Too Much Experience to Be Hired? Some Older Americans Face Age Bias | Hacker News Reader

Too Much Experience to Be Hired? Some Older Americans Face Age Bias

npr.org

213 pointshappy-go-lucky233 comments

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.

Don't stagnate. Evolve.

We can all do a better job of opening up.

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 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.

Yeah, diversity usually just means people of different skin colors or sexual preferences, but with the same class background, education, aspirations, ideology, and everything else.

Some people literally visit places like Peru or the Middle East and the only diversity they get is from talking to people just like them in those places (totally americanized pop culture afficionados, VC types who dream of SV, etc.). And then they think that "basically everybody on the planet thinks the say way and wants the same things" based on those very limited experiences.

Whereas one would encounter much more actual diversity if they got to listen and understand the ideas of people in their own neighborhood, who might or might not be of another color.

I've always made fun of tech diversity when I've been on their campuses.

Most of them all had the same problems, the same rearing, talk to same, same credential's, and acted the same. Even though it looks like a rainbow of culture, tech is the most similar multi-state/national workplace I've seen.

Diversity of experience is directly correlated to diversity in skin color, gender, socio economic status, age, nationality, etc.

You can say that there is "diversity of thought" in a group of white males who all went to ivy leagues because one says he's a libertarian and the other a neo marxist, but that's kinda missing the point.

>Diversity of experience is directly correlated to diversity in skin color, gender, socio economic status, age, nationality, etc.

There's a very limited "diversity of experience" across skin color and gender given the same "socio economic status".

A rich gay person can much more easily command and/or buy acceptance and tolerance even in the most extreme places (and historically tons of gay persons got off just fine in societies that otherwise frowned upon the poor gays).

And usually the tech version of "diversity" only extends to people with the same experiences -- regarding age, education, aspirations, etc, regardless of nationality. An indian nerd colleague is OK, as long as they too lived and breathed Star Wars, Lego bricks, old NES consoles, and doesn't bring much in the way of his country's culture (except cute and inoffensive dietary and cosmetic differences) etc.

>You can say that there is "diversity of thought" in a group of white males who all went to ivy leagues because one says he's a libertarian and the other a neo marxist, but that's kinda missing the point.

So is saying there is "diversity of thought" to the kind of people that end up in VC as programmers -- regardless of their ethnicity or gender.

> An indian nerd colleague is OK, as long as they too lived and breathed Star Wars, Lego bricks, old NES consoles, and doesn't bring much in the way of his country's culture (except cute and inoffensive dietary and cosmetic differences) etc.

Have you thought that perhaps they emphasize playing with LEGO and NES games and tone down their culture to "cute inoffensive cosmetic and dietary preferences" because they code switch to fit in?

Yes, but that's orthogonal, since my critique is to the other side. If anything, it furthers my point.

That the other side (let's say "whites") is all about diversity as long as the ethnic others have the same cultural norms and aspirations as them in most areas, except some cutesy details.

Why can't these white males be diverse? Let me expand your example...

> You can say that there is "diversity of thought" in a group of white males who all went to ivy leagues because one worked in the gaming industry in the UK and the other ran his own web company from his laptop as he travelled the United States...

You can still have a diverse workforce if you ignore race and gender. If diversity of thought, gender, and race are in fact correlated as you say, then if you ignore race/gender and try to get the most interesting people, you'll naturally have a that pizza pie as a side-effect, except you won't be racist or sexist about it.

I filter resumes and do interviewing, and I don't care if you are black, asian, white, male, female or whatever. I just want to see how interesting/diverse of a experiences you've had.

> I filter resumes and do interviewing, and I don't care if you are black, asian, white, male, female or whatever. I just want to see how interesting/diverse of a experiences you've had.

And how do you judge "interesting/diverse experiences"? Presumably through your own extremely blind and biased filter (because really we all are). How diverse is your hiring committee?

Yes. We do all have biases, but I feel more comfortable judging what experiences seem interesting rather than which candidate has brown skin. It's racist.

> 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.

Why do you say that it's unimportant?

I can see how you could argue that it's not the only thing that matters and that too much focus is being placed on it, but it is still important for people who are of a gender or race to feel valued, included, and like they are treated equally. Otherwise, they won't be as open to sharing their ideas.

The computer doesn't care what color fingers are hitting the keyboard. Diversity of thought is the goal in the workplace (unless you've got some other diversity metric you need to hit for regulatory reasons). If you've got a group that's very homogeneous except for skin color and gender you're not gonna get much diversity of thought.

You are conflating the goal of gender and race diversity with the goal of having a diverse set of minds. They are both important points of diversity but their goals and means are entirely different discussions.

I'd argue that the difference in background that generally comes from a different skin color will help a lot with being heterogenous.

But wouldn't ignoring gender and race show that you are valuing everybody equally?

Its a Chinese finger trap. You have to ignore race to have better race relations. If you try to nurture race relations, it causes rifts.

I have the same viewpoint as Morgan Freeman on this subject. He said to get rid of racism, you have to "Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man"

Yes, I'm sure skin color and gender seem really "unimportant" when you don't have to worry about being discriminated against on that basis. People like Susan Fowler might feel otherwise though.

Instead of trying to fight over race vs gender vs age vs income diversity, how about we accept that they are all important and we should strive to avoid bias on all fronts.

>For those providing the excuse of culture - culture is something strongly valued in the Bay Area, and it's one of the biggest weaknesses.

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".

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.

If it was in writing you should have absolutely sued. That is clear age discrimination.

To what end? Do you really want to work at a company that you sued and as part of the settlement they had to give you a job? What sort of damages do you think you could convince a judge or jury to give you for 'not hiring' you?

I get that it is wrong, and that the employer's should have some downside for discriminating against older employees (other than losing out on some great employees) but as an individual seeking a job, the downside is much greater for the individual to sue than the company.

Rather than sue, send a note to the National Labor Relations board and have them set up a sting operation and catch them in the act. Justice is served and your life isn't impacted by being part of a lawsuit that would do you no good anyway.

I'm pretty sure that's not what the court would award you, i.e., a job. They would award damages in the form of lost potential income plus punitive damages.

First, Yuuuuge disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and the rules are different pretty much everywhere so, in this context I'm speaking as a California resident about employers in California, and there are reasons it is hard to win a hiring based case[1] ...

To award damages you have to make the case that you were harmed. It is one thing to sue a company that dismisses you for discriminatory reasons, you had a job and a salary, and a court could find that you were discriminated against, so you were "harmed" by the loss of pay. The court could award back pay and punitive damages to make you whole. However if you had yet to be hired, there isn't any way to prove either what your salary would have been, or if you had worked there that you would not have been dismissed for any of a million completely legal reasons. As a result and claim for damages would have to somehow prove that by not hiring you you were somehow not hireable or through perhaps a long an tortuous interview process you were financially harmed. Both very hard to do.

