Slashdot Mirror
Silicon Valley's Dirty Little Secret: Age Bias
MightyMait writes "With my 40th birthday coming up, seeing this article makes me happy I have a good job (and a little wary of having to find another). From the article: '[T]he start-up ethos extols fresh ideas and young programmers willing to toil through the night. Chief executives in their 20s, led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, are lionized, in part because of their youth. Many investors state bluntly that they prefer to see people under 40 in charge. Yet the youth worship undercuts another of Silicon Valley's cherished ideals: that anyone smart and driven can get ahead in what the industry likes to think of as an egalitarian culture. To many, it looks like simple age discrimination - and it's affecting people who wouldn't fit any normal definition of old. "I don't think in the outside world, outside tech, anyone in their 40s would think age discrimination was happening to them," says Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment attorney who has fielded age-discrimination inquiries from people in their early 40s. But they feel it in the Bay Area, he said, and it's "100 percent due to the new, young, tech startup mindset."'"
" wouldn't fit any normal definition of old" - plzzz.... fashion industry anyone?
If you read Slashdot, you are too old.
Seriously, people, this hasn't been a "secret" in at least 10 years.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you don't like it, consider the alternative. The system craves fresh meat/blood. So what?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Olds like Steve Jobs and Jony Ive have no hope of creating products that young, hip consumers want. Only some grandpa with a calcified brain would have put money in their shit. That's why Apple has a sprightly young turk heading up their marketing.
The age bias is because kids are young and stupid and will happily waste 40, 60, even 80 hours a week slaving away for peanuts on the Next Big Thing in computers. There's something to be said though for people with a few years under their belt. For one, they know what failure looks like. For two, they don't go with the shiny things because they're shiny -- they understand business needs and can design things that'll last and can be scaled up. The dot com bubble happened precisely because everybody thought the dumb fresh-out-of-college kids had all the answers and we threw money at them like girls throw wet panties at singers on stage.
And we paid for it. Apparently though, we didn't learn anything from the experience. Like say, a modicum of business sense.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
15 years ago, I worked for a well known integrated chip manufacturer in Redmond Washington. They make very expensive power conditioning components for aerospace. It was my "dream job".
I started work there as a Database Admin at a salary of well into the 80's with a teaser to move into the 90's, I thought that after years of grunt IT work, I'd hit it. I was 35 at the time.
Well, of course there is a "and then it happened.." I got laid off.
Long story short, at 35, and the "peak" of my "career", I found that employers wanted 20 to 25 year olds because they would do the same job, except at 60 hours a week, and for less money.
So I went back to my military connections, and got a Civil Service job. I make less, but guess what? I have DECENT HEALTH CARE, and - here's the kicker - I GET 5 FUCKING WEEKS OF VACATION A YEAR.
The biggest benefit is that some 20-something puke is not going to take my job.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...not give a rat's a** what your age is if you've got a good idea AND a good implementation (ideas are cheap - despite what you may think.)
I perform technical due diligences for multiple investors and they do consider the makeup of teams but never has age been a factor in the decision making.
Loading...
If people past 40 are valuable, wouldn't some company which doesn't discriminate against them benefit more and market forces will drive out age discrimination. I have a feeling many people in tech fields think doing the same job they did when they were in their 20s is a brilliant idea. Either move up or get replaced by newer crop of talent.
Well aren't you smug.
Whoa now, some of those 40 year old techies actually have enough qualifications to fit the impossible requests on job requirements. If we hire them, we can't get more H1Bs and complain to congress there aren't enough skilled workers in the US despite a depressed economy where jobs are hard to come by.
God spoke to me
Suing an employer for age discrimination is very difficult. Proving it in a court of law is almost impossible. Worse, a former head of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sat on some 20,000 age discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations expired. That person is now a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court -- Clarence Thomas.
When seeking a job, however, there are things you can do on your own to reduce the likelihood of age discrimination. In your resume (electronic or hardcopy), omit any experience more than 10-12 years old. While listing schools attended and degrees earned, omit the years. Both men and women should use hair dye to "cover the gray", but men should not hide their baldness. (Young men are often bald by choice; but a comb-over, weave, or toupee too easily indicates an older man.)
No good software engineer need be unemployed. There is just too much work.
I started coding professionally in 1970 and I'm still coding. Not a single day of unemployment so far, and I don't expect one anytime soon. Just keep up your skills and maintain a network of current and former coworkers, just in case. And do good work so people want to keep you around.
Strange how what the western world calls egalitarian, means meritocracy in the east.
It could be a acceptance of the word engineered by the intellectuals, so that when they change the meaning few will notice. Sorry to be conspiratorial.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
If you're old, you need to be special. Like an actual expert.
With age comes expectations.
Wow, you actually use Yahoo for something? You must be REALLY old!
And this is a secret how?
I developed grey hair in my early twenties.
Depending on whether I've dyed it back to its original color, the experience of age bias is universal, whether tech firm, fellow parents, or getting carded for liquor.
Kriston
I left that place when I was 32 - after I sold my creations (plural) there to the highest bidders
Reminds me of a scene from the book Microserfs (Douglas Coupland):
Ethan: "I have brought four products to market myself. Four very successful products. (Unspoken sentiment hangs in the air like dying fart: "Yeah, but your companies all tanked within a year.")
lucm, indeed.
Actually, I'd say that the 20-25 year olds willing to work 80+ hours a week 30k a year, and more importantly, those who exploit them are those responsible for the country's financial woes.
Whenever I hear these types of arguments I always think there must be some psychological term for this. That is, whenever someone has been deprived of some benefit, it is all too easy to get him to rally behind depriving others of the same.
Why should every business endeavor be a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders?
And good god do you really want the people who will do the job just because it's a job? Desperation breeds loyalty by necessity but it is not a very healthy state of mind. I guarantee the civil service job is anything but sexy and probably pays nothing more than a reasonable wage. These are the tradeoffs that, generally speaking, have emerged from the free market system.
Most of the successful people I know got that way to because they took a risk they were largely unaware of. These people were either psychopathic or young, both stupid. For every one of them, I'm sure there are thousands who suffered the consequences.
But as an investor, who would you go with? The crazy ones of course.
In Silicon valley, when you reached the age of 40 you supposed to have at least 50 millions dollars under you name...
Right.
Just a small piece of information that might prove relevant to your argument here.
The year is 2012, not 1999.
If you are 40 and still looking for opportunities in the Valley, it isn't because you're trying to figure out if the $80,000 signing bonus is worth more than the beach condo in the summer they're offering. It's probably because you're broke and have been unemployed for 6 months, and are willing to take any job just to stay in the tech field..
Like I said, it's not 1999 anymore. Wake up.
I hope your post is satire. If not, then fuck you.
You know what's really wrong with this country? It's the people at the top fucking over what's left of the middle class. Money doesn't trickle down, it rises upward if regular people have money to spend. People are working longer, harder, and for less while their jobs are being outsourced and benefits are being slashed. The 1% is making money hand over fist and even though they're richer than they've been in the last 50+ years they still bitch and moan when it comes time to pay their fair share of taxes. If they don't like Clinton rates then we could always go back to Eisenhower rates.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
I am sorry to say but it's folks like you that are responsible for the USA's [finacial] woes it finds itself in at this time.
People who say things like this, and actually believe them, aren't entirely responsible for our economic problems, but they're probably the worst offenders.
To make matters worse, your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the tax paying ordinary American!
(a) Federal employees pay taxes like everyone else. Yes, their jobs are ultimately paid for by everyone's tax dollars (including their own) but it makes no difference to the person getting the paycheck.
(b) I'm sure he feels a great deal of sorrow for the people caught up in the rat race of private-sector employment, which is why he's taken the step of not being one of them any more. Your statement makes as much sense as saying to someone who's happy to have survived cancer, "Your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the people whose tumors don't respond to chemotherapy!"
Those five weeks should be cut down to say two, and your salary shuld be reduced by at least 20%.
(a) Right. God forbid someone should have a reasonable vacation and benefits package instead of being expected to work himself half to death. Clearly the solution is to drag everyone down to the same miserable level.
(a) You have no idea what his salary is. Most likely, it's less than his private-sector counterparts make. That's one of the tradeoffs you make when you take a government job. Sorry if that doesn't jibe with your ideology.
I can still find folks willing to do your job under such conditions.
Ah, got it. You're one of the parasites, then. See my first line, above.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Why should every business endeavor be a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders?
They aren't. Shareholders (through their management employees) have an incentive to treat skilled employees reasonably well, since it can take a long time to replace and retrain them.
As far as unskilled workers go... well, we've let in ten million Central and South American peasants to remove the tiny bit of bargaining power they had. Pretty much whenever the Democrats and Republicans act in collusion someone is getting screwed, and this is one of those times.
