For those providing the excuse of culture - culture is something strongly valued in the Bay Area, and it's one of the biggest weaknesses.
Diversity brings so much more to the table than people who can drink a beer together. Diversity in age and experience brings different problem solving techniques and instincts to the table.
Put together a group of young single males of the same ethnic background and you will probably get a group of people who don't mind working all night long together six nights a week. Put together a group of people in different age brackets, different educational backgrounds, and different cultural backgrounds and you have a group of people who won't have to work all night long together in order to solve problems and get things done.
I find that the bay area and Seattle (my home) value the wrong kind of diversity. Its the unimportant stuff like skin color and gender that everyone means when talking about diversity.
The diversity that matters (diversity of thought and experience) is not the major area of focus for some reason.
I first felt this when I was asked by a sales rep if I would be interested in coming to work for his company since I had exactly the credentials and experience they were looking for. He said he would talk with the head of development and get back to me. Time passed, and when he did get back to me, he said that the dev manager was looking for someone under 35 and that my resume - which did not have my age - told him that I must be older (I was around 45 at the time). In retrospect, I should have sued, but instead just let it drop.
I'm not that inclined to interview for certain positions because of my age. For instance, I had an internal Facebook recruiter try, pretty aggressively, to get me to interview for a devops position a couple of years ago. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with him, over a couple of sessions, but in the end I declined even an initial interview.
There were a number of reasons:
1) I'm not a devops guy. I've done what amounted to devops in the past as a matter of wearing many hats, but I don't think I've ever done devops well, and I don't think I know how to.
2) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, one that had clients like Google (though not Facebook,) and there is no chance that Facebook would have offered me as much as I was making at the time.
3) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, and, while dealing with clients, employees, contracts, etc. was stressful, and not something I particularly enjoyed, I did kind of like being the boss. Have you ever thought a bit of code was just bad, and wanted to tell someone to re-write it, but refrained from doing so because... reasons? You still have to take people's feelings into account when you're the boss, but you can sit down, pair with them, and eventually hammer out something you're both happy with, but that you have final say over (as an aside, I'd strongly recommend pairing as a method of conflict resolution- sometimes you're very wrong about what you're insisting on, and pairing tells you that, and why.)
4) I wasn't done with my work. I was working on a project that I cared a great deal about, inventing novel algorithms that solved long-standing problems in computer science, and I wasn't finished doing so.
and, wait for it...
5) According to Zuckerberg: "Young people are just smarter." OK, lets be fair: he also said "I don't know...young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
I do not have a car (I really ought to get one, but they are such a pain in the ass,) and I do not have a family (I think it might be a bit late for me to get one of those,) but I'm inclined to think that I know things about solving problems hard enough that they take years to crack by virtue of having spent years cracking hard problems. I'm also inclined to think that that distinguishes me from even very smart young programmers.
The truth is that I think even doing devops for Facebook would be an interesting proposition. I imagine there are hard problems to crack there. If there's one thing I really regret about my career, it is that I've almost always been on top, and I have never had the opportunity to learn from people better than me.
But I am not very interested in working for Facebook, because I think the culture there is not welcoming to people my age, and their recruiting was very scattershot. If I really wanted to move to a big company I'd look at Akamai first. They also recruited me kind of heavily a while back, but they had spent the time to understand who I was, and were recruiting for a serious R+D position in Cambridge, working with other greybeards.
I don't doubt that there's age discrimination going on in the industry. What I'm wondering is why?
Pros of being older:
- More work experience (hopefully useful to whatever position applied for)
- More mature mental / emotional outlook
Cons:
- Possibly higher salary requirements because of the pros above.
- Higher relocation cost?
- Perceived feeling of being able to work less hours?
Overall I'm just not sure I understand the economic reasons for wanting to only hire young people. Especially when most jobs are only for a few year period (nobody is looking for life long employees anymore). Is this possibly some kind of part of the backlash against elitism, where we hate experienced people that might know what they're talking about?
Older workers (30s+) are harder to control, and have enough experience to see through management bullshit.
Many (most?) companies try and paper over business or management problems with engineers willing to work long hours for little gain, and that's usually only young males/H1Bs.
