The Brutal Ageism of Tech

Are you sure you are not committing the same ageist judgement here?

I see an old/young tradeoff between pattern recognition and fluid intelligence.

Maybe why some older developers show less enthusiasm for the next really "awesome" idea is that is really isn't that new. Maybe the older developer has already learned the hard way the downside of the Dunning-Kruger affect, where: the more you know, the more you know what you don't know.

On the other side of the coin, maybe older developers have a blind spot towards opportunities that have failed in the past. Because the timing wasn't right. Because the audience wasn't ready or the infrastructure was premature. The secret of a good joke (and startups) is timing.

Perhaps some startups are best structured like a team sport; with both younger players at the peak of their brilliance and with older players that can both play and coach.

(1) If someone doesn't keep up with currently relevant technology, they will find themselves without the job skills that employers are looking for, regardless of whatever other qualities they may have. This isn't ageism.

(2) If someone works at the same place for 10+ years, getting raises every year and becoming more and more valuable because of their knowledge of the innards of one or more huge codebases that are specific to that company, they're likely to have a hard time finding another job doing something different that pays as much or more. It's very easy for people to settle into a routine for many years that doesn't necessarily carry over to another job. Someone in this situation might have to take a pay cut (maybe a big one) to start from square one doing something else at another company. This is an unfortunate reality of being a software developer, but it also isn't ageism.

(3) If a really young entrepreneur is hiring for their startup, and they haven't had the life experience to develop the maturity and insight to avoid being biased towards hiring people who are just like them, it is possible that they will favor a younger developer over an older developer based on age alone. They may not even be aware that they're doing it, they might just feel like all other things being equal, the younger developer is a better fit for the company. This could be ageism sometimes, and it's very unfortunate when it is.

(1) and (2) are the perils of having a long career as a developer. Employers who don't hire someone because of these reasons are making rational hiring decisions; they're not making decisions based on being biased against someone because of their age.

I don't know how often (3) happens though. I could see it being a problem in SF, where I've heard the job market is disproportionately composed of startups. I don't think it's like that in the South Bay (at least not to the same degree), where there are tons of large and established companies that are less likely to do this.

I can't wait until these 22 year olds of today hit their 40s and they reap what they've sown.

Zuckerburg said "younger people are just smarter"? Certainly there's a degree of hubris in youth that you don't lose without experiences of failure and compromise. But that's usually not "smarts" - just youth. I've had similar encounters with people where I've been able to guess parts of their business (and failures), and it's because I've already had my own.

One example - pardon the long rant...

I did a bit of prototyping with some college students about 15 months ago. Core idea was "coursera/udacity for medical students" - something like that. Being medical students, they saw a lack of useful material focusing on them, and wanted to fill that niche. "You'll have trouble getting content, and will likely run in to IP issues with professors and universities". I said this within the first 10 minutes of meeting them. "Oh no, we've already got people lined up, ready to create content," was the reply.

That intrigued me, because content is the hardest part. We met again, and again, and I did a small (small - like weekend prototype) set of code to let people upload instruction content based on the structure we'd laid out. Then.... nothing. Days to weeks to months... Nothing. What happened? They mistook "hey, great idea! yeah, I'll do it" sort of nice/polite feedback as real commitment. The few instructors who actually were interested in going further discovered they had to clear their involvement with their respective universities, as it seemed to constitute teaching and would conflict with their existing contracts (IIRC it could have been worked out with money/licensing, but there was no revenue at this point).

So... months later after a lot of legwork on their end, they came to the conclusion that I'd come to after 10 minutes. That's not to say "Ha, I was right, dumb idea" - the idea will happen, imo. They just sort of ignored me - I was an 'outsider' - they 'knew the space', etc. I'm the old guy who's not at university - how could I possibly know what student life is like now, in 2012? They could have saved themselves a lot of time by focusing on the issues I'd identified up front (which... was not just tooting my horn here - an older colleague identified the same issues on the same initial evening meeting).

But hey, "younger people are just smarter," right? Nothing is so cut and dried. Smarter people are smarter, energetic people are energetic, etc. There are 50 year olds that run rings around many 25 year olds that I know, both physically and activity-wise.