The funny thing I've found throughout my is that companies run and inevitably staffed by younger people tend to be a mess. Everything is done inefficiently, emotions affect decisions and everyone is far too comfortable working excessively long hours. They're definitely a lot more in tune with the latest trends, but they're also a lot more likely to waste their time on unproductive nonsense.
Companies run by an older group tend to be far more stable and productive. Ironically, you're also a lot more likely to be appreciated. The challenge, however, is not getting stuck somewhere that's stagnated.
On the employee side, however, if you want job security in the long term you'd better be considering management or a very special niche for yourself.
You're a clueless troll if that is what you believe the US's fiscal problems are.
I am in my 40's, an EE, almost 20 years experience, and paid well. I am paid well because I know my stuff and can get things done right the first time with minimal fuss. I have been working for my current employer for several years years and have a reasonable amount of job security. But even if I lose my job for unforeseen reasons, I am not worried because I know I can get hired even in this economy. This is not arrogance speaking; I know my stuff and employers will pay me for my experience and skill.
I can detect short sited employers like you and would never work for you. There are many talented technical people with similar experience as mine and can detect abusive and idiotic employers.
"I don't think in the outside world, outside tech, anyone in their 40s would think age discrimination was happening to them," says Cliff Palefsky
I love this, only a person who can't remember their youth would make such a ridiculous statement. Age discrimination is ever-present, but tech is one of the few areas where it works in reverse. Remember not being able to vote or drink or smoke or drive or choose where you wanted to live or go to school? Yeah... no age discrimination.
The tech world is different. Different because it's based not on hard labour, but on making clear and correct decisions. Be it programming, analysis, or project management, in this world the real effort isn't in the work; it's in deciding what work should be done.
The actual work -- the long hours, the youth-oriented efforts discussed in the post -- is the blue-collar work. It's the low-wage, low-responsibilty, low-risk work of this industry. Of course it's best-suited to the young.
It's not age discrimination to say that any 40 year-old in this industry should know how to make decisions without being told what to do. It's not age discrimination to say that any 40 year-old in this industry should be ready and willing to take responsibility for their own decisions. It's not age discrimination to say that any 40 year-old in this industry should want to be accountable for their work and take the financial risks associated with that work.
What makes this industry different is that the lowly bottom-rung intern programmer has a direct path through project management into senior management right from the start. Unlike most other industry, there's no "management track". Everyone's in the management track. That intern should become a team programmer, then a senior programmer, then a team leader, then a senior team leader, then a team manager, then a senior manager, and then should be acquiring and selling to their own (or partially own) clients.
So given a 40 year-old, with more than 5 years of experience in the industry, who isn't in a management role, it's not age discrimination to say that the person isn't interested in becoming anything more than they already are. And given a employee who isn't interested in moving up, it's not age discrimination to prefer an employee who does.
This industry is all about those willing to spend an absurd amount of time focusing on a ridiculously specific task, and those willing to risk their finances on the success and viability of their own decisions. If you aren't willing to work through the night routinely, and you aren't willing to put your own money on the line, then there are plenty of other industries for you.
Believe it or not, this industry is not about four decades of being told what to do. It's about 2 years of being told, 2 years of being taught, 2 years of being encouraged, and if you don't get it by then, 2 years of finding someone else. As an employer, I'm not interested in the 40 year-old that I need to supervise. I'm not interested in risking my money on the reliability of that 40 year-old. And I'm not interested in paying such an employee more than I would to someone I'm expecting to grow.
So, as always, if you don't like the employment options available to you, start your own business and do it however you like.
Start a business that only hires 40 year-olds. That's perfectly fine too. It can be the first question in your interview. It can be the only question in your interview. Make it work your way. Stop complaining when others do it their way. That's exactly the point. Either make decisions, or do what you're told. And sometimes, what you're told is that you simply aren't good enough. So when that time comes, stand up and prove otherwise with your own business. Some of us have.
lets just cut to the chase and call it what it is. The inexperienced getting taken advantage of. For every facebook there are hundreds of failures and I doubt that a venture capital firm would be so eager to invest in these if they had no way to extract a profit from them. Older also means more savy.
That's what they say, but what's the difference between an idea and a vision? Or between an idea and speaking from experience?
Everybody at my place is over 30, mostly over 40, and we have several over 70. A lot of people come here after 'retirement' because they just go stir crazy sitting at home and not solving problems.
We have a hardcore interview on real world problem solving skills and experience (not Google or MS gotcha brain teasers) and it's very easy to get a feel for how internally motivated someone is. We hire the good people even though they cost a lot more than the ones right out of college. But a good experienced guy can get twice the work done with half the effort/time, because we've already made all the mistakes - and then twice that at least if nobody else on the team is dragging them down. Another 2x if management isn't! It's a bargain if you look at it like that.
Silicon Valley works on the model of 'hire newbies and burn through their endless energy for cheap while we spend the VC money on goodies' so what the story says isn't wrong. But I'd like to let experienced middle-aged people who really feel driven to engineer know that you can always get a good job at a decent small to mid-sized company - the job market there is huge. I get at least a couple job inquiries every month, and they know how old I am.
It's the driven part that counts - I get a high off solving problems and making cool useful stuff, and so do the other people here. I've never thumbs downed a candidate who had decent skills and just couldn't stop talking about the cool things s/he'd done. But we can all smell a stagnant large company 'lifer' when s/he walks in the door. If you've got the drive, don't let yourself get trapped, even if 'it's a job!'
I have been in software for 32 years professionally. Whether there is age discrimination or not it is certainly not evenly distributed across all employers. It is not easy to find employees and co-workers who are adept at software. Even merely adequate software engineers can be elusive to find. So many companies realize that discrimination on any basis is not something they can afford. I am 58 now and still going strong. There is no way I experienced any age discrimination in my 40s. And there are several people at my current small company (80 people or so) who are older than I.
You're quite correct, I do make less that the "private sector". A lot less.
People have this strange idea that most Federal workers are making "bank" and that just isn't so. I also work my ass of to support the mission of the agency I work for (the Air Force) for the benefit of all Americans. When you work for the government, you work for the People.
About my vacation. I said 5 weeks, but I started out with less than that. All the same, the United States is one of the FEW civilized countries in the world where most worker bees get so little vacation time, an almost INHUMAN 2 weeks?
Seriously, what can you do in 2 fucking weeks?
Yes, I know that all the right-wing Tea Baggers thing government workers should be happy with $10 an hour and 2 weeks a year, but you know what? They're "Tea Baggers" which mean they are also morons.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I am sorry to say but it's folks like you that are responsible for the USA's [finacial] woes it finds itself in at this time.
To make matters worse, your statements do not reflect an iota of sorrow for the tax paying ordinary American!
Those five weeks should be cut down to say two, and your salary shuld be reduced by at least 20%.
Funny how in many other countries, people start with 5 weeks of paid vacation and 35 hour weeks, and still have higher productivity than here in the USA.
Methinks there is something else wrong. Like zapping away the joy and pride of work by attempting to squeeze all you can get out of your workers. I wouldn't be surprised if a lesser amount of Americans like doing their job than in any other Western country. Hint: This isn't the fault of the workers.
I am sorry to say but it's folks like you that are responsible for the USA's [finacial] woes it finds itself in at this time.
The USA doesn't have any financial woes. When a Democrat is president everyone wrings their hands about public debt, but when a Republican is president everyone wants to cut taxes and go on a spending spree. Even now, nothing is as important as balancing the budget -- except prolonging the Bush tax cuts. Letting those expire would go a long way toward fixing the "problem", but the deficit hawks won't even consider it.
This is just disaster capitalism brought home to roost. Squeeze the middle and working classes, because... well, because you can.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
During the dotcom bubble, I was at the top end of the age range (35-ish) that was fashionable and working for a US TLA as a general-purpose sysadmin greybeard in an all-Unix shop. I networked more than most and corresponded with lots of folks both in govt and the private sector. I don't know why I did it because I loved my work and wasn't looking for anything new but I did like to keep up and keep in touch with lots of folks. Also, it didn't hurt and sometimes greatly amused me that the part of my email address just to the left of the ".gov" tended to get my emails read.
During those years I turned down a number of job offers. I don't remember specifically; some were informal "let's talk" and others were "I'll pay you $X to come work for us". But I distinctly remember several offers that would have as much as quadrupled my pay (which would have put me at double the going rate since, as a fed, I was already being paid only about half what the average private sector employee in my position received.)
I never bit. Of those companies, none survive today. All of them wanted me to trade my 40-hour work week with time-and-a-half for overtime for positions where I essentially worked 24 hours a day, perhaps 12 at the office and the rest of the time wearing a pager. None offered more than a couple of holidays. None offered sick or vacation time that was more than a farce. The pay, though, would have been great if I was willing to step into the hamster wheel and start running.
So maybe I'm a doddering old fool. Maybe I was unambitious. All I know is that now I'm retired. My retirement check covers my expenses plus a little...and that's after deductions for all taxes, decent health insurance, very good life insurance, and fairly good long-term care insurance. It's not lounging on a yacht with supermodels but I'm not afraid of being three paychecks from living in my car, either.
