In Silicon Valley, age can be a curse

In 2012, three high-tech companies in Silicon Valley announced they were laying off a combined 48,000 employees. Layoffs continue this year, including last week's announcement that an otherwise profitable Cisco Systems was letting 4,000 people go.


At the same time, the total number of jobs in the valley and in San Francisco's tech hub is on the rise. In fact, tech executives claim to have tens of thousands of jobs going begging, so much so that they need to bring in educated workers from overseas to fill them.


But if demand is outstripping supply, how come so many skilled IT professionals in the Bay Area are out of work? In a nutshell, job experience in the tech industry matters far less than it once did. In fact, it can work against you.


"It's been quite a shock, coming out of a job I had for over 10 years," said Robert Honma 49, of Sunnyvale, his resume filled with senior tech positions in multinational companies and small startups. His most recent job lasted two years, and has since been out of work for the past 10 months. "The Facebooks, the Googles, are driven by the young."





Mark Zuckerberg agrees.


"I want to stress the importance of being young and technical," Facebook's CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007. "Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don't know. Young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family. Simplicity in life allows you to focus on what's important."
Younger and cheaper


Like working around the clock, seven days a week on app development, coding and Web design, jobs in the strongest demand in the changing tech world.


"There's definitely a sense that companies are looking for younger and cheaper," saidRobert Withers, a career counselor at Nova Workforce Development, a federally funded career counseling organization in Silicon Valley. "We see experienced people looking for jobs, being interviewed and not getting hired. And they're older."


That trend has accelerated as the industry has moved away from the traditional bulwarks - hardware, PCs, corporate IT infrastructure - to the cloud, apps, mobile and social media, which require new skills.


"The tech industry requires workers with only the most current skills," one in which the "churn of 'creative destruction' regularly displaces workers even in a healthy economy," Nova said in a paper.


According to statistics from California's Employment Development Department, the great majority of IT-related occupations are the province of the 25-44 age group. Software application developers and Web developers skew closer to the 25-34 group - and younger. Computer and systems managers are more represented in the 44-plus group. But even here, the competition for jobs is stiff.
Managers less relevant


"There's been a big paradigm shift, especially with the cloud. It's made a lot of managers irrelevant who don't have the technical experience," said Honma.


Dan Ruth, 40, a corporate IT manager, has been out of work for seven months, which makes him, like Honma, an official member of the long-term unemployed. "There are certainly openings in my field that I'm qualified for, but it's a buyer's market. I've got a family, and while I haven't given up hope, I'm thinking of expanding my job search to another market, like Boston."


Paul Brunemeir, 56, a physicist who has worked his entire career developing electronic hardware in Silicon Valley, is sure he was laid off from his last job - engineering director for a small startup - because of his age, plus his six-figure salary and costly medical insurance plan. "Age correlates with experience, and experience correlates with salary. I was at the top of the layoff list because of the cost of keeping me on the roster. I would have taken a 33 percent pay cut to keep my job, but they never offered."