Silicon Valley’s Brutal Ageism Lyrics

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.[1] And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.

In the one corner of the American economy defined by its relentless optimism, where the spirit of invention and reinvention reigns supreme, we now have a large and growing class of highly trained, objectively talented, surpassingly ambitious workers who are shunted to the margins, doomed to haunt corporate parking lots and medical waiting rooms, for reasons no one can rationally explain. The consequences are downright depressing.

Most Silicon Valley investors, [Dan Scheinman] came to believe, were just like the suits at Cisco: highly susceptible to “presentation bias” and, as a result, prone to shallow conventional thinking. “Paul Graham”—the founder of Y Combinator, the world’s best-known start-up incubator—“says the most successful [investor] makes his decisions in twenty-four hours,” Scheinman told me dismissively. It was time to set off on his own.

The only question was what to invest in. “I could see the reality was I had two choices,” Scheinman told me. “One, I could do what everyone else was doing, which is a losing strategy unless you have the most capital.” The alternative was to try to identify a niche that was somehow perceived as less desirable and was therefore less competitive. Finally, during a meeting with two bratty Zuckerberg wannabes, it hit him: Older entrepreneurs were “the mother of all undervalued opportunities.” [2] Indeed, of all the ways that V.C.s could be misled, the allure of youth ranked highest. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32,” Graham told The New York Times in 2013. “After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.”

Computers weren’t always a symbol of forward thinking. Up until the 1960s, they were the chief accessory of the organization man. Social critics like Lewis Mumford wrote book-length denunciations of them as instruments by which faceless bureaucrats stamped out initiative and imposed conformity.

It was all the way across the country, in Northern California, where computers finally became hip. A visitor to the research labs that set out to develop personal computers in the 1960s and ’70s would have noticed long-haired twentysomethings lounging barefoot in beanbag chairs, surrounded by a haze of illicit vapors. The young engineers hung posters denouncing Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war. In a departure from IBM protocol, they often brought their pets to work.

The two animating impulses of the local tech scene were a deep suspicion of authority and a belief that the young were agents of salvation. There was, for instance, the People’s Computer Company (PCC), which rented out a storefront in Menlo Park and made a terminal available to anyone who wanted to program or play games. As John Markoff writes in What the Dormouse Said, his book about the tech industry’s hippie roots, the proprietor of the PCC was a former engineer and sometime teacher who believed kids took to computers fearlessly while adults “had all kinds of hang-ups.” His organization’s motto was “Fail young.”

In 1975, a PCC alumnus decided the time had come for all the computer enthusiasts in the Bay Area to get together and trade ideas. The group, dubbed the Homebrew Computer Club, met in a garage and was fundamentally subversive. At each gathering, the Homebrewers exchanged not just tech-world gossip but pirated microchips and software. Age and status were meaningless. “It was not unusual to see a seventeen-year-old conversing as an equal with a prosperous, middle-aged veteran engineer,” writes Steven Levy in Hackers. One of the regular attendees was a young, shaggy-haired Steve Wozniak, who held court in the back of the room among a crew of worshipful teenagers. Wozniak used the Homebrew club to field test the Apple II he’d obsessively tinker with late into the night. Sometimes, he’d bring a high school friend named Steve, and they eventually built a company together.

Just because overt age-discrimination is illegal doesn’t mean it never happens. In 2011, Google settled a multimillion-dollar claim brought by a computer scientist named Brian Reid, who had been fired when he was 54. Reid said colleagues and supervisors had frequently referred to him as “an old man” and “an old fuddy-duddy” whose ideas were “too old to matter.” They allegedly joked that his CD cases should be called LPs. A labor lawyer I spoke with told me he recently got a call from a thirtysomething supervisor at a start-up who said her job was at risk because the team she was managing—most of them ten years younger—had rejected her on account of her age. “She was being referred to as a ‘den mother,’ ” says the lawyer. “If no one is following your lead, you’re not much of a supervisor.”

Often the discrimination comes veiled in that vaguest of tech-world concepts: culture. One recent trend in Silicon Valley recruiting is for job candidates to interview with a programmer at their level or below after they’ve cleared every other bar in the hiring process. Ostensibly, the point is to make sure a candidate meshes with the whole team, a perfectly noble impulse. In practice, it’s frequently a tool for weeding out older applicants.

No doubt there are valid reasons to prefer funding youngsters. If, for example, a company is in the market for teenage eyeballs, it probably makes sense to have a founder who’s not long from adolescence. Often these entrepreneurs turn out to be world-class programmers, having affixed themselves to a keyboard since long before puberty. “By the time they’re twenty-two, they’re already expert. They’ve put in the ten thousand hours,” says Marc Andreessen, who co-founded Netscape in his early twenties and is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture capitalists. “But it doesn’t happen in other fields. ... You can’t start designing bridges at age ten.”

And then there is the question of what purpose our economic growth actually serves. The most common advice V.C.s give entrepreneurs is to solve a problem they encounter in their daily lives. Unfortunately, the problems the average 22-year-old male programmer has experienced are all about being an affluent single guy in Northern California. That’s how we’ve ended up with so many games (Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, Crappy Bird) and all those apps for what one start-up founder described to me as cooler ways to hang out with friends on a Saturday night.
When taken to its logical extreme, a tech sector that discriminates in favor of the young might produce an economy with some revolutionary ways of keeping ourselves entertained and in touch at all hours of the day and night. But it would be an economy that shortchanged other essential sectors, like, say, biotech or health care.

However much age and experience may grind down the rest of us, it is simply impossible to generalize to that tiny fraction of people so brilliant and driven as to be capable of creating the next Google. “You’re searching for patterns among outliers,” says one skeptical V.C. “The whole exercise on its face is logically absurd.” It is far more apt to think of these freakish specimen as though they fall out of the sky rather than emerge from any predictable feature of human behavior. By definition, they are different from us in almost every way. There’s no reason to believe they would age like us.

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