Folks who spit on public-sector employees simply don't understand. I often wonder if it's worth the (usually wasted) effort I sometime put towards trying to help them see things from a broader perspective.
The argument is, "you have something I don't have, therefore instead of working to raise myself I will take yours away." Pretty common. Go check out the racial studies department of any American university.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Decent health care -- 5 weeks vacation? You think that's bad?
Sounds like what every other developed western country gives all its citizens. I want every American to get that too (as we used to).
You sound like you have too much money. I don't think you're paying enough taxes. I think your taxes should be raised.
Taxes in the US are the lowest they've been in modern times, and lower than any other developed country. The rich are moochers and freeloaders like Romney who pay a lower proportion than the rest of us (thanks to handouts like the Bush tax cuts). That tax money should come from the rich.
If the executive is math literate, it sends the message that the street's valuation lead the harvesting of value.
These are the same "smart people" that currently have Amazon with a P/E 3,253. That is not a typo, the P/E is over 3k (to compare: Apple's P/E is 13.24, Google is 21.01)
So when's THAT harvest coming in? In the terms of your metaphor, it's like expecting the orchard will have a bumper crop, and that several dozen other solar systems with fertile planets will be found to grow on also.
Yeah, those guys sure are "smart" just like you!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Younger people need to put in the extra time till they learn how to do it right.
I tell everyone I mentor - I want to walk in, press one mouse click on a button, go get my coffee and have your eight hour day done before I get back.
The problem is the PHB folks that don't get that you can actually get things done if you don't put in an 80 hour week.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
Employment is overrated.
I quit my job at age 40, and went independent.
I never made so much money in my life, working so few hours.
If you have the skills, just start your own enterprise, and show those young whippersnappers how old school engineers kick ass.
The time is perfect for it: developers can market their produce directly to consumers via app stores.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
We're investment bankers!
Whenever I hear these types of arguments I always think there must be some psychological term for this. That is, whenever someone has been deprived of some benefit, it is all too easy to get him to rally behind depriving others of the same.
I always think of it as "It was hard for me, so I'll make damn sure it's hard for you!" syndrome.
Some states pay crap but others pay good and you can retire by age 62 or 20 years service. If you have a business, science, or engineering background you are highly qualified in math as well as teaching computers and science coursework. Places like Anchorage Alaska will even start you at 50k a year! I know some slashdotters might baulk and laugh, but for someone hit hard during the .com crunch and great recession begging to work for $18,000 a year because of a resume hole it is a steal.
After 10 years you can make up to $65,000 a year and after 20 or 62 you make $70,000 for life! Oh and you get vacation time too. Teaching you get a sense of purpose accomplishment as well rather than helping some 23 year old nitwitt using daddy's money become rich at your expense. There are people who hate your profession and feel you need to be fired for not having your students pass a test when they do drugs and do not show up half the time, and think you should make minimium wage but that comes with the terrory. I highly recommend it as 35 to 40 is a perfect age. You do not need an education degree to start.
http://saveie6.com/
The role that people 40 and above play in Silicon Valley is that of the Angel Investor.
Nonsense.
They post one of these every month or so. Maybe my perspective is off because I've worked more with Fortune 50 companies there, but I've never seen a real life age bias out there. Intel, for example, when I was there, hired a few really talented people in their 40's as contractors. So did HP, when I was there. In fact, most everywhere I went, there were at least a few 40ish or over 40 people working hard on project work. Same with the Microsoft related entities. Getting an orange badge is easy if you're smart enough to get through the interview. I haven't worked for Facebook, but I would assume, based on what I've seen that it's the same there, too.
Then again, I do my best never to work for startups. My wife doesn't like the horrible instability it brings.
I think, as a general rule, there are more kids that are scared of one day becoming totally obsolete on Slashdot, than there are working professionally in the Valley. When age is an issue, it's usually mainly their issue. Not really anyone else's. Experience in production counts. Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.
This signature intentionally left blank.
Exactly. Studies have showed that after 8 hours of work our production suffers massively, after a while you start to get into negative production because you have to keep fixing the mistakes you made due to exhaustion.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Whenever I hear such arguments I know exactly what it is ... jealousy
So Frostypiss gets 5 weeks off a year and I don't bawawa! Instead of being bitter perhaps one should seek those same conditions for themselves rather than trying to make everyone as miserable as yourself. It is interesting watching Wisconsin as the most vocal supporters who want to end unions were workers who had paycuts, a loss of a union his or herself, and asked to do more with less. They got angry that some people did not get as hard.
Yes I understand in this economic times unions should conceed as what happened with Hostess was well deserved by its greedy employees. But this post is not a political or union oriented.
FYI I am becoming a teacher so yes I get those weeks off a year too. However, I get paid significantly less and it is a crappy job. However, it is a job with the crap to me (not because of the vacation), but for what I feel I provide even if it is stressful. Europeans and Austrailans get these things. Why are people who feel they have no control or wont want to change their lives feel they want everyone else to suffer as well?
http://saveie6.com/
In its last quarter, Apple made about 50 billions and achieved an increase of around 25% of its earnings. Yet the value of its stock dropped because analysts expected more. What kind of message do you think this situation sends to executive? Focus on long-term growth?
I'm pretty sure that you don't follow Apple stock that closely; I was an Apple employee for 8 years, and here's how Apple works: they make reasonable projections, and the street gets pissed at them for not forecasting higher. The stock goes down for a couple weeks, then slowly goes up to the per-prjection value, then goes past it. When it's time for the earnings call, Apple exceeds their projection. The street gets pissed off because they didn't exceed it by "enough". The stock goes down for a few weeks, then slowly goes up to the pre-announcement value, then goes past it.
This is how it has historically always worked.
Now Apple is pretty much over (IMO) due to their loss of Steve Jobs as both umpire (bye, Scott F.!) and the arbiter of taste (Jon Ive, like you a lot, but of the 12 designs you make, Steve was more qualified to pick the 2 to pursue), and there's no one to ride herd on the rest (Tim C., you are a great supply chain guy, but when Steve told you to spend more on the displays to delight the customers, you should have kept that in mind picking the iPhone 5 pixel aspect ratio).
So yeah, it's going to go down over time from its $710 high, but that's not due to the analysts getting a clue about the claims made on Steve's departure from the company that there were more years worth of product in the pipeline than the 1.5 year insiders knew were actually there. It's going to be current_product++ all the way down: Steve did not have a protege to keep them from making bad long term business decisions after he was gone, and so now they are making them.
In Silicon valley, when you reached the age of 40 you supposed to have at least 50 millions dollars under you name.
The role that people 40 and above play in Silicon Valley is that of the Angel Investor.
If you are over 40 and still looking for opportunity to toil through the night hacking away - man, you do not belong in the Valley.
I left that place when I was 32 - after I sold my creations (plural) there to the highest bidders
Pics or it didn't happen!
(Seriously.)
I see a lot of positions open for people with years of experience in various technologies and a 20 year old isn't going to have that. I'm in my 40s and am contacted almost weekly about open positions both at startups and established companies. Experience is everything, that, and networking among former colleagues. At my company we have a number of positions open. We don't care much about age, we care about experience and skill. A programmer who has been around the block a few times will tend to write better more maintainable code. We've been looking for another experienced toolchain engineer (GCC, etc.) for some time now, for example, but they're hard to come by.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I'm over 40 and I honestly have not seen any age discrimination in IT. Maybe it's just the circles I travel in but often age is associated with experience and in many fields it's an asset not a liability. I have seen one or two older people get let go but honestly their skills were not up to what they should be - age had nothing to do with it. Sometimes people get some skills early in their career and make some headway and then just sort of settle in and stop learning. You can ride those skills for a while but eventually the industry moves on and, if you're not careful, you will get left behind. Sadly, by the time you figure it out it might be too late.
Age becomes a crutch, an excuse. In IT, like in many other professions, it's crucial to keep your skills relevant and up to date. Maybe your employer will train you, maybe you have to do it yourself. Either way, you've got to find a way to stay on top of the new developments.
After the first failed performance review that should have been a clear sign that it's time to step it up. If that's me I'm asking my manager what do I need to do to improve? Get a plan together and work towards it. Set some short term goals.
If it really truly is age related discrimination then that's also a clear sign - to get your ass out of there. Go work for someone that appreciates your skills. Better yet, go into contracting. You'll make more money, you'll work on stuff you enjoy, and you'll be hired for what you know and your experience is seen as a positive thing.
Wow, you actually use Yahoo for something? You must be REALLY old!
One word: Flickr. If you are really into photography (not just dumping 1000 vacation pics for Facebook/Google+ friends), there isn't any service I know that comes close.
