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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."
29 years old is young now?
well.. .com reporters are hitting forty and fifty now. so of course 29 is young, straight outta school and whatever. .com boom of '00 and then "old". I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF. and fb and google medians... aren't most of their a lot of their workers technically just phone answer droids working low wage customer support, with high turnaround? that explains how average fb guy is just 1.1years at the company.
but imagine that, being in the middle, first being too young to hit the
"Younger companies tend to have workers with less time at the firm, according to Payscale." am I stupid but does this sentence just mean that young companies don't have guys who have worked at there for decades? how the fuck could they have???
the article is pretty much just total tripe though if you finish reading it - fuck it. "One reason for this, she said, was a function of skills. “Baby Boomers and Gen Xers tend to know C# and SQL,” she said. C# is a software language, while SQL is a database technology. She added, “Gen Y knows Python, social media, and Hadoop,” which are newer versions of those things."
it's just so fucking stupid.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm a IT dinosaur at 44, but I still remember when I was young and working for tech companies with an average age in the high, sometimes even the low, 20s. It creates a very specific mindset and atmosphere:
- office drama, both romantic and tragic. I've seen a lot of love affairs, even more flings, and some suicides. All those do have an impact on business.
- general lack of empathy (people at that age are still very self-centered), especially so towards the older generations to which many customers do belong. Apart from relational issues with customers (50 yo don't empathize with/trust 20 yo that much), it creates specific problems such as: YOU can understand / would use this, could/would your mom ? your grandma ? We have tech-aware hipsters building tech-hipster stuff for tech-aware hipsters, and a huge lack of stuff for the mature and senior markets.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
The issue of age discrimination in the tech sector comes up a lot on Slashdot. Maybe it's just a Silicon Valley thing? I've worked in Austin my entire career, since leaving school, and finding jobs has gotten no more difficult as I've aged. In my current position and the couple that immediately precede it there's been someone in his late 40s or early 50s. And not in an architect level or managerial role, either.
In general, my experience is that employers will go with whoever presents the best value proposition regardless of that person's age. If you're only as valuable as a recent college graduate but cost 1.5x as much then, yeah, you're going to have trouble getting hired.
Last year I was 48. As part of something like a mid-life crisis, I interviewed at several of the Bay Area majors. In some ways, it was kind of a Logan's Run sort of experience, with me in the role of Old Man (Peter Ustinov). (Maybe next time I should bring some cats with me to the interview.) I was turned down by several, but received a good offer from Facebook. After a lot of careful number-crunching and soul-searching, though, I felt that I couldn't accept it. The primary reason is that I have a wife and kids. Though the offer would have been fabulous for a single guy, it probably would have been ruinous with my financial responsibilities. I guess what I'm saying here is when discussing ageism and the Valley, one needs to be careful to pick apart reluctance to hire older people (which I don't doubt is a bias sometimes) versus the personal economics of the Valley, which makes it a marginal place to consider living for many people (and probably tends to hit families the hardest). As an aside, I think many younger managers are nervous about hiring older workers. For what it's worth, I recently worked for several years for a guy that's at least ten years younger. Best boss I ever had. We got along and got things done.
Silicon Valley used to be an awesome place, but now it sucks...
Silicon Valley's business model used to be creating jobs, and environments. Now it is about selling businesses that have no real business value. Look at Google, Facebook, and so on. They rely on free products with advertisements. With privacy and the new addon's like the one where it screws with your cookies that business model is going to go down the crapper like SPAM. Yes Oracle, and Apple do create real jobs, but they are the "dinosaurs" and how many jobs does Apple have outside of Silicon Valley?
My point is that I actually don't look at Silicon Valley anymore as the creme de la creme of talent and ideas. I look at Open Source! Case in point NoSQL. Who had it first? Open Source! NodeJS, who had it first? Open Source! Technologies like PHP, Ruby, etc all open source. Open Source is where it is at folks! Even if you have all of the nay sayers that ask, "so where is the money?" Not in software, but in business's created by that software. Silicon Valley is IMO not a driver of Open Source, they are a consumer of Open Source.
Sure some shops in Silicon Valley add open source to their "portfolio", but let's be real, is Google opensourcing the stuff that is runs their busines? Eff NO! Facebook is a bit better, but again I go back that Silicon Valley is a consumer of Open source, not producer.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
My attitude of not being a miserable wage slave and actually wanting to be paid my market value? Or my attitude of understanding how the economies of my own industry?
