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."

Comments

29 years old

[A Huge Loud Fart]

29 years old is young now?

Re:29 years old

[gestalt_n_pepper]

At 55, it sure *looks* that way.

Re:29 years old

[imunfair]

I'm not sure if you're a silly troll or just too young to realize that most people don't retire until 60-65. vThat makes 29 less than a quarter of the time someone will work if they went to college.

Re:29 years old

[gl4ss]

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.
but imagine that, being in the middle, first being too young to hit the .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.

"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.

Re:29 years old

[Rakishi]

I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF

Hahaha, keep thinking that if it makes you happy. Everyone I know who actually is there or NYC thinks it's about as close to the dot com boom as you can get. Maybe better because the giants have a lot more money to throw around this time. Everyone I know who was looking for jobs had better offers than their old jobs within a few weeks and usually were booked solid with interviews. Usually people have interviews at decent companies the next day if they put themselves on the job market.

aren't most of their a lot of their workers technically just phone answer droids working low wage customer support, with high turnaround?

Neither one has much in the sense of tech support or call centers from what I understand.

that explains how average fb guy is just 1.1years at the company.

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.

Re: 29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

Remind me not to hire you with your attitude.

Re: 29 years old

[jasenj1]

So both have telephone support then?

Re: 29 years old

[Rakishi]

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.

Re:29 years old

[gl4ss]

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...

Re:29 years old

[Dcnjoe60]

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...

Re:29 years old

[mcgrew]

You're a kid, kid. You're my kids' age, and I was five years older than you when I had kids. I'm twice as old as you; compared to you I've lived two whole lifetimes so far. Having served 4 years in the USAF before school I was just getting my Bachelor's at your age.

My daughter's your age, and in college.

You're just getting started.

I do understand your thinking, however -- I was your age once. When I got out of the service, having gone to Thailand, I thought I'd lived more than most 70 year olds.

I was wrong. So are you.

Re:29 years old

[Kjella]

In the sense that you have a long way to go to retirement, yes. I'd worked what, six years back then? With 38 more to go until public pension kicks in here. On the other hand, you'd already be on the "old boys" team in snowboarding. It's all about context.

Re: 29 years old

[aurispector]

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.

Re: 29 years old

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:29 years old

[SirGarlon]

It's young enough to not be protected under California's Fair Employment and Housing Act. Interesting loophole there -- it's illegal to discriminate against people 40 and over based on age, but the 35-year-olds are, apparently, out in the cold. IANAL and I am definitely not a lawyer licensed in California.

Re:29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

At 35 it looks that way too. I regularly refer to people in their twenties as "kids", much as someone your age might refer to me.

On topic, no wonder Google's services are going to shit. Every single change that has been made to those services in the past five years has been annoying and unnecessary. It's indicative of the youth mentality of change for change sake rather than actually improving upon the old. Google Search, Gmail, Google Talk and YouTube have become utter jokes compared to what they once were.

Re:29 years old

[Rakishi]

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.

Re:29 years old

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

Re:29 years old

[AngryNick]

I think a twenty-something media age is pretty normal in any large company, tech or not. I work for a large non-tech firm and our average is closer to 28 and the average lifespan of a new hire is around 4 years. Those who stay (i.e. make the 4th year cut) tend to stick around for 25+ years and gobs of money.

Most people start their careers in places that can hire in bulk, train in bulk, manage in bulk, and promote in bulk. You do your time, decide what you want in life, and move "up or out." Assuming you move out, then there will be plenty of smaller companies waiting to hire you for your prior company's investment in your experience and training. Circle of life stuff, really.

Re: 29 years old

[interval1066]

He may not be a native speaker.

Or one of those young workers.

Re:29 years old

[expatriot]

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.

Re: 29 years old

[interval1066]

Happy now grammar Nazi?

Knowing that the language is in constant decline and today's young IT workers won't be happy until it devolves into a series of gutteral sounds and nonsenical crayon marks, no.

Re: 29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

I didn't feel like typing it, so I grabbed it from here.

Re:29 years old

[jedidiah]

> 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.

Re:29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

"C# is a software language, while SQL is a database technology"

Last I checked, SQL was Structured Query Language .

