Ageism in silicon valley: a foreign perspective | Hacker News Reader

Ageism in silicon valley: a foreign perspective

karaten.posterous.com

85 pointskaraten24 comments

In Japan there's a combination of things that support hiring discrimination against anyone who hasn't just graduated from college, spanning all fields.

The RECRUIT monopoly has pushed a significant amount of hiring into large recruiting events which commoditize applicants with unified application forms and an overemphasis on testing and school names (students have to start looking for jobs in their sophomore year). Job applications also require photographs.

There are also several incentives not to leave a job, such as the general assumption (read: requirement) by other companies and institutions of lifetime employment (e.g., my Gym doesn't have a way for someone to join who isn't employed or a student, and upon changing jobs, I lost my housing contract, even though I was paying for it - granted, I'm a foreigner). It's harder to leave a job, in a culture that's generally considered pretty risk-averse, and so companies are less willing to hire those who have. Moreover, there are many taiiku-kei companies, where work and social life are intertwined, which would likely favor hiring fresh out of college.

Certainly many companies don't discriminate by age, but there's a whole lot more in place to support a company that does. I'd imagine there'd be a good deal of value in reaching out to an untapped labor market in either location.

SEs wrote all code that functioned at my employer, though it is true that management thought this a great waste of resources. I listened to an older SE explaining the grand scheme to make us a software firm without anyone programming in house.

What's age got to do with it? American corporate software development is just as broken. Even the corporate ladder isn't that different. Programmers either move up as they age or are considered losers.

The difference is that the US has that dysfunctional system, but it also has a highly innovative system: startups and companies run something like startups (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc).

Japan simply doesn't have a startup ecosystem. Essentially no other country does.

Indeed. The key factor is, there is no-one who is a manager in a technical organization who doesn't consider management to be "better" than hands-on technical work - it's not as if there are pressgangs of board members roaming the halls, to move into management, you have to want to.

Now obviously these people consider themselves to be "successful", after all, they got promoted didn't they? So it follows logically that anyone with the same number of years of experience who isn't a manager must be "unsuccessful" and who wants to hire an unsuccessful person?

Some companies talk about creating a "technical" career track but in my experience that's never more than lip service, handing out a few job titles like "senior this" and "principal that".

The problem with "age" is really a problem of attitude. We'll be crippling ourselves if we go by this proxy variable of age instead of looking at the real problem, because there are plenty of people under 30 who are a lot more cynical about new tech (e.g. JSON, NoSQL, advanced/mature FPs) than people a decade older than them.

Will there be some BS in the new tech? Sure, but that's because it's new. Too often, some wise-ass with a pretty degree or a major accomplishment at an early age thinks that they'd already seen everything under the sun.

I think it's important to note, though, that ageism in Japanese recruiting isn't restricted to Programming by any stretch of the imagination. Additionally, there seems to be a view of Programming as more of a vocational field here - likely related to the small number of schools with 4 year Computer Science programs. I think it's kind of apples-to-oranges, but definitely some food for thought.

As far as I know, every engineering school in Japan has a 情報工学　(Information Engineering) program which is equivalent to Computer Science.

Anecdotally, I saw a neat open-source cryptocurrency system that come from Japan. From hearsay, I heard he is a cryptography researcher since he published a nice professional looking technical paper on his system. Other than that, nobody knows who he really is.

Other than that, I used the Ruby programming language. There's not much else that I knew come from Japan in software. If they did come out though, they are pretty awesome.

There's not much else that I knew come from Japan in software.

If you routinely play video games, use consumer electronics, or travel via automobiles, odds are quite good you have used Japanese software recently. Don't worry: you are hardly the only person who forgets to count those.

The other category of software Japan is big in is Big Freaking Enterprise backoffice ware, which is overwhelmingly sold to Big Freaking Japanese Enterprises and a few foreign customers who have to interoperate closely with them. (Totally hypothetically speaking, imagine you had a large automobile manufacturer whose supply chain could practically apply for membership to the United Nations. Their backend software might have significant uptake among companies who enjoy pleasing their #1 customer.)

We're really, really behind the US curve in the consumer web space, though. (Working on it!)

Yeah

Mitsubishi, Mitsui and of course the huge Fujitsu... there's plenty of software gorillas in Japan.

Maybe the parent poster has just never needed a Nuclear Silo/Underground Railsystem/Maglev Train.

The article says, embedded software is completely different.

And it is, for some reason, maybe higher barrier to entrance, embedded seems to foster an older alumni it is also far more rewarding to those who stay on a technical tract.

The way I see it, in pure play software dev, it up or out or freelance (which is really management but you get to sling some code). I chose the latter after doing a stint in embedded and later executive management. The problem with embedded is that there just are not a lot of opportunities in the states outside of some concentrated areas.

thanks for all the career advice HN... but i'm finding this discussion really depressing and attitudes really off-putting.

i really really respect you guys but i for one am coding until my eyes fall out of my head... social constructs be damned.

I think the point of this & related threads is simply to make people aware of the attitudes defacto policies that exist, so you can be aware of them if your life choice is to remain what is euphemistically called an "individual contributor" into your middle and later years.

From the article: "On[e] exception [to non-age discrimination in silicon valley?] is YC, but PG did make clear about the chance of anybody above 35 in one of his essays."

Does anyone know which essay this refers to? A quick google search only brought up [1] which says: "Paul [...] said that while this [young grads fresh out of college] was more common, they fund the full age spectrum."

[1] http://www.cloudave.com/link/at-age-35-mozart-was-dead

I've always liked a variation of that from Tom Lehrer: "It's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html

  The other cutoff, 38, has a lot more play in it. One 
  reason I put it there is that I don't think many people 
  have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to 
  work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week. 
  I don't know if I could do that now.

  Also, startups are a big risk financially. If you try 
  something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26, big 
  deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke. By 38 you can't 
  take so many risks-- especially if you have kids.

Hmm, it's an interesting point. I'm not sure how well it holds up for the historical examples, though. Plenty of people (like Mozart) did lots of things early, but plenty also did lots of things later. Is one the predominant mode? I'm not sure, really. Some examples of people who did their most world-class work in their 40s or later: Descartes' famous works were ages 41-48; Newton's Principia was at age 44; Darwin's magnum opus was at 50; Pasteur discovered pasteurization in his 40s, and did his important work on vaccination in his 50s; Fleming discovered penicillin when he was 47. Of course, there are many examples besides Mozart who did most of their work in their 20s or 30s as well, so a bunch of examples don't really settle it in either direction.

That seems to imply that young people are so awesome that they can be more productive by working crazy long hours (compared to the standard 40 hours work-week).

Somehow, I doubt it. I understand his point, but when I see studies[1] that says that on average, working as little 60 hours a week is less efficient than 40 hours a week on the (not so) long term, I don't see how anyone can be more efficient by working even more than that. Even if they are still young and healthy. Even if they are driven like only messiahs have any right to be.

[1]: http://www.lostgarden.com/2008/09/rules-of-productivity-pres...

I'm pretty sure Sir Ranulph Fiennes says in one of his books that he preferred candidates for his expeditions who were in their 30s as he found them a lot mentally tougher than younger folks.

I suspect he knows a lot more about how people work under extremes of pressure than most.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Fiennes

It's 25:

But I don't expect to convince anyone (over 25) to go out and learn Lisp

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

He convinced me at 29. That's about 4 years ago.

I forgot about this one. I was thinking of the 38 limit for startup. OK back to reading PAIP so I can master lisp by the time I am 50..

I suppose all IT companies should be registered as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnership

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