This article crossed my transom recently. It’s about the difficulties that older (here, over 50) women face in finding work. Older men don’t have it easy, either, and in the startup world, it’s common for the ageism to start much earlier. Influential goofball Paul Graham famously said that 38 is “too old” to start a company, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

I’m 32, so I’m not “old” yet, by most definitions, but it’s time to speak bluntly about the age prejudice, especially in software. It’s stupid. To the extent that the ageism is intentional, it’s malevolent. One side benefit that Silicon Valley’s powerbroker gain from age discrimination is two-fold: the younger are easier to take advantage of, and the artificial time pressure put on these people by the ageist culture makes them doubly so. For the rest of us, it’s a raw deal. We know that people don’t lose the ability to program– and, much more importantly, to write good code– as they age. The ageism doesn’t come from technologists; it comes from our colonizing culture. It’s time to kill it. The first step is to recognize corporate ageism for what it is, and to understand why it exists.

I had a phase of my life, like many people of talent, where I spent far too much time studying “IQ” and intelligence testing. There’s a whole wad of information I could put here, but the relevant topic is age, and the truth is that no one really knows when humans peak. Barring dementia and related health problems, which I’ll get back to, the argument can be made for a “peak age” as early as 20 or as late as 70. That’s not so much because “intelligence” is subjective (it’s more objective than people want to admit) but because the curve in healthy individuals is just very flat in adulthood, meaning that measurement will be dominated by random “noise”. Of course, some individuals peak early and some peak late; in the arts and mathematics, there are those who did their best work before 25 and others who did their best work in old age, but the overall average shows a rather flat profile for intellectual capability in adulthood.

In this case, why is there ageism in Corporate America? If intellectual ability isn’t supposed to decline, and one’s amount of experience only increases, shouldn’t older workers be the most desired ones? This analysis discounts one factor, which I find to be a common but under-acknowledged player: depression. And depression certainly can (if temporarily) impede creativity and reduce observable intelligence.

Midlife depression (possibly subclinical) seems to be a natural byproduct of the corporate game. The winners are exhausted and (excluding the born psychopaths, who might be immune to this effect) disgusted by the moral compromise required to gain their victories. The losers are demoralized and bitter. This is utterly predictable, because the harem-queen game, as played for millennia, is largely driven by the objective of making one’s opponents too depressed to continue in the competition. Even in the 21st century, when there’s no rational reason why office work should be stressful (it doesn’t improve the quality of the work) we see human nature driving toward this effect. The end result is that corporate midlifers tend, as a group, to be bitter, burned-out, defensive and miserable.

This isn’t immutable or natural. I can find absolutely no evidence of a natural reason why midlife, viewed positively in other cultures, would have such a high rate of burnout and depression. Yet, that such a thing exists, I would argue, is observably true. Most people over 40 in tech, excluding those in executive roles and those in elite programmer positions (which are more like R&D jobs, and usually entail VP/Director-equivalent titles) are miserable to be there. Does this merit not hiring such people? I doubt it. People can change radically according to context, and negative experiences seem more likely to strengthen people in the long run than to deplete them (even if the short-term effect is otherwise). Having dealt with mood disorders myself, I don’t stigmatize negative moods or view people as inferior for being unhappy sometimes. (In fact, the American social requirement to be, or to seem, constantly happy is one that I find utterly obnoxious. Fuck that shit in its eye.) I’d rather hire a 45-year-old who’s been burned out and miserable, and gotten through it, than a happy, wealthy 22-year-old who’s never felt adversity… but, alas, I’m not most people.

Corporate America is sometimes decried for “worshipping youth”. I don’t agree. Well-connected, rich kids get a different experience, but an average 22-year-old is not going to be tapping the benefits of fresh-faced youth. Instead, he’s going to be assigned the lowliest of the grunt work and given the benefit of the doubt most rarely. Ageism hurts the young and the old, and arguably has the flavor (if not direct influence) of a divide-and-conquer dynamic encouraged by the corporate owners– to keep the workers slugging each other over something as meaningless as when one was born, instead of working together to overthrow the owning class. Corporate America despises youth and age in different ways. Excluding the progeny of the well-connected “1 percent”, who get shunted into protege roles, the young are distrusted and their motives are constantly questioned. Pushing back against an unreasonable request is taken as an expression of “entitlement” and a young worker who arrives late is assumed to have been drinking the night before, rather than having an acceptable, adult reason (kids, commute, elder care, illness) for the lateness. If there is a group, in the corporate world, that is more despised among the young and the old, it’s clearly the young. The ageism of the corporate world toward older workers, instead, is more an acknowledgement of what that world does to people. It burns them out, leading to midlife depression (again, often subclinical) being common enough that even highly talented older workers struggle to overcome the associated stigma with their age. The corporate world knows that 20 years of residence within it causes depression and (almost certainly, temporary) cognitive decline. While this decline would probably be completely and quickly reversible by improving the context (that is, by investing in a better culture), that is a change that very few companies are willing to make.

The corporate world has decided to view “too much” experience negatively. That doesn’t apply only to chronological age. It can also apply to “too many jobs” or “having seen too much” or having failed before. Why is that? Why do negative and even average experiences (that might, in a less fucked-up culture, be viewed as a source of wisdom) carry a stigma? I can’t answer that for sure, but I think that a major part of it is that we, as a culture, aren’t merely depressed individually (for some people) in midlife. It’s deeper. We’re depressed about midlife, and about aging, and therefore about the future. We’re depressed because we’ve accepted a system that inflicts needless depression and anxiety on people, and that probably wouldn’t be any less economically productive without those side effects. We’re depressed because our extremist individualism leaves us seeing a future of near-term demise and our nihilism leaves us convinced (despite scant evidence either way) that there can be nothing after one’s own physical death. This leads us to tolerate a corporate miasma that depletes people, purposelessly, because we view emotional and intellectual decline in midlife as “normal”, when it very much isn’t.

Amid the shuffling stupidity of private-sector bureaucracy, there are flashes of insight. While I find corporate ageism morally reprehensible on many levels, there is a small degree of correctness in it. Corporate residency harms and depletes people, often delivering no benefit to company or person, because that is the nature of humans when locked in a certain type of competition for resources. Ageism is the corporate system’s rejection of the experiences it provides, and therefore an acknowledgment by Corporate America that it is parasitic and detrimental. Entities with pride tend to value (and sometimes over-value, but that’s another debate) the experiences that they’ve produced for people, and the corporate world’s tendency toward the opposite shows an admissible lack of pride. One could argue that it, itself, lives under the fog of status anxiety, nihilism, and depression that it creates for those who live within it.