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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?
"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
It's just that they only hire young people to keep salaries down so the exec's can buy themselves another island or fund spaceflights.
The starting salaries for college grads at large SV companies are I think around $100k now and probably rising. It goes up from there mind you and goes up rather quickly if you switch to a competitor at the right time. As the fun facebook and google salary war has shown money isn't the problem.
In some cases it means you haven't lived half your life yet, in others it means you haven't lived a third of it. Which is closer to the truth for you depends quite a bit on the society in which you live. Either way, 29 is a quite a tender age in the overall grand view of things.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
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.
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.
Kinda explains why Chrome (among other apps) SUCK... Seriously buggy beyond belief, as if it's coded by a bunch of amateurs. Maybe they should focus more on hiring talent, regardless of age.
Signed: An "old" employee above the age of 29.
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?
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"
There is even the appropriately tall carousel at California's Great America.
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.
They can't find enough skilled workers that want to compete with H1B people that are willing to work for "less." These guys aren't dumb, so when they choose to study something in college, do they want to study something that is getting salaries hammered by cheap foreign competition, has rampant age discrimination, and is famous for 80 hour weeks? Naw, better to study law, or medicine. There's at least some money there, and you can do either by marketing directly to the public, without having to worry about being hired by someone else after you're 40 years old. Sure, just keep raising that H1B quota until there isn't a comp sci course available in the USA, or if there is, it is populated only by foreigners.
Open source may be where "it" is at, but you'll notice that the dinosaurs like Apple, Google and Facebook are shuffling around a wee bit more money than even the most successfull "open source" anything.
Yes, Silicon valley is a consumer of open source. Why not? "Never give a sucker an even break," is an adage businesspeople still take to heart.
So, feel free. Go do some work for free on your latest "open source" project. Someone will be along to collect it and sell it, by and by.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I would have thought that by now, "new ideas" are great, but without long-term vision which is all but impossible with wisdom, we end up with... pretty much what we are seeing today. It's also a push for a lot of things people don't want. Of course they aren't seeing it because they have already lost long-term vision.
But this is all great for those who are "at the top" ... for now.
But that's okay... the last remaining industries will be banking and legal and I'd say those two are prevailing at the moment.
It was a book that was adapted into a film ...
but let's be real, is Google opensourcing the stuff that is runs their busines?
Open Source Projects Released By Google
I, and many of my technical colleagues, are quite senior. We'd find work there, but would almost be forced into management, because by "lines per day" metrics and "tickets closed" we're not as fast as the average youngster. However, our abilities to deal with problems the youngsters have never even _heard_ of, and to do things cleanly so the problems don't occur, and the mastery of older and stable technologies, certainly keeps us busy.
You can see the difference in our software, and our hardware. If we buy a pair of switches for high availability, we make sure that the computers connected to them are correctly connected to both switches, with pair-bonding or other failover software. When we get involved with backup systems we actually test restoring the data. When we write new web applicatons, we sanitize the inputs before feeding them to the database. (Obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/327/) And when we deal with "object oriented programming", we use different functions for different classes of input, despite the protests of the Java and C++ youngsters, because we have learned the harsh and bitter lesson: distinct functions get distinct names..
My colleagues and I are also a bit odd in that when someone shows up with a new technology, we don't just demean it. Replacing racks of expensive hardware with commodity disk drives was a real rethink of how we did things, and we oldsters had to get them to slow down and invest in bandwidth to allow offsite replicaton instead of sending tapes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet for an example) We also had to bring in the experience that if you triple people's space, they will fill it _very quickly_: But it worked out really well, and it's a replicatable technology suite.
Depends how you define NoSQL. DynamoDB paper was published circa 2007 but the product is not open source. What open source product did you have in mind that defines NoSQL? BerkeleyDB?
NodeJS, PHP, Ruby are the village idiots... not really worth bragging about :) But beyond these, yes, some very impressive platforms are open source.
you had me at #!
Amazon.
you had me at #!
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
In a 2 year old technology, willing to work for $9/hr 100 hrs a week.
