New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It • Hacker News Board

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#151

Post by epc » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:29 PM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #128

epc wrote: post #25

Am 52. Served as IBM’s “corporate webmaster” in the 1990s (sort of like being CTO but without the cool executive hat). Corporate Webmaster was responsible for all technical operations of IBM’s corporate sites (from systems administration to application development), as well as theoretically responsible for all IBM web sites. As well as serve as the single point of contact inside IBM for anything “internet”. Have been…

What area are you working in now?

Mostly retired. Stopped worrying about finding FTE 5-6 years ago and focused on making the cash I had work for me on a more immediate time scale. I do some advisory work with local startups for equity. Angel invested for awhile but stopped as mentioned elsewhere in an earlier thread.

Would love to work again in tech but have never cracked getting on recruiters’ radar and I have better things to do than play whack—a-mole with the latest and greatest in applicant tracking systems automated decision algorithms.

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#152

Post by madengr » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

tmwprkej wrote: post #68

pleasecalllater wrote: post #34

I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40. It's really hard to work for a 20-something guy who has almost no experience and is happily making all the mistakes he could read in books about. Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic. When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes o…

> "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing team So they are 23 year olds write lots of managing experience? Sometimes I just dislike this industry with its title inflation. I am 33 having been a recruiter for a short stint, I can tell you most of them just checkbox candidates because they have no idea what they are hiring. As they say, no on…

There are 23 year olds who don’t have the technical chops, so rather than being fired, they are put on a management track. This started to happen around 2000.

Back when I hired into my company in ‘96 (I’m 47 now and 23 years at the same place), all the managers were in their 50’s and 60’s, who had done real engineering.

Then they become younger and younger, and eventually my manager was an idiot in his late 20’s whose relevant technical experience was “designing a power supply for an FPGA”, with me in my 40’s and an expert in my field. I told them I was leaving, so they gave me a promotion, and now I report to a 50 something female. She is a good manager.

Fortunately I’m at they point now where I’m the graybeard in the basement who gets to solve all the hard problems.

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#153

Post by manfredo » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

drivingmenuts wrote: post #11

Ancalagon wrote: post #4

I just don't understand the bias. I'm too young to have experienced age discrimination like this yet, but its obvious at least to me that the best developers and hell, leaders, that I've worked with were all a part of older generations. Is it a shortcoming in pay for all these people? I feel like being out of work for 3 years would definitely lower whatever standard of pay I had prior to becoming unemployed. I just d…

Older workers = more experience = higher pay. Younger workers = less experience = lower pay. Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.

> Older workers = more experience = higher pay.

> Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.

If that's really the case then "age discrimination" doesn't necessarily indicate deliberately avoiding older workers to the sake of the fact that they're old. Say you have to fill a software developer role and the highest TC you can offer is $100k. Not unheard of for a company, say, one standard deviation below average. You interview a bunch of 40 year olds and 50 year olds and all of them have existing salaries way above that. What is the recruiter supposed to do, keep interviewing people that they almost certainly won't accept the offer? Ostensibly that' the law, but in reality anyone in that situation is going to shift their attention to people that would be willing to work for that kind of compensation.

This is partly what it's probably best to publish salary ranges as part of the job description, at least for companies other than top companies. The above scenario does mean that the minority of older devs that would accept that salary range get filtered out, and that's suboptimal.

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#154

Post by arcturus17 » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

hash872 wrote: post #63

jedberg wrote: post #32

I think part of the problem is "protected classes". I learned the other day that if you're over 40 you're a protected class for engineering in California. If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get…

Was completely with you until the last paragraph. As the poster above me says, the more you regulate hiring, the more reluctant companies are to do so. You can look at the entire continent of Europe for a 500 million person example of this- sclerotic uber-regulated hiring markets with intense bureaucratic rules around who can be hired or fired, who can be laid off, under what circumstances, etc. The end result of thi…

Tend to agree with deregulating hiring but some economies with heavily regulated employment like Germany (I’ve lived there, it is a nightmare to fire grossly incompetent employees) have very low unemployment rates.

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#155

Post by manfredo » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:35 PM UTC

bonestamp2 wrote: post #133

outlace wrote: post #74

If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average), and you thus end up hiring less 70 year olds, is that really discrimination? I get the article has stories from older people that seem to suggest they are well-qualified for the job and literally just their age number seems to lose them the job, which of course would be discriminatory. But the law suit…

> is that really discrimination? Along similar lines, we have a decent amount of senior (read "older") people at our company that are well paid. But, most of the work we do can be done by less experienced people who are much cheaper. That almost always means they are young. We don't discriminate based on age, but if you just looked at the ages of people that we mostly hire then that data would look like we're discrim…

This is what I observe as well. If you have job that really just boils down to hooking up event listeners in java-script and fiddling with html and css until it looks they way the designers want it then experience beyond competency isn't really all that important. On principle, a company should hire an older dev with decades of experience if they're willing to work at rates that reflect the job they're doing. But devs with decades of experience are probably looking for work that is more complex and pays better.

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#156

Post by manfredo » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:36 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #52

> You’re in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode. This is the first time I'm seeing this message and I hope this doesn't become a trend.

Do browsers announce that they're incognito? Would it be difficult to disable this flag?

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#157

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:38 PM UTC

mykowebhn wrote: post #33

I'm 48, on the West Coast, and recently finished interviewing, receiving multiple offers. I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped. This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on m…

[deleted]

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#158

Post by jaredsohn » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:40 PM UTC

thih9 wrote: post #52

> You’re in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode. This is the first time I'm seeing this message and I hope this doesn't become a trend.

I think a workaround for this would be to open the site in another profile.

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#159

Post by PopeDotNinja » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

mykowebhn wrote: post #33

I'm 48, on the West Coast, and recently finished interviewing, receiving multiple offers. I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped. This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on m…

How did you practice System Design questions?

Re: New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

#160

Post by manfredo » Sat, Jun 08, 2019, 10:41 PM UTC

cycrutchfield wrote: post #56

RandomOpinion wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory ... FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired. The FAANG companies and other technology platform companies have separate technical and management career tracks. Only those who want to be managers become managers.

In theory, yes. In practice, no. At a certain point, a lot of engineers plateau in terms of technical ability and are unable to continue to level up. For many, they feel compelled to switch tracks to management to continue to make progress, regardless of whether they have any innate ability or desire to excel at management.

My company does explicitly say that certain levels, roughly equivalent to a staff engineer at most companies, will likely be a career level (as in, you will never advance beyond it) for many people that level still pays very well - easily in the 200-300 TC range maybe more. As long as companies are okay with developers being at this level for a long time - perhaps even decades - I'm fine with it. The only thing that would bother me is an "up or out" kind of culture, that prioritizes "velocity". Fortunately I think more and more companies are getting comfortable with developers that they no will never progress beyond a senior developer role.