The big difference is that you've never worked there, so you haven't been harmed. However, it is illegal to discriminate and the remedy for illegal discrimination is a fine administered in response to a criminal complaint. That is why you get the NLRB involved, they can bring criminal charges, you can't[2].

[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lawsuits-based-the-hi...

[2] Not strictly true, you could swear out a complaint but it would be up to the District Attorney to decide if they were going to prosecute based on your complaint.

As a California resident who has gone through this, you don't contact the NLRB, you contact the Department of Labor Standards Enforcement first, who in turn takes the case to the NLRB if you can not reach a settlement agreement with the company that discriminated against you.

That's why it's so hard to win a case like this in CA, nobody knows the proper steps to take.

I agree with your response, but you could probably assume someone would make it 2 weeks, couldn't you? Aren't there laws about hiring and having to pay for the first 2 weeks or something, or am I just making that up?

I'm pretty sure suing a potential employer would be a career-damaging move in the eyes of other employers.

most places don't even seem to ask for/call references these days. they're hardly going to conduct a westlaw search to see if you've been involved in litigation.

if you specifically try to get a job with the golf buddy of someone you sued, maybe you'll run into an issue, but there's an elevated likelihood that they're the same brand of asshole you had to sue.

> To what end?

To show the company they were wrong?

In my opinion, the better way to do that. in the US at least, is to report them to the NLRB. The NLRB does take such complaints seriously and they do follow up on them. That can lead to hefty fines. What is more you don't have to pay for a lawyer so it costs you nothing.

Would the company sue you if they had damages to collect from you?

I don't know anyone who was ever happy when they had to deal with lawyers...

And maybe even if not in writing (they would have to swear that they never said this)

There is a reason whey employees over the age of 40 are an legally protected class: your story isn't unique.

Well, they're protected because pretty much all lawmakers are over 40. And over 40s have great lobbyists.

They shouldn't be discriminated against because of their age, but neither should anyone else. Hiring young people because they're cheaper or easier to overwork is pretty messed up across the board.

> Hiring young people because they're cheaper or easier to overwork is pretty messed up across the board.

But hiring employees who are willing to work for less, or for longer hours, is basically exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to work.

> But hiring employees who are willing to work for less, or for longer hours, is basically exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to work.

Unless you are willing to work for less or longer hours, but are still not considered because of some external factor..

Hmmmmm, I wonder if people in their 20s are equally discriminated against but our society as a whole just have less sympathy for them.

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.

>> According to Zuckerberg: "Young people are just smarter."

Well, I come from the future, just fresh off my time machine, and according to Zuckerberg in 2032, "Old people just know more stuff".

Indeed. But I'll be dead, wicked old, or immortal by then, right?

SV thinks it's hot shit, but things like this clearly demonstrate how dumb it is. It matches well the stereotypical "brogrammers" in whose image it was built.

Investors feed the narrative because they need the naive (that is, the young) to pour in and accept the wages of "an apartment split with 8 other guys and some ramen".

Hasn't anyone noticed that Silicon Valley has lost its position as THE place to start a business. There are startup clusters all over the place now, and not just in the USA but in Germany and Moscow and many other countries.

The only thing left that SV has a lock on is some very big VC funds and some part of the buzz around startups. But successful companies are now found in Austin, Vancouver and so on. Perhaps part of the reason is that there is greater diversity in those cities.

That said, I can't imagine suing someone over things like this. Srsly.. if Facebook doesn't want me, or can't handle me, I think it is their loss.

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 think this is the main issue. Hard for them to get enthusiastic with yet another project without clearly defined deliverables and lack of leadership.

Wouldn't this be a chance where an experienced employee would be able to use their skills and experience to help define and lead it?

Every project starts without clearly defined deliverables and a lack of leadership, but hopefully they don't stay that way.

"Wouldn't this be a chance where an experienced employee would be able to use their skills and experience"

Yes, in theory. However, particularly in the case of startups, many of which are led by smart but relatively inexperienced founders, those founders may not have the wisdom or humility to listen to the "grey hairs" who actually have seen the potential failure mode before.

A 24-yr-old CTO may have trouble leading a 55-yr-old software developer who's been coding since before the CTO was born.

Not all, of course, but far from 0%.

Yes it would, but a lot of managers and business leaders don't want that. They want you to do what they say, and also frequently how.

We are also much less likely to want to work 60+ hour weeks. We have kids and have already realized that work is not the most important thing.

I think I can count on my fingers how many times I've created something really good after the 50 hour mark for the week.

What I can't count is the number of times I thought I was creating something really good after the 50 hour mark. The thing is I track outcomes for quite a while, and the math starts to stack up over time, and I just opt out now.

If you're planning to work for a place more than three years, you're going to end up being the one who ends up paying for the bad ideas, whether you can connect the dots or not. You can keep almost anything working for 15-18 months, beyond that the wheels want to come off.

So don't bullshit them.

Source: Am management.

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.

I see people as young as 25 being set in there ways as well when it comes to the latest hipster trends. For example we had a heated argument about Vue vs React at work the other day. Turns out the other party arguing in favor of Vue had actually never even used React before. They were just blindly recycling the same bike-shedded arguments against JSX as every other middle-tier dev I have ever encountered seems regurgitate. You can get set in your ways at any age.

The solution to the happy-hour problem is to have your happy hours during work, not after hours. Even I, who am young, healthy, no kids and loves beer, would get tired of having to go to xyz happy hour at 6p.m just to keep my edge.

The other thing: I bet that old guy is the first one in every morning. And probably brings his lunch every day. Also is not interested in an afternoon ping pong break. Translation: He or she probably actually works more, despite being "at work" less.

> I see people as young as 25 being set in there ways as well when it comes to the latest hipster trends

I once watched a fistfight almost break out in the office over threads vs. event loops. Both engineers were in their mid 20's (as I was, at the time).

From my limited experience, pig headedness seems to be a personality trait - not something intrinsically age related.

Totally true, I sit at my desk at 7am work till 6pm. The kids come in at 11am and do oh so much over time when working till 7pm. And don't get me started about their relationship problems. And this happy hour is the worst social thing ever. I work in London and there are a lot of people here who don't drink alcohol because of religious reasons or it's not a big part of their culture. Happy hour is only social for people who like to get drunk. No problem with that but a company with a drinking culture will never be diverse and will therefor suffer creatively. I once managed a super multi cultural team (9 nationalities and 5 different religions). We socialised by going to a museum or a historical walk through London. That said, I see a lot of young people who can only can do small talk after a couple of drinks. Which is a shame because it shows when new people join the team.

I don't think that many people would consider 7AM to 6PM a reasonable expectation of work unless you're in the game development industry (and even then not reasonable, just expected).