How do you know that all of the bias is because the older developers are underperforming from your anecdotal evidence alone?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
We hired two contractors that we're older. The resume was stellar and they both interviewed very well, but after having them both brought on at the same time. The older of the two (50's) needed constant help with even the most basic computer setup tasks, this got so bad that no one wanted to help him because of the rabbit hole effect. On top of that he wouldn't listen and tended to do the "I know a better way so ill just do that", when its all said and done what we have is functional but may be completely un-sustainable. If we were to do it over I'd hire someone younger that would actually do what he was told, instead of branching off into "interesting"
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
I look towards 40 as an age where I hope to just be getting started. The jobs that exist for the young all-nighter guy amount to being someone's bitch. Personally, I don't like to be anyone's bitch. I prefer to produce work that I am proud of. Alas, that's not always the case, since there are plenty of "I'm smart and I have a bunch of someone else's money and I need to be a part of everything because I'm the badass" type folks out there. Fortunately for me, this creates a nice niche where I get to clean up where others generally fail due to this approach.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The "shareholders" are not paying the slightest bit of attention to what management is doing, or who the hell the managers are.
You could only think this if you've never had experience in the industry. Big mutual funds are very much paying attention to who is on the management team, the numbers the company is putting up, and anything else that might eventually be reflected in the stock price. I worked at a fund company, and trust me, this is what they spend their time doing. They don't change their positions very often just because there's too much information to absorb before you make a change.
Now, is this true for one-man hedge funds run by coke-snorting idiots who see themselves as "Masters of the Universe"? No. But you should try to keep your money away from those guys because they and the funds they manage don't last long.
I love listening to the people in their forties complain. Warms the very cockles of me heart.
And what's wrong with 5 weeks of vacation a year?
It's miserable pukes like you that are clueless and responsible for the USA's financial woes. A happy, well rested employee is more productive and more creative than a miserable, tired, and heartened employee. An extra week of vacation really only translates out to a 2% bonus, and helps keep them refreshed and will keep them more productive, happy, and less likely to burn out.
Whenever I hear these types of arguments I always think there must be some psychological term for this. That is, whenever someone has been deprived of some benefit, it is all too easy to get him to rally behind depriving others of the same.
The term you're looking for is the Just-world hypothesis. Basically, it's the idea that good behaviors are rewarded and bad behaviors punished as a universal law of nature. So when someone is successful, it's not because of luck or chance, but because they deserved it. Likewise, if someone is suffering, they also deserve it. But it doesn't take modern psychology to figure this one out -- the greeks made a latin proverb out of it, which translated says "every misfortune is to be believed when directed against the unfortunate."
This belief enables and extends into other things, such as a blame the victim mentality, and things that follow from the phrase "I was just following orders." Similar studies have been done on personal responsibility and it was found that the more people that could help, the lower the likelihood is of anyone helping -- that is, a person's sense of guilt is divided by the number of people present. Beyond a certain threshold, nobody does anything. That's why you hear stories about how someone was murdered in the middle of rush hour, in the middle of the street, and nobody helped the victim or even called 911.
The asshat you were replying to simply has a larger than average dose of self-importance... a logical consequence of buying into the belief a bit, uhh, more than average. At least amongst the educated.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Funny how in many other countries, people start with 5 weeks of paid vacation and 35 hour weeks, and still have higher productivity than here in the USA.
Europeans keep bringing this factoid up. This does not mean Europeans work harder or get more stuff done at the office. All this means is that because the welfarfe system and high taxes in Europe make unskilled work so much more expensive than in the US or Asia, a larger percentage of the GDP is produced by robots and computers.
Not sure if you are implying that people "looking for opportunities" are unemployed in a desperate market, or that 40 year olds can't get a job in SV, but either way it's complete bullshit. The demand so far outstrips the supply right now in the Valley it's painful.
Painful because of how many interviews it takes to find anyone decent - but if you are a good engineer who works well with others many companies do not in fact give a shit about your age. Facebook and the other social media companies/startups are still a small fraction of the Bay Area employers.
You're full of shit, and just looking to stroke your own ego. You aren't Mark Zuckerburg. You aren't Steve Jobs. Nothing wrong with that, most people aren't.
Most people around here work for companies; they don't own them. That's practically tautological. At my company, the vast majority of engineers are over forty. Many, perhaps even most, are millionaires, but only just. That'll happen when you make six figures for most of your life and are competent at math. But the notion that everyone over 40 either has tens of millions or is a failure is total bunk. Just something you say to make yourself seem cool.
We have a hardcore interview on real world problem solving skills and experience (not Google or MS gotcha brain teasers)
Look, I agree with most of what you've said, but the idea that Google interviews with "brain teasers" is stupid, and I don't know where it originated. If an interviewer did this, they would be told that they were no longer on the interview rotation. The only way to get back on would be to re-take the interview training again, and explicitly contact the HR/recruitment department, and plead ignorance in their last interview.
Google engineering interviews ask questions which are real, solvable problems, and they generally test your ability to try to solve a problem at all, your ability to solve the problem correctly, and your ability to refine your solution to a more optimal algorithm. It's a check on whether or not you have problem solving skills, how you think about problems, and whether or not you can apply your training and experience, and in the limit, generalize between similar problems.
The difficulty weighting is generally tailored to the level you are being considered for being hired in at, and what you've claimed in your resume, and the opinions of the interviewers involved in any previous phone (or on site) interviews.
If you lie on your resume, you will end up screwed by your lies. If you don't have a good college level background in the subject matter, such that it's going to be possible for you to communicate at a high level about complex concepts with your peers, then you're screwed by your inability to do the job as a member of a team. If you aren't smart enough to even try to brute force a solution and show your thought process in doing so, you're screwed.
If you think you've been handed a "brain teaser" in a Google interview, then contact your recruiter, and ask for a substitute interview for the interviewer who gave you the question, or to at least consider the validity of the question when the interview write-ups go to the hiring committee. Realize that in doing this, if the committee thinks it's not a "brain teaser", and that you should have been able to solve the problems, the interviewer you report might end up peer-bonused for catching something that *should* have disqualified you that the other interviewers didn't, and the result could weigh heavily on your changes should you reapply in the future. So it's a two edged sword.
I personally interviewed a multitude of candidates for Google (and before that, Apple).
Google does NOT use "brain teasers", period.
5 weeks of vacation is normal in Europe, for any job. Some get more. Why would you take this away from the OP? Rather, every US worker should have the same amount of holidays.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I've been working at a bunch of companies in my career and I'm well over 50 and now have decided to work only for startups until it's quitting time in a few years. It's like riding a roller coaster - after one exits, I just want to get back on the next one. One before this, Flip Video, was great, but we all ended getting laid off. In my subsequent job search I encountered a fair amount of age discrimination in hiring by companies large and small. However, at the startup that I currently work for I didn't get that at all. The interview was as tough as any other, but I didn't get the some of the negative vibes I did at other interviews. When I joined, I noticed that there were a fair number of crusty old guys like me, right along side of the kids right out of college. The common thing about us is that we are all good at our jobs. The company has no problems with terminating people who can't deliver. Discrimination exists, but not everywhere. The smart companies realize that discrimination in any form cuts down your pool of talented people and is therefore counterproductive.
Very rarely it is so. Very often, the gov provides services much cheaper than industry, in a more timely and efficient manner, and with higher quality. Health care is an example (not in the US, but just look over the pond).
You are so full of shit.
Ageism is based on two things:
= Old Person wants a quality of life and stability
= Old Person is expensive in both salary and benefits
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
No wonder 7 billion simians just throw more poo.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Also, keeping people under constant exhaustion and fear makes them docile, which is the way the corporate state likes its citizens. It is painfull to watch american people with bad insurance, no vacations, no job security, with debt piling well over their heads, etc. blathering about how free they are. Many americans are just slaves in denial of their enslavement.
That is just eerie! Anyone else who was ten years younger ten years ago? Would be spooky!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'll admit I've never worked in the valley (I've always lived and worked in the UK) but where I've encountered cries of ageism it's always been strongly correlated with incompetence or laziness.
Like the British tradesman who likes to knock off early, and do a shit job complaining about Polish immigrants taking his work when they do so because they work twice as hard and do a much better job, it's simply an excuse used by who are too lazy to compete in the labour market and want an easy ride handed to them.
It's nothing to do with age and entirely about how much time and effort you spend on remaining relevant and with IT being such a fast moving industry with platforms and technologies changing all the time you can't sit still for long before your skills and knowledge do become outdated. It's just the nature of the industry.
Maybe Silicon Valley is now an anomally, maybe there are a bunch of upstarts (that wasn't intended as a pun on startups, but maybe it works) who have this problem, but if that's the case I expect Silicon Valley's reign as tech central to rapidly suffer because personally, the people I learn the most from, from reading their books, their online articles, their posts and so forth are those who are over 40 who have continued to learn throughout their life. Certainly I've never seen the attitude "Oh, he's too old to do that job" and on the contrary it's always been if anything "At his age, he'll hopefully have a lot of experience", as an aside, I have however seen two cases of people being told they were too young for a particular job even though they were the best candidates, though that was in public sector, and despite all the PC propaganda plastered around most public sector offices and e-mail systems, I don't think I've ever worked in such a racist, ageist, homophobic workplace as I did when I worked in local government in the UK.