I've worked with some extremely smart older people, who did some awesome stuff in the 70s/80s. My impression is that usually, in my experience, they're very jaded and set in their ways. They seem to like to do things their own way and give the impression that they're infallible because they deconstructed an x stack in y decade, and complain about the cyclical nature of programming. They also seem to usually not go out to happy hours/events with the team to get to know one another as often, so they're excluded a little more, which leads to fewer people getting to know them.
I have seen exceptions, one of the PMs on my current team must be in her 60s and she exhibits none of the characteristics above and is a really amazing, smart person. It's just that most of the older people I have personally met seem to have the traits I described above. This would give me a little pause when choosing between equal candidates for, say, an angular dev position where both candidates have equal experience in the stack, but the older one has the baggage(?) of having been a programmer since the 70s and knows COBOL or something. I would likely have an unconscious bias to hire the younger one.
Hiring manager A doesn't want subordinate employee B who knows more about the work of A than A does, or is better at office politics, meeting customers, managing people, etc. Or, manager A wants only subordinates
(secondary, submissive, subservient, subordinate, dedicated, devoted, obsequious, obedient, etc.!).
Manager A may be willing to hire experienced, capable people as outside consultants, e.g., lots of lawyers, physicians, licensed professional engineers, other experts get hired.
The norms of an old Henry Ford factory are still there: The manager knows more, and the subordinate is there to add routine muscle to the work of the manager.
That manager A acts this way is explained in the B-school, sociology, and public administration subject of Organizational Behavior and, in particular, well named, goal subordination. That is, manager A is looking out for the career of manager A, not to see how much smarts he can bring into the larger company.
Of course, a CEO owner might be different: He doesn't have to worry about a subordinate replacing him. But, sure, if the CEO reports to a BoD, then there is a worry that the board will kick out the CEO and promote one of the CEO's subordinates.
Ah, sure, but a CEO owner might worry about a very capable subordinate leaving and competing with him (the CEO)!
Also an older worker might be more likely to file a law suit on discrimination of some kind.
Sure, the flip side of this slippery coin can be an opportunity for an older, more capable worker -- start their own business and beat the company that is still stuck with lots of goal subordination.
As an older programmer, here's one drawback to hiring me: I'm unlikely to live in the office, and I'm unlikely to sleep under my desk. I'll put in extra hours, when actually necessary, but if I'm perfectly honest I just don't have enough energy to brain 16 hours a day anymore.
On the other hand, I think that I brain pretty effectively during the eight hours a day I give an employer. I don't write a lot of lines of code anymore, but I don't discard much code either. I'm good at case analysis, and if management encourages handling errors... well, I know how to do case analysis.
I like working with younger programmers. I can teach the brilliant guys to be disciplined, and that's what matters, and about all that matters. If they aren't brilliant, who cares. But if they are... they need to be taught a few things.
Still- I'm afraid I can't pretend to be young anymore ;).
IMHO, those are often rationalizations - the real reason is often that an older worker must have obviously 'failed' in some way to be asking for the job in the first place.
It's threatening to people's narrative that if they work hard, they will be rewarded. So, obviously, an older worker must not be a diligent worker.
I think it may also be a perceived long-term cost for health care. Despite more experience and maturity, they may be seen as costing too much in the long term. I worked at a non profit in Atlanta who hired a guy in his late forties. There were many comments that he might not fit into the "youthful culture" of the place, since the average age was 30. Employers want to hire young people because they can work them longer hours, with less health care costs to worry about, and a belief that they'll fit into the company culture more. I've also read about an issue of hiring managers who are young not wanting to hire people older than them.
Thanks everybody. A lot of good threads, but I'm just going to try to sum it up.
- Culture issues, like not wanting to go to off work events, and would rather spend time with family. I agree that these types of things should happen on work hours. This may be related to being exploited, but a lot of culture seems to reinforce the exploitation of the workers. Like work hard, be frugal, do more with less, and don't complain about sexual harassment.
- Employees being basically too smart. Both in terms of knowing when management might be leading them down a boondoggle (which seems like it would be a good thing, if the company cared, but a bad thing for an egotistical manager).
- Employees are harder to exploit. Well I think that's good for everyone. If your business model is all about exploiting your employees you've got bigger problems. I'm not going to make any mentions of car hailing services here. ;)
It does seem like a lot of the SV mentality under the hood is to exploit your employees though, as much as possible, and pay them as little as you can. It's only the competition that will take them somewhere else to be exploited for slightly more money.
