Noam Scheiber seems to be confused about geography. He keeps referring to “Silicon Valley”, but most of his specific examples are from companies in San Francisco. SF is not in the Valley, it’s an hour’s drive north. There’s a real difference. Hipsters who want night life gravitate to the city. Engineers who want hard core tech go to the Valley. So the city seems to be mostly customer-facing-app companies.
I have grey hair, and I must have interviewed at 20-odd companies in the last 15 years. Only about two companies struck me as having an obvious youth bias, and only one interviewer seemed prejudiced.
If you ignore the tech-lite companies and their hipsters, there does remain an age bias. But it isn’t a cultural bias, it’s a price bias. Companies are eventually run by MBAs, and they were taught that you should hire the cheapest employees. Their ideal would be to have everyone below Vice President be interns, or in India.
