from Hacker News

Age Discrimination in Silicon Valley

by robmarkg on 8/12/14, 4:24 PM with 70 comments

• by mm_throwaway on 8/12/14, 5:32 PM

  Anecdata: I'm over 40. I interviewed with a well known VR company which, aside from the dev manager, was staffed by 20 somethings. I've been doing that kind of work for my entire career and have written a number of multi-million seller games as a lead programmer. Still, they didn't want me. It was 7 hours of mostly rapid fire technical questions, which aside from one whiteboard problem that I didn't really understand what they were asking, I felt I did pretty good at. Obviously they felt different. I did go into the interview telling them that given my experience and record of shipping quality titles I expected a higher level of salary. Maybe that did me in, I don't know. But I did sniff that they thought of me as the old guy, and why would I still want to be coding & not in management at my age?

  The upside is that by not getting/taking that job my current job bumped my salary by 50%. I was already making a bunch before, now I'm retiring even earlier! So I guess it all worked out in the end.

• by sxp on 8/12/14, 5:09 PM

  >This latest report by Linkedin is where it hit me – something smells fishy about this. It is just too much of a coincidence that three of the major tech companies have issued almost identical “diversity” reports, and all three have been missing something screamingly obvious – any mention at all of age, or even an explanation as to why it is missing. This almost seems like collusion, it is almost certainly a cover up.

  Someone needs to do more research before jumping to conclusions about motive. Age isn't reported in the US EEO-1 Survey [1] which is the basis of the diversity reports that various companies have recently published [2]. That's why the reports are nearly identical.

  [1] http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/index.cfm & http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/ee1_datafile_2013.c...

  [2] http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/...

• by geebee on 8/12/14, 5:45 PM

  Honestly, much of this wouldn't irritate me so much if silicon valley weren't so emphatic that there is a critical shortage of software engineers that requires special consideration.

  Could it be that one of the many reasons that other segments of the economy aren't experiencing a labor shortage is that they don't discard people at age 35?

• by jiggy2011 on 8/12/14, 5:00 PM

  It's worth remembering that many other industries have the opposite problem. Lots of the best jobs being occupied by baby boomers who are taking longer to retire, leading to a lack of opportunity for younger people to get on the ladder.

  So we have a large number of smart younger people who are underemployed, are google etc simply innovating by exploiting this undertapped talent pool?

• by brightsize on 8/12/14, 7:14 PM

  I have no experience with big-name tech megacorps, my career has been with startups and small companies mostly. As a non-young person who's looking for something new at a small startup, my feeling is that age discrimination is clearly a thing, but it's not (just) a function of expected compensation, skillset, or willingness to work insane hours. My feeling is that, while you're expected to fit the profile in those areas, most of the discrimination is based on what startups would call "cultural fit". Specifically, being "like them" in having an enthusiasm for a dorm culture atmosphere. Yes, Work is Play! It's All About Having Fun(!) here at our hipster office. We have fussball tables. A fridge packed with beer! Group outings to clubs (to hear bands that are popular among the just-graduated set, don't expect a night at the symphony)! Food from the food trucks. Nerf fights! Why oh why would you ever go home??

  I frequently see this sort of work environment publicly glorified on the "come work with us!" pages of startup websites, often accompanied by a self-congratulatory statement such as "of course, we wouldn't be a real {SF|NYC|Berlin|...} start-up if we didn't have all this and an office in the coolest part of the city" and so forth. The implied message being that if you're not likewise enthusiastic about a "work is socializing and play with some coding mixed in followed by socializing and play" atmosphere, if you don't share the non-work-related values and interests of "the team" (i.e. things 23 year olds care about), then clearly you're not startup material. You won't be fun to have around, won't be fun to hang out with, you should probably go work for an insurance company, somewhere boring where you'll fit right in.

• by endergen on 8/12/14, 5:14 PM

  Im surprised that every comment so far basically leans towards age discrimination not being a wide spread thing. Its definitely a thing, especially in startups, incubators, and definitely companies already mostly staffed with young workers.