I get that it might be amusing for you when people complain about an overtime that's three hours less than your total workday, but it really is quite unnatural for someone to work for that long. Spending 70% of your waking hours at work is not something to be proud of.

The rest is quite good to hear as an anecdote, however. It's great to hear about teams that socialize in a way that doesn't involve beer, pingpong, or partying. Strange sort of frat culture that we live in.

> I sit at my desk at 7am work till 6pm. The kids come in at 11am and do oh so much over time when working till 7pm.

Why are you working 11-hour days when your colleagues are working 8-hour days?

Efficiency: I do my thinking/coding/building/writing (not writing emails) in the morning before anyone comes in and can interrupt me. I plan all meetings (which I don't consider proper work) in the afternoons. In short: work first, chatting and socialising afterwards. Some people do like to do it the other way around, which I totally understand and respect. I'm more of a morning person. TDLR; My first 8 hours I start with creating value and at the end of the day I a put in a few extra hours (not always) to socialise ;-)

At my office, we play darts and drink beer for the last hour and a half of every Friday. The majority of the time everyone is there and we spend a lot of time chatting while we play. It's fun and I really think it keeps everyone friendly, it's that much easier to remember the other person is a real person when you disagree.

Sometime people go out to a bar or something afterwards. I may feel like I'm missing out but it never feels like something I "should" be doing.

> Turns out the other party arguing in favor of Vue had actually never even used React before.

It's entirely possible to do your research and evaluate a framework, language, or tool without having to use it, just like I don't have to go out and shoot some smack to know that heroin is probably not for me. Being able to evaluate what your needs and wants for a tool are, without having to write a To Do list is a useful skill.

You're comparing a short experiment with no side effects to getting possibly addicted for life though... Sure, you could research some tech from the books and references, but that's never the same as having an experimental, hands-on experience. Mostly because people almost never have the exact same use case as you, so you may realise what's missing in a few minutes of experimenting - but nobody wrote about it before, because it wasn't relevant for them.

Research may be enough. But research + trying a simple prototype is always better.

Knowing Cobol, Algol, Fortran, APL, Lisp, PL/I, several assembler languages, several scripting languages, etc., actually, maybe surprisingly, does not damage the brain!

There is a lot in, say, PL/I that should be in more recent languages but is not. Gee, guys, C was always supposed to be a toy language, to run on an 8KB DEC PDP-8 (IIRC), and C++ was originally just a Bell Labs pre-processor to C. In contrast, PL/I was a very carefully designed language. IIRC the Multics and Primos operating systems were written basically in PL/I.

Yes, D. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is old, but heap sort, the Gleason bound, and AVL trees are all in there and still relevant. Also that is one of the best places to learn the combinatorial and probabilistic math for finding big-O evaluations.

But, statistics in Python and R? Some people got started in such things by writing their own code, using the IBM Scientific Subroutine Library, using SPSS and SAS. So, who is better at digging into statistics via Python and R? Also some of the older guys actually took good courses in mathematical statistics and know about minimum variance, unbiased, maximum likelihood, statistical hypothesis tests and the Neyman-Pearson result, etc.

"Primos operating systems were written basically in PL/I."

I thought Primos was supposed to be some Fortran dialect (FORTRAN IV in Wikipedia). Then a PL/I variant much later. I've been citing it as an OS written in a Fortran-like language given I had no data countering that. You got some?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRIMOS

The first versions of Primos were written in a slightly tweaked Fortran. The PL/I role was significant but later.

I managed a Prime system when I was in grad school and later lead an effort to get a later Prime system when I was a B-school prof.

That makes sense. Was there anything good or unique you remember about it versus the competition? Or just a boring also-ran of that period?

I remember a lot that was "good or unique":

Prime was a cheap Multics complete with processor security rings, gate segments for user programs to call into the OS, an hierarchical file system, and capabilities and attribute control list hierarchies based on the hierarchical file system. The file system used the relatively large physical record size of 4096 bytes, and the file system continued to work great as we ran hard disks for years without ever once doing anything like a decompression to get all the physical records of a file closer together on the disk for better performance.

For more performance, they had closely coupled systems.

The terminal I/O was super nice and easy to use, 8 bit ASCII at 9600 bits per second, easy DIY cabling, with easy to use DC1/DC3 XON/XOFF handshaking protocol that worked well with lots of ASCII devices, e.g., a nice HP color plotter and the Xerox Diablo daisy wheel printers. Users were not locked into too expensive terminals but could do well with just dumb glass teletypes.

Their standard text editor had some nice ability to be programmed, and they had a nice interpretive scripting language. They had a plenty good enough word processing program well in the theme of the Bell Labs RUNOFF. Prime used that and daisy wheel printers to prepare their documentation.

It has been claimed that the Intel 286 architecture borrowed heavily from Prime's architecture.

On the first Prime I managed, I did a lot of applied math for US national security and also did the software and typing for my dissertation. One prof needed a little clarification in one paragraph, so on the weekend I typed again for a few minutes, had the daisy wheel printer retype the whole dissertation, and submitted the new version on Monday. That is the version that was accepted.

Our work for the Navy very much needed better word whacking: Once we submitted a report from typewriters with so much correction fluid the Navy refused the report. As soon as people saw the file system, terminals, text editor, RUNOFF, and the daisy wheel printer, each of the secretaries begged for and got their own terminal, quickly got a little instruction, taught themselves, kicked their typewriters out the door, and became terrific with word processing. Suddenly the volume and quality of the word processing went through the roof.

We paid for the Prime with about 18 months of our earlier time sharing bills and got MUCH more computing than we ever had on time sharing.

The Prime I helped the B-school with did student work, faculty work, administrative work, alumni office work for fund raising from alumni, and word processing.

The alumni office did a little work with data base and sent boxes of personalized letters to alumni for fund raising. The little system the student assistants put together was copied by the central university computing group for use for the whole campus. Just from the alumni work, the system likely paid for itself in green dollars many times over.

We had a quite nice collection of scientific and engineering software, actually nicer than the IBM Watson lab at Yorktown Heights had when I later went there for work in an AI group.

The system was wildly successful for years.

To me, at the time, Primos was nicely better than Unix. Prime had a great opportunity to port Primos to the Intel 286/386 but didn't and missed out.

IIRC, the first computing Bloomberg used for his trader information terminals was from Prime.

Prime had a good thing going, but Wintel beat them but should not have been able to. Primos was far ahead of Windows for a long time and could have been ported to Intel long before, say, Windows NT or 2000. And I can believe that Primos was relatively secure.

IIRC, Primos ran in about 40 KB so would fit into even the 640 KB of the first PCs and certainly would fit in the memories of the 286 and 386 systems that ran Windows 95, NT, 2000, etc.

When I was in grad school, I was reading the material from D. Knuth about his TeX mathematical typesetting system and hoped to get that on the Prime at the B-school. Well, one of our bright computer center guys got started on porting TeX to Prime. We met Knuth at a conference, and thanks to that guy our Prime became the official distribution point for TeX on Prime. The same guy also got us going on e-mail.