I do find it amusing how people on one hand complain about companies exploiting workers but on the other hand bitch about workers not being team players if they don't let themselves be exploited.
good people get jobs anyways, that's not a sign that the job market is good or in .com shape.
and fb has plenty of people working on app support, going through requests from nsa&whoever, working with people to get them back to their accounts, sorting out if the apps are scams, sorting out spam, selling adverts.. you name it, plenty of stuff that is essentially email or call support - if you think about it, it's only natural for these positions to out-weight every other department.
yeah, sure, I am in tech. in Helsinki and employed and could probably get an interview for another job in days or instantly, I'm hitting nearly 10 years doing mobile development. I know a bunch of people who can't though - and a lot of people who work in tech but don't code who could use a job. what, you think everyone at facebook codes? fuck no, most of them do the menial crap that's associated with having hundreds of millions of users...
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Those three words describe Silicon Valley. Really they do, I've seen that and heard that description for decades from people working there, and more to the point from people no longer working there. Silicon Valley is a trap for the young, once you hit 30 you are no longer employable and either have to move out or scrape by on temp job to temp job.
Silicon Valley is a great place to be from. Ageism is getting so bad in technology that were rapidly reaching parity with strippers. Combine that with H1B and how can anyone in good faith ever recommend a career in technology in the United States?
There are very good tech careers in the US, just not glamours ones like in Silicon Valley. However, if you want a stable tech career, banking is a good option, the large consulting firms (IBM, Rose, etc.) are another. You don't make the astronomical salaries like those in Silicon Valley, but you do make a good living that you can raise a family.
The Silicon Valley type jobs are like being a professional athlete. There is good money to be made, but only for a short time and then your career is over. If you go that route, you better invest wisely or have a backup plan.
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.
Need masters degree as a min for a level 1 job and or that + 1-2 years at an tech or trade school and then after working a few years you get replaced but are still loaded with all the student loans (hope you get income based ones) as then they get next to 0 out of the min wage job you get next (after hiding the degrees to even get that)
We need unions to stand up for workers rights and to have real training / apprenticeship that don't take 2-4+ years of pure class room.
Does it really matter how much income those companies have if you get the same salary you would have in an open source development company?
At the coal face programmers are often young, we have a lot of graduates or people with only a few years experience.
I am near retirement (at 65) but my companies wants me to stay on as long as I want to. I manage a small team and focus on documentation.
We do have some designers over 50, and they are brilliant, but most younger coders either need to get very good at architecture and high-level design or extend sideways into other skills.
Exactly. I tell anyone under 30 in the IT field that, if they want to stay on the tech end and not move up through the management ranks, to get a government job. (Not that many folks under 30 bother to ask an old fogey like me; I'm 48 after all.)
In Austin a few months before the dot-com crash, I noticed that the short term contract gigs I'd been getting were drying up. Remembering that the exact same thing happened before lots of layoffs took place in the recession of the early 90s, I decided to try to find a permanent job with a government agency -- "any port in a storm" and all that. Managed to get a VB job with a state agency because no one else applied for the job. Three months later, after Dell had their massive layoffs, VB programmers were swarming the streets like deranged pigeons.
Now I've been there over 12 years, and long since moved on from programming in VB. And when I got cancer and was out for three months with the treatment and recovery, they didn't get rid of me like a lot of companies would do.
There are plenty of downsides to working for the government, of course. But it is stable employment, and these days that is almost priceless.
I wonder if it's not so much a function of age, but rather that "older" programmers want to live in a place where they can own a home and raise a family. That is exceedingly hard in the Silicon Valley, even for someone with a well-paid tech job. The cost of a rundown three bedroom bungalow in Cupertino is in excess of one million dollars (Zillow link: http://tinyurl.com/lq2wpcq). A four or five bedroom home is closer to two million. Purchasing such a home is a challenge for even a family with two tech incomes, harder for a family with one tech income and one "normal" income, and damned near impossible for a family with a single breadwinner. Even if you manage to pull off purchasing a home, you've still got a rundown bungalow. Why not go somewhere where you can better enjoy the fruits of your labor?
As a tech worker in his early 30s in the Valley, guys my age talk constantly of moving to Austin, Raleigh, or some other non-Valley tech hub---some place where the idea of raising a family doesn't boggle the mind. I suggest that while age discrimination may be very real, we must also consider that "the old guys" are merely moving out of the Valley. Thus, the average employee age of any company that has the bulk of their operations in the Valley will skew towards the young side. I don't believe it's a coincidence that the average age is less than 30, since 30 is about the age many educated men start a family.
You're lucky.
I've seen a lot of people edged out of jobs. With age and seniority comes a larger paycheck. It's easier to bring in someone young, who's less business savvy, and willing to work for much less money. Many places haven't made the relationship that it takes a fresh face twice as long (or longer) to do the job of an experienced person.
I've seen plenty of people make lateral moves to other companies, trying to learn new skills along the way. That simply makes them chronologically older, but with the same skill set as the young. Since they have to hop between companies to stay employed, they also end up getting paid the same. Unfortunately, everything suffers.
