Posted on 09/08/2002 9:55:54 AM PDT by Mini-14
In Silicon Valley these days, precious few jobs are available for high-tech workers. In the past two years, hundreds of companies have folded, and tens of thousands of employees have been laid off. Many of the job hunters who arrived in the late 1990s for the dot-com rush are gone.
I'm a technical writer with more than 20 years of experience, and earlier this year, I was laid off for the second time in two years. As I began reviewing job openings in my field, I started by looking at companies I knew. I found one that was seeking a technical writer, so I reviewed the job description, and it closely matched my skills and experience. I clearly met the requirements listed for the job, and I was interested in working for this company.
This wasn't the first time this company looked like a good match. Two years ago -- when I was first laid off -- this same company was looking for a technical writer, and I sent my resume. The company didn't respond. Nevertheless, I tried again. I sent a resume and cover letter that indicated I was familiar with the company and its products and that I had lots of experience in its market. My resume testified to it all. I also sent a link to my Web site, which contains information about me and samples of my work.
The company didn't respond, and I wondered why. It seemed to me that anyone could review the job description, compare it to my resume and see a very good match. So what was the problem?
Based on my job-hunting experience these past two years, I hypothesized that the problem might be simple: I had too much experience. In other words, I was too old. That might be why the company didn't respond two years ago and wasn't responding now.
A 'Make-Believe' Me
To test my hypothesis, I created a make-believe person: someone 15 years younger than me, with half my experience. I sent this person's cover letter and resume by e-mail, and guess what? The company responded to my make-believe person, indicating an interest and asking for additional information.
I responded on behalf of my make-believe person, but told the recruiter I had created this person to test my hypothesis. The recruiter responded by inviting me for an interview; he wanted to find a good reason why I wasn't a good candidate. I accepted; I wanted to hear why he responded to my make-believe person, but not me.
At the end of the interview, he told me the reason was this: I had had too many jobs. In fact, I had five jobs in the past 20 years; my make-believe person had three jobs in 10 years. My hypothesis was holding up.
This was interesting. When I looked at the company's Web site for job postings, I noticed that it -- like many other high-tech firms in the valley -- was actively recruiting college students -- people with no work history. It seemed I had too much history.
Why would a company prefer to hire someone with no experience? Why prefer recent college graduates to people with years of experience? And if experience comes with age -- and there's no denying that it does -- isn't this preference, in effect, age bias?
Isn't this the same as refusing to hire someone because he is black, Jewish or Chinese? Isn't it like refusing to hire a woman to do a man's job? It's illegal.
A Fun Place to Work
Despite the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, age discrimination is thriving in Silicon Valley. To catch a glimpse of it, review the employment sections of the Web sites of Valley high-tech companies. They usually describe a fun workplace. This is clearly an appeal to younger workers, as mature workers tend to be more interested in well-run companies than those emphasizing fun.
You'll likely find a description of a corporate culture that "promotes dignity and respect for each individual." In the corporate-culture section, you'll also find an emphasis on diversity.
Silicon Valley high-tech companies offer workers not only fun work environments, but diversity as well: the opportunity to work with people from faraway lands. The Web site for one well-known firm offers this apt description of diversity:
"Walk into the cafeteria on any given day, and you will hear conversations in English, French, German, Russian, Vietnamese, Cantonese, just to name a few."
Here's how Carly Fiorina, CEO of Hewlett-Packard, emphasizes diversity:
"The value proposition for diversity is very clear: Diversity drives creativity; creativity drives invention; invention drives profitability and business success."
Silicon Valley high-tech companies advertise their commitment to diversity and equal opportunity. They boast diverse work forces and say their goal is to make them more so. But commitment to diversity veils a preference for young foreign workers. It's a way of making age discrimination sound like a noble cause.
Visit the campus of some high-tech Silicon Valley company on a workday morning. Watch the workers going to work. You'll likely notice that the vast majority of the workers are young -- in their 20s and 30s.
Why would a company prefer younger workers to older workers? Why would it prefer workers with less experience over those with more? I've heard all sorts of reasons:
These sound like the myths that kept women from doing men's jobs or blacks from supervising whites. These myths are alive in Silicon Valley.
Techie outfits? You are kidding. The Mircosoft site used to brag about how few employees the had over age, whatever, 45 or 50.
Many large companies will tell you about their committment to diversity in employment. This excludes older applicants. And, when they do trot out some older person they just hired, it will almost always be a former Congressman, ballplayer or the president's uncle.
Good luck. But, if there ever is a federal law less enforced than the one against illegal aliens holding jobs US workers could hold, it is the one that prohibits discrimination against older job applicants.
This just might be the single biggest pile of horse manure I have ever heard on the subject of "diversity". Hey, Carly, why don't you just admit that you want to hire cheap H1-B's who will work for half as much as American workers?
Oh, I forgot, that would require honesty, something that Silicon Valley executives are not familiar with.
Oh, and Carly, while we're on the subject, creativity and invention come from INSPIRED INDIVIDUALS, not from forced "diversity" and group-think. Just FYI.
Some years ago there was a word processor called Wordstar that was the best thing going. I still use it today. Why did it lose out. There were no good manuals on how to use it. Later on, two british gush wrote a book on Wordstar Made Easy, and it was easy. By that time, it was too late. The best scematic capture and circuit simulation program for many years never made it because there was no decent manual for it.
You got that right!
At least I think you got it right. :-)
I think you just hit on the major reason that age discrimination exists against workers around age 40. If it's harder to fire a 40 year old, better to hire someone younger, whom you can fire if it doesn't work out.
Yep. They do. Big reason - older workers usually have a mortgage and kids to support. So in general they need the higher salary. But to offset that - they have more experience and higher skill levels. Unfortunately the people doing the hiring are ignorant.