The B-school Prime was a good site and very successful for 10+ years.

Complain about the cyclical nature of programming.

After you've seen the same mistakes repeated with a cycle of about 15 years, that happens.

Yeah, maybe instead of complaining about that complaining, it would behoove folks to take it seriously and make a study of prior art a part of their workflow. Those cyclical-nature complainers are a great resource for pointers!

I've found this to be true. Helped me solve lots of problems in highly-assured systems and INFOSEC. Hint: I just started with stuff people did (currently) almost 40+ years ago with some of foundations nearly 60. A lot of it still worked in similar contexts. It's why I drop so many links and references to prior art here.

For what it's worth, I usually find your links very interesting. Thanks!

>" ... 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 ..."

Remove the word "decade" and that could describe people from just about any demographic in tech - millennials, Gen X, etc.

>"and complain about the cyclical nature of programming"

How is complaining about that particular thing different or worse than complaining about why language X sucks because it doesn't have generics or feaure ____" or any of the other complaints about various languages or frameworks that come up on HN all the time?

>"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."

The only way to get to know people is to go drinking after work? You know you can go out for coffee and lunch with people too right? Or is that somehow less meaningful because it doesn't involve booze or craft beers?

Honestly your comments come off as ageist.

Years in the stack of choice is almost the worst possible choice when looking for people. Someone with 20 years _ learned stuff during that time period unless they are a drooling idiot.

The most practical reason to look for younger workers is to find people willing to work below their market rate because they are bad at negotiation. A decade of 5-10% raises can usually keep them happy which is a huge net win as they end up even further behind what the market would pay them. The problem is they only ever learn your internal system and often become blind to it's issues.

I think most tech workers would know the market rates for their position at least 1 year into their first job. Even if they don't want to - e.g. the recruiter who placed them calls them up 6 months later for a friendly chat. "We just want to check that you are happy!".

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.

This, right here, is why Silicon Valley has problems with diversity. As a rule of thumb, the only people who actually want to go to happy hour with their co-workers after 8+ hours of taxing mental work are 1) young 2) white and 3) extroverted. In other words, they fit the "brogrammer" stereotype. I've never really liked going out with my co-workers after work. When I'm done, I want to go home and decompress, not deal with another two or three hours of enforced social interaction.

In my experience going out to happy hour suggests young and extroverted not necessarily white.

Glad you recognize it for what it is: bias. This is exactly what prejudice looks like. Take a small sample, derive a generalization, rationalize it, let it affect your judgement. At least you're aware of it, and hopefully fight it within yourself to try and work with the most talented people regardless of background.

I want to add something to my snappy answer. Age discrimination is just another facet of lack of diversity and rejection of difference that plagues many industries.

Your well-intentioned comment has the pattern:

"I've worked with some extremely smart <class of people>, who <positive comment>. My impression is that usually, in my experience, <display a different pattern of thinking to what I expect>. 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.

It's just that most of the <class of 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 <class of people> one has the baggage(?) of <difference>. I would likely have an unconscious bias to hire the <more similar to the norm> one."

Now, replace <class of people> with "women" or "muslims" and think about how it feels for people to be cast in a generalization. If it's not right in those cases, it's not right for experienced developers either.

"and complain about the cyclical nature of programming"

What is wrong with this? There are cycles in our industry. Sure, it's not exactly the same each time around but the themes go back and forth.

I agree with you.

At the risk of speaking for someone else, my impression is that "cyclical nature" is fighting the last battle filtered through cognitive dissonance. It also comes across as aloof and/or academic to some people.

>> 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

This should vary with context and one must be humble enough to accept the grey hair's argument backed by facts if it is valid and move on. Win win for everyone.

>> 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 dont' understand this craze to know them? Why, for what?

If after working/collaborating for 8 hours with some one over days/weeks/months, you cannot figure out their personality and working style and as long as it is not a disruptive one, there is no point in knowing. This knowing is just substitute for loose pointless talk.

>> I would likely have an unconscious bias to hire the younger one.

We as a software industry must seriously look at how successful sports teams are run and stop this BS about we a family etc whose frailty shows up come layoff time! Every successful sport team is always a MIX of YOUTH and EXPERIENCE.

I think experience makes you humbler, at least it has in my case. You realize you don't know everything, it's always good to have someone to review/give alternate explanations and methods, and that things are not usually as simple as the appear at first. I'm a far better listener, more openminded, and willing to accept feedback from others than I was when I started my career.

If they are set in their ways, how did they get to the point of having the required experience using Angular as well as the rest of the stack?

I think this is more of a generational issue, I don't think it's all about age. People in their forties today seem way easier to deal with then the people in their forties that I worked with out of college.

Why?

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!

> 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.!).

In every job that I've had, I've known more than my manager. This isn't particularly surprising because their job is to manage rather than know the things that I know.

This is known as "A people hire A people. B people hire C people".

> Overall I'm just not sure I understand the economic reasons for wanting to only hire young people.

Cheap + naive + feeling they need to prove themselves.

It's all about costs and exploitation ;)

> feeling they need to prove themselves

To be fair, if you've only had the one boss, 100% of your bosses feel the way your current boss does. There literally aren't any other examples in your work history that you can use to prove (to yourself or to others) that your boss is unreasonable or incompetent.

I also think undergraduate programs could do a better job preparing students for this sort of problem. You don't learn except through experience or maybe good mentoring that chronic crunch-time-to-meet-deadlines is a management failure, not a sign of developer incompetence.

But, yeah, I agree that bosses exploit young employees.

Young employees exploit themselves. A bad boss could make it worse but there doesn't need to be one at all.

It might be some who is so young might feel uncomfortable managing some who is older and more experienced. The lack of confidence and self esteem might throw a monkey-wrench in what could be an effective relationship.

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.

A while ago there was an article in Germany about that ( to expensive to hire) it comes all down to cost.

Cheaper is better. That's all.

Would love to see a source.

Cheaper is not always better. Really what you're looking for is value, which is how much you pay for what you get. More value is always better.

If you have two people that both know nothing, scoop up the one for less pay. But if someone knows something, they might be worth the extra money because they can provide more value.

Otherwise why would anyone ever get a raise?

Seems pretty clear:

older people have more years experience, thus demand a higher salary.

> I don't doubt that there's age discrimination going on in the industry.

I actually do, but I'm eager to be convinced by facts.

How would you measure this? Does anyone do that?

The article references this study: http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...

... which is based on the rate of response to resumes that were identical except for age, submitted to thousands of job openings.

There's also the whistleblower info that forms the basis of the RJ Reynolds lawsuit, which states they explicitly told recruiters to avoid experienced candidates in favor of people two or three years out of college.

