Hacker News Reader

Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

The issue is really more practical: Young engineers can afford to take more risk, particularly if they are not married.

VCs want people who can go all in on an idea that looks like an obvious fail, because often enough, the young engineers who don't know better actually pull it off. These companies become high profile and their founders become famous for being young and wealthy. When VCs profile the successful investments, young, smart and driven all correlate.

Experienced engineers with families can seldom afford take those risks.

View on HN

> When VCs profile the successful investments, young, smart and driven all correlate.

I would be very surprised if investments with old, smart, and driven people were correlated with failure. Considering the bias against age is so strong, I believe more than one person would have reveled in pointing that out already if the data remotely allowed for that conclusion.

> Experienced engineers with families can seldom afford take those risks.

There's a difference between what they say the reasons for discrimination are and what they actually are. There are plenty of young developers with families and plenty of old ones without (including myself) - it's not clear at all that having a family makes you less likely to get hired.

I think the primary reason why founders only hire young people is also the reason why employees are more likely to be white and male, and it's got nothing to do with malice per se. The reasons you hear against the hiring of people belonging to a certain group always sound similar, and that's because they're made up after the decision was already formed on an emotional level. The simple truth is that most people like to surround themselves with other people who are just like them. For an entrepreneur more often than not this means hiring the young.

The simple truth is that most people like to surround themselves with other people who are just like them.

That fits with the frequent discussion/advice about how important it is to hire to fit the "culture" of a company, particularly a startup.

Reminds me of a funny moment at a previous job in a field office providing technical support for pre and post sales (us old timers have lots of stories, don't ya know). There were half a dozen field offices sprinkled around the country. Ours was by far the most diverse - two Iranians, two Chinese, an Indian, a Finn, a Latino, and about six white guys and girls. We were also the highest performing by a large margin. At an annual meeting of all the offices the manager of the Bay area office (consistently lower performing which baffled everyone since they were in the heart of Silicon Valley) talked about how they were working on performance improvement by recruiting candidates that would fit in well with their group (all young white guys). When our offices's turn came one of the technical leads, an Iranian guy, stated "our diversity is our strength". The whole Bay area team appeared totally deflated.

I think the single people can take more risk thing is a ridiculous trope that assumes marriage situations that are rare today (single income couple). A dual income married couple can tolerate more risk than a single person, for obvious reasons.

Add dependents and things get more complicated.

As someone in a 14 year DINK relationship, I totally disagree with this. When you are in a relationship, decisions need to be collaborative - you can't just chase any opportunity that comes along without thinking about how it will affect your partner. Also, when I was single, I could spend the vast majority of my time working. In a relationship, not only CAN'T I do that (my partner would kill me), but I don't want to; I'd rather spend more time on what is truly important - my personal relationships.

Even single people should be thinking through high risk decisions, so I don't really see your point there. A dual income couple has inherently more ability to make higher-risk decisions that have larger expected returns.

As for time spent working, I'm a bit skeptical of that. It's not like single people don't have socialization needs that need to be met. My single friends spend a lot of time and effort on dating and trying to arrange opportunities to see friends.

I think the point is that the decisions aren't as high-risk when you are single and don't have other people to support (especially children). The consequences of failure aren't as high.

Instead of being able to share a place with a few people (maybe even sharing a room) and sharing utilities, internet, cable and so on, you are paying significantly more for housing, food, utilities, transportation (bigger car), clothes and insurance/medical costs. Those costs could easily be 3-4 times as much as a single person.

If you are a dual income family, you may also be paying for child care and have the extra responsibilities of getting your children to and from child care and/or school (let alone actually spending some quality time with them). Working late has a much higher cost and being out of a job has much greater consequences.

My point is that these days, especially accounting for assortive mating, a married person is better seen as having someone to support him or her, not as needing to support someone else.

Your roommate isn't going to pay for your food and rent. Your spouse will. Moreover, old married people are much more likely to have assets to draw on if someone is unemployed than single people. And while they may have higher expenses, a lot of those (like child care) disappear when one person is unemployed.

Just looking at my friends, very few of my single friends could tolerate loosing their jobs as well as my married friends. That includes older couples I know with kids.

A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's.

> A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's.

How is someone's gender in any way relevant to their financial risk tolerance?

The mechanisms are minimally known (it's believed to be linked to testosterone), but lower female risk tolerance is fairly well established. See this report and the sources it cites:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full

And interestingly, this study was just posted here today, showing that testosterone levels fall in married men: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13129483

I think caution is advised at applying these studies broadly, as you are doing. Not only are they done on WEIRD populations, but a limited subset of that grouping.

We are discussing the career habits of WEIRD populations, right?

The same pattern holds anecdotally in many other cultures I'm familiar with (Indian, southern African). Do you have any anecdotes or other evidence suggesting women are equally or more risk averse than men?

Anecdotes? Sure. My wife loves to trade options. I generally avoid them, except for buy-writes. Across investments, she enjoys taking higher risk positions than I.

I can't say that gender doesn't play a role, and it would make sense if gender were a factor, but I don't see how it could be anything close to a dominant factor.

By "anecdote", I meant "a culture or subgroup where women are reputed to be more risk taking than men", not "an individual example". No one disputes that individual examples can probably be found in any culture, and their existence doesn't contradict my claim.

...I don't see how it could be anything close to a dominant factor.

Suppose it were a dominant factor. How would the world be drastically different than it is today?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com