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The Diversity Issue Silicon Valley Isn't Trying To Fix: Age Discrimination (medium.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The tech industry has recognized it isn't as welcoming to women or minorities as it should be, and is loudly taking steps to solve that issue. Major companies are now releasing diversity reports to highlight their efforts. But as Stephen Levy points out, none of them seem interested in doing something about a different diversity issue that's been pervading Silicon Valley for years: age discrimination. He says, "One company, Payscale, does supply some estimates. Looking at its numbers in 2012, Payscale noted, 'The typical tech employee wasn't around for the original release of Star Wars. And as of last year, the average age at Google was 30; at Facebook, 28; LinkedIn, 29, and Apple, 31. In comparison, the average age in more traditional tech industries like data processing or web publishing was almost 10 years higher than Silicon Valley/Internet firms. In my view, age information should be included in those diversity reports, to underline the need for change— and, even more important, those in charge of company cultures should view age diversity as a plus. Right now, that's not happening."
No one's discriminating by age, just by salary requirements. This is a natural consequence.
Umm, longer hours does not mean anything when it comes to actual output. It is one of the biggest fallacies of the software industry. I am one of the older programmers, being over 40, where I work. I work with kids straight out of college. First off, half the time they are goofing off playing ping pong, pool, or board games. The other half, they are throwing code together that kind of works but will never be maintainable. They could spend 80 hours a week doing that and we would be further behind in the long run.
The older coders may only put in the 9 or 10 hours a day. But you know what, we get to work, get it done, and it works right the first time. We have tests, proper coding and documentation. I am also not looking for my company to entertain me and provide all kinds of crazy things just to keep me happy. More importantly, if the company is treating me fairly, I am not going to jump in one or two years because 'I am bored and need a new challenge' like the cheap hires.
Now I know these are generalizations, like everything else, but sometimes you get what you pay for. Hire one guy with real experience across the board earned from the hard knocks of actually having been there, and he is probably worth several (if not more) of the 'cheap' under 30's who really just haven't had the experience yet of what mistakes cost. Pair them together, and you probably have the best of both worlds.
And the code written by the top programmer in his 40s will be so simple that no one will be impressed by it, because it's obvious and only a couple of hundred lines.
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It's called 'leading from behind', otherwise known as wisdom applied to the situation in which the older technical employees attempt to keep borderline retarded lazy-assed millennials along with non-engineering MBAs from either reinventing the wheel or just flat out fucking up the project.
Seriously, us gen x and y engineers have no tolerance for your bullshit.
But what I have run across is if you're unemployed then you're no good - if you're any good, you'd have a job.
I was out of work for two years (2009-2010), underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month), and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2011. For two-and-a-half years I was told by recruiters that I was unemployable and hiring managers that I was overqualified for minimum wage jobs. Why? Because everyone looked at my resume, saw that I've done help desk support for the last three years prior to being unemployed, didn't have any help desk openings, and wouldn't consider me for any other kind of work as they ASSSUMED that I wanted to continue doing help desk. I didn't get back into the job market until I found jobs that NEEDED workers to do the work.
I'm 70 and I've been working in the computer industry for 49 years, the last 28 years in Silicon Valley. These days I work for a very large company and I manage projects and architect solutions. I enjoy my job immensely and I've never had a day of unemployment.
9 months ago I announced my intention to retire at age 70, at my wife's request. My manager's reaction was to ask if I could stay (with a salary increase) until they found someone to replace me. Two weeks ago I told him I would definitely be leaving when I hit 71.
I'm not even the oldest person I know in the company. There's a well respected QA engineer who is 74 right now.
I guess some companies in Silicon Valley actually do value the ability to get projects completed on time, and without fuss or drama.
I can see lots of reasonable explanations -- older people have more experience and demand higher salaries, older people have more life commitments and are less likely to work "epic hours", and maybe even older people have higher health care costs even.
I'm curious how the average age of managers relates to this. As humans, we're raised by adults -- people usually 20 or more years older than us and for the better part of the first 20-25 years of our life, ALL of our authority figures are people older than us. Historically, hiring and promotion practices have meant that managers and more senior employees were also older than the people they managed, even if this got somewhat blurred past age 40 or so.
I wonder if at a given company if you have a lot of senior managers in their early-mid 30s if there's not something intimidating, awkward or socially uncomfortable for a manager to be managing someone who psychologically somehow represents an authority figure to you. I can believe some manager in their early 30s feels like they are the authority figure when dealing with 20-somethings, but when they're dealing with someone in the mid-40s they are dealing with someone where that kind of natural authority is just lacking.
And I can believe it works the other way around -- it can be awkward working for someone who is much younger than you. Seldom are they gifted or experienced enough to avoid the mistakes someone more experienced -- not just in work, but in life -- wouldn't make. And it can create real friction to have that gap -- the manager hates being second guessed, and the employee resents extra work that's a byproduct of inexperience, especially when proffered advice is ignored because a manager is trying to flex their authority.
I wonder if maybe this isn't the real source of the problem.
I know that not everyone reading this is a fan of labor unions, and there have been a lot of corrupt, failed, and ineffective unions out there. All of that said, software engineers would be better off if they had some sort of collective bargaining option and representation (which may be more of a "lightweight union" like the Screen Actors' Guild). The tech barons (the VCs and their puppet CEOs called "founders") know this and the original purpose for driving out the older engineers was to prevent unionization. The pampered, socially awkward, and privileged (if disempowered) 25-year-olds who work in tech companies don't have the organizational skills or the credibility that would enable them to start unions, but older engineers could. That was the original reason to drive them out: a terror in the Valley that some sort of collective bargaining arrangement would form, ending the resource-extraction bonanza surrounding self-undervaluing talent. Most of the ageism is superficially about something else. Open plan offices and "Agile"/Scrum became big due to ageism-- older programmers, even if they're very competent, can't stand that nonsense-- but now they're about "culture", whatever the fuck that is supposed to be. Mostly, "culture" is about keeping the young male quixotry machine going, by driving out the people who might threaten it. This also means that the VC-funded startups are designed to run on large teams of mediocre programmers instead of the "10x" very good ones (who powered the first wave of startups in the 1980s and early '90s) who tend to be older and harder to manipulate.
Are you saying people over 40 are no longer competent to work in TECH?
Ageist asshole.
I do not look as old as I am but it is catching up with me. Back when they used to do real job fairs with tech people at them, I could talk to people at the booth, see that they are excited. Sometimes even help them solve a problem they had. They take my resume and everything sounds great.
Then the HR department gets my resume and they require me to tell them when I graduated college or high school. Suddenly I am black listed and nobody will return my calls. It has happened over a dozen times. They do not call my references. I had one potential employer hand me my job app back and ask me to fix the typo in my date of birth (LOL)
Either I have a murder conviction that I can not remember, or they are trashing me due to my age.
I have been tempted to get a community college degree just to spoof the HR departments.