This allegedly resulted in a unusually low number of people over 40 being hired (19 out of 1000). Similar statistics have been used recently in lawsuits against Yahoo and Google for alleged gender and age discrimination (still pending, afaik)

Pros outweigh the cons.

Of course, that's from an employee perspective :)

Older employees often have families and are less naive, therefore harder to exploit

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.

I think part of this is a control/power issue. Older people have more experience and hopefully more knowledge. They bring a lot to the table. Part of the issue is that this can intimidate the young 20-somethings you see taking on leadership roles with their cavalier elon-musk-type I-can-do-anything-from-first-principles attitude. Except that it doesn't always go down well that way and teams can benefit from elders with more experience. Obviously not trying to explain the entire picture here, but this is definitely something I've seen. Another thing I've noticed is that older people are harder to mold.. they do have their own set of ways, the cultures they've imbibed from the previous companies they've worked at, and sometimes it doesn't go well with the folks who've grown up entirely within the current company. I personally find the differences refreshing, but it takes some maturity to understand that I suppose.

And yet you don't see this in other fields. (Sports? Well, that's on the tin. You do see it in manual labor though :) Take science, for example. There, the older set suffocates the younger ones and they dream of regicide and paradigm shifts.

So imo the underlying issue is that software work, unless it rakes in bags of cash, is not respected as a professional field. (Ever see anyone push to "teach kids how to argue a case in court!"? Coding is information age labor. Needs "young muscle" paraphrasing our absent host, Paul G.)

Possibly something has gone wrong if you are chasing programming work after 40 -- channeling society here, relax -- and yet as an older gentleman coder :) I take quiet satisfaction at the self destructive behavior of the young filters poo pooing "experience". 40 rolls over before you know it. Ding.

FYI, court cases are not a good example of this. Mock trial is quite popular.

Two more pros: older employees don't need to take care of sick kids as often (when their kids are older).

Also, in my experience, younger employees are more prone to leaving after a couple of years, because they want to see what else is out there. Whereas older employees tend to stay longer (have already seen many different places).

I don't have kids personally, but I'd absolutely love to see numbers on how many sick days parents take for the kids. I just can't imagine it being so high that it would really matter. Versus say, flu season, where the flu spreads rapidly through entire teams and floors of open offices.

That being said, people with kids do typically have stricter schedules (like picking up kids from daycare) than people without kids.

Interesting point on the staying longer. The amount of time you sink into training a person on your system / codebase / company etc you're not getting back. People generally only start to become productive after a couple of months anyway.

(Edited: you said it was a pro)

I have three kids. When one kid gets sick, the others get sick too, but not at the same time. It's usually a week later for one, and a week after that for the other. Now we're talking about sick time spread across three weeks.

It's really frustrating that parents bring their sick kids to school, and even sick teachers show up to teach because they can't afford to take the time off (apparently). This winter was brutal, I've pretty much spent all of my vacation time just taking care of my family.

Obviously this is just an anecdote but I suspect that many parents are either taking a lot of time off, or just dropping their sick kids off at school.

A few years ago, in my old job, I was talking to the marketing team about something. One of them mentioned that she rarely gets sick, but she never lets something as minor as a cold or flu stop her, and she still comes into work because she's tough.

I had a go at her, because I'm asthmatic. Someone brought a cold into my previous job, and I spent six months with the symptoms of it (really). Another time, someone brought a cold in that hit my asthma so bad that I needed a break after rolling over in bed. My doctor nearly hospitalized me over that - apparently my airways were really narrow.

The other woman from the marketing team jumped in, explaining that she doesn't usually get the cold, but takes the disease home on her hands and clothes, her young kids pick it up, and then she ends up spending a month off looking after them, using all her vacation time just like you did. After all her kids have been sick with it, she'll get it, and she doesn't have any vacation or sick days left.

In the end, it turned out that the hero who never let a "minor illness" get in the way hadn't thought about anybody else catching it.

Isn't it sometimes that younger people don't want to work for dad/mom?

When there are big age differences, there are natural tendencies towards aggressive prove-yourself competition or slightly compliant deference. These are probably built into the primate minds that we all have.

True peer relationships of any kind are much rarer across decades than between people of similar ages. And there are good reasons for that - not least the way that different decades tend to have different life challenges.

So I think discussions about the merits - or not - of older people are beside the point. If most people in an office are in their 20s, hiring someone in their 50s as a peer is going to be pretty awkward for everyone.

Of course this isn't how it should be. But - no matter what the law says - it's not very realistic to pretend it isn't an issue.

The solution, if there is one, is to deliberately create a polyculture of diversity of all kinds. Hire people of all ages, cultures, genders, and backgrounds. Dammit. Then everyone gets to be different, and the culture has the potential to be a lot less linear.

But SV isn't so interested in that. Until mostly white/asian bright shiny people in their 20s stop beaming enthusiastically out of "About us" pages - extra points for a group shot - SV will continue to be a monoculture, and a lot of practical talent and experience from outside the bubble will continue to be wasted.

The common culture/perspective point is the most important single factor in the old vs young workplace decision. It's the 'Hey nineteen' phenomena.

At almost 50 the desire to spend 8 hours a day with 20-30 year olds, encouraging enthusiasms, persevering in mentoring and then learning/acceptance of new ideas/tools, being persuasive about experiences in project scope/direction and contributing as part of a growing creative team effort is exhausting.

Not to mention the older you get in this industry you see a lot of reinvention/progress the 'wrong way' (or blatant ripoffs done for profit) which you just become opinionated about.

Why is this hard to understand?

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.

---

[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...

Just to be clear: are you advocating that all organizations be required to perform this "anonymous" form of hiring, lest they face the long arm of the law?

I think that's crazy. Talent seeking is a space where diversity makes a great deal of sense, as evinced by the fact that many very diverse companies do very well.

I'm confused -- anonymity wouldn't affect diversity, unless the organization was discriminating to begin with.

What are your arguments against anonymity, exactly?

I don't know if this is the specific problem that the person you are responding to was alluding to, but: a purely anonymous system is going to end up with hiring tons of young white males--surely fewer than a company that actively discriminates against other groups, but noticibly more than a company that is actively looking for diversity--due to young white makes making up a large percentage of the available talent pool at any given level of expertise (due to a combination of factors, including but not limited to all of "available time", "increasing population", "availability bias", and "systemic oppression"). A company might specifically find value in "we don't just want the world's best engineers: we want a diverse set of backgrounds and viewpoints", and a forced anonymous hiring process actually removes the ability to do that, which might actually help continue to entrench the systemic oppression issue (as then everyone builds things for the same market demographic as that's all they understand).

A lot of what you say really requires some evidence.

For example:

> a purely anonymous system is going to end up with hiring tons of young white males-

A system that's non anonymous has already proven itself to hire a ton of young white males...

