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

#251

Post by geomark » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:12 AM UTC

scottLobster wrote: post #106

invalidOrTaken wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My own commentary on this: I've been consulting the last few months, mostly brought in to coach CTO's. I'm (somewhat unwillingly) coming to the conclusion that nobody really feels like they know how to manage programmers. This leads to mismanagement, and nobody likes being mismanaged, (also it usually means you're being underpaid), so devs eventually wise up and get out. If you think about it, this is a natural exten…

Sounds about right. A non-technical manager managing technical people is like the commander of a tank battalion not knowing how fast his tanks can go or what kind of ammunition they shoot, their fuel range, hell he probably doesn't even know how many people can fit in a single tank. But he thinks he's fit to manage such a unit because he's an expert in "general warfare", and he has all the "metrics". I've seen it in…

"A non-technical manager managing technical people" is Dilbert in real life and is so common it's practically a meme.

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

#252

Post by Hermitian909 » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

bradleyjg wrote: post #115

superfrank wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get why companies want to use Leetcode for evaluation. It basically quantifies an applicant down to a number which makes hiring easier and more scalable. There's a lot less room for bias if every candidate can be boiled down to pass or fail by a single test. That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous p…

In addition to being hard to scale and subject to bias, it's hard to know, even for you, if it was actually a good system or not. The best you can hope for is to have decent confidence it had a low false positive rate. Short of industry wide collaboration with some kind of longitudinal study, getting an idea of what does and doesn't work in terms of false negatives is nearly impossible.

I think you can tell if it's a good system for your company. As an individual employer all I care about are:

1. are my false positives low?

2. is the time it takes to fill a position low?

If the answer to both of those questions is "yes" then the system is great for me (and I've seen the system described above provide affirmative answers to both these questions in a startup setting).

Determining whether a hiring system is locally good is significantly easier than determining if it's good in general.

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

#253

Post by rootusrootus » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:21 AM UTC

allenu wrote: post #51

I'm 41 and still have recruiters contacting me and generally do well in interviews. I'm lucky in that the skills I have are harder to find (8 or so years doing iOS development). I also have to admit that one thing that helps me tremendously is that I look young. Just about everyone I work with assumes I am still in my 20s based on my appearance. They all act shocked once they do find out that I'm older. Looking young…

In my experience attitude and connections count for the most. I'm 45 and I don't have any problems finding new opportunities. But I never go through the front door, it's always a referral. I can't imagine having a real problem until I'm in my 60s. At least around here, there just aren't so many programmers that we can afford to turn away qualified people just because they are in their 40s or 50s. If they know their shit, they're welcome to work for us. We've got developers ranging from 20-65, pretty evenly distributed.

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

#254

Post by rootusrootus » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:22 AM UTC

scarejunba wrote: post #143

rootusrootus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PiHole I use at home renders a lot of media sites unavailable to me. I'm not going to subscribe to all of them, so it will effectively reduce my bubble to whatever I'm willing to pay for (and I'll tell you know, that will basically be whatever I can get from a single all-you-can-eat provider, like Apple News).

I'm sure the actions of a person who would buy and set up a specialized device to block ads are not representative of the general population so I (and probably any other content producer) are not going to optimize for that use-case, though I do appreciate your sharing.

It may be that "regular" people are more willing to have a dozen different media subscriptions for various sites, but I don't think that's a safe assumption.

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

#255

Post by sundvor » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:22 AM UTC

mykowebhn wrote: post #217

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you practice System Design questions?

Based on your profile it looks like you have a lot of experience, so I would first rely on your experience. That said, there are plenty of resources that have been helpful to me: 1) http://highscalability.com/ 2) http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032175.do 3) https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer Hope this helps!

Thanks, you've provided some great insights here - and appreciated those links. Will buy that O'Reilly book!

Mid 40s myself, stayed in one tech stack for too long but have been redeeming myself in the past few years with .net core, AWS, Docker and trying to get into React.

I find myself struggling most with the front end bits, but it's just a question of staying with it.

Have always loved tech, and highly passionate about it. Having a family with a kid on the ASD has really restricted available hours to tinker though, that's my main challenge.

Anyway I found what you and others here wrote quite motivational, so thanks again.

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

#256

Post by jtr1 » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:33 AM UTC

A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He’d worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, mentorship experience galore, super nice - super nice, but also clearly nervous during a few rounds.

At the team standup afterward, pretty much everyone was an unreserved yes except the engineering manager who directly said he was concerned about the candidate’s age, and whether he would “fit in.” He wondered out loud whether we could reject the candidate on this basis. The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Something I’ll never forget as I get older in this field.

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

#257

Post by wave100 » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

luckydata wrote: post #180

epc wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-m…

I'm going to rock your world: almost nobody uses the keyword scanners in the ATSs. Sending a resume is mostly a waste of time, if you find a job you like just speak to someone that works at that company, preferably the hiring manager, and your likelihood of at least getting an interview goes up by about two orders of magnitude. Happy to teach you other tricks if you care for it.

I'm a CS student graduating from college in a year - I'd love some advice on job hunting if you're willing to provide it!

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

#258

Post by 4ntonius8lock » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:37 AM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #243

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So 1 of 3: 1- Rational: Your original argument is flawed, you realize it and have changed but can't admit it 2- Irrational: You can't defend your argument since you haven't, but won't change 3- Plain Nasty: You are trolling. I'm inclined to think 3, though most people don't use their real name when trolling.

Or 4. I don't care to argue those points because I find doing so to not be entertaining or insightful. I used to argue to the death and then I realized that in the end it brought neither joy nor enlightenment. So I don't anymore. You're free to think you've won, I don't care. Although one piece of life advice for someone who seems to like arguing and seems to be good at it. People will often stop arguing with you bec…

Every argument you have given has been in favor of discriminating against the young.

If you are intellectually honest you'd just admit that is your perspective. Or clarify.

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

#259

Post by mykowebhn » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:41 AM UTC

sundvor wrote: post #255

mykowebhn wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your profile it looks like you have a lot of experience, so I would first rely on your experience. That said, there are plenty of resources that have been helpful to me: 1) http://highscalability.com/ 2) http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032175.do 3) https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer Hope this helps!

Thanks, you've provided some great insights here - and appreciated those links. Will buy that O'Reilly book! Mid 40s myself, stayed in one tech stack for too long but have been redeeming myself in the past few years with .net core, AWS, Docker and trying to get into React. I find myself struggling most with the front end bits, but it's just a question of staying with it. Have always loved tech, and highly passionate…

My pleasure!

One thing that I'd like to mention that I didn't before is that the interview process can be taxing, draining, and it can be an emotional roller-coaster. Try to stay positive and keep at it. Good things will come!

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

#260

Post by NeverFade » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 1:42 AM UTC

jtr1 wrote: post #256

A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He’d worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, men…

> The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again.

Your CTO shut it down because your engineering manager was breaking Federal law in public. However, I don't need to tell you what happens to candidates that the hiring manager doesn't want to hire.

Also, I have witnessed similar situations multiple times. Everyone who worked for over 10 years knows ageism is thriving in tech, especially in the Bay.