What does median mean. Well, it's the number where 50% of your sample is above, and 50% is below. So half the workers are over 29, and half are younger than 29. That's it. That's all it means.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This claim of ageism is highly skewed. I was 10 in 1981, when the first home computer came out in the UK (ZX81). In other words, still in school - there would have been 8 years ahead of me in the school system still. This defines "The Computer Generation" - people who had computers at home while they were growing up.
Now sure, some adult engineers made the cross-over, or came from a mainframe background, however surely their numbers have to be far fewer than the generation that grew up on computers?
Now I'm 42, and continue to do my best work each year - and my compensation reflects that.
Folk?
I am 31 and FB tried hard to recruit me. I have friends that have passed up Google, etc.
None of us have interest in working for them. They do nothing that interests us (well, I think Google does some cool stuff, but nothing they'd hire me for).
I think it is easier for younger people to get spun up working for "Facebook" or "Google" than it is to work elsewhere. Other jobs may not be resume builders like those two, but they may be of more value.
Conversely, most of the people I know starting their own businesses are 35+, but then again I may have selection bias due to my own age.
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.
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.
The starting salaries for college grads at large SV companies are I think around $100k now and probably rising. It goes up from there mind you and goes up rather quickly if you switch to a competitor at the right time. As the fun facebook and google salary war has shown money isn't the problem.
100k might or might not be a lot of money depending on where you have to live to make that kind of money. If a studio apartment an hour from work each way is the cheapest you can get and runs you $2,000 per month, that 100k just isn't going got go all that far. OTOH if you make half that, but can get an entire 2000 sf house 15 minutes from work (maybe within biking distance) for $800 / month including MITs, you will have a better standard of living. I knew a guy who got a co-op job as a masters student. He was making 70k per year annualized, but had to drive almost three hours a day commute because it was the only housing available, and it still cost him 60% of his paycheck in rent. I'll grant you that was an exceptional case, but raw income numbers don't mean much without context.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
While they killed them off at 30 in the movie (Michael York) of Logans Run it was 21 in the book.
I remember going to that film in Napier, and there was a power failure half way through. We were sitting outside for at least half an hour. (I was chatting to my chemistry 101 lexcturer about Sci_Fi
Still the movie wasn't as bad as the TV series that was made a couple years later which included a solar powered hovercraft, and an android called Rem (Donald Moffat)
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...
And don't want to work 80 hour weeks including weekends. You can take newly graduated college kids and work them like slaves. They even like it and think its cool. If you give them food at work they will live at the office for you
Meanwhile old people want to leave the office towards late afternoon to spend time with their sex mates and kids. They don't want to come in on the weekends so they can spend time with their families
There's a perspective that comes with failing (thank you dot.com bust) that frames your judgements with the preciousness of time, not to waste it and never lose an opportunity because in the next moment it may be someone else's. The advantage with age is knowing from experience that timing matters, paradigms shift and culture belongs to youth.
Carry on Silicon Valley.
I'm really not sure why 'The Valley' even exists anymore. It's hyper expensive and congested. Sure, the various managers and VCs like to get together face to face and synergize or whatever they call it these days, but why should the people whose names the VCs will never remember be there? Why should the servers be there?
The kind of money they have to pay a single 20 something so he can have a decent lifestyle there is enough to allow a 40 or 50something to have a decent lifestyle with a family in other parts of the country. Poof! No more hiring problem.
For internet companies, they're sure bad at using the internet internally.
I've never been to Silicon Valley, but I met a programmer who was happy to get out of there as soon as he could escape. I'll never forget the mental image he painted of the place, "On Friday nights everyone takes their expensive cars out cruising, but there are no women in Silicon Valley, so it's just a bunch of guys trying to impress other guys."
Really sounds like Sartre's description of hell as "other people" to me.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
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?
When we hire, we do not look at age. However what we notice is that if people are too young, they are not take it serious enough. They moan that they want to have time off on moments that it is not possible. They want to go out with their friends.
When they are too old, it is very time consuming (and often impossible) to learn them new things. And yes, we DO look for the exception. We will not rule out anybody on age. They often just do not fit the profile.