> surely fewer than a company that actively discriminates against other groups, but noticibly more than a company that is actively looking for diversity-

Citations needed.

> A company might specifically find value in "we don't just want the world's best engineers: we want a diverse set of backgrounds and viewpoints",

Discrimination isn't good, period. That means discriminating for or against white males. Also, you imply that the groups I mentioned couldn't succeed on their own merit.

Overall, you basically encourage discrimination. Got it.

A lot of what you say really requires some evidence.

You literally just kicked off a discussion by using four op-ed pieces as sources. You have no grounds to tell people their posts require some evidence.

Get some actual facts and figures and then make your point.

His point is actually your point, but less emotional.

Also, in debate, you have neither the grounds to speak or be silent. Rules to free discussion exist because we want them to.

If it's okay to hire for diversity, is it okay to say "I only want to hire white guys in their 20s and 30s"? If not, why not? Is there proof that "diversity hiring" (back in the day we called this "affirmative action", the lingo changes but the goals remain the same) provides substantial benefits to an organization? If so, fantastic! We should promote it across the industry. I have yet to see any data that this is the case though.

"In God We Trust; all others bring data"

Anonymity would not affect diversity, but it would not necessarily enforce it. Indeed until all races, genders, sexual orientation, socioeconomic strata, etc. apply in identical numbers, one must discriminate in order to guarantee diversity.

EDIT: Upon further reflection, anonymity could help combat ageism (scrubbing specific graduation and employment dates, for example). but in the general sense I believe the point still stands.

How do you anonymously interview for cultural fit?

You don't, because "culture fit" sounds nice but in practice means "excuse for otherwise-illegal discrimination".

Isn't the purpose of anonymity in this situation to ensure that the best candidates get hired? Wouldn't diversity be the natural result, assuming that diverse types of candidates are qualified? I'm not advocating for this as law but I feel like this would encourage rather than discourage diversity.

This is part of why I dislike employment anti-discrimination laws. They probably worked better for manual labor and other commodity jobs. A compromise would be to limit them to these kinds of jobs.

I'd suggest providing sources that aren't op-ed pieces - one of them from a tabloid - if you want to be taken seriously.

Which of the following do you not believe? All of these are common knowledge. I don't have time to be educating people won't aren't aware of basic facts. Maybe you're not from the U.S, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt(all of the links I posted link to actual sources, anyway).

1. Women are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

2. Minorities are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

3. Older Americans (unnecessary, as the evidence is already provided) are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

4. Foreigners are discriminated against in the workplace in the United States.

What I believe or not is completely irrelevant - that's an attempt on your behalf of re-framing what I said, and I reject it.

If you want a serious informed discussion on these issues, find some reasonably impartial and factual sources with real figures, not op-ed pieces from your favourite partisan publications. If you don't have time to provide sources, then I'd suggest not talking about the topic since you're ill-equipped to discuss it.

However, checking the past experience of the applicant -- which seems perfectly reasonable for the hiring company to do -- would still allow discrimination against older Americans and foreigners. I'm not sure how that could be fixed even with anonymity.

simple: You don't write all of your experience in your resume, only the experience relevant to the job you apply for. They want 5-7 years experience in Java? List only your last two Java jobs, don't mention that you did 15 years of C++ before that.

That's easy for someone who's worked at many different companies. What about the applicant who's primarily worked for a single company for many years? This is much more likely to be true for an older applicant. Do you lie about how many years you worked at the company?

Regardless, it still doesn't solve the problem for foreigners who may have only worked for companies outside the US.

Government does this where they use civil service exams.

The problem is that maintaining a meaningful evaluation process is difficult. So the exams tend to remove some forms of discrimination, especially against women, but reinforce others, and create other issues too. The process works overall.

In one place I'm familiar with, black and Latino minorities candidates successfully sued because although the candidates had good professional credentials and outcomes, the test disadvantaged them because their educations in grade/high school tended to suck and people in these categories did more poorly in questions regarding English grammar, analogies, etc. Foreign born people have a similar experience.

If you use these types of methods to hire people, you'll need to adopt government style hiring practices. If you need 3 people, hire 5, because you're likely to be forced to hire some duds. When duds are too bad and firing gets difficult, you promote the idiots, etc.

What are the other forms of discrimination that are reinforced? I'm still unconvinced that anonymous interviewing isn't superior in every way for those who are currently discriminated against.

It seems most of the counter arguments basically say "you'll discriminate," unrealizing that occurs, either way.

The cultural discrimination that I cited is one example.

You also create a system where people who are good at testing or manipulating systems will excel in. Personally, I've found in the .gov environments that the best technical people score in the 80-85 range. The people who do better on the exams tend to come from certain less technical backgrounds or job roles.

Taking human judgement out of the process just displaces accountability to some test or other assessment. IMO, the way to fix these things is to treat hiring like an incident. Do a post-mortem/debrief, document how decisions are made. Coach people hiring to be better at it.

Does someone doing anonymous screening get to see the past experience of the candidate?

If so, it doesn't solve the issues raised in this article.

I also don't believe that the hiring process can be made 100% anonymously, with a total lack of bias. That would be impossible. You have to meet with the candidate in person at some point, and get to see what they look like and learn their name.

In the actual research [1] you can see that the discrimination is also affected by gender. In any case, anonymous interviewing doesn't inherently require one to see the duration of ones past experience.

I agree the implementation could be tricky, but in any case, it's better than what currently exists.

[1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...

Maybe only mention recent experiences, say, last 8 or 10 years.

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.

younger engineers "want" tough I want 50k a year

Isn't it more likely that younger, fresh out of school employees have less leverage and it's easier to get more hours for less pay out of them?

Isn't the most obvious reason cost?

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.

The costs are higher today than 25 years ago. A dozen employees at $150/month/employee (10% increase at $1500/month) is nearly $50k/year. That's meaningful money in a lot of contexts.

It's also worth considering that most older job candidates aren't in a highly skilled occupation like accounting where experience often adds value. Most employees are more fungible, particularly outside the world of startups.

Just for clarity HIPAA changed the landscape for pre-existing conditions in 1997.

>> 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"?

He said economically rational which it is. It has nothing to do with whether or not the decision helps you sleep well or not. From a pure economic perspective its the right decision to make.

I'm so not making a moral point. What I'm saying is that, practicallly speaking, thinking only of yourself in the here and now is in the long run detrimental to your own best interest, counterintuitive as that may be.

Selfishness is not rational. It's dumb people's rationalisation of their own short-termist stupidity that calls it rational.

You said you are not making a moral point then proceed to talk about selfishness and morality.

Economic rationals provide an explanation. They does not imply the behavior is moral or ethical absent some theory that equates economic rationality with moral/ethical propriety.

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.

If the average duration of tech employment is less than five years, how is that relevant?