Looking at this from a business case, having a smart person notify you when you're getting into the swamp sounds like a positive thing. Especially if they've been in the muck before. Throwing away weeks/months of work is pretty common, and a huge source of wasted resources.
You don't create a hip, cool, sexy work environment filled with hot, good-looking people who all want to bang each other by hiring some old geezers with grey beards.
Everyone should be under 30 and look like an actor from a Crest Whitestrips commercial.
So who's not being discriminated against? Let's review who's currently getting the short end of the stick.
1. Women [1]
2. Older Americans [2]
3. Minorities [3]
4. Foreigners [4]
What can be done about this? The answer is clear: anonymous screening, interviewing and hiring of candidates. All other solutions are subpar.
People will argue that there's value to be had in asking about things such as hobbies, and other irrelevant, superfluous information, but those who advocate this are probably not in one of the groups mentioned.
Regarding this issue, at least for software engineering positions in the Bay Area there's a possibility that I haven't seen mentioned that I don't condone but understand.
Here, most companies' SE departments are dominated by younger engineers largely because that's what's readily available and affordable. These engineers are likely to want to be working with/surrounded by engineers within their general age range not out of any particular distaste for those older than themselves, but rather because highly experienced engineers are intimidating and on some level difficult to relate to. 20 and early 30-somethings want to be treated like they're intelligent, capable workers who are well-peered with their fellow engineers and introducing titanic knowledge+wisdom gaps can toss that out the window. It can make a young guy with 3+ years of solid experience in the industry feel like he's a half-useless greenhorn who can never catch up, which is demoralizing. These people are quite aware of the gap (see the rampant impostor syndrome in the same age bracket) but would prefer to not have it pointed out constantly. Just as one can't magically subtract years from their age, one also can't just snap their fingers and stop being young and less experienced.
While engineers don't directly control the recruiting process, they are often the ones doing the phone screenings and technical interviews and often have a lot of swing as to who gets hired. I wouldn't be surprised if this is partially why SV company hires continue to skew young.
Older workers are more likely to utilize health insurance for major procedures. More claims will drive up group health insurance rates. For a business that subsidizes employee health insurance, this is a bottom line cost. For a business that does not, higher health insurance costs are still a competitive disadvantage.
Because health insurance is so expensive, the costs can be non-trivial and not hiring older workers can be economically rational. The cost of adding people who utilize health care services to the pool establishing group policy rates is why employer provided health insurance policies typically excluded pre-existing conditions until it became illegal.
As fear of going without is a brake upon entrepreneurship, the rate increase from older workers is a brake upon productivity that derives from national health care policy.
I worked at a startup 25 years ago, and we had trouble getting group health insurance for our company of just over a dozen people because the accountant was over 50 years old, and it's not like we were going to fire him to get insurance. I imagine the problem is different today with ACA.
>> Because health insurance is so expensive, the costs can be non-trivial and not hiring older workers can be economically rational
That is not rational- it's selfish and greedy. It's also very short-termist, because everyone grows old eventually (or at least hopes to). If we all don't hire older people, we'll all be without a job further down the line.
Failing to establish the conditions that will allow older people to be employed is not being rational. It's being completely incapable of thinking more than a few years into your own future.
Honestly- when did "rationality" become synonymous with "tunnel vision"?
While this could be a worry for some smaller companies, I think there are more significant costs involved with employees who are closer to retirement than not. This becomes more serious the older one gets. When retirement becomes a short-term prospect (within 5 years), it gets really bad.
This is not an issue in Canada (Vancouver). Or in the UK (London) or in Germany (Berlin) where everyone is in one national health insurance group. And the three cities that I mentioned all have thriving startup cultures. And American citizens are welcome to immigrate to all these 3 countries as well.
I put obvious clues in my resume that I'm old, beyond number of jobs and dates. If you care about my age, I don't want you to waste my time; I really don't care about your time, but that does save your time too.
I've always been intrigued by the age requirement to become an air traffic controller--a federal job no less--which is under age 31 [1]. I recently came across the study [2] that preceded this rule. An interesting read.
