http://www.newsday.com/coverage/current/books/sunday/nd9051.htm


Newsday
06/11/2000 - Sunday - Page B 15

NET.CETERA
Old and in the Way: Age Biases in the New Economy

Clive Thompson. Clive Thompson is an editor at large for the
technology magazine Shift. His e-mail address is clive@bway.net

AS THE NEW economy prophets never tire of reminding us, youth is the
byword of the information age. Just two weeks ago, Business Week ran a
story about dot-com millionaires so young that they're still in high
school (http://www.businessweek.com/2000/00_22/b3683144.htm). As the
writers boggled over the spectacle of 15-year-old CEOs with
secretaries and seven-figure valuations, you could almost hear the
unspoken, envious question: Man, do you have to be a kid to hit it big
these days? Well, yeah, you might. There is mounting evidence that the
high-tech world practices a rather brutal form of age discrimination.
Over 35? Over the hill.

Consider the case of Randy Baker. The former vice president of Oracle
(http://www.oracle.com), he claims he was fired by the company for
having reached the positively geriatric age of 55. Baker, apparently,
had overheard Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison refer to Baker as "old"; two
months later, Baker was replaced by a 40-year-old. Then he was canned.
"Basically, discarded is the way I felt," says Baker, who's now suing
the company for wrongful dismissal and seeking $18.5 million in
damages.

Of course, it's always difficult to weep at the perceived misfortune
of a well-heeled senior executive. But Baker's situation resonates
even among the worker bees of Silicon Valley.

Programers, in particular, frequently complain about the awesome
premium put on youth. One study done by Norman Matloff, a computer
science professor at the University of California at Davis, has shown
that programers over 35 are relentlessly squeezed out of their
jobs-with fewer than one-fifth of them working in the field by their
early 40s (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.real.html). Many of
these workers voluntarily bow out, burnt out by work hours so insane
that they lack the time to responsibly maintain a spouse, a family or
even a small bowl of goldfish.

Indeed, some critics are now arguing that the much-ballyhooed
"programer shortage" is partly a myth driven by youth worship. As
Matloff discovered, high-tech companies are amazingly picky; they hire
barely 2 percent of those who apply for jobs. The only shortage is a
shortage of young, unattached college grads who'll work 120-hour weeks
without complaining, for comparatively low pay.

Sure, dot-com companies will tell you they need young hipsters,
because they're the only ones who "get it." But they're also the only
ones who'll work endless hours, blast the tunes and generally keep up
the ineffable air of being countercultural so crucial to the dot-com
branding strategy. When I recently checked into one site devoted to
New York tech job listings
(http://www.siliconalleyjobs.com/jobs-pro.htm), I saw one for a "CTO
To Rock the Casbah." This swashbuckling hipster would join an
"electrifying new music startup" destined to "revolutionize" the music
industry.

There's no outright discrimination in such notices, of course. But one
could hardly ask for a more concise and efficient kiss-off directed at
those doddering, palsied 36-year-old programers who might have the
temerity to think about applying.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The high-tech world pretty much
perfected the idea of planned obsolesence in products. Why not perfect
it in employees, too?