Because you don't know which of the five years the employee will select to retire, and because they're getting into the range where it's not unreasonable to suppose that over a period of some years, they may need long leaves of absence to address medical conditions, etc.

To be clear, I'm not justifying this attitude. Just explaining how it can be expensive to have older employees, even excluding potential impact on group insurance rates. Of course, on the flip side, you get a lot of benefits from a highly experienced, highly mature workforce.

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 similarly have mentioned having a family in the past during interviews. If interviewers dislike the work/life balance considerations that come with kids, I'd much rather find out about it in that interview than on the job.

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.

[1] https://www.faa.gov/jobs/career_fields/aviation_careers/ [2] http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/faa-aviation-...

Fascinating. From what I remember reading about it, air traffic control is a tough job. Very stressful, long hours, have to be sharp, but quite routine. It's a very downside protection job and seems to have the kind of properties that would benefit from some serious (partial) automation.

In my first job we had a PM who was completely fried. Always on edge, super stressed, not quite right. It was explained to me that up until not long before that she had been an air traffic controller and this is what the job did to people.

I have no idea to this day if that was a n=1 anecdata or if that's true, but it left a lasting impression in my head.

Air traffic control sounds like the last place you'd want long hours. How are longer hours better than less hours and more shifts?

Alternative viewpoint:

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.

It makes sense. It is not age bias, it is knowledge bias.

You may be a good employee when you have experience, but you may also know what to expect from a "good management", like paying the hours worked.

For instance, I have been literally barred from an interview because they made explicit references to young people being more flexible about accepting to work (way) more than the announced weekly work hours on the contract for free. I said I would accept without making a fuss, they did not trust me.

Actually they were right; if you try to trick me, I will do too.

This is true. Having a few people at the top who can give a product direction is really all you need.

Implementation is easily done by delegating. You give a chunk to the person who is in their early 30s, and they give smaller pieces to the more junior people. It's cheap, it's effective, and people learn.

or you can stack a team with half a dozen 40 year olds and one guy in his 20s and he gets to do all the bullshit that the older people don't want to bother with.

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.

Just for the record I've worked on large codebases but 100,000 LOC isnt the goal just an example. Mastery of course (typically) yields smaller code bases.

The answer is networking. You've been great for years, you should have a stable of former coworkers and managers who desperately wish you would join them on their new project. Hiring a principal developer is a major investment, I wouldn't do it based only on what a person can claim in an interview.

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 could go on...

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.

I'm 37, I've been programming since I was 7.

I get more done in a day than I did in two days at 27 and a week or two at 17.

I'm no smarter or dumber than I was at 27 or 17 but I have a much more intuitive grasp of what will and won't work and I don't paint myself into corners with elaborate what-if's, I solve solutions in the simplest way that will work with some head room if I need to change it later, I religiously document my code as it goes to production because I know if history is any guide the idiot refactoring it in 6 months will be me and I've learnt that good code that works for a year and can be done in a day beats perfect code that will work for two years when both will be changed in 6 months when the current requirements go out the window.

As for the maximum complexity of mental model thing I'm not sure that is true either but it's hard to say I don't write code in a way that I'm constantly butting the limit of what the maximum complexity I can put into my head is anymore.

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it. - Brian Kernighan

I'm about to turn 40 and at the top of my game. Unless some magic spell hits me when my next birthday comes, I'm not real worried about this elephant you speak of.

It's about staying on top of your skills and never assuming you know enough. Always be learning. Most older devs that I know that started sliding into irrelevance did so because they didn't keep up on that.

I think you raise a great point. Perhaps I'm conflating some issues that should really be separate.

It would be interesting to see a breakdown of why older devs get less awesome over time. I can imagine a variety of causes:

- Slower learning due to reduced brain plasticity.

- Early stages of dementia.

- More poorly rested due to kids, age-related physical discomfort during sleeping, or obesity-based sleep apnea.

- Reduced focus on career development due to getting comfortable and/or responsibilities outside of work (child-rearing, etc.) This includes less time on evenings / weekends to self-learn new technologies.

- Reduced exposure to new technologies, because they're now so expensive that employers only want to pay them to work in their current niche(s) of expertise.

- False perception that they actually are less awesome. E.g., they write half as much code as before, because of a better idea about what's a waste of time.

Not sure about the maximum complexity point. I like to think i'm thinking about things with very crisp abstractions, so i avoid some pointless complexity i used to deal with.

Processing complex models though? No. Now i actually process them. I know the 50 things that could be horrible when facing a new environment, and i go look for them. My old strategy was to hope i'd be smart enough to deal with whatever i ran into. This is still the case, but i figure it out now, rather than 2 weeks or months down the road.

I don't meet a lot of old arrogant programmers, the kind with false bravado. It's not bragging if you can do it. I think that's a losing strategy. I try to be humble, and save the bravado for just after shipping. And do that in a very inclusive way. We did it, not I did it.

Condescension is another one i struggled with a bit. That's a long term losing strategy imho. Much better to ask gentle questions about, what happens when the network is unavailable, or what if thread A has the lock when thread B comes rolling in?

I guess, as a younger programmer, i had quite a few ugly personality traits because i was young and dumb. Those are tolerable when you're cheap. Those are tolerable when you're junior.

One other key, i think, is not presenting things like look at what I did, or look at what I'm going to do. Rather, share the magic. We (our organization) got to build this super neat thing that i'm exited about, and you should share in the excitement because it's super cool. Bring people along for the ride, let them share in the joy we all experience building cool stuff. It's easy to slip, and think I did the whole thing single handedly - bosses make time for me to work on something to the exclusion of everything else, my peers cover bugs and other projects so i can do my stuff. Everyone helped create an environment for me, so i could build cool stuff.

My peers likely don't care much at all, but enthusiasm is infectious. They're often happy for me, and inadvertently happy in general because they see progress.

A lot of people fall into the trap of, this place would fall apart without me and i should be worshiped. No. It's really unlikely the place will fall apart. It might suck for a few weeks or months, but ultimately they'll figure out your stuff or replace it, and you'll be forgotten.

At 45 I might not be as quick, in some respects, as I was twenty years ago, but I know a lot more now. A _lot_ more. That's enough to make me far more valuable, even if I've lost a step here and there.

> 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

I believe this is dated, latest research indicates different types of intelligence as we age - https://qz.com/857430/researchers-have-identified-the-types-...

Then again at universities, isn't it generally the older profs and not the fresh postdocs doing the most novel work?

Citation?

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.

Did anyone notice that they specifically ask for a lower GPA?

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.

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".

As an engineering major, you won't have time for anything outside of school.

I should clarify, I've only seen this in CS, which is a far cry from an engineering workload in most places.

It could be a cultural thing, they want those that care more about having fun than just keeping their nose down and doing the work.

Or they may be want people who aren't very bright because they might be willing to take more abuse from management?