Roles that require less experience generally outnumber the roles that require a lot of experience. As you go up the experience pyramid, more and more experience is required, but fewer and fewer roles exist. I'm not talking about management per se, just trying to count roles by experience needed within a generic organization.
Challenge being that any group of individuals advance in age at a fixed rate (one year per year).
I'm 40 with 20 years of real and varied industry experience (big and small companies; crossing systems, desktop, and much web/distributed dev), rabidly curious, and deeply study (and use on real, often side projects) bleeding edge this and that. What I think is my core value is the long-developed ability to build sound/robust architectures fast, with very good estimation and delivery prediction, and using latest tools, platforms, and technologies.
I know this may sound self-promoting, egotistical perhaps but I believe it's true. Less experience brings a lot of risk in the form of opportunity cost -- without hard-won experience, you simply don't yet have the ability to predict delivery or make the kind of "don't-look-back" decisions and optimal prioritizations that comes with mastery.
I can go to market and find a few companies that can pay my current salary. But the jobs I've been interested in (often medium-sized companies) seem to be trying to fill out a slate of 5 junior/mid-level roles, implicitly devaluing the kind of experience that I have.
I don't blame them. How do you demonstrate that you can truly "make better prioritized decisions" or "build sound architectures quickly" -- I can do these things, but the proofs are all counterfactuals. I know people in the industry for more than 20 years who did not cultivate their skill set. So how does a company first differentiate between me* and the other 20-year veteran? On the job you'll experience the difference in talent between him and me, but how do you a priori tell?
We need a way to show the houses we've built in our careers. How I can I show you that the 100,000 LOC code base(s) that I built or refactored at my last job(s) is stucturally sound with little leaks and supports agile development? As opposed to the other guy who left his spavined˜construction to a company in misery trying to maintain it?
Then the second thing is how do get these companies to value the skill set? "Working" is the mantra of the day, but "working" code that's not "sound" doesn't just start bleeding you in a year or two but in weeks from now. In other words, 20 years is worth paying for.
* Swap "me" for "some guy who _has_ mastered his craft to the level I'm describing".
Yes, needs definition, but assume there is a definition.
Ageism is just poor leadership. By that I mean discrimination purely on the stereotypes of older workers is a response to one's own failings as a leader.
Think we don't like to go drink with our friends? Don't like to learn new things? LOL. If I would rather go home than drink with you once a month then maybe you should take that to mean you're a bore. Maybe be pleasant and interesting?
If I don't like to deploy on new stacks for the sake of deploying on new stacks maybe that's a strength? If you think I can't be motivated to use something new that is legitimately better then maybe you can't articulate your ideas well? Maybe you aren't very inspiring?
If you think I can't work hard because I don't do long hours that's on you. Maybe you should stop wasting my time at work and get out of my way so I can get the job you pay me for done during normal business hours.
I think there's an elephant in the room, at least for many of us who are over 40:
We are in some ways less intelligent than we were 10 years earlier. We sometimes process complex problems a little more slowly, the maximum complexity of our mental models is a little lower, and we can sometimes learn more slowly.
We pray that our greater experience and wisdom compensate for that. For some of us it does, for others not so much.
Perhaps many hiring companies do reject us 40+ workers for the wrong reasons. But in some cases, perhaps their reasons are illegal but correct.
Totally anecdotal but before the over 60yr old office manager was hired only young were hired (college and under 30). Now, recent hires include two over 55 women. Interviwees are only older.
We concluded it is a simple as who does the hiring.
I've seen this a few times now already - a GPA over 3.7 or so is a red flag for many employers - I think they interpret it as "does little outside of school".
If older employees are so awesome compared to young workers, why does this bias/discrimination continue to exist?
Wouldn't a shop that rids itself of the stupidity of age based discrimination rise above its competitors as it's able to seize on a talent pool that would otherwise be ignored?
My mother and Father deal with with this internally as German Professors in a university. My mom is in her mid 70s and my dad is is in his late 90s.
For reference, I'm in my mid/late 30s.
No one wants to hire my mom because she's too expensive, and no one wants to hire my dad because he's too old.
The university they are currently employed at won't give them any reasonable updates to their salaries. They have newer, younger managers telling them that they suck at their jobs. And when you get enough of that, it starts to wear on you, on your friends, and your students.