This not just for IT people, but for all staff.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Pretty underwhelming. Android and Chromium OS are Linux-based OS's so Google is legally required to release source under the GPL. And Android was developed by someone else. Go is open source, but that is practically a requirement for a new programming language to gain wide acceptance. GP's comment seems correct.
Now please tell us what you think about PERL. I'd really like to know.
One reason there aren't many jobs for older people there is that there aren't many new jobs in California, period. Companies are moving out of high tax, high cost states like California to low tax, low cost states like Texas.
Texas is still hiring people of all ages for high tech jobs. Austin has startups, giants, and government jobs (though you won't get the ridiculous, bankruptcy inducing pensions unionized California's state employees get), and Houston and Dallas have high tech and oil and gas (lots of hardware and software engineering jobs that pay very well). And the cost of living here is radically lower; someone who makes $50,000 a year here can easily afford a house.
If things suck where you are now, maybe you should move someplace things don't suck.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Now please tell us what you think about PERL. I'd really like to know.
http://learn.perl.org/faq/perlfaq1.html#Whats-the-difference-between-perl-and-Perl-
"Perl" is the name of the language. Only the "P" is capitalized. The name of the interpreter (the program which runs the Perl script) is "perl" with a lowercase "p".
You may or may not choose to follow this usage. But never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym.
So if Aunt Ethel is twice as old as mcgrew's daughter and weighs fifteen pounds more than his son, how many of the people seated at the third table arrived in the silver taxi?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Finally a well worded insightful post, a rare occurrence on this site. The link to the newsletter subscription is missing though.
I'm pretty sure you're full of shit.
I've interviewed, and been offered, several software engineer jobs over the past year at companies in SV. I make $110k in a small suburb of Boston. I have 15 years of industry experience - and if you want to talk buzzword bingo, my work is, essentially, "DevOps / Continuous Delivery Engineer," and I'm involved in building an internal cloud platform for a very large financial services firm - chef, vagrant, xen & vsphere hypervisors, ruby, python, restful apis, rabbitmq, jenkins, blah blah blah blah blah. I'm not an unemployable dinosaur, I have a skill set that is very much in demand these days, and I'm *good* at what I do.
I was offered $120-125k by the 4 SV companies who offered me jobs. I turned them all down, because a 10-15k pay bump for vague promises of "we're gonna be the most amazing billion dollar startup evar!" is not enough to make me leave my nice cushy 12 minute commute and my charming little New England town to relocate all the way across the country to crowded, overpriced SV, to work 80 hours a week and spend 20 hours a week commuting, and never see my family in friends.
I'm pretty sure the "new college grad" is making a fair bit less than 100k with zero experience, on average.
I'd make a LifeLock joke, but apparently they're based out of Arizona.
From (me): http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/16/can-unions-and-strikes-still-make-a-difference/index.html ... In general, this is part of the ongoing downward spiral for labor that is just getting started. As automation increases, like through better robots or 3D printers, and as improved designs come along that take less effort to put together or last longer, there will be even less need for paid labor. So, the people who still have jobs will be afraid to strike or in other ways rock the boat. So, they will let themselves be exploited more and more just to keep food on the table. ...
---
So, it would seem that strikes will be less and less likely in the future as a general trend, although it is possible that one big national or global strike might happen at some point when people realize that major positive social change is going to be now or never.
Any strike will be pointless in the long term unless it is about structural reform in our economy and society. Just striking to get slightly higher pay (or just to keep what one has) or to get slightly better benefits, which has been useful to many groups in the past, is not going to be very effective in the long term if these other trends continue towards decreasing the value of labor relative to automation and improved design.
What good is it to get more money and more benefits for fewer and fewer remaining workers while they wait for their own jobs to be lost to automation and improved design? Yet, this has been the strategy of most unions for many years. The failure of the US American automakers in Detroit shows how, in the long run, unions creating private welfare states within individual corporations does not work well anymore for union members or anyone else in society these days. The companies become less competitive relative to other companies that pay less and embrace automation and better design, and so they fail, taking all the union jobs with them.