Replacing experienced workers with inexperienced and lower paid workers has been shown time and time again to be more costly in the long run. We call it the MBA effect, where beginning the 1960s with the emphasis on MBAs focus shifted to maximizing short term profits. Often, though this is at the expense of long term growth and stability. Since at the time MBAs were in high demand, like IT is now, there was a lot of job hopping, so the "experts" pushing this approach in the organization weren't there to suffer the consequences. They had moved on.
Often, when decisions are made along those lines, nobody is looking at the total cost involved, including the cost of hiring and training or the lost productivity as the less experienced worker needs to be brought up to speed and become part of the team. (Obviously, if the experienced worker left by their own choosing, these costs have to be borne, but that is not usually the case).
One of the real problems is that today's IT managers often are highly educated and trained in computer sciences but not business, and are totally project focused. That works out fine for the company as the bubble is expanding, but on the downside, many of those companies cannot survive because they have the wrong people, not just in management but on their teams.
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. Once interest rates return, which the Fed keeps saying will happen, so that investors can get a better, safer return elsewhere, that money will flow out again. Companies focused on only short term profits will be in a world of hurt because the money wasted on the continual retraining and hiring caused by high turnover and the loss in productivity cannot be made up. That money is already gone.
Smart companies realize that their employees are not an expense, but a resource. After investing money in shaping that resource to best add to the company's value, why would you want to throw that all away and start over?
> 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.
Sounds entirely too good to be true. Corporations gave up on that kind of thinking a long time ago.
Actually there are quite a few corporations that still believe and practice that. They just aren't the Googles and FB of the world. But the corporate culture in the US does make it harder for that kind of thinking to persist with the demand being short term profits to keep shareholders (which really mean board members) happy.
However, most corporations in the US aren't the major conglomerates, but are actually family businesses that have grown in size over the years. These corporations are no different than any other family owned business. The values of those at the top are what set the tone for the rest of the company. If those at the top value the employees who work for them, then the company culture will mirror that. If those at the top value profits above all else, then the company culture will mirror that.
Unfortunately, what has happened in many of these family corporations, the parents have not instilled the same value system in the kids or the kids aren't really interested in the business and hire others to run it for them. In doing so, however, a whole new company set of values is put in place.
I also do consulting for companies all over the globe, specifically on the topic of hiring and there are reams of data to show CEOs and CFOs that in the long run, it is in their company's best interest to minimize employee turnover. It is simply pouring money down the drain. I also work with companies to turn their company culture around, because the two are inter-related (see, our firm does much more than just IT).
Look back to when import vehicles first started coming to America from Japan. Nobody paid much attention, particularly the major American auto makers. The cars were small, they weren't reliable, they were uncomfortable and a whole slew of other negative things. But Japan was in it for the long haul and had a different corporate culture than the US makers did so that today, they are the number one selling vehicles in the US.
Likewise, in the IT business, or pretty much any business. The company that will be here tomorrow needs to have a culture that ensures it's existence for tomorrow. Just like young people today need/want instant gratification, too many companies and their board do the same.
Here is one last tidbit. Often, we hear from managers about having employees that are dead wood, just taking up space. So we ask them why they hired them if they were that bad. They always, and I do mean always, say they weren't that way when we hired them. To which we respond, well, if they weren't dead wood when you hired them, what did you do to turn them into it?
The companies that will be the leaders of the 21st century are the ones that realize that their employees are their most valuable assets and treat them accordingly.
We didn't hire even one engineer under 30 - they simply don't have the skills and the patience.
Are you even in tech? Promotion in tech means you find a better job somewhere else and everyone wants to hire ex-fb people. The shorter people stay in a tech position the better the job market.
Ummmm, that's not called promotion. Promotion means you move up in the same company. Jumping ship to another company only works for so long. For instance, before too long, you find that you are 30 in Silicon Valley and evidently nobody wants to hire you. 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.
Just saying...
I'm over 60 and went the other way. I'm happy now developing software instead of spending all my time managing schedules and doing hiring. For a 20% pay cut I went to a company where I don't work weekends, and I feel way more valuable than what I was doing in middle management. It's not too hard to keep skills current. I spent time on StackOverflow researching and solving C++ problems so I could go in with something more current than FORTRAN, PL/1, APL, and Lisp.
Google recently acknowledged that their hiring practices were not yielding any significant advantage. Specifically referring to hiring only people from Ivy League schools with 3.5+ GPAs. This had been my guess for some time and I often thought it was the root of their stagnation or lack of innovation recently--hiring only people who are proven conformists. Working in education I don't have anything really good to say about those with advanced degrees. My overall conclusion is that it rots innovative areas of the mind and turns those people off to engaging further education, resulting in intellectual laziness and low self-esteem.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock