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Comment by throwaway5250 | Hacker News Reader

I'm old (and indeed pale, male, and stale), but not sure whether I care about age discrimination or not. If a company thinks they can make more money by not hiring me, I don't really want to work there.

I _do_ wish there was some way to eliminate "dummy" interviews--interviewing older people but with no intention to hire, just to make the numbers look good. In my recent experience, this seems to be fairly common.

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Yea the dummy interview phenomenon is infuriating. Seems like companies are not seriously hiring. Instead they are “fishing” for that mythical person who will take a tiny salary and sacrifice their life doing death marches. Just so happens that person is almost always young so we see bias.

> If a company thinks they can make more money by not hiring me, I don't really want to work there.

What if that same sentence weren't about age, but were about gender or race or sexual orientation? Genuinely curious... seems like it would be the same argument, but then some people feel age shouldn't be a protected class like the other ones are.

Speaking only for myself (again, white/male/old/straight), I'm okay with that, too. It does feel like there's a bias against my groups right now, but this mostly annoys me due to the dummy interview problem I mentioned.

(If this seems paranoid, take a look at the detailed stats Google released about their workforce and observe what's been happening to their tech white male category.)

How so? My being hired by a company is based on value proposition. It has to both be worth my time to work there and they have to be able to make as much money as they can off of me. How else should a company decide who to hire?

I first suspected this fake interview stuff a few years ago at Microsoft. Let's just say everyone in the hiring event was one demographic and I was another. I asked one interviewer if he was going to take a picture of the whiteboard and he muttered under his breath "it's not going to matter." It was a good solution but it became clear the interview was horseshit. They were wasting my time to fix their EEOC numbers.

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