We are possibly past the point where union actions related to single companies make much sense. If unions are to have any major role in the future, it may likely be as part of larger efforts to rethink the underlying basis of our economy and society, like by somehow being part of a national effort for a basic income, or comprehensive single-payer health care reform, or reforming education, or things like that.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
You can't compare Google and Facebook. Facebook is at 24.37 and has a P/E of 529.78! That's a scam. Google is at 893.49 and has a P/E of 26.73. That's a seriously successful business. I'm of the old-fashioned school that loves the idea of products, but advertising can fund a real business. That's what Google does. It's no different from how broadcasting was/is supported by advertising, and how newspapers used to be (that was their biggest revenue source, not the news stand price). As my examples show, there isn't even anything new about a business model where revenue comes from advertising.
I've got a great job, put in solid hours, manage a amazing team (I'm not a HR manager, more of a team lead) and have a great salary. Compare that to when I was in my 20s:
Carried a duty pager.
Worked 90 plus hours a week, which in reality decreases your quality of living and your overall compensation (do most companies actually pay extra for hours over 40? Doubt it).
When one gets older they realize that there are more important things to life than working. Like friends, family and exploring more than the insides of a corporate campus. Free dry cleaning? If that meant in exchange for seeing my wife and kids, no thank you. There's plenty of jobs in the silicon valley (or high tech landscape) that don't require indentured servitude at Google/Facebook.
I realized that the career "advice" I've been reading on Slashdot all these years was worthless.
For years, I thought it was my tech skills and I kept pounding away at them - but still no job after several years. Yes, I've been out of work that long and from the feedback that I (rarely) get, I am unemployable - in any field, now.
I've tried changing careers but when folks see that I was a software engineer, they look at me funny and wonder why I want to do what they do. Folks in 2013 still think it's 1999 and all of us are getting a new job offer everyday with a $10,000 pay raise.
Try explaining that somewhere somehow you screwed up and made yourself unemployable. No one gives you feedback. And fellow techies just keep pounding the same drum "It's your tech skills! That's all that matters!"
And then there are the ad hominems - "You're out of work because you are no good." or "There must something wrong with you."
Maybe. I've been doing everything I can to fix whatever problem(s) I may have.
But once you're out - you're out. There's no getting back in.
Then there's the snarky comments from people "What!? You don't wanna work?!" or "What are you?! An alcoholic?!"
And then there's the lame advice of "Keep your chin up!" and "Have a positive attitude!"
How? When I'm basically called a screw-up?
Getting into software was the worst thing I ever did.
It's too bad I have too much student debt - I'd go back to school and get a nursing degree. The nursing job market still kinda sucks but nursing has a long history of career changers and they have the crap we do in IT/Software Development hiring.
This. CGI and Mason had its uses but sweet Jesus am I glad not to have any of that code running our web systems.
Finding God in a Dog
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
I'm sure that's part of the reason in SV, but the survey looked at tech companies all over the country. FTA:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the overall median age of American workers is 42.3 years old. The company with the oldest workers on the PayScale list, Hewlett – Packard, came in at 41 years.
The other five companies with older workers, in descending order of median age, were I.B.M. Global Services (38 years old), Oracle (38), Nokia (36), Dell (37) and Sony (36).
AFAIK IBM, Nokia, Dell and Sony may have SV operations, but they're not based there. Even HP has a lot of facilities and people outside of SV.
If you want an idea of how complex and worthwhile your industry is, look at the average age of your coworkers and whether the more experienced ones tend to have more to contribute. If that's the case, you're probably doing something interesting, creative, and innovative. If it's not the case, you're probably doing something menial like picking radishes or coding.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
Sometimes device manufacturers work out a deal with component makers that the device manufacturer will get a discount on a particular component if certain features of the component are disabled. This is especially common with royalty-bearing technology such as circuits that perform MPEG video encoding and decoding.
people who haven't figured out how to look for a job
But there seems to be a mentality in certain circles that "if you don't already know how to find a job, you don't deserve to learn."
That's the problem. You are living in Santa Clara. It's not about affording a house it's affording a house in a quality location.
