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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Despite it being a violation today, I get the point of wanting to know marital status. But why height and weight?

“Attractability” of a candidate was not limited to their skills. As in some parts of the world today we know that these things are largely orthogonal to performance at job. As rational and simple as that sounds today, back in the day knowing these details was equally rational and simple. We just find it difficult to get that point of view since we didn’t live in that time. This is the same as ageism today. “Young people are just smarter”. What do you think people will say on hacker news 30 years from now when they read that was the thinking of some of today’s tech leaders

Also: this one is more present today. I can just not mention I'm married, while still reaping the benefits of being attractive.

True. But I do just the opposite. Even though they aren’t allowed to ask me if I am married, I go out of my way to mention off handedly that I am married. I want them to “discriminate” against me if they have the type of culture that expects people to work for 60 hours a week regularly.

Hehe.

I've been going around telling how my wife is nine months pregnant, asking how the paternity benefits are.

Any success getting a job after mentioning it?

I mentioned my newborn in all of my job interviews because I didn't want any surprises on either side of the table. I interviewed at six places and got five offers - two at FANGs, three at unicorns. I don't think there's a culture of discrimination against young fathers at large companies, and I don't think it's necessarily bad if there is at early-stage, high-growth start ups.

Any company worth working for would accept it as a fact of life- most people end up having kids at some point. If the opposite is the case,well, it's better to stay away from them.

Unpopular opinion: why is that necessarily the case? I’m 45 for context.

If the company needs someone that can work 60+ hours a week, with less than market pay, but a promise of equity (or if I were starting something risky with friends) , if I were younger, wanted to build my resume and didn’t have grown folks bills, that would be an opportunity I would jump on. On the other hand, if I really didn’t need the money and wanted to work on something interesting, I might do it. Does that necessarily mean the “company isn’t worth working for” or it’s not the the right company for me?

If I cared about paid paternity leave and the company couldn’t offer it, that also doesn’t mean it’s a bad company - just not the company for me.

On personal note, I’m at a point in my career where I’m being heavily recruited for consultant type jobs that require a lot of travel. I have a son graduating this year. I had to turn those types of jobs down even though they pay more than I make now. Is the job necessarily bad because they require travel?

It may not be popular,but it's an opinion nonetheless. I don't disagree with working extra hours on stuff per se, especially if one is passionate about it. However,this is often abused.What is one man's passion,is other man's nightmare. These things are also very hard to balance from the management point of view. Also,60 hours a week of pure work is a lot and unless it's your own business,I would neither want anyone to do this in my own team nor myself. I'm a fan of "work smarter" not "work harder,aka longer hours". Even if you are out of school, there are many ways to shine and develop portfolio without grinding long hours. The company that is not worth working for isn't the one that allows people,who have a lot of time and motivation to do extra hours, to work longer,but one that finds it's not normal to become pregnant or go on paternity leave. Aa for paid paternity:I imagine you are commenting from the US perspective,while I do it from the European,so this needs to be taken into consideration,as on tbis side of the pond is not an option not to get it, it's more about what company can offer on top of statutory pay. As for consulting, I'm in a very similar situation,only my daughter is much younger, that's why I'm having a job that pays substantially less compared to what I'd get in consulting. And no, the requirement to travel doesn't make the job bad,even though business travel is a tiring experience,but,as you said,it could be a perfect fit to a lot of people.

I’m thinking more of working harder as in one person wearing too many hats because a company can’t/ doesn’t want to hire more people. I’ve worked up and down the stack over the years from the front end all the way down to infrastructure (AWS/Dev ops) and have had to be my own project manager doing Statements of work during the last days of a dying company. No matter how smart I work, if I am stuck doing a job of more than one person, I’m going to work more hours.

I’ve also worked extra hours voluntarily to work on new to me technology to build my resume.

Why is it not necessarily bad at "early-stage, high-growth start ups?" Some things we regulate are appropriate to carve out exceptions for based on the size of a company, but why is this one?

Not OP, but i dont think they would have an issue getting hired at any good tech company worth working for because of that.

As an anecdote, last year we hired a woman who outright told us she would like to start working next month, but then would immediately need to take 4-6 months off for a paid parental leave, as she was due somewhat soon (i forgot whether we provide 4 or 6 months; i think it is 6, but i dont remember 100%).

She was a good candidate, so of course we hired her, she worked for about a month, and then went away for the parental leave. Then she got back to work after her leave, and everything went on as normal.

We also had candidates before who went on parental leave on their first day of work, so they essentially had paid months off before they even started working.

For the record, it wasn’t some obscure small family-run business, it was at one of the big N companies.

That makes sense really, I’m sure smaller businesses have a harder time with people not working for long periods

Why is that surprising? At a larger company, one person being missing is not a big deal. At a small company where you are not trying to get as many smart people (tm) as possible, but you have an immediate need, you can’t afford to keep a req open for six months waiting on someone to come back from maternal/paternal leave. Unpaid leave is one thing - you can usually find a contractor to make up the difference.

Got an offer from every single one of them. Chose the one least surprised by this (Google).

Is the belief really that age is irrelevant to mental performance, or do we just want people to be able to continue being employed for moral reasons?

Oh, of course it is related. Also, apart from declining mental performance, with age comes valuable experience.

I've seen that in action. An older dev was an absolute burden on a hack day moving at a snail's pace. But for long term architecture he always had super valuable "oh I didn't think of that" things to say.

He was so awesome to have on the team, at the cost of sometimes having to watch him crawl toward a few lines of code. Not a hard choice in my opinion.

Of course I've seen the whole spectrum. Useless old people. Useless young people. It's best to simply be a meritocracy.

It’s the same issue as gender or race discrimination. There are often differences in means, but because within group differences are an order of magnitude larger than between group differences, from the perspective of any two individuals trying to understand each other, group membership gives you no meaningful information.

Knowing the averages will actually make you worse at assessment.

In India, I remember submitting a passport size photograph with all the resumes I submitted during college/campus interviews. When I moved to US, I realized that was not a requirement.

That is common in Europe as well.

it's not required but it makes you more considered.

Even in countries where it was the norm (like Germany), this is not really true anymore. For tech positions or anything remotely close, the impact will be zero or even negative, don't do it.

statistics? People who should know have told me otherwise

Only some European countries - it is very frowned upon in the UK and might well get your application binned.

Obviously apart from some jobs requiring PV (TS) clearance.

Is this for security or something?

There are listings on Craigslist that once you express interest in, they request photos of you. I always just assume these are fucked up or scams.

Its a scam no job listing on craigslist need a photo - well unless your recruiting for hookers I suppose.

And yet with the rise of software recruitment platforms this practice seems to be creeping in to the US. Linkedin and Hired for example both "nudge" you to add a photo. From Hired.com: "Adding a photo will help your profile get noticed and improve the likelihood that you receive more interview requests. (Optional)"

FYI I worked for a largish UK recruitment company. A lot of CVs had photos. They made not a whit of difference to the recruiters. When the CV was entered onto the database, any images were stripped anyway. I imagine - though did not see - any especially hot chicks were noticed but I guarantee it did not change their chances of being placed. The recruiters just don't care.

As I understand it, resumes were more like a personal trading card with things like your hobbies and clubs you belonged to. As time went on it, it shed a lot of the details that wouldn't be of interest to employers. So maybe height & weight stuck around in a more standardized resume.

my guess is, this was a long time ago back when military service was more common and people were not as reticent about disclosing such information and

So the employer know what size to supply for working clothes I guess?

Or whether they have chairs capable of accomodating a 500lb employee.

> But why height and weight?

Physical fitness for the role.

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