Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias

Re:Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias by michaelochurch on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @03:42PM (#4838865)

Older people are perhaps more likely to be successful. But there is less variance in their outcomes.

We learn how to control our variance as we get older. (I'm 29, so I have no idea if I'm "young" or "old" by SV standards.) High-variance life isn't fun unless you hit an early home run. Otherwise, it's stressful and shitty. Experiences like getting fired because you were better than your CTO's-friend manager and made him insecure are pretty damaging, and they lead to self-filtering and variance-reduction as a survival strategy.

Give us an R&D environment that doesn't beat the shit out of high-variance people for 20 years, and you'll see a world where experience doesn't reduce variance so sharply, but delivers increases on the whole distribution.

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Re:Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias by seiji on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @03:57PM (#4838949)

Can we anchor this comment to the top of the discussion? You've eloquently characterized the entire problem and a potential solution.

So many current work environments have self defeating dynamics. You're not allowed to be better than your boss. When that gets thrown away (e.g. startups -- you have no boss) everybody can thrive. Well, they can thrive if they haven't been trained over a lifetime to be risk averse due to shitty management.

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Re:Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias by Surio on Tuesday November 27, 2012 @09:38PM (#4840702)

>> High-variance life isn't fun unless you hit an early home run. Otherwise, it's stressful and shitty.

Story of my life! +1 to that!

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