Sure you can live in East San Jose along King Street.. but you'd probably much rather live in Sunnyvale/Cupertino/PaloAlto with good school districts.
As they say, "It's all about location." and in the SV location can take your $500k home in SC and make it a $1.3m home.
Successful people with fulfilling lives generally don't like to whine on Slashdot.
The sample is necessarily screwed. The people unhappy about their jobs will whine, and the people happy generally don't write a passionate post on how happy they are at being a corporate drone.
Don't quote me on this.
Nerd rage - that's a terrible Logan's Run reference. In Logan's Run society people are are killed when they hit 30. The median age certainly wouldn't be anywhere near 28/29.
That's interesting, so we pay for a chip we're not going to be able to use, because of a licensing deal. That had never occurred to me.
never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym
It most certainly is, according to Larry Wall no less. PERL = Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
low taxes might be sucking jobs into Texas
They're not. Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan, so low tax politicians crow about how they've created the Great Texas Job Machine. Oops, most of those new Texas jobs in recent years have been government jobs.
There is a `white' elephant in the room as far as Silicon Valley is concerned. Whites are a minority in most areas. Most of the decent schools are overwhelmingly Asian and the school cultures have transformed to reflect this fact. The over-whelming focus is on academics to the detriment of extra-curricular activities like sports or art. This does not affect a twenty-something who has moved over from some other part of the country; he is too busy enjoying the fantastic weather and rubbing shoulders with the tech elite. It does matter to a 40-something whose two kids are the only whites in their class. Even if he does not care, his partner may not see it the same way.
There are already areas of the bay area that whites people avoid if they can help it... Sunnyvale, Fremont, Milpitas, most of San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino.
I'm neither defending nor criticizing these attitudes or considerations. Just pointing out that they exist.
I know numerous older SV engineers that have no problem finding work. For example, my father is now 70 years old. He was hired by Amazon in his 60s to design the hardware for the first Kindle and still works there to this day designing new products. I'm over 40 and am contstantly contacted by recruiters and various companies. It all depends. As long as you learn new skills and keep up with technology there is demand for experienced engineers.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Also, most of those new jobs are low-wage jobs, often minimum wage. I wouldn't crow so much about creating lots of minimum wage jobs.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Ever tried to write nice-looking code in a proportional font? It's pretty much impossible to line anything up properly.
On a related note, I think programmers also have a tendency towards more deeply-nested grammar.
I'm 43 and have been a programmer in Silicon Valley since 1995. From my personal perspective, the job market is red hot. However, having experienced countless interviews, from both sides of the table, I know how arbitrary and capricious hiring decisions are. I've worked at a lot of places and always kept my skill-set relevant, but if, for example, I had spent the last 12 years doing nothing but C++ for one employer, and suddenly found myself looking for work, I'm sure my age would be a liability.
One thing I've noticed from recent experience interviewing candidates: mediocre interviewees with only a few years experience often get the benefit of the doubt, where people with 10 or more years experience who give an equally mediocre interview performance will get rejected outright. The rationale is that the junior person is likely to improve, whereas with the senior person, "what you see is what you get". Is this unfair? I don't know, I guess it depends on the situation, but it certainly illustrates the fact that as an interviewee, you are judged according to significantly varying standards depending on your age. This, by definition, is "discrimination".
You can't legislate egos.
Young guys always know more than old guys.
I remember two years ago young guys telling me about Mongo
and how they were "beyond Codd's rules and integrity contraints".
Of course, now there's a movement to "structure" Mongo.
Yuk yuk yuk.
Why, just on this board somebody replied that they were now "beyond design patterns".
Yeah, let me know that one works out, kid.
I mean, really, a for loop is a for loop.
How hard is that to figure out?
Apparently quite hard for younger people who think they invented a new for loop
because it's in javascript or erlang.
Once I get the job, I can program just fine. I just have a bit of trouble learning certain kinds of social skills, especially how not to make a bad first impression in an in-person interview. My disability sometimes keeps me from detecting when I have made or am about to make a faux pas until it is too late.
