Earlier quoted context omitted.
You guessed wrong. Are you okay? Cheer up!
Sorry, your hiring speech short-circuited some of my wires regarding something else. Yes, im okay. Have a nice day.
It does sound like Radiohead lyrics though. +1
Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the United States age is a protected class over 40 years old.
Question from overseas: what's a "protected class"?
This refers to a category of person protected by the Civil Rights Act of 1964[1], Title VII, as extended by other laws over time. It "prohibits discrimination by covered employers on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin". Those of age 40+ years are covered specifically by the "Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967". In other words, "age of 40 or more years" is a "protected class".
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employme...
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the United States age is a protected class over 40 years old.
Question from overseas: what's a "protected class"?
The government defines certain classes of people and if you are not in that class the law will do nothing to stop discrimination against you. Many types of discrimination are legal. For instance movie studios can refuse to hire a black or Hispanic person to play a real life white person. People under 40 are not in a protected class for jobs.
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#34Serious question: are you trolling? I hire programmers for a startup. When I do, we do not care at all how old you are. We care about attitude, skills, and aptitude.
In the past I've acted very deliberately to hire older and more experienced developers; an act specifically designed as a counter to a streak of egregious and dangerous naivete which was running a very real risk of killing our product.
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#35Serious question: are you trolling? I hire programmers for a startup. When I do, we do not care at all how old you are. We care about attitude, skills, and aptitude.
That's nice to hear. However, based on my personal experience, I'm not entirely convinced.
When I hired programmers for a startup, I'm pretty sure that I had a unconscious bias towards young candidates, which was at the time justified by the blanket word "attitude" (or "cultural fit").
Now, I'm not claiming that you (or anyone specifically) have the same bias, but I'm pretty sure that I wasn't the only one. You may be a nice exception :)
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#36No, diversity is doublespeak for women or black people.
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
In the past, I have interviewed for management positions and some of the questions involved about diversity – when I answered with some anecdotes my experience working Indian or Singaporean colleagues and how we have different blindspots, this seemed to satisfy the recruiters.
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#37Probably not as old (white?) male. But there is a simple way to increase your diversity. You could start identifying as a woman, it is just a verbal identification, no other changes are required. This way you would also become lesbian. In some countries you can legally change your race, by religious conversion (Sikht in UK). Again, religion is just a verbal identification.
That's some cartman-level trolling. It's of course not my job to distinguish true and false trans people ("no true Scotsman") but if you're a stereotypical male in all senses, it makes very little sense to use that label. (Disclosure, genderqueer trans woman here)
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#38how old? 60+? 50+? 40+? 30+? 20+? (I'm serious, sometimes even 25 year old devs feel old).
How do 25 year old devs "feel old"?
Technology fatigue: you have just spent the last few years becoming an expert in a technology stack, and suddenly, nobody cares about that stack. Or worse, people start reinventing stuff that was trendy – or possibly even old – when you were tinkering with it as a teenager, and they make all the same mistakes.
Happens a lot with the web for the past few years (every JavaScript GUI framework, WebSockets ~ sockets, WebASM ~ asm, WebGL ~ OpenGL, etc.) and in the programming language community (generics, functional programming, concurrency becoming mainstream after the industry spent 40 years decrying them, etc.) Probably in other places, too.
Also called Future Shock when I was a kid so even the concept itself is making a cyclic comeback :)
Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#39Re: Ask HN: I'm an old programmer, do I qualify for diversity consideration?
#40Maybe? The type of diversity that companies care about (to contrast with the many strawmen out there) happens to be good for the bottom line. That is, a team with 5 men and 5 women is likelier to perform better than one with 10 men [1]. Some explanations I have heard are that diversity brings perspective that wouldn't be present in a monoculture, and that it improves psychological safety which is a huge determiner of…
The sources you linked are rather weak evidence for your claims. This type of observational research is difficult, and in the social sciences, especially about political topics, you should be very skeptical. The majority of published papers in this field are wrong. Diversity may or may not be good for companies bottom lines, but there is no conclusive evidence (at least from what you linked) - and it also matters the…
It's better to try to understand what's happening than handwave and say "it's all bunk". That is way more political of an action than trying to determine causality through data. The social sciences are valuable in that they're trying to figure things out about the world which are critical to making good policy, rather than winging it and accidentally or intentionally screwing over people who are different than you.
> Some of these articles are implying a size of an effect that is completely ridiculous, there is just no way that diversity "could increase revenue by 41%" - we'd see way more diversity in work places if this was true.
This seems to be rejecting data and substituting and a handwave. From the original study, 41% is the actual coefficient, controlling for a ton of things. Likely there are latent factors that make workplaces both gender-diverse and performant, so just swapping out half of a workplace would not hit all of these, which the paper acknowledges. We are seeing more diversity thanks to studies like these and explicit diversity initiatives, but given all of the biases that can exist in hiring pipelines, I can't think of any reason why it would happen naturally.
The paper you link is trying to measure firm productivity (could not 100% figure out what this means) based on data from Denmark, mainly non-white-collar jobs. It notes that demographic diversity promotes "better problem-solving abilities and more creativity and knowledge spillover" and can be a "substantial competitive advantage", limited by people not trusting/communicating with each other (i.e. integrating effectively).