> SELECT * FROM article_writers WHERE clue >0

0 rows returned

Re:29 years old

[JWSmythe]

    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.

Re:29 years old

[Sarius64]

Really it's like politicians who think they need to change something, or make a new law or no one will vote for them. It's unfortunate that these people are trained to murder their own talent instead of leveraging it.

Re: 29 years old

[Space cowboy]

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.

Re:29 years old

[Dcnjoe60]

    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?

Re:29 years old

[ebno-10db]

That doesn't surprise me. Many of these "new" technologies aren't that new, but many people (especially younger ones quite frankly) are ignorant of that and think the latest thing must be new. I read an article not that long ago where someone justified hiring people who were no more than a few years out of school because the oldies (30) learned their trade before smartphones were popular. Therefore they didn't know about the "new" requirements like working with limited computing power and memory, and worrying about battery life. Yeah, that's real new - I was doing it in the 80's.

Re:29 years old

[Dcnjoe60]

> 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.

Re:29 years old

[phantomfive]

Silicon Valley is fine, the overall unemployment rate is lower than the national average, and for programmers, starting pay, right out of college, is typically $100k. For a programmer with the right skills, $160k is within reach, and $200k is not impossible. Getting a job is as easy as putting a well-written resume on Linked-In, you don't have to apply. There aren't many industries like that. Most people actually have to look for a job.

The people who complain about the job market in Silicon Valley, or working long hours or whatever, are the people who haven't figured out how to look for a job, or the people who have no skills whatsoever. If all you can do is write ASP.NET, it's a little harder to find a job (but not much harder).

Re:29 years old

[hedwards]

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?

Re: 29 years old

[hedwards]

That's an idiomatic use of the double negative. Double negatives in English typically mean the same as a positive, but can also serve to emphasize the point, in some dialects of English it's considered grammatically acceptable to use double negatives in that idiomatic fashion.

But, it's not a feature of English, it's a feature of some dialects of English.

Or, to put it another way, how long do you think you'd be able to keep a job writing business memos or reports if you were using double negatives for emphasis? I'm guessing you'd very quickly be made to either change the language, or change your job.

Re:29 years old

[hedwards]

You said it yourself "long run."

The point of MBAs is to get things going as well as possible in the short term so the executives can get their golden parachute just before the business goes under, and it becomes somebody else's problem.

Which is the same reason why they require people to have all the experience they'll need for an entry level position and don't want to pay people who know what they're doing to stay.

Re:29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: 29 years old

[NotSanguine]

Personally, I'm in favor of teaching people like you some manners and respect for the coming generation, as we're the ones you're going to be counting on in old age, not to just dump you in the middle of the woods to fend for yourself.

Personally, I'm in favor of teaching people like you that those with more experience often have a great deal to share and that if you weren't such a douchebag you might actually learn something. Manners and respect go both ways, my young apprentice.

Re:29 years old

[spire3661]

At 40 I still run circles around most people, younger and older. I never understand the 'young tech' thing.

Re: 29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that you work at Apple R&D and you're old enough to remember when batteries used to be user-replaceable, can you try to do the planet a favour?

Re:29 years old

[Jane Q. Public]

"At 40 I still run circles around most people, younger and older. I never understand the 'young tech' thing."

It's nothing but club mentality. They think that young people are the ones who have fresh ideas. When in reality, it tends to be the people with experience who see new, better ways to do things. (Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.)

Study after study have shown that older programmers are on average more productive.

Re:29 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

It's got everything to do with the fact that the majority of young people don't realize what they're worth, so they'll take substandard pay, work longer hours, take fewer benefits, and are much less likely to complain or fight for their rights. They're the perfect human resources in the corporate eye. Even better if they're foreign H1B holders who can be threatened with deportation.

Re:29 years old

[greg_barton]

What would you do if a 120-year old told you that you were a kid?

He'd be right and I'd listen to him.

Re:29 years old

[Dcnjoe60]

Our employees are just as sought after as anybody else's Ours tend to stay because we a) treat them better, b) pay them as well or better and c) they all get profit sharing in the company. When the economy went bust in 2009, we did not lay a single person off. At some point job security and quality of life are more important to an individual than wages.