They don't know what they don't know, and don't know that they don't know it. That means that they can say - oh, I need a (fill in the blank skill). Get one cheap. They are not personally ever held accountable for bad design or bad code or cost overruns. Worst case for them is if they hire people with insufficient skill sets, they get laid off with their group. But they just blame the workers, not themselves. They go somewhere else and do it again.
You would think someone at a higher corporate level would look into this, but they never do. Statistics show that somewhere between 40 - 60% of software projects fail. Do you think this level of failure would be acceptable anywhere else? Would it be okay if 50% of our bridges fell down within 2 years of being built? If we bulldozed down half of all homes in a residential subdivision because of quality so bad they couldn't be sold? Of course not! But this is considered okay when doing software projects.
And no one makes this connection - if we hired carpenters by saying - oh, he can swing a hammer so he must be a skilled hammerer, that's what I need. Oh, she can duct tape those pipes together so she must be a skilled water pipe assember, that's what I need. That's how I am going to hire people to build my houses, put up my warehouses, put up my skyscrapers. No - we make sure that we have a group of skilled, older workers! Union or not! We know we need the skilled folks. But for software projects - nope, lets just hire some H1-B's or college kids - they've had 6 months or 2 years of experience, that's all we need.
And so HALF of all software projects fail - literally BILLIONS of dollars are wasted every year by corporations - and no one at a senior level makes the connection between A and B - lack of senior skilled workers on the projects.
It would be funny if it wasn't sickening. Meanwhile, these folks with years of experience are now out looking for work as real estate agents, or working for H&R Block doing taxes, or working down at the Home Depot. American businesses are cutting their own throats - and the stupid middle managers are not held accountable.
The only place we found plenty of electronics positions are in KALI..but who in their right mind would want to move to a gun grabbing high tax communistic state?
More importantly, we are missing here the overriding reason why today's front-line and middle-management large corporations (particulary in technical areas and in headquarters in general) recruit and preferentially hire foreign workers: political correctess and good old self-hate instilled in decades of NEA America-last education and media blitzkreig. Add a good portion of white-guilt, and it is very similar to the situation we've had for the last 40 years of white people PATRONIZING black people to the point of being embarassingly ridiculous. (The irony is, however, that now American blacks suffer from the new exalted status of Indians and foreigners.)
To hire an Indian or Pakistani is the COOL thing to do. So many benefits accrue: it demonstrates that the hiring manager is not one of those mean white ethnocentrists they were taught to despise in college and secondary school. The manager demonstrates he is not the eveel bidnessman portrayed in entertainment on TV and movies ubiquitously. (I think a media study some years ago determined that the most frequent "bad guy" on TV was a white businessman; the least frequent felon on TV being the black street thug who makes up 80% of our court dockets and jail population.)
By patronizing the foreigners, they even expunge themselves of some of the white guilt. Additionally, this seeps up and down the management chain: if a front-line or middle-manager tells his/her VP that something wasn't accomplished or CAN'T be accomplished, he/she will skate IF they can present an Indian or someone like that as the SME (subject matter expert.) Is the VP---who is ALSO imbued with and whipsawed by political correctness---going to despute the word of a freaking business and computer genius from Bombay or New Delhi? Nope---the words of an Indian in today's "adminisphere" (the hallowed halls of corporate headquarters) are GOLDEN, are truth just as though they were handed down from a mountain, inscribed on a tablet.
(Conversely, see what happens if you trot out as your SME some paunchy, middle-aged, balding white man whose degree is from a regular old state u, or God forbid has no degree but rather 30 years experience. Then have THIS SME tell a VP a project is behind or impossible and see how long YOU or HE lasts.)
The more "local" you are---the more from the heartland of America---the more you are looked upon as stupid. If you are Indian or foreign, you are PRESUMED brilliant. But it doesn't matter if you are or aren't: the manager has done due-diligence in hiring the foreigner: if this Indian or whatever didn't pan out the manager is totally covered, because he/she did the right thing politically within the organization.
The value of opinions in the corporation are measured inversely to years-of-service and age. The weight placed upon someone's ideas will be inversely in proportion to that person's time with the company and time on the job. I have been in meetings where an informal poll would be taken and the person most GREEN---most fresh out of grad school---would be the one whose opinion was solicited, and if that person had only a year with the company, all the better.
I was recently in a meeting in which a new VP (who appeared in his late thirties) was introduced to a part of his work group consisting of various professionals. The FIRST THING he said to the group was, "Hey, just for fun, let's go around the room and every one say how long you have been with the company." Ha. It was CLEAR what he was doing as each person spoke, and it got worse: 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, and a couple of 25 years. He quickly said, oh, I just wanted to see if there was anyone who'd been here less amoung of time than I have. Only 1 or 2 of the people had. I think everyone felt highly uncomfortable.
From the belly of the beast...
Look at some of those companies that got in trouble. They all had CFO's in their late 30's to early 40's. I would bet that there was no one much older on their management team.
For the most part, though, I have to agree with what Rush has said on his show many times over the years- if you haven't achieved some job success (management, or better) by the time you hit 40, you had best have an entreprenurial streak in you (i.e. start your own business). It may not be right, or fair, but that is the way things are in the business world. Younger workers work for lesser wages, and don't have as many things to deal with outside of work, so I guess the MBAs that run the companies see this as a good thing.
Competition is often the competitor doing the same thing, but in Bangalore...
Results-- a lot of small companies putting out immature, buggy products and folding after the returns start coming in and Cisco or Nortel passed up the opportunity to buy them out...
I'll take the man who has integrity, dedication, and commitment over the genius of dubious character and work ethic any day.
I'd rather have an older man who works his butt off and is honest to the core than a young guy of vast intelligence who has no qualms about lying.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.