Admirable, but in practice this is tough. We have always been age-agnostic and all our engineering hires are remote. I don’t explicitly ask, but can get a sense of how old someone is in the phone call portion of interview. My takeaway from doing hundreds of these interviews is that even after correcting for experience levels, age correlates with inflated expectations: salary, paid vacation, benefits, etc. This alone has been our hurdle to hiring people 40+.
We Hire Old People
51–60 of 303 posts
Re: We Hire Old People
#52Define ‘old’. How young counts as old in tech these days?
A recruiter from a prominent SF / Silicon Valley tech headhunting firm once told me that 40 is the cutoff for individual contributors. As a counterpoint, I know plenty of over-40 (and older!) wise software engineers working for places like Google. So maybe the discrimination is worse at someplace like Uber? Personally, I value age diversity on a team, just as I value gender, ethnic, etc. diversity. The added perspect…
That statement could be illegal.
Re: We Hire Old People
#53We hire old people too! We've found that experienced people are a perfect fit for a startup
Re: We Hire Old People
#54As what some would call an old person (~50), I love this. There is so much knowledge in old workers. Not all is relevant, sure, but there is so much that is timeless stuff that every young Engineer will learn, sooner or later, though varying degrees of suffering. If we could put away arrogance (from both young and old) we could do so much to advance the field.
Re: We Hire Old People
#55Why do I feel uncomfortable with this listing?
Maybe it's because I'm a 20 something dev in Silicon Valley? Maybe it's because I don't trust anyone who calls themselves experts in anything? Maybe it's because I work with plenty of "older" devs in Silicon Valley? Or that I think the two-jobs-at-once hiring process is horrible?
I probably shouldn't feel uncomfortable with it, but I do. I guess the ad isn't for me, though.
Re: We Hire Old People
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you think is illegal about it? They make it clear that age is not an issue.
Many full time jobs include language preventing you from working a second job in a similar role.
Similar role? Or at a similar company?
I would expect my company to be unhappy if I were to consult for a competitor on the side. There's probably language in the employment agreement that prohibits that, and even if there isn't, it's still the kind of thing you should avoid due to conflict of interest.
But I'm not sure about an agreement not to take a similar role. If the employment agreement says that, I'm not sure that it's legally binding. Even if it is, you may be able to weasel around it with "but it's consulting, not a full-time position".
Note well: IANAL. If you're concerned, get advice from a lawyer rather than from some rando on the internet.
Re: We Hire Old People
#57Define ‘old’. How young counts as old in tech these days?
pretty sure old these days means you remember dial up modem noises better than whatever music was on the charts at the time.
Re: We Hire Old People
#58> The hiring process is in the form of a paid, short-term consulting gig that will lead to a full-time offer if we like you and you like us. We'll give you some tasks, you'll get them done, and then we'll talk. No need to quit your day job to do this gig; we'll work around your schedule. Interesting. I look forward to hearing if this works out long term. I'd be worried about legal implications of something like this…
What would you think is illegal about it? They make it clear that age is not an issue.
Important distinction, "legal implications" can mean that an action is unlawful, or that it can result in a lawsuit. This is of the latter sort. If you use your employer's hardware, or your contract forbids secondary employment (or "we own everything you do on or off the clock" type clauses), then there's a risk of your employer's lawyers coming after you.
Re: We Hire Old People
#59I wrote the ad. Holy cow, I didn't expect to be #1 on Hacker News. Will answer any questions. Here's one you might ask: Why? I'm pushing 60 and I've attempted to interview for developer jobs over the last year. Got nowhere despite 40 years of experience. Getting really, really tired of this industry's attitude toward people like me. Based on questions below, I'll give a bit more. Earlier this year I had a personal re…
Thanks, appreciate qualifying a bit what is considered “old”. I am 41, but only 4 years of software development experience. So only applied for junior positions yet. I don’t think I faced ageism applying to jobs, but I rarely applied to SV jobs (I am not from the US).
What do you think is the reasoning people having ageist behavior use to convince themselves they are not bad people? That old people won’t learn, or won’t be “tecahable”, or “manageable”? That old people will be slow somehow? What were you able to grasp from the experiences you had?
Re: We Hire Old People
#60To be clear, age discrimination happens far more broadly than just Silicon Valley. You just hear about it more because there are far more software engineers in Silicon Valley than anywhere else, but it is not a Silicon Valley only problem - it is a global problem. To finish on a positive note: love the contract to hire approach. :)
any concrete examples of the broad ageism claim?