The brutal ageism of tech

~ susie

Three VCs
It’s not just tech. Many organizations think middle-aged people are too boring to have in their “cutting edge” shops:

Twenty years ago, when Matarasso first opened shop in San Francisco, he found that he was mostly helping patients in late middle age: former homecoming queens, spouses who’d been cheated on, spouses looking to cheat. Today, his practice is far larger and more lucrative than he could have ever imagined. He sees clients across a range of ages. He says he’s the world’s second-biggest dispenser of Botox. But this growth has nothing to do with his endearingly nebbishy mien. It is, rather, the result of a cultural revolution that has taken place all around him in the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America. Tech luminaries who otherwise pride themselves on their dedication to meritocracy don’t think twice about deriding the not-actually-old. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told an audience at Stanford back in 2007. As I write, the website of ServiceNow, a large Santa Clara–based I.T. services company, features the following advisory in large letters atop its “careers” page: “We Want People Who Have Their Best Work Ahead of Them, Not Behind Them.”

And that’s just what gets said in public. An engineer in his forties recently told me about meeting a tech CEO who was trying to acquire his company. “You must be the token graybeard,” said the CEO, who was in his late twenties or early thirties. “I looked at him and said, ‘No, I’m the token grown-up.’ ”

In talking to dozens of people around Silicon Valley over the past eight months—engineers, entrepreneurs, moneymen, uncomfortably inquisitive cosmetic surgeons—I got the distinct sense that it’s better to be perceived as naïve and immature than to have voted in the 1980s.1 And so it has fallen to Matarasso to make older workers look like they still belong at the office. “It’s really morphed into, ‘Hey, I’m forty years old and I have to get in front of a board of fresh-faced kids. I can’t look like I have a wife and two-point-five kids and a mortgage,’ ” he told me.

Don’t drink the diet soda

~ susie

#diet #coke #cocacola #100th dis month... :p
Just in case you needed a reminder — oh, and don’t forget the only reason it got approved was because of Donald Rumsfeld:

“When aspartame was put before the FDA for approval, it was denied eight times. G.D. Searle, founder of aspartame, tried to get FDA approval in 1973. Clearly, he wasn’t bothered by reports from neuroscientist Dr. John Olney and researcher Ann Reynolds (hired by Searle himself) that aspartame was dangerous. Dr. Martha Freeman, a scientist from the FDA division of Metabolic and Endocrine Drug Products, declared, “The information submitted for review is inadequate to permit a scientific evaluation of clinical safety.” Freeman recommended that until the safety of aspartame was proven, marketing the product should not be permitted. Alas, her recommendations were ignored. Somehow, in 1974, Searle got approval to use aspartame in dry foods. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing from there. In 1975, the FDA put together a task force to review Searle’s testing methods. Task force team leader Phillip Brodsky said he “had never seen anything as bad as Searle’s testing” and called the test’s results “manipulated.” Before aspartame actually made it into dry foods, Olney and attorney and consumer advocate Jim Turner filed objections against the approval.

“In 1977, the FDA asked the U.S. attorney’s office to start grand jury proceedings against Searle for “knowingly misrepresenting findings and concealing material facts and making false statements in aspartame safety tests.” Shortly after, the U.S. attorney leading the investigation against Searle was offered a job by the law firm that was representing Searle. Later that same year, he resigned as U.S. attorney and withdrew from the case, delaying the grand jury’s investigation. This caused the statute of limitations on the charges to run out, and the investigation was dropped. And he accepted the job with Searle’s law firm. Stunning.
Continue reading “Don’t drink the diet soda” →

Who, me?

~ susie

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A “comprehensive and exhaustive” review that doesn’t include interviews with the principals? And of course Christie gave them access to his phone records and emails, since he was famously paranoid about not leaving anything incriminating. But I hear there’s some guy named Frankie in Newark who’s pretty excited his governor has been cleared!

