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

There are many industries around the world where agism is rampant, and there is only ever one excuse: money and control. Young people are cheaper and more gullible.

It's not a secret, far from it, it's one of the few things for which the cliche "everybody knows" actually applies.

Sure, many industries try to cover up this fact a bit, but only tech makes up such elaborate stories to pretend it isn't all about cold hard cash.

Obviously, there is a reason for this beyond creating a flattering self-image: Most other industries that exploit the young and naive have plenty of supply.

Good engineers however are rare at any age, so market forces aren't sufficient to maintain this exploitative relationship, it needs to be artificially enforced.

Resulting for instance in the insane situation that many older engineers are unemployed whilst the industry is importing cheap young and easily abused engineers from abroad.

(Full disclosure: I too used to believe the main cause for that was that these older engineers had outdated knowledge and no longer making the effort to learn anything new, until I became a hiring manager. And although I have nothing but anecdotal evidence (so has the other side btw), I will be so bold as to state that that is a big fat lie.)

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 afford take those risks.

There's a difference between what they say the reasons for discrimination are and what they actually are. There are plenty of young developers with families and plenty of old ones without (including myself) - it's not clear at all that having a family makes you less likely to get hired.

I think the primary reason why founders only hire young people is also the reason why employees are more likely to be white and male, and it's got nothing to do with malice per se. The reasons you hear against the hiring of people belonging to a certain group always sound similar, and that's because they're made up after the decision was already formed on an emotional level. The simple truth is that most people like to surround themselves with other people who are just like them. For an entrepreneur more often than not this means hiring the young.

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

This means the extend to which an employer can profit from preferring younger employees is very much limited.

Also, young people in Europe are generally less sensitive to promises of future riches because of both cultural differences and the fact that it's simply extremely rare that a European startup strikes gold.

The agism is the same, but it's easier to overcome since there's less profit in it.

There is a downside though: youth unemployment.