Readers offer tales of Silicon Valley's ageism

Robert Honma is an IT professional in Silicon Valley, who, like many others, is out of a job and looking for a new one. Robert Honma is an IT professional in Silicon Valley, who, like many others, is out of a job and looking for a new one. Photo: Mathew Sumner, Special To The Chronicle Photo: Mathew Sumner, Special To The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Readers offer tales of Silicon Valley's ageism 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Call it what you will, but Silicon Valley is no country for middle-aged - let alone old - men and women.

That's the opinion of Chronicle and SFGate readers responding to last week's column on hiring practices in the valley.

"Being 47, a software engineer, I have known for quite some time that my days are numbered," wrote Michael Lascombe, who lives and works there.

"The big question for me, roughly 20 years away from retirement, is the certainty that I can only continue being a software engineer for a few years at best, and with absolutely no clue as how to recycle my skills into some profession which will allow me to remain in the workforce."

He touches on a larger point - that age is a major issue across the labor force, where the odds of re-employment lessen the older you get.

"The construction industry is worse. Anyone over 29 is laid off or never hired, no matter how much experience they have," said an SFGate user.

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But it's happening in spades in high-tech, including in left-liberal San Francisco. An experienced iPhone app developer said he spent a year interviewing at various startups in the city, where he "encountered a homogenous culture of mostly white, recent graduates under 30 years old."

"Sometimes, interviewers wouldn't even shake my hand and tried their best to get rid of me as soon as possible," the developer wrote.

Where are the age discrimination class-action lawsuits, some wondered. Proving discrimination on an individual basis, as employment law attorney Cliff Palefsky pointed out in the column, is hard enough, as an applicant can be written off as simply being "not a good fit." A class-action suit seems even less likely in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's recent rejection of a gender discrimination suit involving female Walmart workers.

A few played down the age factor. "At the last company I worked we hired a number of engineers in their late 40s, early 50s and they worked out great. We delivered a market-winning product and wound up selling the company to a major player," one said.

More focused on the obsolete skills factor. "I know that at age 58 my tolerance for tackling new tech skills is sadly diminished," said a "highly competent" IT worker living in Shasta County. "But I could probably still get a job in Sacramento for the state government or IBM."

To stay in the game, these readers urged, make sure your skills are up to date, especially in areas like coding, and be prepared to work longer hours and get paid less than you're used to. "I would suggest taking an honest look at whether you are pining for the past," one reader advised.

Or go out on your own.

"As another old guy and a former senior manager with a number of startups, I've been through what these guys are going through," said Allen Price, 61, of Oakland. "I finally got tired of trying to fit in to a scene that was focused on hiring younger and younger employees."

So Price launched his own startup, a social network travel site (in beta) called Tresendas, which as startups often go, offers little in the way of pay, at least in the beginning. Still, said Price, he would be interested in talking to "unemployed senior programmers to see if they'd like to join me in building a business that isn't ruled by youth."

For others, it's maybe time to move on altogether.

"Every now and then I regret getting out of high-tech, like when I run into a former colleague who drives a Ferrari and lives in Los Altos Hills," said a Gate reader. "Then I see my wife poring through a three-inch manual for the latest build of Ubuntu (operating system) or read an article about how 'The Accidental Billionaire' (a book about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook) hates oldsters, and I am glad I wrote my last line of code in 1989."

"I love software engineering. I hope to write software until I can't write software anymore," said Ian Kaplan, 56, of Livermore, who has "had the same experience that was related in your article," about looking for work in Silicon Valley.

"But the picture that Zuckerberg paints, of a culture that demands complete focus on the job, with no family or outside life, is draconian. I find it difficult to recommend this profession to young people."

Final point, made by a number of our alert readers: Zuckerberg's example of young-is-superior - "Why are most chess masters under 30?" - is factually challenged, at best.

Viswanathan Anand, last year's world chess champion, who will be defending his crown in November, is 43 years old. William Steinitz won the first ever world chess championship in 1886, when he was 52; he held it for eight years.

World champion contenders, let alone chess masters, run into their 80s.