When do you pass your hire-by date? Steven Levy, who writes the terrific Backchannel blog on technology, reckons that once you're over 40 you've hit old age in the eyes of the bright young things of Silicon Valley.
Levy is steeped in the world of the valley and his book Hackers, published back in the 1980s, is regarded as a classic.
He is 64 years old which makes him, by his own account, one of the exceptions in the tech world.
The average age at Google, he notes, is 30, at Facebook it's 28, at Linkedin it's 29 and at Apple it's 31.
You have to wonder what happened to the people who used to work in the industry and who also made great things happen in our world? Did they get pushed off a cliff? Not all, of course – Apple boss Tim Cook is in his late 50s. His famed predecessor Steve Jobs died at 56 (and if he was still alive and kicking does anybody doubt, for a moment, that he would be innovating like crazy?).
But Levy suggests that for your employability to survive into the 50s or 60s in that world you have to have an exceptional talent and reputation.
What does that matter to us? First, we tend to look up to the Silicon Valley wizards. They are the trendsetters who make glittering gizmos for us and disrupt our world in apparently irresistible ways.
Second, we need to think about these things because prejudice about age is just below the surface here also. I would enter in evidence the fact that in Ireland we have laws against discriminating on grounds of age. The existence of such laws is, in itself, evidence that discrimination is a real problem. And discrimination does not have to be obvious – we live, after all, in the land of the nod and the wink.
Young people fill out their CVs to make them as fat and impressive as they can. Older people, according to Levy, are warned by experts not to list too many jobs on their CV – it gives the game away by suggesting you must be really, really old despite what that Botoxed face conveys. Plastic surgery to reduce the appearance of age is by no means rare in the corporate world either, he suggests.
You might argue that this is like colouring your hair to hide the grey and for the same reasons, but it feels extreme. It feels like something that shouldn’t be happening.
At the hard edge of things, prejudice against older people puts those who lose their jobs in redundancy programmes in middle age at an enormous disadvantage in the jobs market, no matter how well they may be at what they do. It’s been like that for a long time – I would hate to see it getting worse.
I should emphasis, I guess, that I have huge admiration for young people who have done amazing things in the tech world and have been able to keep very large corporate ships afloat while others might have run them aground.
The Collison brothers from Limerick launched the global payments company Stripe when they were in their very early 20s and had a really impressive list of achievements to their names before that also.
But even these dynamos will get old. The Collisons are heading for the big Three O – does anybody really think they are going to lose their drive and their genius when that happens? Of course not. In fact it’s going to be fun to see what they do next as the years speed by.
Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in his college dorm and has brought it, more or less, to world domination. For anybody of any age that's an amazing achievement.
But Zuckerberg who once declared, before he retracted it, that young people are just smarter, is 32. By the logic of prejudice he will be in his 40s and unemployable a decade from now.
Better stick with Facebook, Mark.
Steven Levy’s article is at http://bit.ly/agesilicon
Padraig O’Morain (pomorain@yahoo.com) is accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness for Worriers. His daily mindfulness reminder is free by email.
@PadraigOMorain