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

nytimes.com

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

#281

Post by geggam »

oblio wrote: post #178
pmiller2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. What region do you live in, and how do you think your bottom line compares to what you’d see in a comparable role in the Bay Area? I’m not really architect / principal level just yet (probably 3-5 years of continuous improvement from that I would say), but I feel like I’m just barely getting ahead as a senior making $200k paying $2300/month in rent with no hope to buy and about a 40-60 minute commute (de…

Excuse me, but at $200k you're making $100k net so about $8k per month. With rent at $2.3k, you should be able to save enough to buy something at some point, no? Or at least you could rent something more expensive, closer to work?

He said BART so he is in SF bay area.

If he is only paying 2300 rent he is living in a small apt even 60 minutes out. The cost of everything in the bay makes you wonder where money goes.

Lunch is a minimum of 25 bucks, bottle of cheap beer 10.

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

#282

Post by okaram »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #252
bradleyjg wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sys…

You can say if it's acceptable ... but not necessarily good

The problem is that you don't know the cost of the false negatives; you don't know whether the people you didn't hire would have greatly improved your processes / code / business

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

#283

Post by scarface74 »

lallysingh wrote: post #23
jobigoud wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. This just implies they like keeping their career trajectory more than coding.

They like paying their mortgage and providing for their families more than coding.

If you live anywhere besides the west coast in a major city and have 7-10 years of experience you can easily make $130K as a senior developer. That puts you right at the 5th quintile of household income.

If your spouse is making even $50K that puts you in the top decile.

https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/

You don’t need to move into middle management to comfortable support a family.

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

#284

Post by pixelrevision »

rolltiide wrote: post #10
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #5

Seen on Mastodon (not me): >Whenever I hear "We need more programmers! Make more young people interested in programming! Teach programming at kindergarten!" I always get the urge to ask "What did you do with the old ones you had?" >Where are all those programmers you hired 5-20 years ago? Why is no programmer at your company older than 40? Why do you have senior software engineers that are 25 years old? What did you…

there are obvious answers, likely interrelated older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. the ones that failed in some way - meaning a disruption in their spending and earning capability - are the only ones on the market trying to get programming jobs, and complaining about it. fixing the earning trajectory in a programming track helps…

I wonder how much the transition to management helps nowadays. I have a few friends who did that, lost a lot of technical relevance and have had a terrible time finding new jobs as many places promote from within.

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

#285

Post by [deleted] »

cortesoft wrote: post #279
pmiller2 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more a matter of how far behind I am. I spent a lot of years being underpaid and my net worth is about $-100k due to student debt. I am also not in my 20s anymore. I have also only been a software engineer for about 5 or 6 years.

My wife had about 130k in student loan debt when we married, and we went on a ten year repayment plan. Total payment is about $1700 a month... So your rent plus debt servicing should be around $4000... leaving your around $4000 a month for everything else. You should be able to live pretty well on that! That is more than most people make total.

[deleted]

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

#286

Post by stale2002 »

marcinzm wrote: post #187
stale2002 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really care. People who engage in age discrimination, against young people, should be fired or fined out of existence. Discrimination is discrimination.

So every car insurance and car rental company should be removed? After all, they all charge higher rates to young people irrespective of years actually driving. I mean, sure science says the human brain doesn't mature until mid 20s and sure young people have much higher rates of accidents. But, damn it, we should just wipe them all out anyway, right?

Im sure that people made the exact same arguments that you are making, regarding race and gender.

And it is just as bad.

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

#287

Post by aleister_777 »

specialist wrote: post #241
Zenst wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 50+ chap, I had an instance of a top company, referred by friend, whole team up for it and to not even get an interview as I got `filtered` by HR and the recruitment process. Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`. Equally in my early years pre PC mainstream days, there was an age bias towards older people. With many personal experiences upon that in that time/culture - including, believe it or not…

As a gen-x'er, I wonder about being caught in the middle. I was too young for boomers (started as weekend tech in 9th grade). Now I sense I'm too old for millennials. Supposedly both demo groups strongly prefer their own. Whereas us x'ers were so few, we just had to get along with everyone.

As a gen-xer, I fucking love where I'm at. I have the perfect combination of knowing how to to fix my toilet and my wifi (was third engineer at Aruba - suck it).

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

#288

Post by wsc981 »

throwayscid3 wrote: post #114

I'm 47 and have run my own companies, exited some of them with handsome returns, enjoyed many cool start-up projects, worked for some fortune-50 companies, have an IQ that is through the roof, but despite everything, since around 7 years am unable to get a job. Mostly I'm "overqualified" or "just too old" ... never mind I am still hands-on and happy to just get paid whatever the Junior gets, but nobody is interested.…

Have you tried consulting? I believe companies might be less scared to hire experienced consultants compared to hiring salaried employees.

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

#289

Post by granshaw »

nimbius wrote: post #215

Is this something exclusive to white collar jobs or is it mostly programming? Asking as my day job is in the skilled trade of engine mechanic. If youre over 45 in a machine shop or in any trade (plumbing, electrical, automotive, HVAC, etc...) your biggest barrier to getting any job is picking up the phone when it rings. Johnson Control, Honeywell, heck even people like Nest and Ford are kicking down your door and off…

From what I can gather it’s way worse in programming than at least in other Engineering fields

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

#290

Post by shearskill »

donjigweed wrote: post #59
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…

These days, holding all other factors constant, SV companies will generally hire {gay|female|trans|minority} candidates before {male|white|indian|asian}. So companies are apparently not at all concerned about hiring members of protected classes, rather they prefer to hire them. Now, if you want to make the argument that older employees don't boost the companies D&I numbers, while at the same incurring the risk of a p…

TFA is about ageism which still affects all the “preferred” candidates you listed. How many older women engineers do you work with?
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