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Silicon Valley In 2013 Resembles Logan's Run In 2274
theodp writes "The 1976 science fiction film Logan's Run depicts a dystopian future society where life must end at the age of 30. So, it's a world that kind of resembles today's Silicon Valley, where the NY Times reports that the median age of workers is 29 years old at Google and 28 years old at Facebook. The report that technology workers are young — really young — comes on the heels of other presumably-unrelated stories that Silicon Valley execs can't find enough skilled workers and no one would fund Doug Engelbart in the last four decades of his life. On the bright side, at least old techies don't die in Silicon Valley — they just can't get hired."
I work at a technology company on the opposite side of the Country and we joke that we will not even interview anybody under 35 years old. We have the opposite problem except a lot of us old timers have skills in system administration, programming and project management so with a very small staff and some long hours we implement some pretty cool stuff. Our biggest impediment is our CEO.
It's a good thing Google and Facebook aren't the only employers, then. I was at a local conference lately where I met techies who work for organizations like the state police and fraternal societies (the Freemasons, Shriners, etc.). At another talk, a bank VP told the crowd "when we looked at how dependent we are on software and how much of it we develop in-house, we realized we're a software company."
I don't mean to understate the problems age discrimination causes for tech workers. I do want to point out that IT has penetrated very deeply into the economy, creating a need for programmers and sys admins and whatnot in places you might not expect them. Look around. I don't know how salaries compare, but you can probably find a company whose culture is a better fit for people over 40.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Very, very good point about the Valley being a lousy place if you have a family. Truly lousy - unless you have a bucketload of money, of course. We moved away when we were looking to start a family and haven't regretted it for a microsecond. It was a simply awesome place before kids though.
Ageism exists, zero doubt about it, and I think that it is particularly important to note given the looming changes to immigration. If you want more H1Bs, prove that you are not discriminating against older workers (or anyone for that matter.)
By the way, If you think that companies are bad, try a VC. I'm in mid forties, have done several successful startups (as either a founder or employee number one) and have had VCs tell me, straight to my face, that I was too old. You kind of respect those VCs. At least they are honest.
That said, there is also no shortage of older engineers who are simply unable or unwilling (my bet: mostly the latter) to update their skillsets. Yeah, great, so you've been doing it that way forever. The world has changed. Stay current.
And, if you are young, pay heed. If you're lucky, you'll be old someday too. Chances are you won't make that pile of cash and chances are you, too, will face age discrimination. Might want to work against it now.
Gosh darn that silly market for determining wages.
It's not just the IT market, it's ANY market - if you're over 40 and don't have very specific technical skills you're unemployable.
No company wants the increased wage and insurance costs, not to mention having to deal with employees who actually know how to negotiate instead of being fearfully compliant.
Of course, walmart is hiring. There is that.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
I think he said the opposite of what he thought he said. I think what he thought he said was "Neither Google nor Facebook have any phone support whatsoever".
He may not be a native speaker.
Free Martian Whores!
Only hiring young people to keep salaries down *is* age discrimination.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF
Outside the little bubble of Silicon Valley, it's a lot worse if you're young than if you're old.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/07/jobless-rate-for-poor-black-te.html
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
NoSQL is not something to be proud of.
Node.js is not something to be proud of.
PHP and Ruby are not things to be proud of.
Like it or not, they are all pure shit, and every self-respecting software developer who has any talent knows this.
NoSQL is what happens when dipshits who don't know the slightest thing about databases try to create one. You look at their work, and you can just hear them saying thing like, "ACID? What's that?", and "Referential integrity? What's that?", and even "Indexes? What are those?"
Node.js shares a similar level of stupidity with NoSQL. It's what happens when dipshits who only know JavaScript hear the big boys talking about Erlang, and then they try to build something similar on their own. What they do manage to build is a steaming pile of horseshit. It would all be quite funny, but then they actually try to use Node.js seriously, creating one disaster after another.
And PHP and Ruby are much the same. PHP, as a language, is fucked up beyond repair. PHP's standard library is diarrhea. Ruby is rife with "best practices" that are moronic in reality. And Ruby has the worst community that has ever existed around a programming language. It's like a sewage pit full of very vocal floating turds.
The things you mentioned are literally the worst things to have happened to the software development industry in decades, if not ever. Even Visual Basic isn't as bad as PHP and Ruby are. At least its standard library wasn't fucked to high heaven, and its community wasn't made up of smug hipsters.
