Tech Ageism Worse in S.F. Than L.A., 2016 Census Data and Anecdotes Suggest

7 min readDec 2, 2018

May 14, 2018

The conventional wisdom may hold, but data and anecdotes suggest otherwise: ageism was worse in the San Francisco Bay Area tech sector, and many job sectors, than those of Los Angeles as recently as 2016.

One cause of fewer tech workers over 30 in San Francisco could be expensive housing, but age discrimination in hiring occurs, insiders report.

“I mean at Kleiner we had this anti-harassment training session, and during that whole time, the partners kept asking ‘well if we want to hire somebody who is 26 years old what do we do?’”

Venture capitalist Ellen Pao told a San Francisco audience last fall, that her former employer Kleiner Perkins sought legal ways to recruit and fund software startup founders of a very, very specific age.

Reports filed by Bloomberg news show recruiters in the “Silicon Valley of China” see 28 as the maximum age a tech job candidate is seen as ideal, or even acceptable, despite discrimination there being frowned upon.

From the ideal age to get hired is a quick travel to thoughts of retirement. Lore tells of tech workers retiring early by choice, but Bay Area reports show well-paid young professionals save to extremes, “don’t trust the systems in place.” Some live in vehicles.

The Data

Programmer, friend and former colleague of this reporter, R. Davis, pulled data from the IPUMS.org data collation service. Davis wrote python code to analyze and generate the line graphs shown at the top of this story, which he explains on his website.

IPUMS.org data collated and graphed by R. Davis

In San Francisco in 2016, the age distribution of workers filling tech jobs peaks early for workers with occupational code “1020” for “Software developers, application and system programmers.” 33% of all workers with job code “1020” are between 24 and 29 years old; 23% are between 30 and 34; 12% are between 35 and 39 years of age.

That shows a career peaking at 29 for an average Software Developer in San Francisco.

Conversely, in 2016 Los Angeles, the data show a career trajectory that grows stronger through one’s 30s. 25- to 29-year-olds constitute 17% of all workers workers with job code “1020 — Software developers”; both the 30–34 and 35–39 age groups in that job code occupy 21% of the area’s jobs. After age 40 a sharp employment drop-off begins.

Housing

Interest groups in the San Francisco Bay Area and a state Senator Scott Wiener want zoning changes and building permit requirements eased, more housing developed, and extra supply to bring down rents and single-family-home prices.

The region reports high employment and a “tech worker shortage,” which in recent years begat demands for the government to grant companies more temporary H1B guest worker visas.

But for individual workers, whether employment is steady enough for today’s residents to lay down roots after careers peak, at 31 or 32, is less clear.

A Google employee lived in his truck to set aside 90% of his income; one worker lived in her van; an internet forum subreddit “vandwellers” shares lifestyle tips.

Last week’s glossy California Sunday magazine profiled 20-something tech workers following celebrity saver Mr. Money Moustache’s frugality movement.

One follower “found tech less stable” than she expected. Followers reported “agonizing” over $10 Uber expenditures. They shorten traditional five-year plans “who do you want to be in six months?” Workers earning healthy $180k salaries live on floor mattresses and eschew all nightlife spending. Many plan to leave the area, industry, or both, at 30, 35 max.

Age vs. “Mindset”

Kleiner Perkins partners asked a lawyer training them in anti-harassment codes of conduct, how to search for aspiring software startup founders within a 12-month age range, Pao told an interviewer.

The lawyer rebuffed, Pao said, “he was like ‘you can’t do that, that’s discrimination.’”

But the partners pressed him for routes through that barrier.

Podcast 49:00 mark -> ELLEN PAO: RESETTING SILICON VALLEY (commonwealthclub.org)

And they said “well what if we asked for somebody who had the *mindset* of a 26-year-old?”
The lawyer was like “no! That’s the same thing!”
And eventually like after a whole series of questions, they’re like, “well what do we do to get a 26 year-old in?”
And the guy was like, “moving on! I can’t have this conversation with you.”

