Ann Friedman, at NYMag, breaks out the world’s tiniest violin for the newly trendy victims of “Silicon Valley Disruption”:
… It’s been a full decade since Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and launched a thousand breathless trend stories about the code-fluent, post-adolescent masses flocking to Silicon Valley to change the world in Adidas slip-on sandals. But this youthful uniformity, once considered a feature, has become a bug. Tech, the the New York Times confirmed this week, has a “youth problem.” Writes former Facebook staffer Kate Losse, “Silicon Valley fetishizes a particular type of engineer — young, male, awkward, unattached.” Or, as the New Republic put it, the tech industry’s “brutal ageism” means that if you don’t fit the archetype — say, you’re over 35 and only wear hoodies when you’re exercising and have a few kids and a mortgage — you have to work twice as hard to get ahead. They’re stressed out and ostracized by the “culture,” worried about their wardrobe choices, wondering if they should freshen up with some subtle plastic surgery, and struggling all the while to downplay their family lives…
Older men in tech are discovering the unseen work that women and people of color have done for decades. Fitting in is hard work — an additional, invisible task on the daily to-do list.… For most of recent history, we’ve made it women’s responsibility to fit in. Despite the prevalence of equal-opportunity disclaimers, actual corporate culture isn’t changing fast enough (or at all), so it’s on women to figure out how to succeed in workplaces that are not overtly sexist but still quite alienating….
When it’s men who are confronted by biases, we look at the bigger system. When women are, we put the onus on them to get ahead. And when it’s people of color facing bias? Well, that story is so familiar it barely makes headlines anymore. Journalists are paying attention to ageism in tech because it’s a new story that older white men, traditionally a very powerful demographic in the white-collar world, are struggling with how to succeed in a collarless culture that claims to reward merit but rejects them due to factors beyond their control.
Maybe Silicon Valley has inadvertently produced an innovation here: It’s “disrupted” discrimination, to use the industry parlance. The tech-ageism stories, with their focus on culture rather than explicit policies, provide a new way of seeing the now-familiar stories about Silicon Valley sexism — and indeed, general workplace sexism, too. In most cases, companies aren’t actively alienating women. They’re rewarding people who match their deep-seated archetype of what “successful” looks like…
Suffern ACE
Ah. I have developed an app that allows people to bet whether 38 year old white men in Santa Clara will solve their workplace problem before women can de-alienate those same workplaces.
WereBear
Sigh. Why, oh, why do they take these shortcuts instead of thinking? Thinking works so much better.
jl
” Maybe now that a major industry is excluding a traditionally powerful group (older white men), it will be easier to recognize that other groups’ failure to break into the highest ranks of corporate and political power isn’t a result of personal shortcomings or lack of ambition, it’s a cultural problem. ”
One hopes this situation would prompt the entrenched white man power nexus in this country to rethink, but I doubt it.
dollared
That original NYT article has to be the clearest demonstration that privilege has overwhelmed meritocracy, even in Silicon Valley. It was all about the coding children of Harvard and Stanford, and whether they all wanted to be worth $100M each, or change the world completely, by age 30.
Class is now all that matters in the US.
? Martin
@dollared:
Now? When didn’t it?
Chris T.
@? Martin: Class has always mattered, but there have been periods when it matters more, and periods when it matters less.
beltane
@jl: Whenever there is a situation where older males are pushed aside by younger males, it’s not often the case that anyone who isn’t a younger male stands to benefit.
Betty Cracker
Boo-fucking-hoo. Seriously, though, it sucks that anyone is discriminated against for factors beyond their control that have fuck-all to do with their ability to do the job. I’m not happy that the shoe’s on the other foot. I just wonder why we all can’t go barefoot.
PsiFighter37
Part of the reason I would never live in Silicon Valley is because you do feel like an outsider there, even if you fit within the demographic (I am relatively young and am the ‘right’ demographic, i.e. young, mixed-race Caucasian and Asian). One of my best friends lives out there, but I can’t ever visit for more than a couple days because I am bored out of my living daylights – I just don’t have anything in common with the rest of the people who live there, and I’d much rather spend time in SF (which is slowly being inflicted with Silicon Valley-itis, from what I’ve read). It’s a shit-load of suburbia filled with nerds, and while I have my nerdy quirks, it’s not something I think I could do 24/7/365.
Betty Cracker
PS: Just saw a commercial for Taco Bell breakfast waffle tacos with bacon. Will people eat such a thing?
PPS: Go Gators!
beltane
@Betty Cracker: My teenage sons would definitely eat such a thing. I suspect my husband might try it too as long as he thought I wouldn’t find out.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: Will people eat such a thing?
