I actually find ageism to be one of the most overt forms of illegal discrimination. People talk about how they are looking for young devs in a way that would seem insane if they were talking about white devs or male.
It's also astonished me how at least some of the people trying to find the young devs who will work long hours are going to be in the discriminated group in a few years time! They don't seem to realise that by perpetuating the discrimination they're making themselves the future victims. It's a bizarre kind of cognitive dissonance.
He has some pretty good insight and stories about this.
It's no surprise so many people deny the less overt racism and sexism!
Nobody seems to care about the 18 year who can produce a lot of good work, but isn't likely to be paid even a third of what an equally capable 40 year old makes. How is that fair?
I never made decent money programming until I became an independent contractor. (For reference, I probably have been a developer longer than you’ve been alive.)
Would you say the same thing if someone used similar dog whistles to talk about old people?
IE, "oh, being able to move quickly and think on your fit is important, and sometimes this can only be gained by being in good physical shape, and having good health, like a young person would have".
Either discrimination is OK or it isn't. One person's justifications aren't any different than another person's.
So yes, you are allowed to discriminate on those sorts of things. If the attribute you are discriminating for is relevant to the job, it is ok to discriminate.
Take, for example, discrimination against the physically disabled - if a construction company requires that you are able to lift 50 pound bags of concrete, it wouldn't be guilt of unlawful discrimination because that is required for the job.
On the other hand, if you require someone be able to lift a 50 pound bag, but their job is to sit at a desk and program a computer... then you would be found guilty of unfair discrimination against the disabled.
IE age discrimination.
Either age discrimination is morally OK or it isn't.
I'd be fine with either the situation of age discrimination being disallowed or allowed, across the board, regardless of whether the discrimination is against young or old people.
Either way. I just want age discrimination against young and old people to be treated exactly the same.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Either age discrimination is morally OK or it isn't.
I don't care whether it is legal or not. If you are engaging in this discrimination you are exactly morally the same as any other person engaging in discrimination, whether that be based on age, sex or race.
There are lots of places in the world where discrimination on race, gender, and sexual orientation is legal.
And people who engage in this kind of behavior, even when it is legal, are still horrible people, and should be treated as such, by society.
It is fully within my rights to judge horrible people, and to also treat horrible people as they deserve to be treated (ie, I will treat them poorly, as they deserve).
People are often under the mistaken impression that the only way to punish someone is through the law.
That's incorrect. There are many many perfectly legal ways to punish horrible people, and there are even methods of punishing horrible people that are illegal but you are unlikely to get caught for.
Wut? This number seems wildly off to me.
I would guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change or stray from their "tried and true" methods.
The same cannot be said of a white person vs. a black person.
As I mentioned elsewhere, as I got older I am more skeptical/cynical of many fads/trends, and this "attitude" is often not valued by management. The thing is, I'm right more often than wrong and would bet my own money on such if I could. The fear of keeping up with the e-joneses has made our industry stupid. Fads/trends are poorly vetted for fit.
Warren Buffett has made similar observations about faddism in the financial industry, and he has the fat bucks to prove he's right.
So, you're not hired on how to solve a problem now, you're hired on how much you know their desired solution. This isn't engineering, you're not helping desig action, you're implementing it.
One of the huge failures in this sense is that tech has assumed priority over user value. Like your users give a shit about microservices, React, Vue, etc. etc. when you're using more of your runway on the infrastructure and not on the solution they want.
Most of this stuff has little value to most businesses. So if you push back you don't get hired; you have to find the places mature enough to understand why you would push back at all.
Lots of people can be trained to be implementers and do valuable work. But we also don’t have stable best practices so that makes it harder. The line between engineer and implementer is blurred because an implementer constantly has to evaluate which new things should really be best practices.
Further, if people don't see the "latest" UI on their screen, they become afraid that the underlying technology is "behind" even if it technically satisfies a business goal. Books are judged by covers.
Young vs. old is different. A young person with 5 years of Java << an old person with 5 years of Java. Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience.
Not necessarily. I suspect what happened is IBM used to pay that way, but the industry practice has changed (for good or bad), but they fired based on current industry practice instead of their original practice, making it come out lopsided by age.
Anecdotally, my company is an ANSI C + ClearCase shop. Anytime discussion comes up about transitioning to safer languages like C++ or about using different VCS like Git or Mercurial it is shot down immediately by the senior developers who feel that those things are faddish.
Anecdotally, my parents always hated Windows and Microsoft Office upgrades because they would no longer be able to navigate the UIs. They became extremely resistant to upgrading anything that required them to relearn anything.
Heck, there's ancient adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" - why does that saying exist if it doesn't contain a kernel of truth??
There may be some older developers who are the exception to this, but my argument is that generally the older you get, the more entrenched your opinions and patterns become.
That's not necessarily a bad thing since those opinions and patterns were forged through decades of experience and hence contain much wisdom, but at a certain point when you are still using ANSI C and ClearCase in 2018 because there's "no need to switch to faddish version control like Git when ClearCase works perfectly fine" you are no longer fairly evaluating the technologies available on the market.
In addition, switching the VCS your company uses is possibly not what your engineering organization should focus on. I don't know enough about your company to say if switching away from ANSI C is worthwhile.
Books on coding technique won't help much, because one needs experience to understand the point those books try to make.
Did you seriously just use a stereotype as evidence.
A lot of people will also cry "oh god!" or something similar when they find themselves in a difficult situation, but that doesn't mean they believe in god; some do, many don't and still use the phrase. What's more, it doesn't mean there is a god. It's just something that people say.
Please keep the discussion civil.
Im not a young dev anymore, but I can see why the older crowd has the rap they do. It doesn't make ageism right, at all.. but I can understand how it has happened.
An entire generation of people like me who have heard our older loved ones say they need their "foxfire" fixed or whatever.
10 years ago this was more palatable. Now a days it is dissolving as more older people learn the technology and more older people want to learn the technology. I personally never want to stop learning. My colleague is well into his 50's and still takes college course in math and CS. It has challenged my own personal prejudices and pushes me to be better as well.
If you mean the average, then you're saying something no different from any other prejudice. You can't judge an individual by the statistics of some group s/he belongs to.
If you mean all young/older people, you've been really lucky with the young people you know and really unlucky with the older ones.
But beyond that, we as a society have decided that in many cases the benefits of using group based heuristics aren't worth the damage done to individuals within groups who are judged negatively.
Imagine you toss out all resumes with non-white sounding names because white people are statistically more likely to have x, y, or z characteristic. Even if there is a correlation to some characteristic that you are looking for (more likely to have a college degree, statistically higher income etc...), the damage you do to the individuals in the groups you are tossing out far outweighs any benefit you receive.