  Disclosure: I'm 35 and have been CTO at my ladt 3 companies. I've certainly have been biased myself worrying that older candidates I'm interviewing wont have the same hustle, want a higher salary than the value they would contribute, and might be more stubborn and resistant to leadership.

  Age should definitely be included in these reports.

• by steven777400 on 8/12/14, 5:04 PM

  How much of the "ageism" is actual discrimination and how much is "we have a small budget and need 80 hour weeks" that older workers won't accept?

  I received an offer from a very interesting startup in southern California (down between LA and San Diego, not SF). The offer was $30K/year (with increases as revenue increased), with minimum 80 hours a week expected. As cool as the projects were... There's no way I at my current age and life situation could possibly make that work. Ten years ago? Maybe. Fifteen years ago? You bet!

• by ashwinaj on 8/12/14, 4:57 PM

  Well there goes another person who is "offended". Is there age discrimination? Possibly, but at my workplace there are a lot of slackers and you guessed it, they're usually (emphasis on "usually", stop trolling) older, paper pushers, "Let's have a meeting to talk about changing a line of code" people, etc. Needless to say, I work in a big company.

  The best way to avoid discrimination of any kind is to continuously update your skills (technical, social, inter-personal etc.). If you have nothing to show for working X number of years, then why would people hire you? They'd rather have someone who can put in an insane amount of hours. I'm not supporting companies who do this, but I'm rather stating the stark reality of Silicon Valley. It's unfortunate, but it is what it is.

  Edit: I should've expected these responses; I've said explicitly I do not support this. But at the same time instead of complaining, invest in your skill set.

• by wcummings on 8/12/14, 5:00 PM

  It seems equally likely age isn't included because widespread discrimination based on age hasn't been a historical norm (and arguably isn't now) the way discrimination based on race, ethnicity, religion etc. has. One "high level google employee" declining to answer such a loaded question in a social/unofficial context is definitely not a strong indictment of their culture.

  There could be something to this (younger workers don't have families, work longer, cheaper, fresher skills, to rehash some common points), but this article feels really contrived.

• by adambratt on 8/12/14, 5:18 PM

  I've worked in a few different industries that are traditionally a lot more corporate than most startups. Most notably, finance.

  What I've noticed is that while these companies tend to have older tech guys than you'll find at a lot of startups, it's still a lot younger age-wise than the rest of the business.

  I think part of it is that the number of young people who were in tech 20 years ago compared to now was much smaller. This is a new industry and it's not completely far fetched to think that part of the reason why we are missing a lot of grey hairs is that there's simply not as many of them. It's also pretty well known that a lot of older programmers move out of full-time coding roles and into management positions. Granted this isn't universal across the board but it's been proven true in my anecdotal experiences.

  Personally, I absolutely love it when I get an applicant who graduated college before 2000. No matter what their skill as a developer, I know they have way more life experience than me. Someone with experience will usually beat out the guy working more hours so for me, it's a no-brainer to hire the older guy who's done it all than a young whipper snapper who's super ambitious but has a massive ego.

• by JabavuAdams on 8/12/14, 5:48 PM

  You should hire young ... but not to get the best technical ability. You should hire young because we older developers, while being technically superior to our younger colleagues, don't want to put up with your bullshit.

  I've been on enough projects that can best be described as rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic that I don't put up with management dropping the ball. The challenge for more experienced developers is to recognize when some extra individual effort would actually save the project and also be compensated, without getting burned on another fucked project.

  In every software company I've worked at there's been no feedback loop for poor management tighter than project failure, or ultimately company failure -- but that takes a long time. Also, it can be attributed to many confounding factors by bosses who are less than self-aware.

• by incision on 8/12/14, 6:03 PM

  I would certainly like to see the data, but I'm not sure what I think about the topic.

  Age discrimination feels like it could be the other side of the coin that presents so much opportunity in this field to begin with - a system that values intelligence, willingness to learn and work hard on par with or lieu of experience.

  I jumped into tech without a degree or much in the way of experience. Now that I'm established can I reasonably expect that the situation should reverse to suit me?

  I just turned 35, young by most standards yet older to old by seeming tech standards. After 17 years working full-time, I'm a better asset than I was 15, 10 or 5 years ago in every way, but I can think of plenty of reasons why someone would understandably prefer to hire young me versus old me.

