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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."
When for fuck's sake will the editors... oh, wait. Not women or minorities this time.
Carry on.
I write embedded software and linux device drivers. When I was 50 I joined a startup that went toes up in '10.. I've been unemployed ever since. I've had one interview, but mostly my resume submissions are ignored. I can't even find contract work any more.
I live in San Diego.
This month is another milestone. I finally ran out of savings and dipped into my 401k. Yay 10% penalty from the government!
They can't legally ask your age, so the job application has a space to write your feelings about kids on your lawn.
Pro tip: They leave you room to continue your thoughts on the back of the page, it's a trap!
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I say this as a 46-year-old... I'm able to find plenty of opportunities with most companies up here in Portland, and regularly get recruiters calling from Utah, Texas, Nevada, numerous East Coast locales... they actually want the experience.
Silicon Valley is chock-full of startups and Type-A corps, and they only want one thing: disposable slaves.
It's far easier to convince a a kid with a still-crisp CS degree (and way too much student loan debt) to work 90 stressful hours a week for a pittance.
It's much harder to convince someone with sufficient experience and a family to do that... life is way too short to become the personal bitch of some IPO-seeking asshole.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
No one's discriminating by age, just by salary requirements. This is a natural consequence.
No.When you're out of work, you'll take anything at just about any pay. 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.
And there's this nonsense of having to match requirements 100% to even get an interview. Back when I started in the late 80s, being proficient in a programming language was enough - mainframe jobs many times also wanted CICS knowledge on top of COBOL. Knowing the OS or platform was a plus; after all, outside of the language, everything else is just API. But that changed with the advent of Java; that seems to be when the industry started getting retarded. And when web development took off with all these different languages and tools, we went into full ludicrous hiring mode - yeah, the H1-b scam added to it immensely.
Back in my IBM days, an old timer took me aside and said that when he started, there weren't any of those people - as he was pointing at the Indians. Then we were shut down and everything went to India and the rush to get what jobs there were in the area happened. It was amazing how fast the younger guys got jobs even though they had less skills than we did. So much for "if you have the skills, you can get a job" fairy tale,
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.
I have a pretty good resume - almost 20 years of experience at the Fortune 500/Global 1000 level as a programmer, consultant and technical sales. I have published 2 books. Last year, I got laid off from IBM in one of their annual "resource actions". My resume skews me younger though because I graduated from college in the mid-1990's ( I went to the military for a stretch before college). If you look only at my resume, you may think I'm in my 30's or early 40's (I am nearly 50). I sent my resume out to a metric crapton of companies in the silicon valley area and went through a number of interviews. Here's how one went for a technical sales resource. I started off with a local team of sales guys in my hometown. This went well despite one of the sales guys looking like he was on the tail end of a 4 day bender and tweaking pretty hard. The feedback I got from the recruiter was very positive with the biggest comment being, "We can close sales with this guy!" So they fly me out to SJC for the face to face. Now, I'm no spring chicken but I do run marathons and half marathons and my extensive background in marital arts pretty much means I could kick the crap out of any one at that office (during my lay off, I worked security at a high profile venue for a TV show). However, there is some gray at the temples and my hair is a little thinner than it used to be. Of the 7 people I interviewed with in SJC, 5 made direct comments about my age and asked if I thought it would be a problem - as in, "Do you think your age will be a problem here?" and "Tell me about a time you worked with younger people and what the challenges were" and "When did say you graduated college?", etc. etc. After the interviews, the asshole recruiter congratulated me on my willingness to answer and insights into this line of questioning that violated California as well as federal law. They are, shockingly, very comfortable with ignoring the laws in Silicon Valley regarding discrimination. Had I not been out of a job, I'd never have entertained them further but I was in a bind so I had to put up with it. Needless to say, I did not get a job offer. This is the most blatant of them but every company in Silicon Valley I spoke with took the same line. Every. Single. One.
I was at a 'hot' company a little over a year ago. They literally had the who's who of silicon valley and the east coast investing in them. I figured it was a great opportunity to be involved with at the time. Then I was sitting in a company wide meeting (kind of a pep rally that happened every week) and the head guy gets up and says exactly this:
"Look around you. Notice you don't see very much grey hair? That's on purpose. We want people on they way up, not their way out!"
I was shocked that they would be so blatant about it. Not even a hesitation in a corporate wide meeting of 500 people and recorded to boot. If I didn't care about torpedoing my own career, I would have filed a suit that day, being 44 at the time. Funny thing was their code was some of the worst I have ever seen and was having to re-write large portions of it do to the horrible architecture and coding patterns in place. Literally in just a few months I had re-written what was not working for their largest clients and had it running in a fraction of the time. The desperately needed people with experience.
Once I heard that I put my resume out to a couple of people, had a job offer within two weeks, and am making 50% more than I was there anyways with rapid promotion within a few months, and been at my current job exactly a year now. So in the long run, their loss. But I can tell you it is in fact real and blatant out there.
That said as a programmer if you keep your skills up, there are still plenty of jobs out there. It's just a bit more work than it should be to find a good one.
No one's discriminating by age, just by salary requirements. This is a natural consequence.
This is completely untrue.