Or to give an example of the problem, if someone has been learning day in, day out for 40 years, they're inherently going to have an advantage over someone whose only been doing the same for 20, or 30 years. If however someone has been learning day in day out for 30 years but stopped doing so, then by the age of 40 why would they realistically have an advantage over someone whose been doing so for 30 years? 10 years of stagnation doesn't look good, and it's a much safer option to take the person whose still working hard to keep uptodate.
To be fair, I don't think it's necessarily entirely always laziness (though much of the time it is), sometimes it's the pressures of having a family and so forth, but I'm not sure what the answer is here - that's still a choice you make, expecting to get paid just as well, despite having less talent than someone else who is younger than you just because you chose to have a family, and they haven't yet seems a bit unfair on the younger person- it's not their fault you chose to have kids and dedicate much of your time to that rather than continuous learning either.
But mostly it seems to be people getting to a certain milestone - 40, 50, 60, and looking back on their life and realising they missed a number of opportunities, but rather than accepting that, and simply looking at how they want to live going forward - to try again, or just be happy with what they have, they instead look for someone else to blame for their own failings.
Still, this is just my opinion based on my experiences, as I say, maybe in other places it really is a problem, but I'd be rather surprised as it seems to be entirely contrary to a region being succesful - throwing away the workers with most potential for competence and knowledge. I don't really see how Silicon Valley could have succeded as it has if it was relying entirely on the inexperienced, nor can I see how those many excellent older technical authors and bloggers living in Silicon Valley could have obtained the experience they have, to write about what they do in the level of detail and with the air of competence that they do if they hadn't been given opportunities in the valley, even post-40.
I've also not worked in Silicon Valley, but I did spend a couple of weeks there earlier this month visiting various companies. The vast majority of people I met were under 40, but there were still a significant number of people over the age of 50, including a number of very competent people.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some attrition for two reasons. The first is that older people are more experienced and so should either be more competent (i.e. more expensive), or leave you wondering why they've failed to learn anything useful in the last 20 years. If they're more expensive, that means fewer jobs (although still quite a lot in the bay area). If they've failed to expand their skills, then it might be better to bet on someone younger who has a similar level of ability now but a lot more potential. If they don't live up to that potential, you've not lost anything.
The other reason is the kind of lifestyle in the valley. As a stodgy 30-year-old, I view it as the sort of place that's nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Given the sort of salary levels that you find in the valley, it's easy to imagine people working there in their 20s, saving a hundred or two thousand, and then moving somewhere else where they can buy a decent sized house and have a much lower cost of living.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
One line the bleeding hearts have been using is that the Greeks ain't lazy work shy tax dodgers, they work MORE hours then people in Northern Europe (UK does not count), the part of Europe that isn't having an economic melt-down.
Yes, indeed, Greeks do put in more hours at the office... they just ain't productive. Especially the tax collectors. They got a lot of them they just don't do anything.
It is the old "2 dollars for the tap on the engine and 100 dollars for knowing were to tap it". Productivity is NOT how many hours you work but how much work you get done in an hour.
But it is rare for management to have an understanding of true productivity. For instance who is more productive, someone who writers a new routine in two hours OR the person who needs two weeks to get it to actually work? I have had to fix code, slowly, were it completely failed if the user put in a wrong value... that is called happy path testing, you only test if things work if the user does EVERYTHING exactly right. That is less then useful even if you can train all the users. But in customer facing applications? It is just WRONG. And FIXING bad code is harder then writing bad code.
90% of the work takes 10% of the time and 10% of the work takes 90% of the time. But try getting managers to accept this.
When I freelanced (stopped because I hate accounting) I improved the quality of clients a LOT by first examining their existing projects, I could easily tell if they valued quality by looking at whether they had quality already. I also increased my rates to be "holy shit, you charge HOW MUCH!" and that helped me work fewer hours for more money! Web development is a sector where quality often goes to die and it is the young who continue this as they have not yet learned that any incomplete feature will result in endless bug reports, hack jobs and finally bug fixing with hacks on hacks. Then anyone with experience leaves and the code is left to fester with the young who can barely keep up with the crises let alone ever update the software.
One of the things to look out for in an employer is in how much time they spend on cutting costs by just looking at salaries. The CEO of Costco is in the news for paying high wages. He runs a succesful growing business but managers at wallstreet know better, max this quarters profits by cutting wages, next year you are down because of increased theft, increased training costs because of increased churn rate and your employees spend half their time on the phone looking for a better job instead of doing their work.
If you freelance, the moment a customer starts about your rates, politely decline. They are CERTAIN to want to discuss your fee again, usually before paying.
If a company needs young cheap employees, it is because they are squeezing the last percentage of profit out of the company before collapsing and their managers can't handle anyone who has an opinion and dares to voice it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The problem with this logic is that the employer credits to themselves the output of automation, not to the workers who set it up. Hence the world "capital" in "capitalism." So, in the PHB's mind you aren't getting 10x what the junior guy gets done - you're just sipping coffee all day.
But its ok because the guys who built the industry were white guys.
Seastead this.
Read his post - his first item was institutions who care about beating the numbers. So, the managers make sure the company beats the numbers, especially really good managers like Kenneth Lay.
What secret? IT is and always been age biased. The perfect IT employee is a 24 year old with 15 years experience in a 2 year old technology.
It's a little silly I agree. The name comes from a story in a Dragon Magazine (remember that? lol) story about a dwarf that carries around a huge 2H Warhammer and the dwarf's name was Assmasher. For some reason that made me laugh for ages (hey, I was 12...) I have always used that name for character/profile names in games so I used it when creating my /. account (I had a much earlier slashdot account but registered it to a company e-mail I had at the time so I lost the account - this /. account was actually my first name [that's how early!])
So, being in my 40's now, it is a ridiculous profile name, and gives many people the wrong impression, but I keep it for nostalgia's sake...
Loading...
Keep in mind that companies keep the lion's share of profits to themselves, paying as little to the employee as wages as they can get away with (and they can get away with a lot). So, while the week of vacation is only a 2% raise from the employee's position, it is a much larger loss from the employer's position since they employee makes WAY more for their employer in that week than they actually get paid.
That is why employers in the US get so touchy about vacation time.
Just look at someplace like Foxconn as an ultimate example of this in action. They house the employees at work, and wake them up in the middle of the night to make more iPhones. If the employee makes $200 per week then you might say that a week's vacation only costs the employer $200, but Apple makes $300 per iPhone and how many iPhones could that slave, err, employee build in a week - oh the horror of lost profits!
Interestingly 5 weeks vacation is the legal minimum in the UK and most of the EU, plus public holidays. We also give workers to right to refuse to work more than 48 hours a week with no penalty (including loss of promotion).
I don't people in the US realize just how poor working conditions and worker protections are there.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The tech industry is discriminating against older people now? Crap! When did this happen? I thought we were still discriminating against women! Oh well, that chick I interviewed last week was a total MILF. That counts as old, right? So I'm still cool not hiring her?
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
but I've never seen a real life age bias out there
Sure you have, it's just camouflaged as lowball salary requirements. ;)
I've never experienced this. Then again, I'm only 37 and I don't live in the Bay Area. Add this to the list of reasons not to live in the Bay Area.
...as a progressive, meritocratic business environment hasn't been squashed yet?
Not only is it even more ageist than the rest of the IT industry in general, but it's also racist as all hell.
Apparently nobody notices if you cover it up with some hipster glasses and trendy office design, good thing this wasn't discovered earlier.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Karma is an insane bitch; and insane is nice, until it likes you.
The kids work hard because they want to get to where the 40 year old is, they want their career to progress and see working hard as a way to get ahead and prove themselves to their boss. How long will they continue to do that if they see there is no actual career path and that they will be used up and spat out by the time they are 40 ? Also technical skills are the easiest part of the job to learn, The skills like teamworking and experience are what takes years to build up, often at great expense but people with out wisdom and experience rarely value those commodities. Zuckerberg and his friends will get old and like almost everyone else they will wish that they could know what they know now 10 years ago and maybe they will realise how foolish they have been.
At 50 you should have insights that the younger crowd doesn't.
You know what business spends their money on. You see what users waste their time on.
Don't try to make the next Facebook, but look for an area that cries out for a solution and provide it. Everyone wants to be a Rock Star, but for every Rock Star, there are hundreds of other people who build the stuff that Rock Stars have to use. Facebook runs on servers and uses software that they didn't create/write, but could not operate without. Be that guy.
Think razor blades, not razors.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
...find that over-forties aren't naive enough.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
These age discrimination stories are really getting old.
