The Offline Report

Sufficiently advanced technology, useful or useless, is indistinguishable from magic. Some dead English guy almost that a long time ago . Youth is magical. And some venture capitalists (VCs) are magic junkies. From California Sunday magazine's The Real Teenagers of Silicon Valley : Even the teens think it’s a little strange. “I want people to think of me for my merit, not my age,” Latta says. “I almost feel like my age can be distracting. I’ll often lie about it.” But he did admit that he’ll sometimes “pull the age card.” Theil fellows drop out of college, sometimes high school, move west and code: She knows the tech teen posse but has her own friends outside of it. “I’ll either meet people who will fetishize it or will dismiss it. The fetish is kind of weird,” Varshavskaya says. “The group of young guys here. A lot of them are treated like gods and wizards and heroes, and all the venture capitalists are waiting for their next magic thing, but they’re not doing anything that spec...

Young, old, middle-aged. A reporter's a reporter. Irascible, obsessed, chasing sources, facing deadlines. First let's hear from the young : A young staffer on the digital side of a legacy broadcast outfit said, “All these old white men like to scream and wave their arms that journalism is dying. They say, Oh my, it’s dying, guys. But they’re the ones cutting budgets and trying to do things the same way they’ve always done things. Did that work out okay for you, guys? Shit no, it didn’t. We need to move on from how people did it in the fucking 1600s. Get over that shit . . . . I want to be like, Your model died, dude. Seriously, we need to reinvent journalism as we know it. Throw out the playbook.” -- CJR Is Mr. "Throw out the playbook" correct? Let's read on. Later in the same piece we hear from his colleagues: “I don’t want to be Pollyannaish. We’ve lost a lot of people and lost a lot of capacity. It’s scary. But I don’t sit around and pine for the old days,”...

The cognitive shock of an approaching birthday marking the magic threshold age of 40 did a number on me and my confidence in my career. There, I said it. My abilities were stronger than ever. But the opaque awareness of age discrimination in my field -- illegal, yes, but prevalent nonetheless -- had me looking at other careers on evenings and weekends, instead of giving my job my all. Don't let this happen to you. Because we need to wage a campaign that alerts the partners at Kleiner Perkins , the editors selecting New York Times OpEds, even 61-year-old NatGeo reporter Katie Couric, from saying, often on the record, the blatantly discriminatory things they said within the last two years. "I'm looking at your resume - you worked somewhere in 1998? How OLD are you?" That's what one employer who was then only seven years my junior, but below the magic 40 threshold, said to me in a phone interview for a job in 2016. Let's get to a place where...

The magic phase of life for aspiring software startup founders begins on their 26th birthday. And ends on their 27th. After posting statistics earlier this week showing a more youth-lopsided workforce in San Francisco than Los Angeles , and studying ageism breakthroughs in other industries, like the Hollywood writers who achieved greater age diversity after a lawsuit was filed in 2003 , very specific ages began to stand out: 26, 30, 35 and 40. It's worth asking how much our brains cling to these magic age numbers because of some cognitive fallacy. "A 26-year-old is who we should hire." "He's 34? We'll only get one good year out of him before he expires at 35." Anchor Bias is a term scientists use to describe that over-reliance on certain concrete traits to judge a person's potential, ScienceDaily.com says: Anchoring or focalism is a term used in psychology to describe the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one tr...

A University of California professor who taught ethics in computer science one semester generated lively discussions after assigning news articles that revealed ageism in the high tech field, he said on his blog . Norm Matloff of U.C. Davis taught an accreditation-required ethics course in 2014 and assigned: a 2012 article on  older workers perceived as "less innovative"   from Reuters (then Associated Press) a 2011 article series of older workers hit harder by the 2008 recession   from Computerworld a 2011 article on a shortage of python workers  from New York Times attending a lecture of author, "STEM worker shortage skeptic" and Harvard labor worklife researcher Michael Teitelbaum Teitelbaum, the Harvard researcher, startled the students when he revealed how many applicants Microsoft auto-rejects, Matloff said in his blog post : Among other things, the students were startled to hear from Michael that Microsoft automatically rejects half of its job applic...

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...

We decry the lack of wisdom in Silicon Valley. Yet the youngish scribes in the tech press perpetuate a myth that no matter the year, anyone over 40 doesn't know how to turn on a computer. We're on a hamster wheel: young professionals work in tech; they gain experience in lawmaking; they get elected to lower office, then higher office; they're ready to hold hearings, or make sensible laws. ... And then tech journalists vying for tech CEO access start the enabling: Sorry electeds! You're too old to understand this, you were born (we youngsters assume) before TV was invented. A blogger for the established Spectator magazine promoting his book said this in response to the April 10 senate hearings: First every politician needs to roughly understand what an algorithm is (rules based instructions for a programme) and roughly how they work. This should probably include some understanding of what they are generally good at (repetitive, rules-based tasks) and what they are ...

A second viewing of the Zuckerberg senate hearings from his first day on Capital Hill Tuesday shows two things: why the first impression that the senators were unprepared was patently false; and that it was one of the best performances of the senate in recent history. Whether that holds or Facebook's lobbyists gum up legislation to make Facebook more of a monopoly, only time and voter engagement in this debate will tell. A tweet from a young viewer added this to a journalist's thread : " it IS about age, one generation grew up with tamagotchi, nintendo and social media, the other one grew up before TV was invented . it's not about competence, it's a different world and that has nothing to do with #ageism, just a fact, not everything is an -ism & offensive" In response to the tamagotchi user and other early media reports that congress "doesn't know how the internet works" we're compelled to correct the record (for starters: Facebook ...