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Silicon Valley does't want you if you're over 30.
Kiyoris
Member RarePosts: 2,130
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tech-workers-over-50-literally-131500241.html
People in their 30's are tolerated. "Don't fund anyone over 30"
A group at Google called "Greylers" is for Google employees over 40.
Almost all of the people we spoke with said they had directly experienced ageism at their jobs after they turned 50.
One said he even had to inflict it. He was a former manager at a huge global tech company that had multiple rounds of layoffs.
Firing people just because of their age is illegal, says labor lawyer Kelly Dermody at firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco.
In 2014, age complaints jumped to 4,510.
When it comes to being a woman over 50, things can be even scarier."
Comments
There are 3 main things affecting older employees. First most new employees tend to be young and for a company growing it means more newer employees. Second is that some don't work on their skillset. So they end up being outdated. Third is pay. A person who has been with a company for 20 years tends to get paid a lot more than one who has just started. If 2 of the newer employees brings the same level of competence as the single older employee. It makes more sense to go with the newer ones.
From my own experiences with the companies in San Diego, they tend to keep the older employees and the middle-rung employees face the brunt of layoffs. Most of the hiring staff here prefers people their own age, and that's typically mid-30s to 40s. We also have some amazing programmers and engineers in San Diego, so it only makes sense to keep them around. For instance Daybreak's programmers are top notch compared to most other game studios. I would keep them despite their age. Their artists tend to be so-so and they face the brunt of layoffs.
1) Tech is new and ever changing
By its very nature, the tech industry penalises older people simply because their knowledge and world view is out-dated. I work in IT, im a development manager, I'm in charge of recruitment, I'm 30. In truth, I've never met anyone over 40 whose tech knowledge is still current. There are some excellent tech managers, leaders etc who are older, but in terms of people who actually make/design stuff, they just don't exist. Hell, even at 30 I'm nearly irrelevant in terms of tech / world view, but have been lucky enough to get a managerial position.
2) Young, expanding companies hire young people
This is because its cheaper, primarily, but also because older people take less risks. I've worked for 2 tech startups in the UK, and even when we've been successfully expanding and hiring, we can only afford 50%-60% of the salaries offered for the same jobs in other industries with the added bonus that our company could collapse if a few things went wrong. You may not think it, but silicon valley also suffers from this. You'll earn more as a developer working for a bank than you will as an average developer at microsoft or google.
3) The older you get, the less likely you are to to change careers / learn new skills
We get stuck in our ways, and as we get older most people tend not to bother learning new things. Given that personal computing only took off in a big way in the 90s, chances are that anyone over 40 will have already been through school and had an idea of what career they wanted before computers even entered their lives. This means anyone over 40 who knows tech / programming will have either been part of a very small minority dealing with computers in their youth (my dad learnt to program using punch cards for example) or they will have had to learn new skills as an adult on their own. Odds are against this happening.
4) The older you get, the harder it is to learn new skills and tech is a hard thing to learn
I can't remember the proper term (plasticity?), but basically, as you age it becomes harder to rewire your brain, i.e. it becomes harder to learn new things. Tech subjects are pretty hard to begin with, so chances are that older people just wont be able to make the change into a tech subject.
As the tech industry matures, so will the average employee age. PCs have only been "big" for 20 years, so its natural that employees will also be young.
But I digress, 'correlation does not imply causation'. You're painting a black & white picture, when reality is almost always ever shades of grey. You'll need a lot more than that one chart to 'prove' a point.
Totally agree with you too.