Of course they will. SATSQ.
dollared
@Betty Cracker: Yes. Go Badgers!
Hob
I’m in the software industry, I’m 41, and I’m definitely feeling pretty old these days. Not necessarily a problem if I can keep muddling along in the little niche I’ve found, but could be a problem if I need to find work again in a couple years. I won’t ask anyone to play a ciolin for me– I’m being paid well right now, and if I’m unemployable in any other field, well, I won’t be any worse off than many of my friends.
But whether you sympathize or not, it’s still worth pointing out that this kind of shit is fucked up and self-defeating, because no industry can do well if they’re really determined to shut people out for having too much experience. Of course they’re already missing out on lots of talent by having very few women and minorities, but they’ve gotten by anyway because there were shitloads of white men in tech to choose from so some of them are bound to be good. A whole world of 22-year-olds, though– no matter how smart they are, that’s just not going to work. It does take time to learn how to do shit well.
Suffern ACE
Honestly, can we have a history channel that isn’t devoted to miracles, aliens, masons and the illuminati?
dollared
@? Martin: You know, the really cool thing about Microsoft was that while it was mainly tech elites and east coast preppies that got to be vice presidents, there were a lot of state school smart people, and even a lot of self-taught techies, that got to be millionaires.
Facebook, Google, Amazon, they put a stop to that. Gotta be from the right schools. Much higher contractor to employee ratio, especially at Facebook. Microsoft made 10,000 millionaires. Facebook, 300.
Yeah, class matters, but for a long time in Silicon Valley, just being goddamned smart and effective would do the trick. Not anymore. And if you’re still there when you’re 40, and you’re not a VC, you’re heading for a crash.
gene108
I did not realize this until March, but the dates and days of the week, in 2014, line up with 2003. March 31, 2003 was a Monday and March 31, 2014 is a Monday.
I had a major mental breakdown around this time in 2003, culminating in a suicide attempt on March 30 (night)/March 31(early morning).
I usually get a little messed up this time of year, i.e. I somehow channel the anxiety and exhaustion of what I was going through then, but now that the calendars aline it’s just weirder than normal. I can think, yeah I was doing this then, but hey, March 31st isn’t Monday so what I’m actually doing is different enough that I’m not going to be able to sit around and say, “on this Monday day 11 years ago I did this” because it is not Monday. No such luck this year.
Anyway, the whole thing sort of hit yesterday for whatever reason.
Hopefully the weather warms up, even if it rains like they predict.
I am sick of having to wear layer upon layer to go out.
I just want to run around in a short sleeve shirt, pants/shorts and sandals.
gbear
Last time I was in Silicon Valley was to visit my uncle and aunt who bought a house in Mountain View for about $16,000 in the 50’s. We drove around and looked at all the empty buildings that used to be dot.com hubs. A Minnesota friend of mine was an early computer geek who moved to SF and sold his company for millions just before everything blew up. He’d be in his 50’s now. I wonder if he’s still a part of it or has just decided to fuck it. It’s a shame that they’re wrecking SF. It’s a city with a HUGE service sector that isn’t making enough to live there, & those tables won’t wait themselves.
gene108
@Suffern ACE:
There just isn’t enough history in the world today to fill 24/7 programming.
Also, I’ve become a big fan of Ancient Aliens.
The logic in that show always amazes me.
“Hey, look at this ancient painting/sculpture, the body ratios are not exact for a human, therefore it must be an accurate representation of aliens“.
And they can tie anything that has every happened to alien intervention.
am
@Hob:
Thanks, I was going to the same thing, but not as eloquently as you. I thought that was a really depressing article in the Times. If not for the ageism, then how badly it bodes for the startup environment.
beltane
@gene108: I can empathize with you. This winter has been so brutal that it has felt like an assault on the soul. I have some health issues which aren’t helped by the cold, but it’s more than just the cold-it’s the snow cover and resulting lack of colors and contact with the earth. To preserve my mental state I’ve been avoiding reading about politics (mostly). The weather here is supposed to break ever so slowly over the next few days, but I can’t see the snow being gone before late April at the earliest.
