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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."'"
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.
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.
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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.
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.
>You were fired because you failed at doing your job, hence failing serveral performance reviews
Ah, to be young and innocent again.
The funny thing about performance reviews, my dear boy, is they are written entirely by your manager(s). If your management chain gets it into their heads that they're tired of your face, well...
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.
"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.
Don't be naive. It's pretty easy for management to manufacture a reason to terminate 'for cause', especially in an at will state. While it's certainly possible that the performance reviews were legit and the person was terminated because they weren't great at their job, don't automatically assume that just because some manager said their performance was below par, that's fact. I've had a few run ins with managers over the years who torpedoed my reviews for questionable reasons. The most memorable being the one who cited me for a lack of professionalism. Apparently, telling a manager they're wrong (privately, and very very conscientious of word choice, context, and tone) is unprofessional. This is why I refuse to work for little tin gods. The second I find out my direct manager is of that vein, I'm either seeking a transfer or another employer. My discretion and ability at choosing who to work for has gotten much better with iteration.
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.
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 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.
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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.
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.
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.
Don't know anything about the GP, but I do agree that his posts on this thread don't sound like they came from a mature adult. Having said that I'm over 50 with 3 grand-kids, family life takes up a lot less time than when the kids were at home. Yes I am slower than I used to be, some of that may be due to dead or dying neurons, but I like to think it's because I have accumulated a long list of answers to the proverbial question; "What could possibly go wrong?"
From the employers POV there are two main reasons to hire old farts like me.....
1. More industry experience.
2. More life experience.
Speaking from my own experience, Once the kids leave home the financial pressures dissipate, even if you have no kids your mortgage is now what your rent was 20yrs ago. I was a middle manager for a few years in the 90's, herding cats is a thankless job and I don't want to go back. I would much rather get slightly less pay, spend my work time training my future boss and go home at 5pm. It's hard to explain that to young people who's only measure of success are the rungs on the corporate ladder and the digits on their paycheck. It's even harder to explain why some of my co-workers still turn up every morning even though they are in a financial position that would allow them to comfortably retire.
As for Zuck and the other wizz-kids, they didn't get where they are by working for a boss, they got there by selling new ideas to a new generation. The keys to that kind of success are; the right place, and the right time.
Disclaimer: Age != Maturity. I'm also fortunate enough to work as a developer for a Japanese multinational, they have an entirely different POV wrt to age and loyalty.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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.
Plus about a million. I was a manager, and had been told to alter reviews to manage out people. I complained loudly that it wasn't true, but in the end they forced the hand. I got off the management train at that point, and I am happy to be where I am today.
You were fired because you failed at doing your job, hence failing serveral performance reviews. You were NOT doing you job decent enough. Age has nothing to do with it, so quit making excuses because you were lazy at work.
LOL. I've seen all sides of this situation, and let me tell you, there is always a way to get rid of people. It's called "managing them out". Read Corporate Confidential for a primer if you are really this clueless.
I don't know about the specifics of the GP, but consider this: if senior management wanted to get rid of him for being 50+ and "expensive" compared to cheaper younger employees (and not get sued for obvious age bias) all they have to do is come up with a crap or impossible project he cannot succeed in. Or give him something they actually need, but starve it of resources - a team of 10 is needed but he gets 2, including himself. Then put in enough of a paper trail to cover their ass (establish a lengthy history of "failed" performance reviews) to ward off legal action, and poof, he's gone.
Again, if you are so naive as to think everyone let go is 100% responsible for it, well let's just say you must be quite young and stupid yourself.