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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

In the United States (where most Cloudflare employees work):

    > The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older.

To answer your question: Probably not. Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

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> Even so, it is incredibly hard to prove workers 40 and older were laid off as a result of age discrimination.

The only way for this to happen is by leaked private conversations, I think.

So you can’t be discriminated against if you’re less than 40, but that seems somewhat discriminatory (maybe you wanted to be), but that means that you are being discriminated against, but that’s meant to be forbidden.

I sense a paradox.

There's no paradox.

The law is you can't descriminate against a protected class. Lots of things are protected classes, like race and religion. Old age is, but young age isn't. Clothing choices in general aren't, but if it's a religous choice, it likely is protected.

Etc.

It's kind of weird that you can fire young people because they're young, but not old people because they're old. But it's not a paradox, it's just how the system is codified.

Yes, from a legal perspective this will always be true: in-group vs out-group. Age discrimination is a special category because everyone will be in the out-group (when young) the age into the in-group. In this case, it is probably legal to fire someone for being too young. It sounds weird, but that is not a protected class of employees.

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