My Mom could go anywhere to any university in the country, but she built a house and wants to stay in that house.
There's not a university that wouldn't hire her, and probably dad as well. They have every credential you could ask for.
How do I find an attorney that could take this case and put this university in place? My parent's have basically no money. But I have a cash cow. I'll pay bucketloads to get this right.
PM me if you think you can help. And a I also have 5 other cases from women and men with similar claims. If someone is willing to take it, we're talking about 5 cases minimum, and I will front the cash. Get in touch.
If discrimination exists doesn't that imply someone can arb the situation by, in this case, hiring all the smart older workers for more than what others are paying and still get a good deal?
Because of my age, some authority figures don't expect me to know how to perform complex tasks with greater responsibility. Often those tasks are given to older folks who (in my view) don't have the experience.
It goes both ways - I'm not saying any of it is right/fair/karma.
This along with privacy, backroom fixed market pricing, making it harder to change jobs and making it harder to start a business, is a big reason to remove healthcare from employment.
Employment should provide salary only. People need to get their own insurance for health, home, fire, life etc. Keep your employers out of your personal dealings.
As an aside, I always make sure my resume makes me appear to be someone in early thirties. I combine the experience under a few recent jobs, and never put when I graduated college.
[+] [-] Steeeve|9 years ago|reply
Diversity brings so much more to the table than people who can drink a beer together. Diversity in age and experience brings different problem solving techniques and instincts to the table.
Put together a group of young single males of the same ethnic background and you will probably get a group of people who don't mind working all night long together six nights a week. Put together a group of people in different age brackets, different educational backgrounds, and different cultural backgrounds and you have a group of people who won't have to work all night long together in order to solve problems and get things done.
Don't stagnate. Evolve.
We can all do a better job of opening up.
[+] [-] devmunchies|9 years ago|reply
The diversity that matters (diversity of thought and experience) is not the major area of focus for some reason.
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
Also when they say "culture" they just mean "an artificial BS bro- and nerd-bonding thing we made up and cringe-force it to everybody on the team".
[+] [-] klancaster|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelukelugames|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tagore|9 years ago|reply
There were a number of reasons:
1) I'm not a devops guy. I've done what amounted to devops in the past as a matter of wearing many hats, but I don't think I've ever done devops well, and I don't think I know how to.
2) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, one that had clients like Google (though not Facebook,) and there is no chance that Facebook would have offered me as much as I was making at the time.
3) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, and, while dealing with clients, employees, contracts, etc. was stressful, and not something I particularly enjoyed, I did kind of like being the boss. Have you ever thought a bit of code was just bad, and wanted to tell someone to re-write it, but refrained from doing so because... reasons? You still have to take people's feelings into account when you're the boss, but you can sit down, pair with them, and eventually hammer out something you're both happy with, but that you have final say over (as an aside, I'd strongly recommend pairing as a method of conflict resolution- sometimes you're very wrong about what you're insisting on, and pairing tells you that, and why.)
4) I wasn't done with my work. I was working on a project that I cared a great deal about, inventing novel algorithms that solved long-standing problems in computer science, and I wasn't finished doing so.
and, wait for it...
5) According to Zuckerberg: "Young people are just smarter." OK, lets be fair: he also said "I don't know...young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."
I do not have a car (I really ought to get one, but they are such a pain in the ass,) and I do not have a family (I think it might be a bit late for me to get one of those,) but I'm inclined to think that I know things about solving problems hard enough that they take years to crack by virtue of having spent years cracking hard problems. I'm also inclined to think that that distinguishes me from even very smart young programmers.
The truth is that I think even doing devops for Facebook would be an interesting proposition. I imagine there are hard problems to crack there. If there's one thing I really regret about my career, it is that I've almost always been on top, and I have never had the opportunity to learn from people better than me.
But I am not very interested in working for Facebook, because I think the culture there is not welcoming to people my age, and their recruiting was very scattershot. If I really wanted to move to a big company I'd look at Akamai first. They also recruited me kind of heavily a while back, but they had spent the time to understand who I was, and were recruiting for a serious R+D position in Cambridge, working with other greybeards.