Suffern ACE
@gene108: the problem is that is the logic of all the shows now. Hanger 1, Ancient Aliens, the Secret Files. The military channel is now the Heros network, and devotes most of its programming to the Nazis (whose heros are they) and some program on Chem Trails explaining the weather. Is any country like this but ours?
mainmata
I work for a firm that works on international development. As a result, people that look like me (white males) are a small minority in this sizeable firm. But, we were bought 2 years ago by a firm that does a lot of domestic and DOD work and their employees were totally shocked by the fact that they were pretty much all middle aged white men and we were all mostly young rainbows of 33 nationalities, i.e. lots of browns, blacks and yellows and post-Soviet nationalities. We have been unable to integrate because of radically different corporate cultures and so the high earning rainbow hippies have been allowed to just do their own professional thing since they are bringing in the earnings and the drones do their own declining things. Long term, this relationship won’t work, of course. As part of the multicultural mix disconnect, one problem is working for a publicly traded company, which results in a blizzard of bureaucratic paperwork that kills the technical excellence, which is what the young people want to do. More and more I see the American work place changing radically within the next ten years as people go to self-entrepreneurship and small companies to do the creative stuff that gets utterly stifled by the big corporations.
ruemara
As a woman of colour that was banned from the cool kids table when there was money and now can’t even get a spot under the table-I don’t “fit” (corp speak for um, black, old, female)-boo fucking hoo. I hope you all get to go through what I’m going through. I hope all your families offer as much help as mine. I hope your friends are utterly worthless. I hope you finally have to do it all yourself. May you choke on your stock options, you greedy, bigoted bastards. My hatred of SF and the whole startup culture is only rivaled by my current hatred of my job.
Suffern ACE
@mainmata: there is a reason for that bureaucratic paperwork at public companies. That claims to glorious technical excellence and creative solutions are often covers used by fraudsters. The problem for the past 150 years since the rise of the corporation has been coming up with ways to tell one from the other.
Anoniminous
@mainmata:
Corporations suck at Creativity and Innovation. Look at MicroSoft. They haven’t had an original thought since they bought QDos from the Seattle Computer Company, relabeled it as MS/DOS, and flogged it to IBM.
2liberal
@Suffern ACE:
the problem is they need a certain demographic watching, who isn’t interested in what you (and probably I) consider to be history
? Martin
@Betty Cracker:
You live in fucking Florida. You have talked to other people from your state, right?
? Martin
@dollared: That’s all true, but MS came up at a time when there were rather few people trained for that kind of work, and the company had to get big before the MOTU would bestow billion dollar status on you. They had no choice but be egalitarian.
The modern dot coms are in a different time. You can hit billionaire status with 2 dozen employees (witness Whatsapp with just that many and a $19B valuation) and adding 1,000 more employees doesn’t make the company more valuable, but less. And with so many CS grads out there, they can afford to be choosy.
Now, how you choose is important to focus on, and just sucking them out of Stanford is all too tempting (which is why they do it). Until the rise of the app store just a few years ago, there was really no way to prove yourself, and even there, it’s hard to stand out. Status of diploma has always been, and will continue to be a problem. It wasn’t so bad in tech a generation ago, true, but it was true on Wall Street, in courtrooms, and a number of other industries. Tech just grew into the world everyone else was already occupying.
Chris
@gene108:
Ah, so that’s why the “SyFy” channel only shows wrestling now. Because all the science fiction’s moved on to the History Channel.
Chris
@? Martin:
Yeah. I was going to say, seems like the natural cycle for institutions/environments like that. Wouldn’t something that’s as big a fountain of money as Silicon Valley kind of inevitably fossilize into just another elite center, with everything that entails, over time?
Origuy
Maybe I’m the odd man out, but I’ve been working in Silicon Valley since 1978 and in my division we’ve hired exactly one person out of college in the last eight years. We aren’t developing the latest app for a piece of hardware that is obsolete the day it hits the market, using some bit of software that no one heard of last year and will be replaced next year because all the cool kids think it’s passe. About half the software engineers I work with are from India, but they’ve been here for decades. At least a third are women; more than half the people I’ve reported to over the years have been female.
I was recruited by Google a while back; they sent me a list of interview questions to prepare. It was full of stuff I’d learned in college and promptly forgotten because I never needed to memorize it. If I needed to know it, I could look it up. Besides, I have a life outside of work; I don’t want to give that up to spend twelve hours a day on campus. I did that in the 70s.
Suffern ACE
@Chris: yes. To repeat, the Heros network is devoted to how clever the Nazis were, the Science network has three nights devoted to aliens, and the running theme of both history channels is that your high school teacher was part if a vast conspiracy covering up alien influences. Our learning channel covers grade school super model wannabes. The former arts channel is devoted to the fine art of competitive cheerleading.
I blame syfy. Really. If they’d have been better at their mission, we would not have ghost hunters on National Geographic and Sasquatch on Animal Planet.
catclub
@Suffern ACE: competitive cheerleading
The US is weird.
