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We Hire Old People

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Re: We Hire Old People

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I get what you are saying and appreciate it. But when you are in a position to hire and there is no apparent benefit to hiring someone who wants more money vs someone with the same skills and relevant experience, why would you hire the person who wants more money?

How do you know they want more money if you don't interview them?

Re: We Hire Old People

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may all be true, but (at least some) older people have more to extract.

> That may all be true, but (at least some) older people have more to extract. Not when multiplied by number of hours foolishly spent on employer interests while caught up in the competitive frenzy with effectively zero other obligations.

I have far fewer obligations in my 50s than I did in my 30s. Kids are gone, I’m happily married and not in the dating scene, I am settled in a home. Other than work and hanging out with my wife, I don’t have anything else going on. But back when I was dating and then had young kids and then even older kids (with all of their activities) I had a ton more obligations outside of work. It started going down in my mid 40s and now I’m totally free. I don’t intend to retire for 15-20 more years, that is a lot of years of zero obligations someone could get out of me.

Re: We Hire Old People

#183

As a general question, why would someone write age/birth date in a CV? Maybe it's different per region, but I never saw this as a strict requirement. Profile pictures may be skipped as well (although a good quality image is hardly telling much). As a personal experience, hiring personnel sometimes asked about it, some even told this is required by employer/customer, I told them they can drop my application then - it…

> As a general question, why would someone write age/birth date in a CV?

If someone graduated university in 1986 (or 1976), it doesn't matter if they've written their birth date on their CV or not.

Re: We Hire Old People

#184
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd venture a guess that (especially in SV/venture tech startups in general) that bias also comes from young folks not having many/any external commitments, so may be easier to get to work longer hours - someone with a family probably can't pull a 60 hour week as easily as someone living in a microstudio with few other cares in the world, yeah?

Even absent external commitments (which, BTW, also biases towards men), older folks are often more resistant to 60 hour weeks since they've either observed or experienced burnout and understand that these unsustainable death marches typically result in lower productivity, more bugs, bad code, and mounds of technical debt.

Re: We Hire Old People

#185

Define ‘old’. How young counts as old in tech these days?

I hope/believe that this is getting higher with time. Worldwide, programming as a full-time profession only blew up 15-20 years ago. There will be an increasing mass of aged IT people, and career paths will be fleshed out in parallel - the same had happened with all modern-age jobs, like racecar drivers or professional bodybuilders.

Re: We Hire Old People

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get what you are saying and appreciate it. But when you are in a position to hire and there is no apparent benefit to hiring someone who wants more money vs someone with the same skills and relevant experience, why would you hire the person who wants more money?

How do you know they want more money if you don't interview them?

Please read my original comment. We discuss salary expectations during the initial interview.

Re: We Hire Old People

#187

As a general question, why would someone write age/birth date in a CV? Maybe it's different per region, but I never saw this as a strict requirement. Profile pictures may be skipped as well (although a good quality image is hardly telling much). As a personal experience, hiring personnel sometimes asked about it, some even told this is required by employer/customer, I told them they can drop my application then - it…

It's not just age and birthdate. What about the year I graduated college? The year I started working? These are not perfect, but you can put a pretty tight lower bound on a candidate's age with these. You can leave these out, or say, lower your claims number of years of experience, I suppose.

Re: We Hire Old People

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They bold "We hire old people". They're already primed to think about the age of their candidates, and potentially bias towards older people. Or they're primed to make sure they try to exclude accidental bias, or are just signalling that people that might forego the process under the assumption that they are already biased against give it a go? This is sort of like the whole "Well don't white people matter too" cri…

> What way would you advertise this position such that older developers felt welcome that you think wouldn't cause you to feel biased against? Why would they feel unwelcome? On this post, I'd feel unwelcomed as a young person. Which, whatever, I don't actually care beyond having a conversation about it. I'd just not apply. Likewise, as a white person if a posting said "We hire black people!" then I'd be like "alright…

> Why would they feel unwelcome?

I can't but feel this is a problem of you being uninformed. I don't know if that's because of what I presume is relative inexperience in the industry and lack of exposure to the problem based on your age, and I'm not trying to be flippant or denigrate, but there's a widely known and acknowledged problem of ageism in this industry. So widely known and acknowledged, that those that try to cut through the problem feel the need to advertise like this.

You can search on HN[1], or elsewhere for more info.

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ageism

Re: We Hire Old People

#189
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> That seems like a court case at least.

For what? Youth is not a protected class. Discriminate against them all you want.

> 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

Age discrimination is different from other discrimination cases. It's really hard to win, for instance[1]. The company doesn't have to prove anything. The worker would have to prove that it was explicit age discrimination. For other types of discrimination, like race, the only thing that needs to be shown is differences in outcomes.

[1] https://www.nextavenue.org/what-it-takes-win-age-discriminat...

Re: We Hire Old People

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They bold "We hire old people". They're already primed to think about the age of their candidates, and potentially bias towards older people. Or they're primed to make sure they try to exclude accidental bias, or are just signalling that people that might forego the process under the assumption that they are already biased against give it a go? This is sort of like the whole "Well don't white people matter too" cri…

> What way would you advertise this position such that older developers felt welcome that you think wouldn't cause you to feel biased against? Why would they feel unwelcome? On this post, I'd feel unwelcomed as a young person. Which, whatever, I don't actually care beyond having a conversation about it. I'd just not apply. Likewise, as a white person if a posting said "We hire black people!" then I'd be like "alright…

> Likewise, as a white person if a posting said "We hire black people!" then I'd be like "alright I guess this isn't really for me" and not apply.

As a white person, I don't understand; why wouldn't you apply?

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