[+] [-] cbanek|9 years ago|reply
Pros of being older:
- More work experience (hopefully useful to whatever position applied for)
- More mature mental / emotional outlook
Cons: - Possibly higher salary requirements because of the pros above.
- Higher relocation cost?
- Perceived feeling of being able to work less hours?
Overall I'm just not sure I understand the economic reasons for wanting to only hire young people. Especially when most jobs are only for a few year period (nobody is looking for life long employees anymore). Is this possibly some kind of part of the backlash against elitism, where we hate experienced people that might know what they're talking about?
[+] [-] gedy|9 years ago|reply
Many (most?) companies try and paper over business or management problems with engineers willing to work long hours for little gain, and that's usually only young males/H1Bs.
[+] [-] grepthisab|9 years ago|reply
I have seen exceptions, one of the PMs on my current team must be in her 60s and she exhibits none of the characteristics above and is a really amazing, smart person. It's just that most of the older people I have personally met seem to have the traits I described above. This would give me a little pause when choosing between equal candidates for, say, an angular dev position where both candidates have equal experience in the stack, but the older one has the baggage(?) of having been a programmer since the 70s and knows COBOL or something. I would likely have an unconscious bias to hire the younger one.
[+] [-] graycat|9 years ago|reply
Hiring manager A doesn't want subordinate employee B who knows more about the work of A than A does, or is better at office politics, meeting customers, managing people, etc. Or, manager A wants only subordinates (secondary, submissive, subservient, subordinate, dedicated, devoted, obsequious, obedient, etc.!).
Manager A may be willing to hire experienced, capable people as outside consultants, e.g., lots of lawyers, physicians, licensed professional engineers, other experts get hired.
The norms of an old Henry Ford factory are still there: The manager knows more, and the subordinate is there to add routine muscle to the work of the manager.
That manager A acts this way is explained in the B-school, sociology, and public administration subject of Organizational Behavior and, in particular, well named, goal subordination. That is, manager A is looking out for the career of manager A, not to see how much smarts he can bring into the larger company.
Of course, a CEO owner might be different: He doesn't have to worry about a subordinate replacing him. But, sure, if the CEO reports to a BoD, then there is a worry that the board will kick out the CEO and promote one of the CEO's subordinates.
Ah, sure, but a CEO owner might worry about a very capable subordinate leaving and competing with him (the CEO)!
Also an older worker might be more likely to file a law suit on discrimination of some kind.
Sure, the flip side of this slippery coin can be an opportunity for an older, more capable worker -- start their own business and beat the company that is still stuck with lots of goal subordination.
Back to it!
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
Cheap + naive + feeling they need to prove themselves.
It's all about costs and exploitation ;)
[+] [-] Tagore|9 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I think that I brain pretty effectively during the eight hours a day I give an employer. I don't write a lot of lines of code anymore, but I don't discard much code either. I'm good at case analysis, and if management encourages handling errors... well, I know how to do case analysis.
I like working with younger programmers. I can teach the brilliant guys to be disciplined, and that's what matters, and about all that matters. If they aren't brilliant, who cares. But if they are... they need to be taught a few things.
Still- I'm afraid I can't pretend to be young anymore ;).
[+] [-] WalterSear|9 years ago|reply
It's threatening to people's narrative that if they work hard, they will be rewarded. So, obviously, an older worker must not be a diligent worker.
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bombthecat|9 years ago|reply
Cheaper is better. That's all.
[+] [-] sceew|9 years ago|reply
older people have more years experience, thus demand a higher salary.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
I actually do, but I'm eager to be convinced by facts.
How would you measure this? Does anyone do that?
[+] [-] happy-go-lucky|9 years ago|reply
Of course, that's from an employee perspective :)
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbanek|9 years ago|reply
- Culture issues, like not wanting to go to off work events, and would rather spend time with family. I agree that these types of things should happen on work hours. This may be related to being exploited, but a lot of culture seems to reinforce the exploitation of the workers. Like work hard, be frugal, do more with less, and don't complain about sexual harassment.
- Employees being basically too smart. Both in terms of knowing when management might be leading them down a boondoggle (which seems like it would be a good thing, if the company cared, but a bad thing for an egotistical manager).
