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

nytimes.com

291–300 of 451 posts

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

#293

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.

Well, I’d also like to retire in less than 20 years, so, factor that in (probably $2000-2500/month). Food, utilities, insurance, car expenses (I don’t drive much, but it’s fairly essential for me to have a car to get certain places; it’s also paid off, fortunately), etc. I think you can see where this is going.

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

#294
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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. How are you supposed to find out the…

Linkedin. If you can't find the person who manages that department, find anybody in that department and ask them about the job and the manager. One "trick" is to let them know you're looking to apply at the company and want to ask them for career advice. Most people love giving advice.

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

#295
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…

Let's say the CTO said "I'm concerned the candidate won't fit in because he's not into video games or partying with coworkers or working on the weekends, all the things that help us bond and keep a cohesive team". While not directly mentioning his age, such criteria would still make it very unlikely that the older candidate would be hired.

Would you consider this to be age discrimination (from a moral perspective; let's ignore legal considerations since those are incredibly vague and convoluted)?

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

#296
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.

Until everyday does it. And then what?

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

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like studying. Like, my list of things to learn more about in CS/software engineering/Math alone is probably longer than I'm going to get to before retirement... which, if I'm lucky, will consist in no small part of studying things and working on personal projects. I don't understand people who say they don't want to be immortal, they'd get bored. I can sortof imagine my psyche eventually crushing itself und…

I can guarantee you that someone knowing leetCode and algorithms would be absolutely useless where I work. Most developers are doing CRUD apps or at most apps where the complexity is in the business rules and process.

This is curious to me, and it's not just in your comment that I've seen this.

But why is there this assumption that if someone studies Leetcode and algorithms then it means that they can't do anything else? Why is there this all or nothing mentality?

If someone studies Leetcode and algorithms, wouldn't one assume they know other things as well in the software engineering realm? I have plenty of friends in the Bay Area who are thriving at FAANG who studied algorithms and Leetcode intensely.

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

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm almost 50 myself. I've been coding for 25+ years, and am looking for a new job myself. I have one at a well-known company but I want to make more hay while the sun shines. I currently have a week of onsites booked with the Big N, and I'm in study mode. Because I'm still technical and hands-on and never became a manager, I haven't had any trouble getting contacted constantly for new jobs.

What's the 'Big N'?

Netflix

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

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can guarantee you that someone knowing leetCode and algorithms would be absolutely useless where I work. Most developers are doing CRUD apps or at most apps where the complexity is in the business rules and process.

This is curious to me, and it's not just in your comment that I've seen this. But why is there this assumption that if someone studies Leetcode and algorithms then it means that they can't do anything else? Why is there this all or nothing mentality? If someone studies Leetcode and algorithms, wouldn't one assume they know other things as well in the software engineering realm? I have plenty of friends in the Bay Are…

How much time have they spent using the standard frameworks that most companies use everyday? Could they even model a standard relational schema? Do they know anything about automated testing?

If they were told a web page was slow would they know enough architecturally to know how to find the bottleneck and no the solution for solving it? No the answer is not based on finding the o(n) complexity of reversing a binary tree.

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

#300
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…

Let's say the CTO said "I'm concerned the candidate won't fit in because he's not into video games or partying with coworkers or working on the weekends, all the things that help us bond and keep a cohesive team". While not directly mentioning his age, such criteria would still make it very unlikely that the older candidate would be hired. Would you consider this to be age discrimination (from a moral perspective; le…

Of course it is ageism. The CTO confused finding an employee with finding a fk buddy. The company is toxic, and is certainly discriminating unlawfully in multiple axis.

Also, none of the things you mentioned contribute to team cohesion, they are all detrimental to it.

Basically you are describing a CTO that has no idea how to CTO. We can take solace in the fact that his startup will fail hard.

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