In Silicon Valley diversity conversations, age is left out

[alp227]

Often criticized for its lagging workforce diversity, Silicon Valley appears to be feeling the pressure. Over the past three months, a half-dozen leading tech companies have released diversity numbers, accompanied by pledges to improve them. Still others have promised to follow suit.

But one set of statistics has been noticeably absent: the age of those companies' workers.

Silicon Valley's conversation about diversity has revolved chiefly around gender and race, although the stereotype of the techie as white, male and young has written out the over-40 set as well.

"Walk into any hot tech company and you'll find disproportionate representation of young Caucasian and Asian males," said Ed Lazowska, who holds the Bill & Melinda Gates chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. "All forms of diversity are important, for the same reasons: workforce demand, equality of opportunity and quality of end product."

full: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/In-Silicon-Valley-diversity-conversations-age-is-5649228.php

[JDPriestly]

1. It is assumed that older workers cannot learn the new technologies.

That is false.

Simply false.

[steve2470]

2. exactly right nt

[modrepub]

3. Maybe

But more likely older workers cost more (higher in the pay scale and possibly more healthcare dollars). Besides, why hire an "old dog" when you can get a new pup out of college for half the price (plus less vacation time used)? This is what happened to my father. Was forced out into pasture once he got into his fifties. He managed to get a string of lower paying jobs until his military retirement pay kicked in then retired for good several years later. My wife and I are approaching that 50-year mark and I wonder when it will be our turn to struggle through our last decade or so of employment.

[cascadiance]

5. It is more like the newer work force is made to "cost less" by expanding H-1B hiring for less...

The wages are artificially lower when people like me that fit that over 50 mark are working at contract jobs for quite a bit less than we made 15-20 years ago in this profession. And those working in the expanded H-1B program aren't working there to fill positions that need a set of "unique skills" only offered by foreign workers (which in the past cited things like a combination of certain technologies and language skills) that U.S. workers can combined. The real reason it is used is that many in this program come here to work for less than American citizens (or green card workers for that matter) would work, but more than what they would make home when the difference of cost of living here and in certain other countries like India is a factor of 10.

The net effect of this is:
1) Wages for similar skill sets are made lower than they were 20 years ago.
2) Workers that were reasonably paid 20 years ago are forced out or have to work for a lot less for similar jobs now.
3) Newer American workers get far less wages than newer American workers did 20 years ago. THIS (NOT education) is what keeps smart kids that might enter this profession from entering it. All this about fixing our education system to address the smaller number of Americans working in high tech is just BULLSHIT that won't fix things unless the systemic issues of outsourcing and insourcing to pad the wallets of the 1% owners of the increasingly large oligopoly in the high tech sector are fixed properly.
4) In the older days, people worked in start ups at lower wages thinking that at some point they might get rich on stock options when it went public. Now that dream no longer exists. Startups, if they exist today, strive to get bought out by the big companies in the market now instead of "going public". The net effect is that people don't get rich off of stock options any more in most cases, and often people get laid off when these moves happen.
5) In the older days when workers in the high tech industry were well paid, and we had the startup culture, we didn't feel the need to have unions then. Now, we CAN'T have unions when so much of the work force aren't citizens and kept from voting or being a part of unions by the nature of H-1B visas.
6) A large part of the tech work force has their family live overseas. Their salaries get sent over there to their families that fuels OTHER economies, not this economy.
7) A large part of the tech work force comes here temporarily and then moves back to places like Bangalore. We train THEIR work force, not those of places like Silicon Valley, which has ceded it's "title" of being world high tech capital (most high tech jobs, etc.) to Bangalore, India now. We are building the investment of a trained work force in other locations, not here in this country with the jobs that are offered here now.

There are many skill sets (especially in high tech manufacturing) that are not being replaced in our work force by the younger generation. When I see job networking groups, I see many older workers with the skill sets that could rebuild our manufacturing sector if the right incentives were made to reinvest and locate manufacturing centers back in this country instead of overseas. That group of people is getting older and is close to retirement. We have a very small window of time to leverage those people's skills, if we can still do so, to rebuild our own country's manufacturing sector with our own citizens. We need new leadership to prioritize rebuilding our local jobs here, not the f'd up trade deals that just serve the elites.

[modrepub]

9. Yea, there is some of that going on too

Outsourcing coding to India also seems to be another way to reduce the local workforce (and costs). My wife's company does that and then she gets stuck working the bugs out when it doesn't work. My thought is that private industry does little to no post-move cost/benefit analysis when they do these things. It would be interesting to see how much "savings" these activities actually get. Based on my limited knowledge (and the lack of publicly available studies from the companies that do them) I would guess that a lot of these "cost control measures" actually cost the companies more in the long run.

[jeff47]

7. No, it is assumed that older workers will accept less abuse.

Older workers understand that they don't actually have to work massive amounts of overtime. They've also learned that massive amounts of overtime actually makes it take longer to produce the software - when you're running 60 hour weeks, you get 30 productive hours, and you spend 30 hours fixing the bugs you introduced because you're exhausted.

Lots of management types don't understand that. They think if they make the developers work overtime, they'll get the software faster. And young developers will work the massive overtime the bosses demand.

Wanna know why software today has so many bugs? That's the main reason.

[devils chaplain]

4. Meanwhile, they keep try to push the retirement age upward and upward...

Something's gotta give. If you want people to work until they're 67, at least make sure there's something to do.

[lpbk2713]

6. It is assumed young new hires bring with them new ideas, new approaches.

Not necessarily so.

[Starry Messenger]

8. The HBO series Silicon Valley had an episode on this.

http://readwrite.com/2014/05/14/silicon-valley-hbo-season-1-episode-6-third-party-insourcing-recap