>they want those that care more about having fun than just keeping their nose down and doing the work

This is purely anecdotal, but many 4.0 students I knew in college were not at all interested in "keeping their nose down and doing the work." They were 100% interested in having "4.0 GPA" on their resume which generally meant doing very well on tests, everything else be damned. So they were awful to have in a project groups and didn't participate in any activities because it didn't contribute to their GPA at all.

Or maybe they want people who wouldn't be able to easily switch jobs as soon as shit hits the fan.

They hired a Police recruiter.

Yes, and they seem to want frat boys.

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 guess is that the market for high quality software engineering simply isn't there at scale. A lot of what we use day to day really just scrapes by the threshold of passable. So that's the bar they need to clear. If your customers are content paying you for 80% reliability, why pay for engineers who can deliver 5 9s?

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.

Your dad is 90 IMO enjoy more time with him than to waste his remaining time on some lawyer.

> No one wants to hire my mom > There's not a university that wouldn't hire her

Something doesn't sound right.

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?

As Keynes (or someone else [1]) said in a somewhat different context, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent."

[1] http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

In arbitrage you make money from the market being irrational so remaining solvent could not be a concern for somebody doing it. It's for the market being arbitraged to become rational or become insolvent.

I believe age-based discrimination can happen to anyone of any age. The government does not:

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.

How much of this is explained by increasing health insurance rates if your company has an older age pool?

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.

Then US hospitals should provide free healthcare for all and not insist on getting insurance details before providing actual health care. Glad you see the whole picture and embrace SOCIAList ideals like the rest of the planet.

My thinking exactly, and you can easily make that entire line of thinking moot by contracting.

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.

I imagine that if I knew your name and email address, i would have enough information to find the year you were born on the internet. Not having an online presence is a red flag, unfortunately.

Hehe, actually in my line of work, it's an asset.

I'm a young developer, but if my experience is anything to go by I think that this age bias is driven by a desire for cost-efficiency over quality. It's cheaper per unit of work (for some fuzzy definition of unit of work) to hire two young developers than one experienced one, even if the quality of the latter's work would be superior. I'd say I'm a good developer, but I think my employability is as much due to my low wage requirements as it is due to my skill.

A possible factor (but not the only one) - older workers are more expensive to hire due to higher salary expectations and higher health costs. That would make them unappealing to a whole swath of companies - the ones with limited hiring budgets, the ones with simple enough job requirements that a new-ish grad can do them for cheap etc etc.

It would be interesting to see the data pertaining to salary+health costs based on age.

I left the bay area last summer for this very reason. I had a recruiter at an agency in SF tell me how my resume should look for a "candidate my age" and sent me a resume of an older candidate so that I could follow the format. The bay area is the worst for age discrimination. It's the subtle bias I find disturbing. I know a lot of awesome software engineers who are over 40.

This is a huge issue for my mom - she's an amazing designer (graphic and general), but she stopped working to take care of me and my siblings, and now she can't find a job anywhere. She always makes it to some end round, but is passed off for someone younger. I wish I could help somehow :/

I've said it before as an 'older dude', network, network, network.

I'm not trying to downplay any one person's hardships, but if tou have a good netoekr of people that can vouch for you, it's 10x more powerful than coming into a place hat in hand..

Good luck and network!!

Gee I just got divorced and was looking at spousal support - the court said that at my age I was only a minimum wage person. Good for me but shows that the bias is legally recognized.

(That's after 30 years in the IT industry)...

You got to visit actor camp, where you learn to pretend to be hyped by the same rediscovered technologies and do "fruitfull" failures once more.

Oh brave old world, that holds such people.

I have found that some older employees have decades of valuable experience.Others have one year of experience repeated thirty times....

I bet that if were for software dev jobs the reject rate would be a lot higher.

> These were actual guidelines that tobacco company R.J. Reynolds gave to job recruiters.

Right, but it also told its marketers to get children hooked on cigarettes. Who gives a rat's about hiring at tobacco companies? Way to scrape the bottom of the barrel for examples.

you're a young white male? of course you won't understand, "keep improving yourself" what an elitist thing to say from the IT bubble.. most profession plateau, it doesn't matter if you have 10 or 20 years of experience, even in IT it doesn't.

That's unduly personal and breaks the civility rule here. Please read the rules of this site and follow them when commenting:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13957192 and marked it off-topic.

I've conducted a lot of job interviews and debriefs at "IT bubble" startups and have not seen anything resembling race/gender bias. Where is this bias happening?

Just recently I saw a reddit thread about a black web developer women being paid much less than her coworkers, she overhead her boss talking on the phone about hiring another guy because they have a lot of work, talking about how he affords it, because he pays her so little and he can get away with it, because "what she's going do", "who is going to hire her" a black developer woman.

If she is any goood any of the big companies would take her. There is always a shortage of good talent.

Another lawsuit ITT :-)

There is a definitive bias from older people against startups.

Half of them stop the interview soon after we tell them there are on-call on some week ends.

The other half simple refuse the offer, something to do with the number allegedly.

Can't tell if this is meant to be facetious. If it's not, it seems more like a case of misaligned expectations.

Did you read the article?

Maintaining your health and the health of those under your care is your own responsibility. You don't get to blame other people when you get yourself infected.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13958403 and marked it off-topic.

You must live in some imaginary world where bacteria and viruses respond to your will and refuse to infect you.

And of course, if you happen to be asthmatic, it's all psychological, and you get to decide, eg, whether that cigarette smoke will trigger an attack or not.

> You must live in some imaginary world where bacteria and viruses respond to your will and refuse to infect you.

Are you saying there's no such thing as prophylaxis? Doctors must wear gloves for fashion, since microbes apparently just phase through solid matter.

> And of course, if you happen to be asthmatic, it's all psychological, and you get to decide, eg, whether that cigarette smoke will trigger an attack or not.

Regardless of whether you're asthmatic or not, deciding not to go near the smoke is within your power.

>You don't get to blame other people

What? Of course you do. Sick people should probably stay away from work, especially if they have things like Noro.

So your only rebuttal is "nuh-uh"? In that case, I say "yuh-huh". See my sibling response.

In other words, "Just don't get sick." As if it worked that way.

No. In other words: your well-being is your problem. Don't expect other people to change their behavior for your sake. If you don't take care of yourself, no one will.

Again? I'm annoyed of this topic. If you kept improving yourself along the way, I'm confident you will find a good company that value your knowledge.

This article is about age discrimination happening at the initial levels of the job application process, before you're evaluated on your merits. The study the article mentions is about identical resumes with different ages. The lawsuit against R.J. Reynolds is about guidelines given to recruiters. In both these cases, it doesn't really matter how good you are if you're trying to get a job through the standard process.

Having years of work experience doesn't count as improvement? Because it does in almost every other industry out there.

Let me guess less then 35? Male?

Let me guess: The same?

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