I'm 56. I applied for a position developing cutting edge deployment methodology with a startup using open source toolsets I have extensive experience with and have contributed to. I dropped my salary requirement 35% because (1) I don't have to make top salary, and (2) I expected that the markers on my resume would be worth more in the long run than any other job I would have held at this stage in my career.
I had several phone screenings and then interviews and feedback was extremely positive.
As soon as I walked into the building to interview in person the tone and attitude changed. I have grey hair. I've had grey hair since I was 32.
What I'm told is they are looking for "fit", or "cultural fit". The reality is they are looking for and screening against a type, and part of that type is mid-twenties to mid-thirties. I usually get hired because my qualifications are fucking outstanding. And because there is at least one outlier - someone also with grey hair.
With any luck, all of us outliers, we can band together and start looking for "cultural fit".
You are probably in support of that other bullshit spawned by the tech sector, ethical altruism...
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"My buddy at HP (Loveland CO) said he has an opening in his group. ... However, his boss told him not to bother bringing any white males to interview".
So, HP has an illegal hiring policy and are not afraid to tell their managers, who are not afraid to tell their professional staff, who are fine telling members of the public. We've come a long way, Baby.
I will never purchase or recommend a HP product again.
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.
If you quit on your own terms and took a break for a few months to do something worthwhile, you have a lot less of a problem picking up where you left off. When asked why you left your last job, immediately indicate it was your choice to do so (even if it wasn't exactly a choice), and then explain what you did besides immediately start looking for a job.
At my last job, I ran into issues with my boss. We both agreed it'd be better if I quit. (No employment insurance that way, but I retained positive rehire status, which is more important than people realize.) So I quit, and took the summer off. I published a book on Kindle, and when that inevitably didn't make me an overnight millionaire, I started applying for jobs. I got an interview by the second application, and framed the terms of ending my previous employment as, "My boss and I both agreed the position really wasn't what I had expected it to be. So I took a break, and pursued my dream of publishing a novel. Now that I've done that, I'm ready to get back to work."
On the topic of matching requirements - match them in the cover letter with the qualifier of "I may not have (x) but I do have (yz)" - (x) will get picked up by the HR scanning software, and get it in front of a pair of human eyeballs. Which is really all you need to get an interview if NOBODY has all the qualifications.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
The problem is that you look like Julian Assange, and they are worried you are going to post all their source code and internal emails on wikileaks.
As a hiring manager, and as someone who has looked for jobs, I feel for you.
The best way to get a job in this market is to have someone you know in a place that needs someone of your skillset. I have something like 10 people on my FB account, I have hundreds on LinkedIn. Why? Because there are recruiters camping out there to dragnet that database and offer you a job. You can also see if other people have gotten jobs in places you'd want to work, or if they are posting a job in the hopes of getting a referral bonus for you.
Some people hate LinkedIn. I'm not in love with it, but people keep asking me if I'm available to go to another job. Maybe like once every six months, I get an offer that would actually be a small step up and worth considering.
Using job boards works if you're desperate. I still regularly get pinged for shit contract jobs from people. Keep it up to date, keep it fresh, and pile on the key words. You will likely have some churn of course. The goal here is simply to get hired, work in your field for a year or so, and if you can't stand the job, get out. I never had a short contract back in the day, but if that was a possibility, it allowed me to at least be paid while I looked for another job.
One benefit of a job that the contract runs out and you're out of a job again? Not only can you simply state that your last contract ran out, but you can ask your former employers for references because you don't have to sneak around on your job hunt. They know you're leaving, they know it wasn't your fault (presumably), and so they may be happy to help out. Obviously, it helps if you make friends while you are there and do a good job.
As for getting picked up for an interview and not getting screened out, you need to write your resume to hit the hot key words in your field. Now, as a manager, and as an ethical person, I cannot advise you to lie about it. I can also tell you that if you simply lie, with nothing to back up, you'll get detected by the recruiter, you'll definitely get detected by the phone screener, and if you somehow faked it through that, you'll be torn apart in the interview.
However... don't go full retard on your ethics. Which is to say, don't disqualify yourself for a job that you probably could do, if someone gave you a shot at it. Some people hide behind "ethics" when what they really mean is that they think it is dishonest for them to attempt a job that they know they aren't perfectly suited for. It's like people playing a video game who invent all sorts of rules about how the game is to be played "honorably" or whatever, and then get beaten up by some kid who plays by the actual rules set by the game.
In other words, if you have the luxury of playing with your hand behind your back, then more power to you, but don't bitch about it when you do not have that ability and people who are actually playing the real game are dancing around you. That's your pride and ego talking. IF you are suffering from that, you need to drop it.
If you are ethical, then you need to do the following. Write the resume that needs to be written to get you a job. Which is to say, know what the keywords are put them on the resume. Then look at the resume. If you think using that resume would be a lie, then *do what it takes to make it NOT be a lie*.
Experience will be the hardest thing. You can't pretend to have a job when you didn't. Volunteering and such can help with that. Get references. Realize that you will not be paid well, and may well start at a shit position.
That said, key words are the easiest, conceptually anyhow. Look at the key words and then teach yourself everything you can about them. In this, you cannot simply open a book and skim it and consider yourself an expert. You must have memorized the book, backward and forward. Then done everything you can with it.
Use of keywords in the right places *should* at least get you some phone screens, and your actual knowledge of the stock questions should get yo