One aspect: Kids are a lot cheaper. Ask any school hiring teachers. When they're only worrying about the short term (because we're all gonna die soon, I guess), they'll chase out real talent and settle for cheap.
Old as Rome: It takes talent to build the roads and bridges and catch the horses. When that's all done, get rid of the expensive talent and hire roadsweepers and gate-lifters. Again, because we're all gonna die tomorrow.
Basically I'm saying the US is living through a sick period in which profit is the measure of all. I can say that because I've been around long enough to see the sea-change. Nobody will pay me to say it, because it's not the fashion. But the phones and the databanks will all go away eventually, as sanity returns, and the world will return to a place where everyday know-how like Ben Franklin had, will once again count for more than fancy wigs and penis-extenders.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
I'm 49, and not having any trouble at all finding work to do, because I keep my skills up to date. I've got several decades of programming experience, and right now I'm pretty well situated since I'm a Mac developer with more Obj-C experience than most people will ever get. But, if some better platform comes along, then I'll switch to it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I bought a house in Willow Glen last September for $550K - the schools in this area are fine (great, even) and so is the neighborhood. If you're focused on a perfect house in Cupertino or Shallow Alto, yeah, its gonna be pricey, but there are plenty of perfectly fine areas in San Jose and Santa Clara with older, smaller homes that sell in the $500-$600K range, which should be easily affordable on a $200K salary (or lower, even). Heck, our mortgage+taxes are less than we were paying in rent on a downtown SJ condo and that's before taking into account tax benefits...
But is very real, particularly when dealing with sound and video. Many chips have Dolby capabilities for example, but it's frequently not included in the part because with Dolby comes licensing and compliance that costs money. So it's disabled...
never write "PERL", because perl is not an acronym
It most certainly is, according to Larry Wall no less. PERL = Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister.
http://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl3/lperl/ch01_02.htm
It's actually a retronym, not an acronym. That is, Larry came up with the name first, and the expansion later. That's why "Perl" isn't in all caps.
Yeah...that's the thing with Austin. It sounds pretty great on the surface.
Sure...Apple is building/expanding a huge campus here in Austin. (Sounds great.) It's really only operations stuff, like finance, accounting, human resources, etc. (Not great.) All of the interesting design and development work is in California, and it's there to stay. (And for some very good reasons, IMHO.) I hear they'll do some manufacturing here though, so if you fancy the idea of working in a factory, this is the right state to be in.
It's a low tax, low service state. Don't expect them to do much for you, because you're getting what you pay for. They also won't regulate many things in the state...so you'll occasionally have things like the fertilizer plant explosion up in West Texas. 15 dead, 150+ injured, and about 150 buildings damaged or destroyed. But at least they didn't have those dreaded regulations to contend with.
Oh, but if you're a woman, they WILL regulate the hell out of what you can do with your own body. Good luck with that.
Anyways...I've vented about this stuff before. I'm headed back to the one of the coasts sometime next year. There are some great things here too, and I'll miss a handful of them...but the bad things here aren't outweighing the good anymore.
Perhaps age discrimination laws(never mind employment status discrimination or even discriminating against US citizens!) need to gain some teeth and be applied a lot lower than 40.
While there might be "a great deal of employers", they operate something like monopsony power and a lot of them need to have their entitlement mentality smacked right out of them to change that.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Since TIMTOWTDI, there should also be TIMTOWTCI.
Almost everyone over 30 at my company, just on typing speed alone, is about as productive as one half of a 23 year old. Overall, I'd say they're about as productive on a computer in general by about 1:10 ratio to a 23 year old. I'm 26 and I'm head IT manager. I replaced a 45 year old who had no idea what he was doing despite being in the IT business full time for 25 years. Every decision he made was wrong (like buying XP Pro machines just 2 years ago which we now have to replace) because he's too sick of keeping up with technology and tech news. He didn't even know it was being discontinued.
Don't even bother with IT. Go over to HR. A 25 year old would know how to use all sorts of job listing sites, find HR laws online in seconds, type close ot 100 WPM, use social media, etc. A 50 year old, no way in hell. There's nothing to do with the age itself, it's just that older people have no interest in time-saving IT or learning or computers really. So it's their own fault, not a stereotype.
