to be frank, the way twitter is being used to consume information (as a news feed) was not how it was being thought of then. However, the greater point still remains: If you are skeptical of nascent ideas, you will never let them grow or become mature.

You would make an amazing political speech writer.

I think this debate boils down to "acknowledging certain market realities" versus "creating market realities." If you advocate youth based startups, you have to define youth, which is entire subjective. "Youth" in this context probably just means "hasn't reached full creative potential."

Of course, people won't think that much. They'll see youth, think 25, then start evaluating the world from that viewpoint.