Ummmm, that's not called promotion. Promotion means you move up in the same company.
*Woosh*
For instance, before too long, you find that you are 30 in Silicon Valley and evidently nobody wants to hire you.
The people who can't find jobs at 30 are those who spent 8 years working at one company on dead end technology only to get laid off with no current skills or connections. I've had friends hit that wall and it's not pretty to be playing catch up while burning through savings. You know those co-workers I mentioned in my previous post? They're not 20 year olds and yet they find jobs without difficulty.
Hopefully in all of those jumps you develop some management skills along the way because by 40 you'll need them to keep your job from going to some kid.
Hopefully? I plan for my future, I try to not rely on luck and good fortune.
You think you're more likely to be promoted to management or to find a new job in management (or a lead of some kind) at a different company? I've found the former an utter crap shoot to pull off (and most who I've seen do it were ass kissers foremost) and personally I prefer not to gamble on my future.
No, I don't think I'm more likely to be promoted to management. I already am in management and do the IT hiring for a very large entity. Here is what we look for in our employees: the ability to work as part of a team; the ability to communicate well with customers (internal/external) and others; the ability to eventually lead a team; knowledge of the business/industry; overall attitude; stability; project management and eventually the IT skills in question.
Why are the IT skills so far down the list, particularly behind the soft skills? Because we can train the right people to give them the skill set needed for the task at hand. It's a lot more difficult to train for the soft skills.
We work with several local colleges and tech schools and encourage them to add non-tech courses to their IT curriculum. Why? Because we aren't hiring just programmers or network administrators or whatever. We are hiring people that represent our company. Many of our IT personnel do not even have CS degrees but come from a varied background of degree programs. Why? Because, diversified backgrounds lead to better solutions.
Just like most people get their impression of their bank from the tellers, our customers get their impression of us, by the people we send to them. Technical skills are easy to obtain and at the rate that technology changes, we have to keep retraining anyway. People and soft skills, that is what we value most.
BTW, if you are interested, we have very low turnover, we are good to our employees. We have found that if you treat your employees like the valued resource they are, then they stay. It's good for them and it's good for our customers and good for us.
Then again, we are not a Silicon Valley company, so maybe that's the difference.
From TFA:
Today's computer systems are essentially what we had with time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s and 70s: personal workstations connected to a large central computer system (server farm), able to communicate with each other and run spreadsheets, word processors, and apps.
Oh please he has no idea what he was talking about. Mainframes had as much freedom as a Stalinist gulag. Usually you could run a single application as decided by the IT department.
Sure, PCs are connected to the cloud which acts as a server of sorts, but I can run any application I want, connect to any server I wish. These are key differences with the centralized world of the 70s. How soon do they forget...
Just started a new job in Apple R&D. I'm 44.
No company will hire you if you don't have the skills they want, but I'm hardly the oldest person in my (fairly small) group; likewise in general on the floor around me. That's not to say there aren't younger people around - of course there are, it's just that age doesn't appear to be any sort of criteria.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I've noticed that. They skip necessary, but boring, features to add something more interesting.
For instance, Google Tasks still doesn't have any method for adding recurring tasks, they expect you to add an event for that, but the problem is that these aren't events, I might have it on my to do list for a week sometimes, and want it there until it's been finished. And, it doesn't require me to do it at a specific time either, just sometime during the day.
And then there's the features on my Nexus One that are in the phone physically, but that they never felt like enabling in software. Or at least they hadn't as of the time when I switched to CyanogenMod. Did they ever choose to enable the colored scroll ball for user customization or enable the FM tuner?
Currently IT is in the midst of another bubble. Unlike the bubble in the 1990s with the .coms, this one is fuelled by federal monetary policy holding interest rates abnormally low, which means there is excess money coming in from venture capitalists.
Can someone please explain to me why the Fed's QE means there is excess money coming in from venture capitalists/
It's all about ROI. QE means low interest rates which lowers the overall ROI required to take on an investment. Bond yields are too low because of QE, so money isn't going there and stocks are too volatile, plus they will plummet once interest rates rise. The only market left is the venture market and money has been flooding into it just like before.
Even established companies aren't using the low rates to expand production, which was the intent, but instead to buyout other companies. And why not? The can borrow for 2%, which adjusted for inflation is basically borrowing for free. QE is basically giving free money to banks and businesses. If they aren't going to expand, they have to do something with it and there are only three types of investments: equity, fixed income, venture.