Wages are just one piece of the puzzle, but in many organizations, they are viewed as the most important piece. For instance, we had a very good programmer whose performance started to drop. In discussing the situation with him, his manager found out that he was frustrated because his daughter received a college scholarship to play softball (which was good) but he and his wife were very active in her sports life through high school would not be able to attend her games anymore. While we couldn't do much about the away games, we allowed him to adjust his schedule more than the normal flex time during the softball season so that he could make the games. His productivity improved far beyond what it was before.

That was 10 years ago. Since that time, he was instrumental on two large projects. He'll be retiring in a few more years and one of his main tasks now is to head up a mentoring program for new programmers. If we had taken the route of assuming that he was just old, burned out or otherwise a non-performer, he would have suffered, the customers would have suffered ,the projects he worked on would have suffered and so would the bottom line, which impacts all the employees.

If somebody wants to leave, they are free to do so. The fact that they don't very often is indicative that money isn't the primary motivator many believe it is, but in reality, it simply makes up for all of the abuses a company thrusts on its employees. The problem is that those abuses are still there and eventually take their toll.

Maybe the difference between you and us is your believe that in the end it is all about how you can pay the least for your employees. That is not a concern of ours at all. Our concern is how we can let our employees reach their fullest potential. Our manager's jobs aren't to keep employees in line, they are to help remove the obstacles that keep our employees from being successful. That's not to say that profits aren't important. However, when the entire staff shares in those profits, everybody's fortunes rise and sink together. If we pay our employees less, so there is greater profit, the employees just get it back in their share of those profits.

Not everybody believes a free market is about charging the most you can for a product. A free market also means you are free to charge a fair price for your goods and services. Maybe we would make more money if we acted like everybody else, but then again money isn't our primary motivator. It's just one piece of the puzzle.

Re:29 years old

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

Re:29 years old

[datavirtue]

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.

Re:29 years old

[Austerity Empowers]

As far as I can tell this is it. In software it's 'round the clock coding. In hardware it's "people willing to travel and basically live in China". I know some design engineers in Apple, while they may "design in Cupertino", they live 1/4-1/2 of their lives in Shanghai. People in their 30s and 40s with children young aren't going to be very willing to do that, particularly in two-income households (which in California, is virtually a requirement).

It's better to flee the valley and find a more traditional job elsewhere. The paycheck may LOOK lower, but probably goes a lot farther.

Re:29 years old

[pwizard2]

That, plus the new Gmail interface looks like it was beaten with an ugly stick. Useful text labels are gone, everything is represented with an icon. Are people illiterate these days or something? Some changes are downright impractical. For instance, what's with the tiny editor pop-up window when composing a new message? I have all this screen space, so why not use it? I really don't need to look at the contents of my inbox while I'm writing. Replies use the full-size interface, so what gives? They even manage to get that wrong since essential features like Forward are hidden in menus that are not immediately obvious. It's been over a year since they rolled that UI out and I still want the classic interface back.

Re: 29 years old

[pxc]

A foreigner gets caught up in their own idioms and sometimes erroneously imports them into their understanding of English (and we do the same in other languages). My girlfriend is from Mexico City, and she's likely to occasionally say ‘of X’ rather than ‘X's’. She also sometimes confuses gendered possessive pronouns, because in Spanish the gender is determined by the gender of the object, whereas in English it's determined by the one who possesses it.

A lot of Latinate languages (Spanish and French are the only ones I know well enough to speak for) use two-part negations, which might sometimes seem like double negation to an English speaker. As it happens, we use a two part negation for disjunctive lists as well: neither/nor; neither/or is wrong. It looks like the writer here just didn't know to attach the negation to the word or rather than placing the negation after it.

I would also argue that your position is wrong generally: native speakers can happily pick up idiomatic irregularities by habit, but second-language learners are more likely to presume regularity and just run with it because they haven't had a chance to pick up the irregularities of our idioms by experience.

Re: 29 years old

[NotSanguine]

Well, then perhaps your generation should have done a better job of teaching us manners. Or generally not cut back on funding education, worker's rights, and generally making things shitty for us, because you got yours, the hell to anybody that comes after.