-
I know SO MANY IT workers that are 40+ that haven't kept up on the latest technology because they're too lazy and tired of learning new things. That pretty much explains the entire top end of the IT department at the hospital where I worked. A lot of them were around 50 and they didn't even have a basic understanding of computers that would work in modern society. They got some cushy management job and stopped caring. I know other independent repairers like me who use outdated virus removal methods and keep pushing Phenom quad core chips and XP because they don't want to research and learn new stuff.
.NET and website and graphics design with MCSE and A+ training as well.
If old IT workers want to get jobs, more of them have to stop being lazy and keep their skills up to date. I'm 25 and I've already had to go back to college for 1 class and read 2 more textbooks cover to cover. Now I get to learn server 2012, yay. But I do it because I have to if I want to stay employable.
So that this makes any amount of sense, I work 25 hours as the head IT manager for a medium sized company half the day and run a computer repair shop for the other half and I've been doing repairs for 10 years but my 2 associates degrees are in software programming with
Oh, many of us do, but the laws have been written that keep the working class down. We take what we can get and be glad for it. It's the American Way!
I guess I wouldn't know about that. I haven't worked full time in 5 years, and I haven't worked anywhere that if I took a full time position that I would start with less than 4 weeks off. And I haven't had less than 4 weeks in the past 15 years.
I've found they during hiring negotiations that companies are more willing to give an extra 2 weeks off than another 4% in pay. Granted, it usually comes up because my salary is out of their price range, and I drop my asking salary 2% for every week they can offer. I'd be willing to even take up to 8 weeks if anyone would offer it, but most I've been offered is 5 +1 the last week of the year.
Why should every business endeavor be a race to the bottom for everyone but the shareholders?
Actually, shareholders get screwed too. The only folks who make money are at Goldman Sachs giving "advice" to muppets that benefits GS and nobody else.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In Silicon valley, when you reached the age of 40 you supposed to have at least 50 millions dollars under you name.
Sounds like hacker culture and interest in technology has been completely crushed by corporate culture.
The role that people 40 and above play in Silicon Valley is that of the Angel Investor.
Ok, I'm really interested in mastering a new aspect of technology that I hadn't experienced before and applying it back to my career. For me IT has never about getting rich, it's about lifestyle and it sounds like that is not on offer in the Valley.
Living 5 minutes walk from the best beaches and surf since I decided that's how I wanted my life to be in my 20's is what I wanted from IT. I'm not certain I could have sacrificed all that for my business, which was quite profitable, but I decided that I was having more fun recording music with my band, catching waves and training martial arts. I'm not sure if that lifestyle would have been available and look as young as I do if I focused on just making money. Maybe I should have taken my band more seriously.
I would have liked to have made a lot of money but I didn't want to give up on spending time with friends and family. Because I've made that choice and I'm now over 40 does it mean I'm locked out of a career I love to do? I probably sound naive but is there no room in IT for people who love what they do AND want to have a life?
If you are over 40 and still looking for opportunity to toil through the night hacking away - man, you do not belong in the Valley.
I always thought that innovation was about the willingness to try and the courage to fail. Sounds to me a lot like the same vapid exclusivity that geeks and nerds rebelled against at the hands of the jocks. If ageism has become the modus operandi then the Valley has limited it's pool of good ideas and longevity whilst perverting the very thing that made it a career destination in the first place, namely that ideas trump perceptions.
This concerns me because it makes people ask if IT is a viable career at any age I certainly hope that as IT matures it's attitudes will value the wisdom of IT workers with 25 years+ experience. Every company I have worked for has benefited from the innovation I bring because experience has taught me which innovations matter most.
If experiences, drive to learn, capability and proven ability to innovate in a systematic way is not welcome in the Valley any more because of a perception of age, then perhaps it is no longer viable. After all it was born in 1956.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
And why is having robots do the grunt work bad?
Why not automate the hell out of everything and give everyone a twenty hour work week and ten weeks of vacation each year.?
More time off means more recreational activities, more holidays, economic boom for all the service sectors. Lower stress means reduced health care costs and probably just an all round happier society.
The average hunter-gatherer worked about five or ten hours a week to survive. With all our advances, it now takes 60 hours a week? That's bullshit.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
In the Silicon Valley, the money resides with the investors or Venture Capitalists along Sand Hill Rd in Palo Alto... These guys aren't in their 40s. They love young CEOs because they know exactly what motivates them, which is the same thing that motivates the VCs: more money.
Young founders don't want to start a long term business with lots of employees, making a quality product and having loyal customers etc etc... I can't see today's founders following in the footsteps of Aaron Feurestein at Malden Mills who paid the salaries of his employees after their factory burned down...
So since young founders want to make piles of money/drive a fast car etc.. or also known as Instant Gratification, it's easy to move them in that direction. Remember that from the VC's perspective, the startup is an investment. VCs aren't looking for a 20year investment, they want to build a company with potential, that is purchased by a larger company. Once bought by the larger company, the VC is done, and they and their backers have made their money. Building a startup isn't about getting enough money to give the founder/employees a "better lifestyle", but to make them tons of money, fast.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The startup goals have changed dramatically out here in Silicon Valley. It used to be you built a solid company with employees/products etc and it was a long term process. Then in the 90s it evolved into "IPO or bust!". Then after the dot-com bubble burst, the goal of the startup transitioned into being bought out by an established company. Going public is too complex, expensive etc... but if you can get bought by someone else, the CEO/employees can cash out and be done.
VC's don't care about helping people with a better lifestyle, they're already millionaires and are looking to become billionaires, and will drive the founder and his/her company into the ground to do so. Remember, a startup is just an investment, nothing personal, it's an investment and people invest to make money.
Almost no one age 50 or older works at Intel. And Intel isn't alone.
That may explain some of their dumb crap. The Poulsbo GPA driver (losing that term loosely since it barely worked) comes to mind as one example.
You see that everywhere there, though. It's not age, it's the fact that there are just too many techies competing for the same jobs.
This signature intentionally left blank.
I've never worked in a startup type company, but I've been in IT my entire professional life and have never seen ageism in any of the places I've worked. Mind you, they've mostly been medium-to-large corporations that have been around for a while. But there's always been a good spread from 20s up to 60s in terms of who you had running around in the shop. At 40, I have yet to have a boss younger than me. It's been weighing on my mind, though--I've seen the same news items as everyone else--and I'm trying to get a realistic assessment of how bad it is outside the west coast/startup kinda zones. Anyone got any experience to share?
Biologically, humans get more risk-averse as they get older. Given that a large percentage of Silicon are basically gambling with ideas, doesn't it seem natural that the risk-averse are shunned.
I think a similar argument can hold for why there are less women in that industry. Less testestorone.
Funny, I seem to get *less* risk averse over the last 10 years. More confidence and I'm better at appraising complex situations I think.
The coverall internal jargon would be something like: "we are a youthful company and they are a poor cultural fit". Or more of the fallacy that only young grads could possibly be "up with the latest" or "on top of trends".
Those two 50yo+ talents that you mention will probably move into consulting companies (I hope).
I was a federal employee for several years. The workforce could have easily been slashed by 50% and productivity would have remained the same. I left because I didn't want to turn into someone who just kept dust off a chair. So many there would do very little work which left plenty of time to chat amongst themselves about how great it will be when they can retire and start collecting their pensions. These people are the parasites.
I don't even see how that's possible. Etsy didn't even exist back then, so there's no way he could've sold his creations there.
Maybe he used eBay?
Yeah, right.
In Silicon valley, when you reached the age of 40 you supposed to have at least 50 millions dollars under you name.
The role that people 40 and above play in Silicon Valley is that of the Angel Investor.
If you are over 40 and still looking for opportunity to toil through the night hacking away - man, you do not belong in the Valley.
I left that place when I was 32 - after I sold my creations (plural) there to the highest bidders
I saw a documentary on Silicon Valley ageism once, it was called "Logan's Run".
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Wow, you've insulted my products, my services, my goats, my opinions, and my actions, you've stated a fact about my business, and you've done it all anonymously. I don't know what to say. You're not making any sense. Why do I need a 51 year old senio developer for this conversation? I'm very confused.
My stance is very simple. If I hire someone older than 40 (and for this conversation, let's say I'm paying them an amount that a 40-year old needs to live on, and let's also say that I'm not sitting over him the way I would a 14 year old), I expect them to learn what I'm looking for very quickly. More so, I expect them to bring a wealth of experience in some area with which they're familiar -- after all, they've done something for a decade; whatever it was, I can profit from it.
And very quickly (many months, or a couple of years) I want them to not need my supervision at all. As adults, I expect them to make decisions and be able to trust their work. So I want them to bet on themselves. I want to pay them from profits. That means they don't get paid until the client pays (if the client pays). That lets us do interesting things like double-down on client projects, instead of forcing clients to pay on-time. It reduces the necesarry cash-flow (since I don't need to pay the employee on a schedule) which in turns grow the total amount of profit.
