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We Hire Old People

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Re: We Hire Old People

#81

Post by em-bee »

samcheng wrote: post #40
jonplackett wrote: post #5

Define ‘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…

> I know plenty of over-40 (and older!) wise software engineers working for places like Google.

yes, but at what age were they hired? and at what level are they working?

Re: We Hire Old People

#82

Post by beebeepka »

hkrgl wrote: post #69
bequanna wrote: post #51

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…

> age correlates with inflated expectations: salary, paid vacation, benefits, etc. This alone has been our hurdle to hiring people 40+. I am curious why you wouldn't offer market-rate salary with paid vacation and benefits to all employees. What does age have to do with it?

They have to treat older people with respect, and pay them accordingly. Apparently, they don't want to.

Re: We Hire Old People

#83

Post by city41 »

bequanna wrote: post #51

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…

Is it inflated expectations, or do younger people not always understand what they are worth? I suspect it's probably somewhere in between the two.

Re: We Hire Old People

#84

Post by sokoloff »

hkrgl wrote: post #69
bequanna wrote: post #51

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…

> age correlates with inflated expectations: salary, paid vacation, benefits, etc. This alone has been our hurdle to hiring people 40+. I am curious why you wouldn't offer market-rate salary with paid vacation and benefits to all employees. What does age have to do with it?

Exactly. Age has no place being passed to the proposed compensation function. Experience and other correlated parameters are valid, but age itself is not.

If a candidate and the employer can’t reach an agreement, so be it. If that is because the candidate inflates their expectations because of their age [or wisdom], well, see previous sentence.

Re: We Hire Old People

#85

Post by pkolaczk »

shock-value wrote: post #32
azhenley wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought is that it might be illegal to do consulting without your employer's approval in some places (like the US).

It can certainly be in violation of an employment contract. What makes you think it would be illegal though?

In some places. Not in Poland, as long as you're not competing with your employer. Also clauses like "we own the work you do in your personal time" have no legal implications here, because they directly contradict the labor law.

Generally you're free to do whatever you wish with your free time outside working hours and the employment contract has no power over it.

Re: We Hire Old People

#87

Post by beepbooptheory »

MattGaiser wrote: post #65
ccleve wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't even get to the interview stage. My tech skills never got assessed.

Damn. I have no great experience and can get interviews in a day or two. And everyone I talk to complains about no experienced tech people.

How do you get interviews in a day or two with no great experience??? These days, I just feel lucky to get an email rejection back at all

Re: We Hire Old People

#88

Post by chana_masala »

bequanna wrote: post #51

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…

You sound stodgy

Re: We Hire Old People

#89

Post by SkyMarshal »

cmiles74 wrote: post #66
maerF0x0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what you attribute the ageism towards? I wonder what actual or perceived traits trend with age that hiring managers are trying to avoid? I'll venture one idea-- Once you have enough experience you start to be able to see the emperor has no clothes situations. Not being naively positive about everything can be interpreted as being overly negative (at least in the bay area). Funny enough it might just be the "…

When I'm feeling generous, I would guess the company doesn't want to spend the money required to compensate people with that level of experience.

Or ungenerously, they think all engineers are interchangeable and don't realize there may be a difference in code quality between different levels of experience, so why not just get the cheapest ones you can.

Re: We Hire Old People

#90

Post by api »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #76
ccleve wrote: post #30

I 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…

I worked at an electric autonomous car company in the Bay Area (not that one) that was crawling with 22 year olds slinging code every which way. Periodically a bug emerge that the younger generation couldn't get their head around. Invariably one of the older guys (in his 50's or 60's) would spend an afternoon looking at it, fix it, and then yell at all the kids in the room. I was somewhere between the two age groups…

I've seen this too, and I really wonder why there is such an age bias toward straight out of college kids. Having some is fine but the whole industry seems heavily biased in that direction.

I suspect it's rooted in the historic youth of computer aficionados back during the early-mid PC era in the 1970s and 1980s, and a cargo cult idea that youth was the ingredient that made this stuff happen. Instead it was the other way around. The youth of the participants was a product of all this stuff being so new. Now that the PC revolution is almost 50 years old there are tons of people who know computers very well in all age groups.

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