We're going to be spending a shit ton of money and effort clearing up the messes that the elderly caused.

Respect does go both ways, but you guys should demonstrate it first, because all we know is the douchebaggery that you've shown us.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I am polite and kind almost to a fault. Well, except that I don't suffer fools gladly. My generation? Yeah, sure. My generation will be the ones that are the first to get the shaft with Social Security. My generation is the one that made those shiny phones and created the network infrastructure that makes your job possible, boy.

And I do emphasize the word "boy." Because you clearly aren't acting like an adult. Hence the term "douchebag" in reference to you. Perhaps I should have said whiny child, but douchebag seems to flow quite naturally in this case, don't you think?

In any case, since no one seems to read Santayana any more I'll remind you that if you don't learn the lessons of history, you're doomed to repeat them. I'll break it down into small words so you'll be sure to understand. Yes. There are assholes of every stripe, including older folks. However, look around you -- some of those who came before you clearly knew what they were doing or you would still be up to your knees in pig shit on the farm.

It would behoove you to seek out those who have more experience and try to gain from it, rather than denigrating those who have lived longer than you have. Soon enough, you'll be the old one and there will be young people who might benefit from the experience you've had. It seems clear that you're (at least at the moment) too immature to get that, but perhaps that will change in the future.

Re:29 years old

[Jane Q. Public]

"Productive != creative"

Repeat: "When in reality, it tends to be the people with experience who see new, better ways to do things. (Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.) "

"At least the places I've worked older workers are more interested in keeping the status quo."

Anecdotes do not statistics make. I've worked in places where most of the management turned out to be assholes. I do not then conclude that all (or even most) managers are assholes.

"When you consider that the hot new thing all the startups want to write in changes every 5-6 years it's no surprise that older workers don't hold as much value. "

This is directly contrary to study results, which was the whole point of my comment. Your assumptions are not in line with what the statistics actually say. Hell, some of those studies were discussed right here recently on Slashdot.

Re:29 years old

[Jason Levine]

As someone just a few years ahead of you (37), I've noticed the creeping signs of "old age" (as I'd have defined it in my 20's): The music I grew up listening to is being played on the Oldies station (Billy Joel is NOT Oldies!!!!), I refer to college students as "those kids", and the hairs on my head now include some grey members. 20-something me would refer to me as "old", but 30-something me knows I'm not nearly old yet. (I'm sure 50-something me would laugh about 30-something me's ideas of what constitutes "old" so I won't make a new list.)

Re:29 years old

[jrumney]

Billy Joel is NOT Oldies!!!!

Sorry to burst your bubble, but as a 41 year old, I consider Billy Joel to be music my Mum would listen to.

Re:29 years old

[Macgrrl]

As a 45 year old I remember going to Billy Joel concerts in my late teens, early 20s. IT was an awesome show.

On that front I also saw Eurythmics, Dire Straits, Peter Gabriel and INXS around this time - give or take a few years.

Re:29 years old

[Kazoo the Clown]

It's quite simple, younger workers are easier to mold into the latest fad development management methodologies (agile, etc.). Older workers have been through those attempts before, fell for it at one time, but don't anymore..

Re:29 years old

[julesh]

Productive != creative.

At least the places I've worked older workers are more interested in keeping the status quo. When you consider that the hot new thing all the startups want to write in changes every 5-6 years it's no surprise that older workers don't hold as much value.

Creative != using the latest buzzword-compliant language/framework.

The older workers just realize that switching to a new framework will usually end up wasting time that could be spent actually coming up with some interesting ideas for novel features that customers might actually care about. The productivity gains of new environments are marginal if you spend most of your time learning how to use it effectively. You're not going to hit your 10,000 hours to master a skill (per Gladwell's suggestion) if you switch to a new one every 5 years. Or at the very least, you're not going to have chance to do very much with that knowledge once you've obtained it.

Re:29 years old

[TWiTfan]

I've noticed that. They skip necessary, but boring, features to add something more interesting.

They also don't want to deal with boring long-term tasks like maintenance, incremental improvements, etc. Google is notorious for that. Make a big splash with the debut of some new project, then slowly let it become abandonware as you move on to newer, sexier projects.