Matt McIrvin
@Origuy: I’m in software in Massachusetts, I’ve worked in both big and small and in-betwen companies… and while we’ve definitely got some youthful startups here trying to make the next killer phone app, when I read these articles about what things are like “in tech” (meaning: in software startups in the SF Bay Area) they don’t describe the culture I work in at all.
I’m 45 now; I’ve got a family; I work non-crazy hours (most of the time), I don’t spend my spare time hacking (not much at least), and I’m in this to make a living doing interesting stuff, rather than a fortune on some mega-IPO. And on the basis of these articles you’d think I’d have been unemployable for over a decade, but I’ve never experienced it. I got laid off at the end of 2009, a scary scary deep-recession time and I figured my luck had run out for sure, but even then I had a new job within a couple of months.
No tale of woe here. Maybe it’d be different if I’d gone to Palo Alto, or if I’d specialized in something sexier. Maybe I’ll be singing a different tune in 10 or 15 years (but my wife’s in IT and her career seems to be on the way up, so I probably still won’t be crying). I mostly feel like a deeply lucky person.
I think the sheer amount of money sloshing around in Silicon Valley, in an otherwise depressed economy, does make some people do unreasonable things. A lot of the associated social pathology seems like just the general scourge of income inequality in acute form.
? Martin
@Matt McIrvin: Tech really has three fairly distinct sides to it. There’s the genuine startup culture of entrepreneurial folks busting their ass for the promise of money, who organized primarily through networking. They might become zillionaires, or they might just burn through their 20s not working for the man but having fun. This is the romantic tech. This is what everyone wants to do, or at least wishes they had the freedom to do.
There’s the pseudo-startup culture of Apple/Google/Facebook that try to capture some of the romance of the startup culture, but have real salaries, 501Ks, stock options, and are really much more like a big law firm or hedge fund that writes code. It’s less douchy than big law and wall street, but it’s mostly populated with people that genuinely believe they made it, get paid like they made it, and act like they made it. They all believe they’re changing the world, but mostly they’re just polishing it up here and there. Their work is very visible. Let’s call this glamor tech.
In their shadow are a bunch of companies that used to be that and failed. Dell, (late-) HP, RIM, etc. Culturally they’re wastelands, because the notion of having made it long escaped them. Culturally they trying now to turn into the last category, and the workers are either making the shift, or bailing out trying to find former glory.
The last category is big tech. This is where 95% of the jobs are. It’s good work, non-sexy, pays decently, and works like any other white collar engineering industry. They hire locally, have a few superstars, but mostly they’re they gears that keep the world running. They write ATM software, build networking gear, make sure your stock trade goes through, and all that jazz. This really is the future of the US economy, but we pay it little attention.
All of these are largely devoid of women, latinos, and african americans in the tech jobs. The big tech companies and the more engineering-like glamor ones (like Apple) tend to be the most normal. They have big marketing and HR departments and all that shit and those help balance them out – and there are more women in fields like mechanical and materials engineering, even electrical engineering. They look more and more like any other business. And the 80-hour weeks at Google are fine when you’re 26, but once you have that first kid at home, working for some boring 8-5 place looks a lot more appealing, and so big tech can hire a steady stream of quite good engineers away from the sexy places.
The software glamor ones tend to be much more programmer dominated and I suspect have more of these kinds of cultural problems. And all of them being so high-profile can do the choosy ‘let’s only hire from Stanford’ business, at least as much as they can afford. They also tend to have much lower employee footprints, so bad cultures are easier to hold onto. And there is a large degree of networking and competition in places like the valley, so these cultures do transfer. I don’t know anyone in the valley that hasn’t worked in at least two different firms there. There’s a decent amount of movement between Apple, Google, Facebook, smaller startups, etc.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Which Silicon Valley is this? It’s not the one I work in AKA Menlo Park, California were most of my coworkers for the past 20 years have been 30 +. Is this Apple Computer, that just asked my 50 year old behind to interview with them? I suppose if you only look at the sexy cool kids stuff, you find sexy cool kids. But Valley is a lot more than some twenty something kids doing apps.
am
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
This is the angel/incubator area (think Y Combinator). I think 25 is ancient in that space (which is why the Ruby community keeps reinventing things from 30 years ago, badly). It’s a good career option for a young entrepreneurial developer, but the expectation really is to live the job/sleep in the office/eat ramen/etc. Or realistically, order out from one of the other mobile food cloud quadcopter delivery startups that your backers also invest in…
boatboy_srq
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t Friedman’s article just “never trust anyone over 30” redux?