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We Hire Old People

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Re: We Hire Old People

#141

Post by ren_engineer »

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…

how do they even know your age? I think it's a pretty common best practice to only list your most recent 2-3 jobs for a 1 page resume and you could just remove your college graduation year to hide that as well.

Re: We Hire Old People

#142

Post by marcosdumay »

gonehome wrote: post #104
marcosdumay wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entire market is discriminating against old people, you don't need any discrimination to fill those roles with them. You just need to ignore age and filter for competence.

Ideally yes, but if the discrimination is there in the process (by recruiters/interviewers intentional or not) then that's hard to do. People will think they're 'ignoring age and filtering for competence' when they're not totally. If you tell recruiters "this role can only be filled by someone 40+" it immediately forces that competence filter within those bounds. If there is a lot of under valued talent there that co…

Oh, sure, when the entire society is discriminating, not discriminating may require active initiative. Things like this one "we don't care if you are old" announcement surely help.

But you don't need to discriminate on the reverse direction, and doing that is probably harmful.

Re: We Hire Old People

#143

Post by suchire »

api wrote: post #90
cjohnson318 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A large part of it is ease of hiring. In 80% of cases, new grads are relatively simple to hire; you go to campus recruiting fairs, get bundles of resumes, and since new grads don’t usually have specialized skills, you can do bulk filtering by things like GPA or simple coding exercises.

There are a lot of negative consequences of this sort of “factory hiring” mentality (for one, you exclude huge numbers of some groups of people because everything is one size fits all), but if you contrast with hiring experienced folks, it’s way more streamlined. You don’t have to do sourcing, figure out location/geography, match up skill sets and team fit, deal with expectations around title/role, etc.

A lot of people mention salary and hours worked, but I suspect the real limiting factor in hiring at fast growing companies is time and staffing to do hiring, and if all you care about is the number of people typing code, you get new grads being overrepresented

Re: We Hire Old People

#144

Post by gmadsen »

TheDong wrote: post #99
foobarian wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How awkward would it be to have the 35+ requirement be outlawed. Would certainly be interesting to read those legal arguments. Edit: I meant 35+ not 40+. Updated.

It would be quite tricky to outlaw. It's perfectly legal to have "years of experience" requirement, so for example you could have a requirement of: "Communication with spoken language is a valuable part of the job. We require all applicants to have 35+ years of experience speaking one or more languages". That's practically a requirement that you're 40/45+ without ever mentioning age.

That seems like a court case at least. You would need to prove there is any difference in language skill from someone with 15 years versus 35 years, otherwise it is just an age requirement superficially disguised as a needed skill requirement

Re: We Hire Old People

#145

Post by hcta »

sahillavingia wrote: post #75
gravypod wrote: post #4

> 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…

We do this at Gumroad. Works great; will never go back.

Do you have any pointers/docs on how to make this work? At the most basic level, how do you prevent people from wasting your money with no effort on their part e.g. by transitively contracting the task to the lowest bidder and pocketing the difference? (Not to say there are many people out there who would actually do this, but incentives clearly need to be fixed if it is feasible.)

Re: We Hire Old People

#146

Post by Rd6n6 »

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…

All the best developers I know are over 40, if not in their 50s or 60s. I don’t understand the stigma. All the young smart programmers I know will be better next year than last year

Re: We Hire Old People

#147

Post by outside1234 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #60
outside1234 wrote: post #6

To 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?

My friend in France recently complained to me that it was impossible for him, at 52, to find another job in the industry. He's at the top of his field (databases). Its pervasive.

Re: We Hire Old People

#148

Post by pengaru »

echelon wrote: post #139
pengaru wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they were infrequently used, and when they were in use, it was always the same three guys. Incidentally most startups I've been part of, there were just a few guys doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting while the rest treated it as just another 9-5.

> Incidentally most startups I've been part of, there were just a few guys doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting Is there a way to identify that talent and pay them more? Or find them and poach them?

Troll public git repositories for committers with the greatest number of hours having commits, then audit for quality?

I assumed this was the kind of thing Microsoft was already doing with both github and linkedin under their belt, either for bolstering their own ranks or as a paid service to offer recruiters.

Re: We Hire Old People

#149

Post by bloodyplonker22 »

outside1234 wrote: post #6

To 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. :)

The contract to hire approach is great for the company if the applicant accepts it, but any good applicant would not because the applicant would simply take another full time job with benefits instead. Especially in today's market.

Re: We Hire Old People

#150

Post by bee_rider »

ianlevesque wrote: post #126
bee_rider wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or that programmers who'd rather focus on things like "minimum viable products" and "just get something down" rather than "designing maintainable systems" and "avoiding sources of tech debt" skew young/inexperienced.

I’m just as capable of adding tech debt as a younger engineer is!

I always thought engineers' job was to make designs in line with best practices, which should hopefully reduce tech debt (in contrast with technicians, whose job is to execute and worry less about the overall project). But that was a lonely and pointless hill to die on...
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