Re:29 years old

[Jane Q. Public]

"This is not an assumption. It's basically a stated fact."

NO, it is not. It is an assumption, and a false one, according to the studies I previously mentioned.

NO, I am not going to spend an hour going back to look for them to prove it to you. You can find them youself if you want. It's not worth my time. But that doesn't mean they don't exist, or that you are right. You are not.

Your long stories and justifications mean nothing to me. I have read the statistics, and they disagree with you. Period. End of discussion. I shall not reply again.

Re:29 years old

[HeckRuler]

As long as that doesn't mean that kids lose the right to vote, smoke, watch porn, comment on the right way to code things, and get a job.

Kids are generally immature, inexperienced, and dumb. They do not have the rights that adults have. To say that someone is a kid dismisses their input. It's an insult. It's agism. And it's just as bad as the line "you can't teach an old dog new tricks".

But yeah, the voice of experience is often valuable. No one is saying we should dismiss the input of old people. And in the exact same way, you shouldn't dismiss the input of young people.

Now go play with your blocks child, the adults are talking.

Re: 29 years old

[Branciforte]

I way hired by Google as a 45 year old with a 2.2 GPA. And there are plenty of people here in their 40's. There may be age discrimination in SV, but I haven't seen it here at Google.

Obligatory Primer Quote:

[lobiusmoop]

"You know what they do with engineers when they turn 40? They take them out and shoot them."

Re:Obligatory Primer Quote:

[MrBandersnatch]

As a 41 year old (software) engineer...I sort of wish that were true.

Re:Obligatory Primer Quote:

[TuringCheck]

We didn't hire even one engineer under 30 - they simply don't have the skills and the patience.

Re:Didn't RTFA

[Rakishi]

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.

It goes both ways

[DukeLinux]

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.

Re:It goes both ways

[16K Ram Pack]

IMO (and I'm older so may be biased) I want older programmers. I was talking to a young guy where I work and he had his own ORM that generated code. "Why don't you use entity framework or nHibernate". "Because I wanted to build one".

And that's a young programmer's attitude, and to some extent, in the days of mainframes, building cool stuff in a company was a good thing because you had no other option. But in the days when you can just download something open source that someone has built, and wire it in and test it or maybe buy something for £100, it makes no sense. We know about things like technical debt, that young guys don't, that you want to write as little code as you can to solve the problem.

This has drawbacks.

[obarthelemy]

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.

Re: This has drawbacks.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't expect a dinosaur to use a normal font do you?

Re:This has drawbacks.

[erroneus]

old school

Re:This has drawbacks.

[Dcnjoe60]

You speak with wisdom, unfortunately, the people that need to hear it are the same 20 year olds who won't really give a damn until it is too late. They will have a rude awakening when they find out that the world really doesn't revolve around them.

Re:This has drawbacks.

[evilviper]

(people at that age are still very self-centered),

Now who's being ageist here?

Re:This has drawbacks.

[plopez]

Frontal lobes often don't kick in, on average, until about the mid 20's. That very fact means that many people in their 20's lack good judgement. Not ageism, facts.

Re:This has drawbacks.

[smellotron]

Perhaps you shouldn't project your own shortcomings onto others...

Do you plan on becoming less wise as you age? If not, then you will at some point probably realize mistakes you have made in your youth. This isn't a knock against the younger generations, it is the natural outcome of learning.

It's a trap!

[onyxruby]

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?

Re:It's a trap!

[Dcnjoe60]

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.

Re:It's a trap!

[ebno-10db]

if you want a stable tech career ... good option ... the large consulting firms (IBM ...

What about a stable career in the US? IBM stands for India Business Machines.

Re:It's a trap!

[ebno-10db]

to be fair, IBM is an International company

What company of over 100 employees isn't international these days? Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. However the 'I' for international was simply the trendy way to name companies 102 years ago when IBM was founded. It meant international sales. They had foreign offices for foreign sales, support and customization (e.g. helping the Nazis keep track of death camp inmates), but it was still very much an American company. Moving things offshore for cheap labor and then re-importing the product is very different from how they traditionally did business though, and has nothing to do with the 'I'.

they also do a tremendous amount of US hiring and consulting

Consulting? Yes (although a lot of customers are catching on that the name IBM means little anymore and they peddle overpriced crap). US hiring, of Americans? You're really living in the past.

le sigh

[buddyglass]

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.