I'd then like that 40 year old to have the opportunity to bring in new clients. It needn't be a coordinated affair. But when they are at a baseball game, and the guy in the next seat asks what he does for a living, the enswer needn't be "I work in a cubicle at a programming company". It can be "I build software that does X". The latter inspires a conversation where that random stranger can become a prospect. That's the only way that I get clients now. That's how it works.
I've said elsewhere, but my ideal programming team has always been two senior developers working on a given project, with one or multiple junior developers as assistants for minor tasks able to be verified upon completion. "Manager" isn't to the exclusion of everything else.
You're talking about expert skills in which they lack confidence?
If those skills are expert, then that 40 year old should be willing to bet their money on it. That means not getting paid until the client pays. That means letting the client delay payment in order to get more work out of the client.
If those skills are so expert, then I don't need to supervise that employee. I can expect them to do the work properly, and they can supervise themselves.
If those skills are so expert, then I don't need to tell that employee how to use them. That employee can just take a project, and apply their skills to complete it without any assistance from me.
If those skills are so expert, then I don't need to teach them to someone else. That employee can teach someone else for me.
If that employee applies their own skills, gets paid directly from the use of those skillls, teaches other employees those skills, and supervises their own work, then they are self-managed partners, team leaders, and that's awesome.
On the other hand, if they don't take the financial risk on their own skills, and they aren't interested in doing things my way which conflicts with their way, and they won't teach junior employees their skills, and I need to supervise them, then they aren't worth very much to me because there's a maximum amount of profit that I can extract from them. In that case, the only way for me to profit on them is to sell projects that fit their skills precisely.
That makes then inflexible, in a market that's anything but. That makes them less valuable to me than the lowly peon who'll do things any way that I say.
Read my post. The people who run mutual funds aren't stupid. They understand underpaying people to get a short term boost in the stock price is going to destroy value in the long run. People accuse investors of only caring about next quarter's numbers, but it's not true.
As far as Ken Lay goes, yeah, sometimes you get guys who cook the books. But his contention was shareholders "are not paying the slightest bit of attention to what management is doing". The fact that you're paying attention doesn't preclude the possibility someone is cooking the books. The fund company I worked for actually sent people around to look at factories and count things, but there's only so much you can do.
they still bitch and moan when it comes time to pay their fair share of taxes
Uh some of those 1% pay more per year in taxes that I and *all* of my family have ever paid (and we make decent money). That 'fair share' is an invented term (of the lowest form of class warfare). Did you know at one point our gov did not even have payroll taxes and they did just fine.
My only issue with taxing people more is the gov shows little to no interest in actually balancing the books. If they did that one thing then yes I would get behind it. If they do not do that then that 'fair share' you want will continue to grow and you will end back at Eisenhower rates just to keep up.
I hope the Clinton/Gingrich rates do kick back in (they are going to need it to even begin to balance the budget). It was stupid to create the 'bush cuts', just as much to extend them, just as much as it was stupid to give pretty much everyone out there 300-600 dollars in checks (no one was bitching about those). However Clinton's balancing of the books was a bit of accounting jigery-ju. The took all of the money out of SS and balanced the books with it. Then let everyone and their brother play with futures again with the expected results every 3-6 years. Next crash is probably mid to late 2013 (the signs are there, yoy systematic declines across the board).
You know what is wrong with our gov? It is too big and soaking up every bit of loan money out there to cover debts it made 40 years ago never mind the new ones being created... Loans are what drive our economy. In 2008 it totally froze up with the expected consequences of all the businesses that depend on loans going under (as our gov had first pick at the loans created by the fed and they have huge obligations).
As a 50+ year old still earning good money at an IT company, I can say that yes, there is age discrimination, but yes, you can and SHOULD be able to work around it. The biggest problem that I see with fellow 50+ year olds is that they still want to be doing the job they signed up for when they were 22. Sorry, but if you are making a lot more money than you were when you were 20, then you should be doing a lot more. I keep seeing 50 year olds with resumes that brag about coding in Java or PHP. I'm sorry, but at your age and with that many years of experience behind you, you should be doing a lot more than coding. You should be leading, setting direction, defining architecture, setting the ground rules for the younger generation to avoid the mistakes that 20 year olds make. If you want an IT job at 50+, you need to show that you can do MORE than the 20 year old, not as much as the 20 year old.
Their high P/E is based on the fact that they've shown twice that they can identify new markets and become dominant players in them
Unlike Apple, who has only done the same thing with music stores or music players or smartphones or tablets...
Apple has done something similar with the iPod, iPhone and iPad (and, before that, with the transition to high-end laptops), but in each market they were gradually pushed into a niche by commoditisation
Apple's shares in each of those things is still growing. In the U.S. they are the current leader in smartphone sales, and they hold something like 80% of the tablet market despite fierce attempts to knock them out.
I don't think you quite grasp how absurd a 3k P/E is. It means not just "identifying and owning" a new market, it means doing so about 100 times a YEAR for the next three decades.
Good luck with that!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And why is having robots do the grunt work bad?
Actually, I didn't call it good or bad, but now that you mention it: you pay for it with structurally high unemployment, especially in the lower skilled segment of the work force.
Even if they do get decent benefits, work isn't just about the money. Once you're prematurely out of the work force for too long, your world shrinks and so so your chances of getting back in.
Why not automate the hell out of everything and give everyone a twenty hour work week and ten weeks of vacation each year.?
More time off means more recreational activities, more holidays, economic boom for all the service sectors. Lower stress means reduced health care costs and probably just an all round happier society.
The average hunter-gatherer worked about five or ten hours a week to survive. With all our advances, it now takes 60 hours a week? That's bullshit.
I don't know where you got those figures, but the average hunter gatherer had a very low standard of living. Half his children died in infancy, he had no health care, in the winter he was cold, in the summer he was hot, he frequently starved. These days we still have such hunter gatherers in our society. They're called hobo's, and for lack of wild fruits and small game, their hunting ground is the dumpster. You could say they don't work many hours a week, but I'm doubtful that many of them consider it a very relaxing lifestyle.
No, that's exactly my point! At that point, they've improved enough to the point where they can fly on their own. So I want them to take the helm, grab the wheel, hold the reigns.
The guy that you describe so succinctly, I want him! And because he knows how to talk to customers, I want him to take a project from start to finish. Do the work that he likes, delegate the work that he doesn't. I want him to call new clients and talk to them like the expert that he is. And because he can take calculated risks, I want him to choose those risks! I trust his calculations, so I want him to lay his own money on the line (along with mine) so he has skin in the game, and I want him to make his calculations and go for it.
If he doesn't do all of that, I want him to never ask for a raise, I want him to never expect any new kind of challenges, I want him to never complain that his job is boring. I want him to never cut back on the amount of time he spends.
I'm supposed to share risk with somebody who works on live systems without version control? You say you've got something better, and apparently so far it's worked for you. When it doesn't work, it's going to not work BIG, and the client is going to be very unhappy.
If you want anybody intelligent and experienced to work for you, you need to either work in a way that isn't boneheaded, or you need to be very determined to see that they get paid regardless of what a furious client does. I'm very confident in my skills, thank you, but I'm not confident that they will trump stupidity and inability to use basic software engineering principles.
You can run your business as you like, but don't expect anybody competent to work for you for long.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Interesting that you'd think my system to be inferior to someone else's system. But we've all seen version control systems fail equally big. My system hasn't failed big. We can say yet, as we always can. And there are backups of course. So in the event that everything vanishes, I've got backups for months and can re-instate a working project in a matter of hours from nothing. But again, my system allows a developer to break one file at a time. So if they make a change, and a file blows up, then we just grab the old file from last week, or last month, or yesterday.
And like I also said, there are aspects of my system that protect the developer from majorly screwing up the live system while mid-development.
But more importantly, my current platform has been in production for over 15 clients and over 50 projects for over 5 years, and it hasn't had any such drama. I think that history stands for itself. And I've seen the history on version controlled companies -- it sucks.
But hey, you might not be open-minded enough to see that perhaps someone has built something better than your current tools. But if you are, I'd be happy to discuss it with you in detail, and prove to you that you would indeed feel very comfortable working in my system. It's odd that you'd already think you wouldn't, having no idea how it works.
I'm seeing a lot of people complaining that they're not being given opportunities because they're "too old".
That's very large pool of calm, collected, experienced professionals who've been through the trenches, and already know all the products, systems and software that currently run the world, and will probably *continue* running the world for at least a decade.
So why not literally pool together and form a company?
"At Silver & Steel, we specialize in providing you with experienced industry professionals that don't make youthful mistakes that can cost you millions in lost profits or corrupted databases. Our team of proven operators can walk into your legacy environment and take full command of any situation without breaking a sweat and bring your systems back up to full operational capacity in short order. We don't make theories, we give answers.
When you can afford to spend money on chasing your dreams, go for youth and enthusiasm.
