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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

#341

Post by aiisjustanif »

mykowebhn wrote: post #297
scarface74 wrote: post #275

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…

> I have plenty of friends in the Bay Area who are thriving at FAANG who studied algorithms and Leetcode intensely.

And I've seen developers come from doing Node green field APIs at Netflix to waist deep in a 15 year old Java application with Spring MVC and some underlying Struts yet to be removed and don't understand why debugger stopped going any deeper and they lost where they start 10 classes ago from shared modules.

Then they don't understand how refactoring a core message for alerting customer across the sight has tight coupling, wanted to something fancy and broke the key business features, try to argue it's better but a business unit just list functionality of it's product. Instead of researching, and coming up a plan with a team to refactor using TTD and Strangle Vine method from the legacy tightly coupled code, to a separate module with better testing and following SOLID principles.

Welcome to multiple Fortune 500 companies.

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

#342

Post by _cs2017_ »

dragonwriter wrote: post #304
_cs2017_ wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Would you consider this to be age discrimination (from a moral perspective; let's ignore legal considerations since those are incredibly vague and convoluted)? It's straightforward (disparate impact) age discrimination from a legal perspective. The law in this area isn't that vague and convoluted.

I believe this is incorrect.

Disparate impact is not a violation of the US law (neither federal nor state). If the disparate impact is related to the job, it's legal. (For example, a movie studio that turns away old actors who apply to play young characters will most likely win in court, if sued.)

What is reasonably related to the job, is far from clear; the rules are vague, and the previous rulings are complex and inconsistent.

In addition, I didn't want to make my question specific to the US. And the laws across different countries (even the Western developed countries) are not the same.

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

#343

Post by seattle_spring »

shearskill wrote: post #290
donjigweed wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Want to share some statistics on what percentage "older women" have CS degrees versus how many have them overall?

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

#344

Post by aiisjustanif »

mykowebhn wrote: post #95
b212 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "I did 250 Leetcode"? You solved 250 problems there?

Yes, I'll update my original comment to clarify.

Geez, that's insane to me. Very exhausting, and probably idk 140 - 180 hours?

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

#345

Post by pmiller2 »

seattle_spring wrote: post #338
jacobsenscott wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it is ageism. The CTO confused finding an employee with finding a f k 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.

I'm not sure working weekends and liking video games are traits of a "fk buddy."

You’re nitpicking and not addressing the point. Substitute “friend,” and the argument remains intact.

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

#346

Post by yawaramin »

_cs2017_ wrote: post #342
dragonwriter wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Would you consider this to be age discrimination (from a moral perspective; let's ignore legal considerations since those are incredibly vague and convoluted)? It's straightforward (disparate impact) age discrimination from a legal perspective. The law in this area isn't that vague and convoluted.

I believe this is incorrect. Disparate impact is not a violation of the US law (neither federal nor state). If the disparate impact is related to the job, it's legal. (For example, a movie studio that turns away old actors who apply to play young characters will most likely win in court, if sued.) What is reasonably related to the job, is far from clear; the rules are vague, and the previous rulings are complex and i…

Come on now. It should be perfectly clear that playing video games and beer pong with colleagues is not a requirement for a job as a software developer.

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

#347

Post by aiisjustanif »

freyr wrote: post #54

Can someone tell me where the older software engineers in the Bay Area have gone? I recently moved into the software industry (after years in the telecom industry), and the lack of older software engineers is disconcerting in a Soylent Green type of way. I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely…

The answer is Texas.

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

#348

Post by pmiller2 »

Youcandothis wrote: post #322
wellpast wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is striving toward ‘hiring fairness’ ... don’t believe any person who says that’s what they are after. Better outcomes, better industry productivity, sure. But ‘hiring fairness’?

Hiring fairness sounds to me like the same as hiring for better outcomes and industry productivity.

I agree. Fairness in the sense of “equal ability to do the job results in the same outcome” would, indeed, get us there. The problem is that interviews don’t actually represent ability to do the job, not in this industry, at least.

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

#349

Post by aiisjustanif »

jxramos wrote: post #320
povertyworld wrote: post #92

This is why I gave up on ever having a "real job". This thread inspired me to take a look at a job board and the first thing I saw was a mobile developer job listed as "entry level". Scrolling down, the requirements are 5 years minimum mobile development experience. This is entry level now? Five years experience? By the time I have five years experience working at some kind of theoretical pre-entry level job and fina…

I think the I internal consistentcy of these job board postings is a function of the recruitment actors of a company properly filling out the webforms for the roles they post. I get the sense that they leave default values or reuse templates that carry over copy/paste errors.

Some of those job postings are so high on requirements to deter outside folks, and hire someone internal. Most companies have a policy of posting a job x amount of days before internals can officially be offered.

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

#350

Post by _cs2017_ »

yawaramin wrote: post #346
_cs2017_ wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is incorrect. Disparate impact is not a violation of the US law (neither federal nor state). If the disparate impact is related to the job, it's legal. (For example, a movie studio that turns away old actors who apply to play young characters will most likely win in court, if sued.) What is reasonably related to the job, is far from clear; the rules are vague, and the previous rulings are complex and i…

Come on now. It should be perfectly clear that playing video games and beer pong with colleagues is not a requirement for a job as a software developer.

It is not a secret that some famous game studios turned away experienced software engineers simply because they didn't play video games.

Expecting employees to work on weekends is even more common, and not just in the gaming industry.

Please remove "partying" from my list; it was dumb of me to mention it, it only makes my example less realistic.

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