  It's the difference between a guy who will work 65+ hours a week year round and someone who wants to spend every hour possible with his child. It's also the difference between a guy who is learning certain things and one who has fully automated those things a dozen times over.

  That's an oversimplification on both fronts, but hopefully you get the idea.

  How much 'done it before' value can there be in the context of growing companies which are creating things which don't yet exist or are constructed with tools that are <5 years old? How many opportunities are there for people whose most effective position would leadership or strategic?

• by brightsize on 8/12/14, 9:07 PM

  I'm reminded of an amusing encounter in Berlin. I went to meet a seemingly promising proto-startup, one associated with a prominent accelerator, at their well-known coworking space. I was interested in their CTO spot and had plenty of relevant experience. I could tell from the first handshake that my potential non-tech counterpart was not exactly amused by my lack of youth, which, as everyone knows, is crucial to CTO success. I was dressed the part - the standard-issue German uniform of polo shirt & jeans, nothing off-putting there. At some point not far into the meeting, he asked me what my GPA was. I kid you not. I graduated from a well-respected school, decades ago, have a long track record with startups, keep up to date on tech, but he emphatically wanted to know my GPA. I scratched my head and guessed, upon which he asked if that put me in the top 5% of graduates at the school. Color me mystified: not only did they not tell us that sort of thing upon graduation, I could not imagine why he would think it important. Not only did he think it important, he informed me, gesturing through the glass partition at the worker bees, "most of the people we hire are in the top 5% of their classes", and that was just something I should know. It seemed obvious that knowing one's GPA and class standing was a gating factor: it screened out both those who could not claim to be “elite”, but also those with enough age and experience for whom school performance had long ago become irrelevant.

  I found it disturbing how much the Berlin startup community deifies SV, attempts to ape it, and maybe this encounter was just one facet of that. In general my impression was that Berlin companies seemed to be less inclined toward age discrimination than US ones, but I would be interested in hearing other opinions on that.

  Edit: typo

• by robmarkg on 8/12/14, 9:27 PM

  Wow - these are wonderful comments everyone - even the ones I don't agree with all that much. This post has had almost 4000 views since this morning - that is huge for me. The point I really want to drive home here though, is that even if you think there are "issues" with older workers, do you also believe these companies should be suppressing this data? As I said, it seems to me to be too much of a coincidence that three different tech companies would independently decide to leave this data out, unless they were hiding something. I think "transparency" is a base value among members of Hacker News, and I appreciate the support I have gotten for writing this.

• by JabavuAdams on 8/12/14, 5:58 PM

  Fundamentally, it's better to be an owner than a worker.

  Sometimes it takes decades to realize this. It's easier to sucker young people who have lots of free time into working crazy hours under avoidable stupid conditions with a few cheap perks.

• by taylodl on 8/12/14, 5:09 PM

  A good company balances the overzealous enthusiasm of youth with the practicality of the wisdom that can only be attained through years, possibly decades, of work. The problem is a lot of people get jaded over time and forget what it was like to be young and excited to work on new (usually to them) projects. The older people tend to become downers if allowed to. Companies that can foster mutual respect between workers spanning multiple generations are the best. If everyone, old and young alike, can focus on continual growth and realizing we can all learn from one another then much can be achieved.

• by mrbird on 8/12/14, 5:22 PM

  Is there any published research on what CS majors or people working as software engineers in their 20s are doing at age 30, 40, 50, 60?

  As many has observed, the numbers don't make sense for everyone to be a manager or CTO.

  I definitely sense anxiety when people talk about their future - "I know I don't want to still be coding in 10 years" - but I wonder if that's partly an incomplete picture of what others are doing.

• by fleitz on 8/12/14, 5:11 PM

  The key with ageism in tech is to move into mgmt. You're not supposed to be a code monkey at 30. And especially not having 10 years of experience in a technology 10 years old.

  Also as you said, young people put up with shit no one over 30 would ever put up with. $30k for 80 hour weeks? No thanks, I'd rather flip burgers because it pays more than $7.50/hr, McDonalds also has free soda.