Pao started her own venture fund, and advocates companies increase diversity before, during, and after hiring an employee.

China & Education

The trend here and abroad raises questions about staying in school, or dropping out before it’s too late.

“A recent job posting for a front-end developer at a Beijing tech startup explained that the company is willing to relax its requirements for educational attainment but not for age; a college degree isn’t strictly necessary, but if you’re older than 30, don’t bother applying,” Bloomberg reporter Shelly Banjo wrote in the article.

Because discrimination in China is technically legal, it can be more overt. But it’s culturally shunned:

In 2011 the Shenzhen Stock Exchange posted a recruitment notice on its website asking for applicants younger than 28. The director of a local nonprofit wrote an open letter about the listing to the municipal bureau of human resources and social security. The media picked up the story, and after the stock exchange conducted an investigation into the listing, it was taken down.

Human Rights

Another job posting inspired a human-rights lawyer in the area to organize. According to Bloomberg’s report:

Last fall, shortly before Ou’s story began circulating, human-rights lawyer Zhang Keke heard from several colleagues about a job listing for a clerk’s position in the public prosecutor’s office in Shenzhen. The upper age limit was 28. “I really can’t believe that such things could happen in Shenzhen, an open city compared with other cities in China,” he says. China’s fifth-largest city, Shenzhen is considered to be the nation’s Silicon Valley — in addition to ZTE, Tencent and Huawei are headquartered there — and as such it tends to be more progressive.
Zhang is known for taking on controversial cases, including defending members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual group, and belongs to a network of public-interest lawyers created two years ago to handle discrimination cases. He sent the Shenzhen job posting around to his network and eventually assembled a group of eight lawyers to write an open letter to the Shenzhen prosecutor’s office recommending that it replace age limits with a merit-based exam.

Silicon Valley’s Pao is now working with diversity-focused funders at Oakland’s Kapor Capital. Pao launched her own initiative “Project Include” to broaden what startup funders and employers see as a viable tech job candidate pool, beyond men and a few women, mostly white or asian, age 26–28 years old.

Performance vs. Perception

Journalists’ reactions to last month’s congressional hearings when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testified before the senate on April 10, show this will be an uphill battle.

Senators pressed the founder in a five-hour session with cogent questions on technical legalities like biometric privacy law carve-outs, breach notifications, data scraping and harvesting, and prescient questions on the encryption strength for messages in Facebook-owned WhatsApp (a WhatsApp founder quit Facebook over privacy disputes weeks later, the New York Times reported.)

Journalists in their 40’s filed befuddled first-take stories saying the senators seemed too old to question Zuckerberg, and to understand how the internet works.

Pushback Grows

The public’s notions of which age group is the “digital native” generation grows younger. People are pushing back.

Reports last week from Pew that H1B visas import young workers from concentrated world regions, were published widely even in tech-friendly regional newspapers like San Jose Mercury News. Other reports, that the U.S. government in 2008 doubled young foreign students’ post-graduation length of stay for tech work purposes, then tripled the permitted duration in 2016, were also widely reported this month.

Pao last fall told a Commonwealth Club audience member asking about age discrimination in tech that it was not her imagination:

Um so it is real! And I think … part if it is really thinking about inclusion from this broad perspective of, looking at what people are contributing. And how they are working, instead of looking at what they look like. Or you know what, um, how, you know how much of a culture fit they are in terms of a bro-culture.

Pao urged the audience to think in terms of diversity beyond including more women. “And that’s why we’ve been pushing really hard, and it’s been this uphill battle, but the hope is that as we look beyond gender we don’t just look at throwing in a few under-represented people of color.”

Thinking this way across the workforce, Pao said, will require we shift beyond token employees representing identity groups, and start “really thinking about how do we reset all the systems to make it inclusive instead of exclusive.”

— —