A substantial portion of the tech titans running Silicon Valley probably don’t recognize that quote in the title of this post nor have they ever seen the Lethal Weapon movies. In fact, we would be willing to bet that a lot of the Northern Cali techies don’t even know who Danny Glover is. As for the rest of you, you’re probably “getting too old for this shit.”
According to a recent Bloomberg article, you might have a difficult time finding a job in Silicon Valley if you have anything greater than a 4 handle on your age. While the median age of an employee for the overall United States is 42, the median age at Apple is only 31, while it’s only 30 at Google and Tesla and 29 at FaceBook and LinkedIn.
The result is that a lot of “older” workers looking for employment in Silicon Valley are having to go to great lengths to try to “fit in” with their new bosses that are half their age. As several people told Bloomberg, the typical tactic of simply replacing your wardrobe to look younger doesn’t cut it anymore in Silicon Valley. Older workers are having to make much greater sacrifices to fit in like catching up on the latest Kardashian gossip, watching all the latest superhero movies and studying up on the latest lingo on Urban Dictionary for hours on end. Still other others have gone even further by getting plastic surgery to look just a little younger.
So as Rodriguez chased more interviews, dresses with brightly colored sweaters or jackets over skirts replaced her five suits. She started regularly scanning Reddit, Yelp, IMDb, and MSNBC, checking words she didn’t know on Urban Dictionary, so she could talk about superhero movies, the Golden State Warriors, and the Kardashians. She collected 500 connections on LinkedIn, got herself on Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat, and started a blog. A hiring manager at Aruba, a wireless equipment maker owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, read the blog, and after five months without a paycheck, Rodriguez got another sales training job.
Michael Peredo, a 55-year-old auto engineer dismissed from Mercedes-Benz in February 2015, says he had trouble giving up his bow ties for T-shirts, as some he met at ProMatch suggested. “I feel like myself wearing them,” he says. He spent 18 months out of work before landing a contract gig at Velodyne, writing software for self-driving cars. Just before that interview, he took off his bow tie.
One 60-year-old software engineer, fired in January after seven years at a chipmaker in San Jose, now wears casual button-downs, khakis, and sneakers to interviews, studies embedded systems (cell phones, video game consoles) at a local extension school, and has started working out and dyeing his gray hair a dark auburn. He also had blepharoplasty, plastic surgery to remove bags and dark circles under his eyes. “It’s smart to stay current and look as young as possible if you want to keep working in an industry where so many people are in their 20s,” he says.
Others have taken a slightly more combative route in alleging age discrimination. In fact, Bloomberg points out that Silicon Valley companies are way more likely to face age-related discrimination lawsuits than suits related to alleged racial or gender bias.
Not all the older workers are going quietly. From 2008 through last year, the Valley’s 150 biggest tech companies faced 226 complaints of age discrimination filed with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, 28 percent more than complaints of racial bias and 9 percent more than those of gender bias. Last month, former employees of the old, combined Hewlett-Packard sued spinoffs HP Enterprise and HP, alleging they were targeted in a large wave of layoffs because of their age. (One of the plaintiffs, an efficiency expert, had just earned HP’s highest performance rating; only 250 of its 50,000 employees get that.) The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status on behalf of workers 40 and older who were laid off and replaced by younger employees. Next year, Google is scheduled to face a trial in a suit alleging age bias in hiring. The plaintiffs declined to comment. HP and Google deny the plaintiffs’ claims and say they’ll defend against them.
Still others, like 61 year old Bob Schoenberger, are planning to pack it up and call it a day saying that he is “pretty much reconciled to leaving this area for someplace cheaper…cashing out the house and fleeing.”
Bob Schoenberger, 61, is among the unlucky ones. He’s taken classes to learn new coding languages since his job at chipmaking supplier Applied Materials was outsourced to Asia in 2010, but except for some contract work at medical device maker Hospira, he and his wife have had to subsist on now-exhausted unemployment benefits, savings, and cash from the sale of the land where they’d hoped to retire. Schoenberger plans to start a training program to become a pharmaceutical technician. “I’ve pretty much reconciled to leaving this area for someplace cheaper,” he says. “Cashing out the house and fleeing.”
Given where home prices are right now in Silicon Valley, something tells us that Bob might just be making that best move by getting out of town.
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