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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)

#61

Post by michaelochurch »

Udo wrote: post #41
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.

31. The fact that 39 is "definitely old" is fucked up.

Age discrimination isn't about competence (programmers peak much later than 40) but control. It exists because the VC man-child oligarchy (oddly enough, software inherits the age-discrimination culture from business-culture colonists who'd be "too old" to write code) thinks that people will work harder if this shitty, artificial time pressure is put on them. And, of course, much of the ageism and sexism is unintentional but still exclusionary. See: open-plan offices and the aggressive micromanagement of Scrum. I don't think Scrum and open-plan were devised with ageism in mind, but they contribute massively to the attrition. As people get older, they have less tolerance for macho-subordinate bullshit.

This macho-subordinate culture that is imposed on software engineers needs to die. It drives out an incredible amount of talent, makes us an HR nightmare as far as diversity goes, and it has nothing to do with programming; in fact, it detracts from the quality of what is produced. We have to kill it at any cost and professionalize our industry because we can't trust our financial backers.

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

#62

Post by geomark »

Udo wrote: post #35
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…

> When VCs profile the successful investments, young, smart and driven all correlate. I would be very surprised if investments with old, smart, and driven people were correlated with failure. Considering the bias against age is so strong, I believe more than one person would have reveled in pointing that out already if the data remotely allowed for that conclusion. > Experienced engineers with families can seldom aff…

The simple truth is that most people like to surround themselves with other people who are just like them.

That fits with the frequent discussion/advice about how important it is to hire to fit the "culture" of a company, particularly a startup.

Reminds me of a funny moment at a previous job in a field office providing technical support for pre and post sales (us old timers have lots of stories, don't ya know). There were half a dozen field offices sprinkled around the country. Ours was by far the most diverse - two Iranians, two Chinese, an Indian, a Finn, a Latino, and about six white guys and girls. We were also the highest performing by a large margin. At an annual meeting of all the offices the manager of the Bay area office (consistently lower performing which baffled everyone since they were in the heart of Silicon Valley) talked about how they were working on performance improvement by recruiting candidates that would fit in well with their group (all young white guys). When our offices's turn came one of the technical leads, an Iranian guy, stated "our diversity is our strength". The whole Bay area team appeared totally deflated.

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

#63

Post by seiji »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #48
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.

The fun part about unions: when you see your company has $200 billion cash in the bank, the union gets together and says "we made that. everyone deserves a raise."

If you're a programmer working at Apple or Google making less than ~$3 million per year (or any other large-scale, profitable firm), you're being taken advantage of.

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

#64

Post by puranjay »

In my line of work (digital marketing), I actually prefer slightly older people because they usually have a body of experience and data to rely on to make better decisions.

Yes, young people know social media better, but that's a role I can easily get a couple of fresh college graduates for. For deep analysis and understanding of customer personas, messaging, etc. I feel older people do better.

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

#65

Post by serve_yay »

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

Insane. This issue is unfortunately what gets me so down about the diversity efforts happening today. We seek to empower a new group of people, more broadly representative of humanity's rich spectrum, to be unhireable at 45.

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

#66

Post by michaelochurch »

rshlo wrote: post #52
r0naa wrote: post #26

There is something I frankly don't understand. Why would anyone discriminate against older, more experienced engineers? Tech companies are spending millions of dollars on their offices and employee-perks to attract and retain talent and yet they discriminate against the category of people who has the most experience? It just boggles my mind. I have a very limited perspective, but come from a country where the ageism…

It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.

It's quite simple: a young and single engineer will cost less and work more. An older and married (or with kids) engineer will cost more and work less.

However, that older engineer will achieve more in an 8-hour day than the CommodityScrumDrone achieves in three 70-hour weeks.

Unless, you know, you orient the entire organization around replaceable, low-skill, "Scrum" compliant engineers and never invest in your people. Then you're striving for mediocrity and deserve to fail miserably.

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

#67

Post by JesperRavn »

Just a reminder that the following are inconsistent (and both views go basically unchallenged on HN)

- Tech is exploitative, underpaying and overworking naive employees.

- Tech is dominated by privileged White/Asian males who exclude women and minorities from what would otherwise be a great opportunity.

(If you take a Marxist view that attaches a ridiculously high value to what an employee is worth, then these views can be consistent, in the sense that you can label almost any employment arrangement as exploitation. But I would guess most people on HN subscribe to the (correct) market oriented view which defines exploitation much more narrowly as getting a person to accept something worse than their outside options by the emotional appeal of the job. If startups were really duping White males into working for them instead of a better paid and lower stress banking job or whatever, someone who really cares about women and minorities would presumably tell them to steer clear of this exploitation).

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

#68

Post by michaelochurch »

seiji wrote: post #63
nileshtrivedi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fun part about unions: when you see your company has $200 billion cash in the bank, the union gets together and says "we made that. everyone deserves a raise." If you're a programmer working at Apple or Google making less than ~$3 million per year (or any other large-scale, profitable firm), you're being taken advantage of.

I laugh heartily when management types say they want someone to be "more of a team player".

A team player-- that is, a unionist-- is the last thing that Silicon Valley investors and executives want.

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

#69

Post by guscost »

seiji wrote: post #55
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.

To start a "modern" project today, you have to know programming languages, infrastructure, and packaging systems that didn't even exist five years ago. That's the surface-level "technology" they (VCs) mean. VCs don't care about your deep algorithm knowledge or domain experience unless it can accelerate user-facing interfaces to the moon. If you hire people with 30 years experience, do they know what a Gruntfile is? D…

I get where you're coming from, but this should really be qualified by acknowledging that the overwhelming majority of software work is not "modern" by that definition and has nothing to do with any of those newer technologies. Most software products will never have to be deployed on 1,000 AWS instances. For example, I've never used a DevOps stack, a JS module loader or build manager, or an AWS instance in a professional setting. And if I didn't feel like researching those technologies on my own it would be totally fine as long as I didn't try to get hired as a DevOps guru or whatever.

I am using React/Flux a lot lately, but that is just one straightforward JS platform, and since in my opinion they absolutely nailed the "pit of success" it's no problem to learn it by making real applications.

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

#70

Post by zanny »

bottled_poe wrote: post #47
outside1234 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you aren't already wealthy, and its a startup - which means you pretty much selling you life to the thing - than everything you have.

A VC might invest a million in ten different companies, but they often still have another 10 in traditional stocks to fall back on if all their ventures fail and they can continue to sit pretty. Their investment in the company is mathematically significantly larger than an employee, but that isn't how it feels when the business goes belly up. The VC writes off another failure, made another million somewhere else, and meanwhile the dev is distraught with blaming himself for basically his lifes work failing.

Yes, there can be role reversal there, it is not absolute, but it is the average. Just because some have and some have not does not mean someone can not put in a lot more of themself into a project. There are enough VCs that got rich off of being the developer that they probably recognize the difference.

And yes, that should hold weight when you only want to give the guy that makes the dream the reality .05% while a guy surfing waves after doing a VC round on a yacht providing the money to make it happen can expect incredible returns if the dream succeeds.

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