Toxic Tech Culture
Discussing perceptions of age and ageism, Rosales and Svensson point out toxic traits in tech culture in their article Perceptions of age in contemporary tech. The homogenous roots of tech culture start from the 1960’s: a mono-culture of young, Caucasian and Asian males who believe in their own brilliance was formed. Back then, hacking was the most visible embodiment of tech culture and its influence is still visible today. In addition to being a counterculture, tech culture grew from Cold War military-industrial research. (Rosales and Svensson, 2021.) Believing in your own brilliance, not to mention forming a group based on said feature, is a red flag! Back in the day, hacking was a way for youngsters to spend whatever spare time they had, hacking was a questionable style of showing off. Probably, the years of lacking diversity resulted in the tech culture we know today.
The roots of tech culture are as absurd as Rosales and Svensson (2021) put it: “industry and high science’s technological and intellectual output meets Eastern religions, LSD mysticism, and the 1960’s back-to-the-land movement” . That’s the basis of entrepreneurship and startup culture. Fast forward 20 years, tech people were a group of predominantly white men who saw themselves as the creative and independent elite (Rosales and Svensson, 2021). Don’t you dare to call that toxic! The all-male “elite” believed they could bring the world back into balance by combatting bureaucracy and authorities with information technology (Rosales and Svensson, 2021). Humbly, taking risks and thinking of being above others.
Ageism is argued to be the most invisible type of discrimination. To put it simply, it’s discrimination based on age only. As you probably already guessed, it is strongly present in everyday life in both the work culture of IT companies and when engineering or designing products and services. There is an actual risk of marginalising older users! Building stereotypes, tech culture is heavily leaning towards youth thus making perceptions of age and ageism important to study among tech workers (Rosales and Svensson, 2021). This is counterintuitive as the global population is ageing. In addition, According to Rosales and Svensson, older people have been ousted from positions of power in Western welfare societies.
It is generally believed that young people are enthusiastic, immature, willing to put lots of hours into work and inclined to learning new things. Older people are somewhat the opposite: reluctant to pick up new skills, not that motivated and spending time with their families rather than working overtime. It is also in the general knowledge that young people use more novel technology than older people. However, that allegation is only partly true. Whereas older people adopt less technology they are more digitally connected than ever. (Rosales and Svensson, 2021.) This kind of false stereotypes mould relationships between individuals, society and institutions. It is true that communication patterns and interests change as we grow old but it doesn’t necessarily mean that old people should be excluded when designing products and services.
What is considered old in tech you may ask. If you’re over 35-year-old you’re considered old. Anyone under the age of 30 years is considered young. That’s only perverted by like 20 years. (Rosales and Svensson, 2021.) Whereas programming has been a rare subject to study it’s became the promised land of opportunities, good salaries and whatnot. In their Bachelor’s thesis Open Salary Policy and Anonymity, Parkkamäki and Siponen found out that IT companies don’t really care about education or personalities as long as the future employees are experienced in programming. Another interesting find they made is that the companies say to treat introverted and extroverted people equally but the data gathered shows it’s a lie. Though it’s probably just an unconscious bias, extroverted people are unanimously preferred. Nonetheless, the presence of younger people is a generational issue thus worsening the already skewed perspective of age (Rosales and Svensson, 2021). It’s a positive feedback loop with negative effects!
People should work in positions they naturally lean to. But this is not the case in IT! Young people are supposed to take risks and tend to get startup positions, older people are working in better paid manager positions in stable companies (Rosales and Svensson, 2021). Tech workers are forced through career paths that progress linearly from inexperienced developer to project leader or manager roles. Most of the time this is not desired but it is what it is, right? This trait renders younger managers uncomfortable when managing people older than their own age. This conservative hierarchy based on age isn’t visible in society anymore, besides tech culture. But why? It is falsely assumed, and only market related, that most of the users are young so it’s thought to be better to be designed by young professionals (Rosales and Svensson, 2021). Thus it’s natural to put older employees to leading positions. This is a crazy situation as Rosales and Svensson give lots of examples how older tech workers aren’t up-to-date with technology, don’t realise the underlying potential, have trouble keeping up and aren’t willing to embrace the role of being a beginner. Not everybody should be a manager; people are different. It would be pretty difficult to switch to a more natural hierarchy after decades of a mono-culturistic age-based system. Despite the difficulty, that change needs to happen for the sake of us all! It would lessen ageism considerably by itself.
Nowadays, tech culture remains toxic. Traditionally, tech workers have been white male but there’s a trend where diversity is preferred over skills to make the company look better. It’s a good idea but a very bad execution. Would you feel comfortable to know that you were hired only because there wasn’t an employee with your skin colour yet in the company? Additionally, good guys are preferred as companies try to avoid anonymity in recruitment processes. This allows unconscious biases to affect who gets selected. (Parkkamäki and Siponen, 2021.) Rosales and Svensson argue that young people are strongly preferred, especially in Silicon Valley.
Workers who prefer not to use these on-site resources in their free time risk being marginalised in their own teams. Companies are trying to appear as playgrounds for people in their mid-twenties to the point where the employees don’t even realise it’s a business. This is enforced with on-site benefits, team-building programmes and fridges full of beer. Devotedness is wanted, even required, and you shouldn’t have started a family yet as the company is your family. These kinds of strategies are deployed to distract tech workers. (Rosales and Svensson, 2021.) The best kind of prison is one where a prisoner doesn’t know they’re in jail.
This article was originally written for the course Sustainable Development at Tampere University.
