Age Discrimination at Work

It's illegal, but also hard to prove. Even without birth dates, you can make a reasonable estimate based on work experience and graduation date. And when the candidate turns out to be a bit grayer than you expected, that can, even subconsciously, affect your decision.

My life was destroyed due to age discrimination. Even with a masters degree and a CS degree I was pushed into homelessness and had to beg for food for nearly a year.

In order to escape my situation, I removed 19 years of work experience and joined a boot camp where 90% of the things that were explained were already known to me.

Last year a fresh hire (white male graduated from a second-tier US college) was making 50% more than all of us (mostly brown men in their 30s and 40s), not in the same position but at a lower one. Most of my co-workers are on H1b visas so they get underpaid that way. The other trick they use is to hire you as a contractor. All of this is happening at an Indian/American outsourcing firm which is where most of this stuff happens on a regular basis - at the bottom of the industry.

After 1000 applications I gave up trying to find a managerial role (with 10 years of managerial experience abroad, plus a top 10 MBA). I was passed on by companies who hired the younger mba candidates (I was 35 at the time). I went back to my country, got a green card, moved back to America and spent months trying to find a position. I settled for a position doing something that I used in my 20s.

For a lot of people, age discrimination is just a fairy tale. But the reality is very clear: millions of Americans are overqualified for their jobs (See this article by USA Today https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/27/study-...), millions more have left the IT industry, and millions more have lost their jobs due to outsourcing or younger hires. A large percentage of people in hiring positions see employees as cattle - hence they go for the younger ones. Experience is not quantifiable, and especially not by the laughable tests that companies use nowadays for recruitment.

My life was hard, I lived in the trains of Manhattan. I lined of for food in soup kitchens for nearly two years. To get out of my situation, I worked four odd jobs simultaneously. After the biggest suffering of my life only one thing pulled me out: I took 20 years out of my resume. I deleted awards, titles, certifications, international experience, newspaper articles, publications, you name it.

Today, the job market is very clear to me. Companies are trying to compete and will hire the best candidate they can find. But, as you age life gets more and more complicated and you might fail to land a good job. Maybe you are an immigrant and your English pronunciation is lacking, maybe you are not willing to pull all nighters, or maybe you are not as good with newer technologies. Maybe one of those things is at play, but what happens when you are hired, get the highest performance review (above all your coworkers), see the young college grad fired after only two months and reflect back on your situation?

At that point, like I did, you start to think about whether age discrimination is real. For me, it is.

Some of the most talented engineers I've met were older men and women. I think companies that don't value them won't do well in the long run.

Age is just a heuristic. It's not an age gap, it's a culture gap.

Expectations of one's job are vastly different (fulfill all of my personal needs versus provide financial stability to support my personal life; work-life blend versus work-life balance).

Ethics are different (Adderall will get me through crunch time versus ugh! crunch time!; give me little projects like I had in college versus give me an area of responsibility and a mandate).

Standards are different (this project will be dead/replaced in a year, or I'll be at a new gig, so building quality is a waste versus always build quality, the definition of which I've determined based on decades of experience).

There's a gap of political perspective as well (boomers and, to an extent, Gen-Xers screwed up the world versus inheriting the established business/social order was generally accepted).

Easiest to understand is a vast difference in language and cultural reference points - not as different as an ESL candidate but on that same spectrum.

I had a very similar problem and ended up in the streets. The solution was to join a bootcamp, cut things from the resume and get a junior job. From here, you can leverage new connections to get a better job or a promotion.

Joining a bootcamp makes it look like you are new to the field and will settle for an entry-level salary. This is a very extreme solution, but might help you solve this problem for several years.

I feel bad for saying this, but my advice is to dye your hair, join a gym and take some years of your Facebook profile.

Try to save some money to buy a car to do Uber, start a small IT consulting firm or get a job teaching. Most people will advice mild patches but they dont know what it's like to run out of money. I feel your pain.