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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

#131

Post by [deleted] »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #89
embwbam wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you seriously saying that keeping up with fashion is an indicator of being able to adapt to new tech?

[deleted]

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#132

Post by AerieC »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #89
embwbam wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you seriously saying that keeping up with fashion is an indicator of being able to adapt to new tech?

They're not so different these days, especially in SV, I think. Apple, for one, has made itself on being a fashionable product. If one of a company's goals is to be fashionable, does it make sense to hire people who don't care about a core portion of the company's vision?

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#133

Post by freyr »

koko775 wrote: post #124
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…

> (a) avoid income volatility that becomes more unacceptable with age, (b) evade the "job hopper" stigma (a) Ding! I had to drop out of college to support my parents. (b) Ding! I stuck around with jobs that made my physically unstable and emotionally depressed because otherwise I would have been unemployable. I was originally an iOS dev, which I love, and I hate Android programming, but I've been forced by circumstan…

> yet to some of the people I know, I'm the "old" guy, and I haven't even hit my mid-twenties.

If that's the case, it speaks to the immaturity of some of the people you know.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#134

Post by jasonshen »

smacktoward wrote: post #42
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…

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…

While that might be true (that young people are more easily manipulated) it doesn't make much sense as a primary reason for why VC's like young people.

Ultimately, making a big successful company is really hard and VC's would want to bet on people who have the best chance of doing that - not the ones they can easily screw with.

Note: I don't buy the idea that only young people make good entrepreneurs. There's tons of evidence that older entrepreneurs can be very successful. It's probably true though that young people in general are more likely to massively revolutionize something entrenched, even if their overall success rate is the same or lower than older people.

Einstein, for example, was 26 when he published 4 papers that would change the field of physics forever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_papers

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#135

Post by jsaxton86 »

lsc wrote: post #130
jsaxton86 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also worked with developers in their fifties who are awful. Age bias is awful, and I have worked with a lot of older developers who know their stuff and are extremely competent, but the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong. Good developers are able to learn and adapt quickly, and often older developers can't do that.

>the idea that 25 years of experience automatically makes you a better programmer is wrong. Seriously? You think you can do something for 25 years without getting better at it?

Yeah, I do. I think the only constant thing in software engineering is that you need to be able to learn and adapt. If you spend 25 years at a single organization where you aren't forced to continuously learn and adapt, you'll be at a disadvantage when you are inevitably forced to do something outside of your comfort zone.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#136

Post by sokoloff »

jpdoctor wrote: post #85
finnw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get sued for firing someone, but I'm pretty sure you can't get sued for declining to invest in a company (that would be very scary indeed.)

> but I'm pretty sure you can't get sued for declining to invest in a company Try this for example: "Our VC firm does not invest in companies with black founders. We looked at the data, and companies with black-founders have a measurably lower ROI." Are you still pretty sure ?

If someone was dumb enough to say exactly that, they should be sued for outright stupidity and perhaps for discrimination. I suspect that in practice, "those companies have not been the right fit for our investment philosophy" is as close as you'd get, and that's hardly actionable, even if you strongly suspect that their thesis is as offensive as "we invest in white people".

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#137

Post by reinhardt »

JVIDEL wrote: post #81
radicalbyte wrote: post #38

The thing is, Randy did get hired once he shaved his head and started dressing down. This isn't ageism, it's a filter against older people who are unable to adapt themselves to the changing environment. It's like classic cars: no-one is going to buy a neglected rust bucket that hasn't been serviced since the 1960s. Yet if the car is loved and cared for it can be worth millions ( http://www.topgear.com/uk/car-news/fer…

Bad example, that's a Ferrari GTO, it would sell for hundreds of thousands even if it was at the bottom of a lake. And fashion means nothing, just that you read fashion blogs. The guys who invented the internet in the late 1960s wore 1950 dork clothes. It doesn't matters.

Most guys haven't invented anything though, let alone the internet. Fashion (or some other triviality) sometimes ends up being the tie breaker, all else being (or rather seeming to be) equal.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#138

Post by stevenameyer »

I think this bias stems from the perception that people who are older are more established in life and their ability to support themselves and possibly their family is not dependent on the success or failure of the company.

I think the model that most people, including investors, see when they picture early stage start-ups is a small team that is so connected to the success of the company that they are willing to work themselves to unhealthy lengths if need be to succeed. That image is often associated with young recent grads or drop outs because they have student debts, are less likely to be able to find another job, and don't have any substantial savings to fall back on if the company goes under.

On some level this does make sense, if you are relying on this company succeeding to be able to earn a living then you probably want to be looking at the guy next to you and see a guy in the same boat. However it fails to take into account the experience or expertise that may be brought into the company by someone who is older and has proven the ability to succeed in this industry, which may lead to the success that will earn everyone in the company a living.

Re: Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

#139

Post by [deleted] »

codewright wrote: post #10

Dirty yes, secret no. Straight talk: I'm the CTO at a startup and I often have to call out the founders and employees for ageism. I resent that they say things that make me think they wouldn't take hiring an experienced engineer seriously. I resent that they think my profession is best served by dumb happy newbies with no private life. I refuse to tolerate this in any company I work for and I will ceaselessly call th…

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