But when your nightmares become reality, come to us."
[End Of Line]
To be blunt, what you said could be said either by a genius who devised a better system, or an arrogant blow-hard, and I've met a lot more of the latter than the former over the course of my life. I'd be very interested to learn of your system. I'm confident that I can find serious flaws with it within a few minutes, but I've been wrong before, and finding where I've been wrong has usually been fun and informative.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Oh, granted on the statistics. The thing is, while there are hundreds of major flaws in my platform, no doubt about that, they aren't flaws to my business because they are simply in areas that do not apply to my business, my clients, or my projects.
For example, my platform would fall apart quite quickly in a company where more than 5 junior programmers work independently from each other on the same feature. I didn't design the system for that. I designed it for three senior programmers to work in tandem on a single feature or on independent features.
Similarly, my system fails miserably on speed. I'm basically slowing everything down by a good 10% as a result. I can get back 4% of that with caching, and in theory another 2%, but that last 4% is totally wasted. I make it up in hardware, and argue that it's worthwhile but expediting development over 50%.
Also, there's no way that it would work for a mass-market site. It'll simply top-out at a few hundred visitors per minute, on any hardware. That said, I've spec'd a solution to that limitation, but don't have a project warranting the upgrade.
But obviously those aren't my market anyway. So in the end, working with my platform, I get to program directly, I get to test directly, I get to put features live or take them down on a whim and sandbox mid-development code at any level. I can hack things together quickly for a demo or build the same feature robustly. It takes minutes to setup a new project, and I can share databases, codebases, resources, and files in any combination across any set of projects. And I can upgrade/migrate an existing site from an old version to a newer version in under an hour (I intentionally don't keep live projects up-to-date in terms of new features.). The only "maintenance" I have is a manual log file of major features added, with any migration-dependencies. I manually process it a few times a year in a couple of hours.
In production, live bugs are reported by text message, with a file and a line number, making life really easy to resolve it. Legibility is off-the-charts, making it really easy to re-fold the code when client business objectives go topsy-turvy. And major platform-level features are easily added at the platform level without file-by-file manipulations, which means that significant developments basically graduate up from templates, into project-specific code, into generic code, into platform code.
That's too bad for you, I guess, but that doesn't mean just because you aren't getting calls that the jobs aren't there. I still get recruiter calls every week and emails more often than that, and I'm not looking. In fact, I'm hiring, and the quality of candidates we are seeing right now is generally awful, because there is so much competition and a lot of companies are really making efforts to keep the people they have.
Maybe it's also because a 50 mile radius basically covers the entire greater Bay Area, so there are plenty of leads for recruiters/headhunters to contact. If you are not in a tech center, why would you expect people to "knock on your door"? If you want a job, go get it, don't sit there and wait for it to fall in your lap, jeez.
It seems you're one of those people that can't read?
As I pointed out, there are plenty of succesful over 40s still in the field. Of those who complain they can't compete in the field I pointed out they tend to fall into one of two categories, either those who don't have time to compete due to greater family commitments etc. which is a more prominent issue at that age, or those who genuinely have become lazy and can't be bothered anymore.
You're obviously very bitter about this given that you completely failed to misread the post and hence miss the point, so I guess your specific problem is that you're simply one of those who can't compete, to be fair I guess that may not be because of laziness, it may be because you obviously a) can't read, or b) if you can read, you can't properly interpret just a few simple paragraphs. In other words, you're too stupid for the field in the first place it would seem. It's no one elses fault you're this way though.
Sophisticated investors like mutual funds certainly care about long-term performance. Why, they try to anticipate performance several quarters into the future! The problem is that when you calculate net-present-value just about anything that happens more than three years out is almost completely irrelevant, unless you're talking about something like a start-up with minimal capital investment and the ability to potentially create some huge market and have near-exclusive access to it. Net present value still butchers those returns, but when you're talking about investing a million to make 100x that back, the question as to whether that is really only worth 10x or 50x doesn't matter as much.
And performance is nothing more than whatever the books say it is. Whether you're Ken Lay or Jack Welch there is tremendous pressure to manage your numbers, or analyst expectations.
The people you know should contact their recruiters and inform them. This is probably unnecessary, since if it occurred, the internal checks and balances will have already pulled them from the interview rotation. In general, those questions would have shown up in the write-ups, and the hiring committee would not have been pleased.
They may want to make the effort anyway, and ask for a re-interview, if they actually want to work at Google. For a lot of people in a lot of ways, it's a fantastic place to work.
He asked the questions because he was qualified to. It would be utterly absurd for an interviewer to ask you questions on the relative merits of different weave patterns for baskets, if the interviewer was not themselves an accomplished basket weaver.
The interviewer in question was likely chosen precisely because you had worked on a lot of cool stuff, in order to decide whether you had a broad general ability, or whether your focus in those areas had lost you your breadth. Someone who has to look up an algorithm, isn't going to look at a problem, generalize it to a class of problems, and then pull the appropriate most optimal algorithm for the problem out of their toolbox.
Even if the algorithm were in your toolbox (i.e. you were able to generalize the problem, pick the most appropriate algorithm, and apply it), and you just didn't have the stats associated with it (i.e. you knew it should be Vanadium, but you didn't know it was atomic number 23, or that it's electronegativity was 1.63), you would not have been in a position to discuss with code reviewers. Unless you can say why you chose that particular algorithm, compared to some other algorithm, by quantifying its relative merits (e.g. "it was O(N) rather than O(N^2)", or "algorithm X conserves space better than the slightly more efficient algorithm Y, and space is at a premium in this application"), then you would not be an effective member of the team.
Minimally, someone who was able to explain would have to follow along after you cleaning up the code and/or check in comments so that the basis of your decision wouldn't be lost to a future engineer working on the code, who might then make the mistake of changing the algorithm, thinking your years of experience were unimportant because they had not been documented. Three years down the road when you are off at Google X working for Sergey on a space elevator, or Google Glass, or whatever, you aren't going to remember why the hell you picked a particular algorithm for a particular job.
So yeah, you may not value that interviewers input into the hiring process, but given what you've said, you would likely need to brush on these things you imagine are "stupid" before you'd be a suitable hire, for the reasons noted above. I have no doubt that someone who has worked for 20 years on a lot of cool stuff could do that.
You should be aware that other companies in the valley, either started by ex-Googlers (and it's easier to get VC funding if you are one), or those who are greedily hiring as many (sometimes ex-) Googlers as they can, are going to have similar requirements, due to the culture your interviewer comes from, or is attempting to emulate.
This isn't all wine and roses; there are some really terrible problems with the Google engineering practices that these people will have brought with them, as well, but realize that Google, for better or worse, is effectively homogenizing the valley environment so that no matter where you go, you are likely to see either a watered-down version of Google, or a poorly drawn characterture.
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/affluent.html
"The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sophisticated investors like mutual funds certainly care about long-term performance. Why, they try to anticipate performance several quarters into the future!
They look at the company as an ongoing concern. Funds are pretty good at spotting corporations that are eating the seed corn and adjusting their perceived value of the stock appropriately. A company that stops investing in new product design, for example, may get a short-term bump and long term slide in profits, but if everyone understands that (and the big guys do), the price of the stock will go down even as the company announces record profits.
And performance is nothing more than whatever the books say it is. Whether you're Ken Lay or Jack Welch there is tremendous pressure to manage your numbers, or analyst expectations.
And the analysts aren't stupid, at least not the ones you've never heard of who work in the bowels of big funds. Even a company like Enron could only do what it did because they had so many subsidiaries and shell corporations nobody could figure out what was going on. Not even the IRS. The way to deal with that is to only buy stock in companies you understand at the financial level. My employer didn't lose a dime in Enron despite the bias toward big players in industry sectors. They looked at the quarterly reports and said "It's not impossible this is legit, but there's no way to tell so we're not interested."
Honestly, if what you said were true in reality, then we wouldn't see the kinds of messes we see in the US economy every year. Sure, investors profess to care about the future, but if they were any good at it you wouldn't have things like the housing crisis.
The housing crisis was a policy failure on the part of the government going back to the '70s.
Sure, but a few sophisticated investors managed to go bankrupt in the process.
...
At 50 you shouldn't have to be making mortgage payments anymore. It should have been paid off. I've been reading some economists, and 5 year mortgages used to be the norm. OTOH, people planned against the risk of having to go into debt for medical expenses.
...
No, it means you get squeezed out at 35 and the "recruiters" stop returning your calls, but you keep on sending out resumes. Your killer system becomes superannuated, but you keep on sending out resumes; your car dies because you can no longer pay the repair shop or buy or lease a new one, but you keep on sending out resumes; you can't pay the rent, but you keep on sending out resumes; you lose your personal library, but you keep on sending out resumes; after a few months the relatives show you the door, but you keep on sending out resumes.
And all that time you keep on working and hoping for an end to the Bush-Clinton-Shrub-Obummer economic depression.