The Loga's Run world, with a maximum age of 30, would represent of median age of 15. Compared to Silicon Valley, with a median age of about 30, this would be half. Does not compute. Conclusion: Silicon Valley in 2013 DOES NOT Resemble Logan's Run In 2274
This is nothing new. SC has had a young bent to it since the 60s and the counter culture that spawned it. The latest iteration of the SC start up is the IPO bubble: get hired, work insane hours. Get preferred pre-IPO stock. If the hype is matched with money on IPO day, cash out and get rich.
Anyone who didn't hitch a ride one of these IPO bubbles, stayed on to keep things running. They aren't the math and comp sci majors who will work hundreds of hours on a project with a language they never truly mastered. They ARE the masters who can whip out the same code in a fraction of the time, get raked over the coals by some ex-techie who things he's still technical manager because the code isn't elegant or something. These are the left behind. Those you rarely hear about because they're too busy trying to stay employed and raise a family. They aren't "leaning in." They don't have the paycheck to hire a round the clock nanny or hire someone to take care of Dad while he's recovering from chemo or a stroke. They don't fit into the idealized, simplified world of the mythical SC Tech God who never interacts with reality.
I run into this all the time and I don't work in SC. I'm in DC. What do I see? I see a desire for "plug and play." I see a desire to keep people cheap by only paying for the most basic training or offering to reimburse you for the test, provided you pay for it out of pocket first. I don't see companies who want to keep you around, nor do they care if you stick around. After nearly 30 years of job hopping, no one expect you to stay anyway. So maybe SC hires the young. It's California and they've had an age bias since the youth quake of the 60s. If I was in a similar situation, I'd sell that over priced home to a kid with more paycheck than sense, move somewhere I can buy a house outright, and find any job to pay the monthly bills.
Why? Because eventually you miss a step on that great treadmill of a career and you get clobbered. So save up and make your move fellow old guys. Let the kids sacrifice their minds and bodies. Then laugh at them as you go home to your paid for house, in your paid for car. After you put in your 40 at your new stress free job.
Only the dead have seen the end of War. - Plato
They should consider Atlanta. Several of the folks who work for me moved back to Atlanta from SF with their families. Square is a great place to work, and Atlanta is a great place to live.
Once they can no longer innovate, as slaves to Wall Street they must they grow revenues and user bases through rent-seeking behavior. Microsoft: Windows and Office. Adobe: Creative Suite. Intuit: QuickBooks. Look at how they all add absolutely nothing in terms of new features while forcing their users to buy into a new SaaS "subscription" model so they can keep selling them the same thing forever.
And here class is a fine specimen of a C++ hipster. They exhibit all of the hipster traits in the purest of forms. Note the perfect disdain for the new. Only "vintage" languages will suffice. Hand writing binary trees in assembly is a job requirement for their secretaries, and "Web Sites" are for nothing but listing plain text pages of endangered plants in the state of New Mexico.
Seriously though, I would rather code CRUD apps in Brainf**k all day than to be involved in a community with this sort of attitude. Say what you will about the utility of the tools above, but they have made unprecedented gains in the diversity of the programming community. They make an effort at teaching new people how to build things. I do not like or use PHP, but I am not about to go bashing someone else's tool, especially when it helped build the majority of the modern web. I find it especially interesting that the AC (astoundingly modded informative) does not list his own stack. No stack is perfect.
Some people learn from their mistakes, but others refuse to learn when things have changed. The "lessons" they've learned are no longer appropriate---or were bogus to begin with, re: racism, gender discrimination, homophobia---but they cling to them anyways.
So yeah, people can become less wise with age, certainly at least in a relative measure.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
If you think that Silicon Valley looks like Logan's Run, then you should take a close look at Shenzhen. No end of the government follies look as though they could be the carousel (the stadiums especially have often been used for similar purposes) and most businesses have a very open policy about hiring youngsters only. Terry Gou would look especially good in a Sandman suit.