Comment by tamaatar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tamaatar | Hacker News Reader

I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.

For older people, who have experience building stuff,e.g-software developers who have done some development in their life- they are worth their weight in gold. BUT most older people I work or have worked with, they are not all developers. People like sysadmins,IT people, sharepoint admins, automation managers,DBAs,Managers some system architects etc- I have seen some common traits- 1) They have no enthusiasm for work. Work is not even secondary for them. Its the last thing

2) They either think they are doing hard work or act like they work hard. Exaggerate all issues or whatever work they did even if its just an installation

3) No passion for technology 4) Do not want to learn anything new 5) Don't care about above, because its time for their retirement and so they don't care what others think

Given this, if I were building a team, I would lean towards the younger crowd. Unless the older person has experience building stuff.

>I am going to get a lot of flak for this. This is my personal experience.

Yes, you are going to get a lot of flak. I'll start. Yes, it's your personal experience. Personal experience is where prejudice usually comes from. If you get beat up by 3 people in green tee shirts, you're going to cross the street to avoid people in green tee shirts. That's the way our brains are wired. It's natural. It's instinct.

It's also natural to pee on the sidewalk when we feel the urge. But we suppress that instinct because society functions better when we do. Similarly, society functions better when we suppress our natural prejudices while interviewing. We use our intellect to remind ourselves that there are people who don't fit the mold of our personal experience, and force ourselves to interview one person the same as anybody else.

And you keep doing it even after interviewing several people who do fit the pattern you've seen previously.

You should get flak for this. If you were building a team, you would be judging a person based on a group they belong to, not the person. You would also be doing something illegal (assuming you are in the US and the person is over 40).

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