At 48, I got an offer from FB, but...

[tutufan]

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.

Re:At 48, I got an offer from FB, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:At 48, I got an offer from FB, but...

[the eric conspiracy]

I think 45-55 is the worst age. It's when money demands because of kids in school and getting married are the highest, and technical jobs are precarious. The combination is horribly stressful.

I'm 63 now, working in software development after a career change at 50 from a traditional engineering field. Thank God I don't live in a dysfunctional place like Silicon Valley. I've had no problem finding decent and even fun jobs, although the names are nothing you would recognize and there are no useful stock perks.

Once I hit 55 or so things got much easier. The kids are out on their own and the house is paid off. With the recent run up in the stock market I'm sitting on a 7 figure nest egg - if I got laid off now I'd probably retire.

The idea that life is over at 30 seems to be specific to a particular type of manager who mostly lives in one small part of the country. It just isn't the case when I've been out looking for jobs. In fact some of the managers I've worked with have told me that dealing with the sub-30s is a giant pain. Giant egos and can't relate to coworkers, customers or managers.

Re:At 48, I got an offer from FB, but...

[hey!]

Not really discrimination if there are reasons. Old people are in physical and mental decline. Old people also aren't a minority: just like it's OK for a female manager to prefer to hire women, or a black manager to prefer blacks, the young can prefer their own kind. Sorry, time to die.

I've got news for you sonny -- we're *all* in physical and mental decline. If you think you are going to live forever, think again.

But the decline goes at different rates for each of us, it starts from different points, and is offset (in most cases) by gains in maturity, experience, and wisdom. So the bottom line is you can't make any useful generalization whatsoever about the ability of a fifty year-old to do programming vs the ability of a 25 year-old. It depends on all the things that add up to that unique person.

This is what's broken about bigoted thinking. It reduces people to some kind of ill-conceived average for their "group", when it ought to be evaluating them as individuals. Back in the 90s there was a controversial book called "The Bell Curve" which pointed out that there was a racial difference in IQs between blacks and whites, and made a number of (stupid) policy recommendations based on that difference. The inevitable shit-storm followed, in which the validity of IQ tests was questioned (in some cases with good reason), but lost in the shuffle was a simple mathematical fact: even if we assume that IQ tests are a perfect, unbiased measure of mental capability, and accept the racial differences in scores as measuring something real, those aggregate differences give almost no useful guidance in making decisions about *individuals*. That's because under those assumptions, something like 40% of blacks are smarter than 50% of whites. When you're looking for very high scoring individuals, they occur as statistical flukes in both groups.

Where that leaves you is that when intelligence is an important factor in judging a candidate for something, *especially* if you're looking for high scoring individuals, you have to judge individuals on their own merits. Skin color is at best statistically useless as a selection filter, at worst self-defeating.

The analogy holds for age differences. Even if we grant that 25 year-olds are on average more capable programmers than 50 year-olds (which is doubtful), it nonetheless remains that the vast majority of 25 year-old programmers are mediocre. It may be true that mental decay has shifted some fifty year-olds from the high performer category to the mediocre category, but it remains true that high performers are statistical flukes in either group. So gray hair has no value as a filter if you are looking for *good* programmers. They're a fluke in any category.

By the way, about older people being "minorities" -- they are effectively so *for purposes of anti-discrimination laws*. The term of art you are looking for is "protected class". So the good news for all you young, white American males who resent the legal protections minorities get is that all you have to do is survive until you are forty and you'll be protected by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY IS!

[SerpentMage]

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.

Good thing there are other employers

[SirGarlon]

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.

Re:Good thing there are other employers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY

[gestalt_n_pepper]

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.

NoSQL

[toby]

"Case in point NoSQL. Who had it first? Open Source"

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.

Re:It's not age discrimination

[SirGarlon]

Only hiring young people to keep salaries down *is* age discrimination.

Look at when PCs were invented

[Prehensile Interacti]

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.

time for unions as be for long it will be

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Re:Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Nostalgic wool

[Alomex]

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...