- Employees are harder to exploit. Well I think that's good for everyone. If your business model is all about exploiting your employees you've got bigger problems. I'm not going to make any mentions of car hailing services here. ;)
It does seem like a lot of the SV mentality under the hood is to exploit your employees though, as much as possible, and pay them as little as you can. It's only the competition that will take them somewhere else to be exploited for slightly more money.
Looking at this from a business case, having a smart person notify you when you're getting into the swamp sounds like a positive thing. Especially if they've been in the muck before. Throwing away weeks/months of work is pretty common, and a huge source of wasted resources.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] HillaryBriss|9 years ago|reply
You don't create a hip, cool, sexy work environment filled with hot, good-looking people who all want to bang each other by hiring some old geezers with grey beards.
Everyone should be under 30 and look like an actor from a Crest Whitestrips commercial.
[+] [-] _m8fo|9 years ago|reply
1. Women [1]
2. Older Americans [2]
3. Minorities [3]
4. Foreigners [4]
What can be done about this? The answer is clear: anonymous screening, interviewing and hiring of candidates. All other solutions are subpar.
People will argue that there's value to be had in asking about things such as hobbies, and other irrelevant, superfluous information, but those who advocate this are probably not in one of the groups mentioned.
---
[1] http://www.vogue.com/article/female-discrimination-tech-indu...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2014/01/31/the-ugly-tru...
[3] http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/25/news/economy/racial-discrimi...
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alev-dudek/foreign-born-citize...
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|9 years ago|reply
Here, most companies' SE departments are dominated by younger engineers largely because that's what's readily available and affordable. These engineers are likely to want to be working with/surrounded by engineers within their general age range not out of any particular distaste for those older than themselves, but rather because highly experienced engineers are intimidating and on some level difficult to relate to. 20 and early 30-somethings want to be treated like they're intelligent, capable workers who are well-peered with their fellow engineers and introducing titanic knowledge+wisdom gaps can toss that out the window. It can make a young guy with 3+ years of solid experience in the industry feel like he's a half-useless greenhorn who can never catch up, which is demoralizing. These people are quite aware of the gap (see the rampant impostor syndrome in the same age bracket) but would prefer to not have it pointed out constantly. Just as one can't magically subtract years from their age, one also can't just snap their fingers and stop being young and less experienced.
While engineers don't directly control the recruiting process, they are often the ones doing the phone screenings and technical interviews and often have a lot of swing as to who gets hired. I wouldn't be surprised if this is partially why SV company hires continue to skew young.
[+] [-] brudgers|9 years ago|reply
Because health insurance is so expensive, the costs can be non-trivial and not hiring older workers can be economically rational. The cost of adding people who utilize health care services to the pool establishing group policy rates is why employer provided health insurance policies typically excluded pre-existing conditions until it became illegal.
As fear of going without is a brake upon entrepreneurship, the rate increase from older workers is a brake upon productivity that derives from national health care policy.
[+] [-] stevenwoo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|9 years ago|reply
That is not rational- it's selfish and greedy. It's also very short-termist, because everyone grows old eventually (or at least hopes to). If we all don't hire older people, we'll all be without a job further down the line.
Failing to establish the conditions that will allow older people to be employed is not being rational. It's being completely incapable of thinking more than a few years into your own future.
Honestly- when did "rationality" become synonymous with "tunnel vision"?
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] memracom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3n|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LVB|9 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.faa.gov/jobs/career_fields/aviation_careers/ [2] http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/faa-aviation-...
[+] [-] paulsutter|9 years ago|reply
Roles that require less experience generally outnumber the roles that require a lot of experience. As you go up the experience pyramid, more and more experience is required, but fewer and fewer roles exist. I'm not talking about management per se, just trying to count roles by experience needed within a generic organization.
Challenge being that any group of individuals advance in age at a fixed rate (one year per year).
Does that make sense? Not sure about it myself.
[+] [-] wellpast|9 years ago|reply
I know this may sound self-promoting, egotistical perhaps but I believe it's true. Less experience brings a lot of risk in the form of opportunity cost -- without hard-won experience, you simply don't yet have the ability to predict delivery or make the kind of "don't-look-back" decisions and optimal prioritizations that comes with mastery.
I can go to market and find a few companies that can pay my current salary. But the jobs I've been interested in (often medium-sized companies) seem to be trying to fill out a slate of 5 junior/mid-level roles, implicitly devaluing the kind of experience that I have.