Everyone can stop speculating about Chris Christie’s involvement in Bridgegate, and the other controversies that surfaced in its wake, because a new review has cleared the governor of all wrongdoing. Though, the haters will point out that Christie commissioned the study. And Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, the firm that conducted it, has close ties to his administration. Plus, they weren’t able to talk with Bridget Anne “time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” Kelly, ex-Christie aide Bill Stepien, or former Port Authority official David Wildstein, who are all key figures in the George Washington Bridge lane closure. Aside from those factors, the lead investigator calls it a “comprehensive and exhaustive” review.

While Kelly, Stepien, and Wildstein refused to participate in the investigation, over the past two months Gibson Dunn & Crutcher had tremendous access to Christie’s administration. The New York Times reports that lawyers interviewed more than 70 people, including Christie and his senior staff. The governor turned over his phone records and personal email accounts, and lawyers had records on the phone calls, text messages, and emails of top current and former administration officials.

Lawyers would not discuss any of the report’s specific findings, but it’s said to include a detailed account of who ordered the lane closures, analysis of how the culture of the Christie administration contributed to the scandal, and recommendations for preventing similar incidents. The report will be delivered to Christie, who’s said he’ll release it to the public without alterations – which seems only fair, since New Jersey taxpayers are footing a bill of $1 million or more.

Upcoming grand cross eclipse

~ susie

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Let’s just say that I remember the grand fixed cross eclipse in 1999 very well (it was a huge turning point), and I’m hoping this one is nothing like it, but since it hits right on my ascendent, I doubt it. Keep calm and carry on, I say!

If you keep up with my update articles, you’ve probably caught more than one reference to extremely bumpy astrology headed our way in April. Guess what? That’s now only a month away.

This perfect-storm of contributing factors—namely, (1) a very-tightly-orbed cardinal grand cross between Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and Pluto, (2) while Mars is still retrograde in Libra, a sign of his detriment, (3) smack in between two eclipses—is just the sort of configuration that’s had us astrologers chatting and conjecturing well in advance. (For example, horoscope queen Susan Miller says: ‘April’s so scary that I’m giving classes on it.’)

But I’ve also been around this block enough times to recognize, sometimes the astro-happenings we beforehand herald with the most sensational hype, in the end, come and go with surprisingly little fanfare… though, to be clear, that’s not to say they proved insignificant. I try to keep a safe distance from the business of stirring fear responses by giving power to doomsdayish predictions, for I’m not sure what value it provides to warn that the sky is falling when we all still must live under that same sky each and every day until it really does fall.

You can read more if you’re interested.

Price-fixing cabel

~ susie

#google employees waiting for #googlebus across street from #eviction #gentrification

I’m sure we’ll have a congressional hearing on this illegal restraint any day now:

Confidential internal Google and Apple memos, buried within piles of court dockets and reviewed by PandoDaily, clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based public relations behemoth WPP. All told, the combined workforces of the companies involved totals well over a million employees.

[…] A confidential Google memo titled “Special Agreement Hiring Policy,” dating from November 2006, divides the company’s wage-fixing agreements into two categories: “Do Not Cold Call” and “Sensitive Companies.” Below that, the Google memo offers a brief chronology and list of companies.

[…] In September 2005, eBay CEO Meg Whitman called Schmidt complaining that Google’s recruiters were hurting profits and business at eBay. Schmidt emailed Google’s “Executive Management Committee”—the company’s top executives— summarizing Whitman’s, and “the valley”’s view that competing for workers by offering higher pay packages was “unfair”.

[…] Beneath that list, a rather cryptic warning suggesting that all across industries, illegal non-solicitation agreements were common everywhere: “Please be cautious when recruiting teams from any company to keep our candidates and potential employees safe from legal action. Most companies have non-solicit agreements which would limit or prohibit a candidate from asking a coworker to interview with us as well.” That passage alone is a stunning example of not just flagrantly illegal practices—it also shows how few rights companies assume their employees are entitled to, rights that Americans take for granted—such as the right to free speech, the right to assembly, the right to ask one’s own co-worker if he or she would be interested in taking a better job somewhere else.