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Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

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Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#41

Post by Udo »

leaveyou wrote: post #25

I'm not "young" anymore and not "old" yet, but I'm quite saddened by this point of view: 'The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”'. Software business seems mostly about exploitation of the naivety of the youngsters and less about software and programming.

I'm definitely old - going on 40 this year - and I don't recognize myself in that argument either. I think the reason why these points sound like they're made up is because they are, in fact, made up to justify something that's already been decided based on feeling.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#42

Post by adevine »

rayiner wrote: post #33
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #18

The issue is really more practical: Young engineers can afford to take more risk, particularly if they are not married. VCs want people who can go all in on an idea that looks like an obvious fail, because often enough, the young engineers who don't know better actually pull it off. These companies become high profile and their founders become famous for being young and wealthy. When VCs profile the successful invest…

I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious reasons.

As someone in a 14 year DINK relationship, I totally disagree with this. When you are in a relationship, decisions need to be collaborative - you can't just chase any opportunity that comes along without thinking about how it will affect your partner. Also, when I was single, I could spend the vast majority of my time working. In a relationship, not only CAN'T I do that (my partner would kill me), but I don't want to; I'd rather spend more time on what is truly important - my personal relationships.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#43

Post by parasubvert »

First, Keep in mind this was written by Vivek Wadhwa, who has a history of attention-seeking articles and statements on social issues in tech.

Second, while the startup scene may follow this trend, the larger employers of the SF Bay Area are not staffed with 20-somethings, they're staffed by all age groups.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#44

Post by yummyfajitas »

rayiner wrote: post #33
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #18

The issue is really more practical: Young engineers can afford to take more risk, particularly if they are not married. VCs want people who can go all in on an idea that looks like an obvious fail, because often enough, the young engineers who don't know better actually pull it off. These companies become high profile and their founders become famous for being young and wealthy. When VCs profile the successful invest…

I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious reasons.

A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#45

Post by tarr11 »

dominotw wrote: post #37

It is definitely not a secret. Age bias is so obvious that its actually celebrated. Look at this example from Jetbrains Jobs page https://www.jetbrains.com/company/jobs/ We offer: Fascinating work in a friendly, young team

Yikes. This needs to called out.

They also offer bonuses tied to product releases. Seems like that will create some perverse incentives.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#46

Post by MPSimmons »

> Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

Pretty clearly, there are tens of thousands of unqualified engineers.

This is less about age, and more about whether you adapt with the times and changing technology. If you're a developer who grew up writing, say, COBOL, and you got REALLY GOOD at COBOL...I mean, just completely amazing at COBOL, so that you're in the top 1% of COBOL programmers in the world...where do you work in 2015? At one of the dozen or so banks that still uses COBOL.

But what about the people in the top 10%? The people who still devoted their time to learning COBOL like no one's business? Where do they work in 2015? Wal-Mart.

I hate to quote Seth Godin, but if you're going to devote yourself to being great at something, you need to absolutely be the best at it, or you're going to find yourself out of work whenever that thing isn't in vogue - and even then, it's a gamble.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#47

Post by bottled_poe »

outside1234 wrote: post #12
sv_muppets_ wrote: post #10

Let's see - you can get these experienced engineers, who will build a proper platform, a robust architecture, a decent code base, and given the fact they have delivered before, a solution that will provide what the customers want. Or You can have these wet behind the ears fuckers straight from college who will just download a metric shit ton of code via gem install and npm, and then rebuild several wheels in JS, whil…

Youth also doesn't ask complicated questions, like why is the VC getting 10% and I'm getting 0.05% when I'm doing 10% of the work and the VC 0.05%.

In my mind, fair ownership is proportional to investment risk. Each owner invests some combination of time and capital. I assume you are an employee, so how much risk are you taking on?

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#48

Post by nileshtrivedi »

bottled_poe wrote: post #6

Don't worry, I'm sure the union has your back. What's that? No union in the tech industry?

Why do we need unions when it's so easy to start a company? There is no monopoly on means of production when it comes to software.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#49

Post by justincormack »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #13

How is this a dark secret? This is true for almost all industries is it not? Most business want young hires because the work more (in quantity, not talking about quality here), and can be trained to fit the organization's needs.

No, in many industries experience is (or was) valued.

People businesses are generally worse though, look at law firms where the idea is to exploit the young, overwork them, and if they survive that offer them a tiny chance of the huge profits that senior partners share. Apparently this is supposed to be motivational.

Re: Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age (2010)

#50

Post by gexla »

> The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”. As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

Underpaid AND you have to pull all-nighters? No wonder software engineers are hard to come by. What are my other options?

Is building forms in Rails really that difficult for older people? EDIT: Keeping in mind this article was from 2010.

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