I don't blame them. How do you demonstrate that you can truly "make better prioritized decisions" or "build sound architectures quickly" -- I can do these things, but the proofs are all counterfactuals. I know people in the industry for more than 20 years who did not cultivate their skill set. So how does a company first differentiate between me* and the other 20-year veteran? On the job you'll experience the difference in talent between him and me, but how do you a priori tell?
We need a way to show the houses we've built in our careers. How I can I show you that the 100,000 LOC code base(s) that I built or refactored at my last job(s) is stucturally sound with little leaks and supports agile development? As opposed to the other guy who left his spavined˜construction to a company in misery trying to maintain it?
Then the second thing is how do get these companies to value the skill set? "Working" is the mantra of the day, but "working" code that's not "sound" doesn't just start bleeding you in a year or two but in weeks from now. In other words, 20 years is worth paying for.
* Swap "me" for "some guy who _has_ mastered his craft to the level I'm describing". Yes, needs definition, but assume there is a definition.
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|9 years ago|reply
Think we don't like to go drink with our friends? Don't like to learn new things? LOL. If I would rather go home than drink with you once a month then maybe you should take that to mean you're a bore. Maybe be pleasant and interesting?
If I don't like to deploy on new stacks for the sake of deploying on new stacks maybe that's a strength? If you think I can't be motivated to use something new that is legitimately better then maybe you can't articulate your ideas well? Maybe you aren't very inspiring?
If you think I can't work hard because I don't do long hours that's on you. Maybe you should stop wasting my time at work and get out of my way so I can get the job you pay me for done during normal business hours.
I could go on...
[+] [-] DoofusOfDeath|9 years ago|reply
We are in some ways less intelligent than we were 10 years earlier. We sometimes process complex problems a little more slowly, the maximum complexity of our mental models is a little lower, and we can sometimes learn more slowly.
We pray that our greater experience and wisdom compensate for that. For some of us it does, for others not so much.
Perhaps many hiring companies do reject us 40+ workers for the wrong reasons. But in some cases, perhaps their reasons are illegal but correct.
[+] [-] losteverything|9 years ago|reply
We concluded it is a simple as who does the hiring.
[+] [-] startupdiscuss|9 years ago|reply
Go for 2.8-3.1 GPA w/ lots of activities.
Avoid 4.0 with no other activities.
Now If they had just said go for activities, I would understand, but they actually asked for a lower GPA too.
[+] [-] adjkant|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dikdik|9 years ago|reply
Or they may be want people who aren't very bright because they might be willing to take more abuse from management?
[+] [-] wott|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madengr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koolba|9 years ago|reply
Wouldn't a shop that rids itself of the stupidity of age based discrimination rise above its competitors as it's able to seize on a talent pool that would otherwise be ignored?
[+] [-] ianamartin|9 years ago|reply
For reference, I'm in my mid/late 30s.
No one wants to hire my mom because she's too expensive, and no one wants to hire my dad because he's too old.
The university they are currently employed at won't give them any reasonable updates to their salaries. They have newer, younger managers telling them that they suck at their jobs. And when you get enough of that, it starts to wear on you, on your friends, and your students.
My Mom could go anywhere to any university in the country, but she built a house and wants to stay in that house.
There's not a university that wouldn't hire her, and probably dad as well. They have every credential you could ask for.
How do I find an attorney that could take this case and put this university in place? My parent's have basically no money. But I have a cash cow. I'll pay bucketloads to get this right.
PM me if you think you can help. And a I also have 5 other cases from women and men with similar claims. If someone is willing to take it, we're talking about 5 cases minimum, and I will front the cash. Get in touch.
[+] [-] startupdiscuss|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blitmap|9 years ago|reply
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm
I am a younger adult performing IT functions.
Because of my age, some authority figures don't expect me to know how to perform complex tasks with greater responsibility. Often those tasks are given to older folks who (in my view) don't have the experience.
It goes both ways - I'm not saying any of it is right/fair/karma.
[+] [-] wbl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|9 years ago|reply
Employment should provide salary only. People need to get their own insurance for health, home, fire, life etc. Keep your employers out of your personal dealings.
[+] [-] kazinator|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|9 years ago|reply