No harm no foul.

[ElitistWhiner]

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.

Why does SV exist anymore?

[sjames]

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.

Re:Why does SV exist anymore?

[ebno-10db]

For internet companies, they're sure bad at using the internet internally.

It's ironic how people who brag about the technology that eradicates distance, think that anything outside of their little valley is too far away to do business with. Exception: India. Apparently there's a wormhole between SV and India, so that in practice they're closer than say, SV and Pittsburgh (lot of serious software talent near Carnegie-Mellon). I think Google Maps should be updated to reflect that wormhole.

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.

The only way to get the SV companies to do that, or end tech industry age discrimination in general, is to shut off the H-1B cheap labor spigot (exactly the opposite of what Congress is planning on, of course). Companies will whine and moan for nanny government to make special exceptions for their ever so special needs, but if that door is slammed in their face (a guy can dream, can't he?) then they'll find other ways, even if it means overcoming their prejudices.

Nothing ends discrimination like a tight labor market. Then it's either get over your prejudices, or have your business suffer. The best examples of that are the world wars. In both cases lots of industrial labor was needed at the same time that many young men were being shipped off. In WWI companies suddenly found that people with dark skins can do good work too! Whudda thunk? In WWII they even found that people without a Y chromosome could do a good job!

Re:Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY

[cheesybagel]

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?

Goes for many other jobs as well

[houghi]

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.

Re:Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY

[Anonymous Coward]

Now please tell us what you think about PERL. I'd really like to know.

Sonds like one of those word-number problems

[Hognoxious]

You're my kids' age, and I was five years older than you when I had kids. I'm twice as old as you; compared to you I've lived two whole lifetimes so far. Having served 4 years in the USAF before school I was just getting my Bachelor's at your age.

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?

They've moved--can't raise a family in the Valley.

[Arakageeta]

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.

Logan's Run?

[Bieeanda]

I'd make a LifeLock joke, but apparently they're based out of Arizona.

Beyond unions to a basic income

[Paul Fernhout]

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.

Re:29 years old ?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Amen. It's obvious that most "modern" interfaces and "apps" are being designed by people who have no real idea of what they are doing, delivering, and are simply winging it on bluff.

Engelbart's tradgedy is the same tradgedy that is giving us substandard tablet interfaces, less usable UI's like Unity, and which is walling us off in restricted private gardens like Facebook instead of offerring us the wider potential of the web.

After reading your post,

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY

[MAXOMENOS]

Now please tell us what you think about PERL. I'd really like to know.

This. CGI and Mason had its uses but sweet Jesus am I glad not to have any of that code running our web systems.

Re:They've moved--can't raise a family in the Vall

[ebno-10db]

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.

Median Age Correlates with Complexity

[Colonel Korn]

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.

Royalty discount for disabling HW features in SW

[tepples]

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.

"You don't deserve to know"

[tepples]

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."

Re:It's not age discrimination

[sethstorm]

You shouldn't be treated differently just because you hire people, if you hire people, you shouldn't lose rights and people you hire shouldn't get any special privileges.

The problem is that the employer can do more damage to more people versus the people that seek and perform work. You act as if owning a business should be worthy of divine status while workers are a problem.

Or have you not understood the idea of monospony power(and no, not through any Randian interpretations of such)? Then again, your ideals combine the worst of Rand (all of it), and combine them with Taylorism. Expecting someone with those ideals is hardly able to consider that, much less the idea that working for someone as an equal peer is no less noble than being someone that people seek for work.

There is a market to solve all of these issues, be it pay or whatever

The problem with your statement is that it leaves too much in the employers' favor.
Cases in point, the abuse of temporary labor as a second-class form of work as well as the catch-22 situation of employment status which would break easily if one were to grant protected hiring status to the unemployed (say, for 10 years contiguous employment with the same direct-hire/non-temp company - and resets/stops in the favor of the worker). To handle the temp abuse, just apply RTW laws to staffing agencies, temporary work, and every non-secure form of employment - to where it has to be a conscious and competitive choice to give up security.

Re:Ok, lets talk about what Silicon Valley REALLY

[hackula]

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.