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We Hire Old People

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Re: We Hire Old People

#201

Post by varispeed »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #199

When companies say there's a shortage in labor they mean there's a shortage of cute fresh 25 year olds who don't talk back and accept bad treatment. Employers will do anything not to hire 40+ year olds including recruiting people from Greece or Lithuania. Enter the great European brain drain. Meanwhile the government wants everyone to stay in employment until the retirement age of 67.

Let's not forget that those corporations are allowed to avoid paying tax while workers are taxed through the nose. Proxy taxation doesn't work, because you don't see people enjoying the same growth as corporations wealth wise. The whole system needs an overhaul and big corporations need to pay the money back.

Re: We Hire Old People

#203

Post by poisonborz »

jp57 wrote: post #187
poisonborz wrote: post #171

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.

Per my experience in recruiting, not many will make these inferences during a process, especially with a lot of candidates/large company.

But even as such, other "telling" signs can be worked around:

- College graduation years can easily be skipped - what purpose do they serve besides the count of years?

- You only need to put in the last few positions anyway, anything 10+ years is mostly irrelevant.

Re: We Hire Old People

#204

Post by yupper32 »

meepmorp wrote: post #190
yupper32 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

If they specifically mention race in the listing, then it's probably a program specifically meant to help a company's diversity. I definitely do not fall into that category, and would feel that I'm actively hurting that effort by applying.

And then if they turned around and also said "Unlike Silicon Valley, we aren't racist" then I'd just be uncomfortable with the whole thing.

Not a perfect 1:1 comparison here, but hopefully it makes sense.

Re: We Hire Old People

#205

Post by MomoXenosaga »

webmaven wrote: post #184
klardotsh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I generalize of course but I think older people realize there's more to life than the office and career. Takeaway pizza behind a laptop feels less glamorous at age 40.

Re: We Hire Old People

#206

Post by SergeAx »

hcta wrote: post #145
sahillavingia wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

IF I am ready to pay XXX bucks for doing a given job in N days, I don't really care about who actually did it. I do care about quality, so if it is substandard - we'll part ways with this contractor sooner or later.

But this actually may work for simple tasks, and a company in question doesn't looks like it is gonna throw simple tasks on their consultants.

Re: We Hire Old People

#208

Post by UncleOxidant »

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…

As a 58 year-old who has pretty much given up on tech, thanks for doing this. I'd apply, but I have no experience with postgress internals and have never even used Postgress.

Re: We Hire Old People

#209

Post by zsmi »

jays wrote: post #62
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 did this at the last startup I founded. While it can be difficult on the paperwork side, it's nothing short of amazing. It helped us find high quality fits for the team AND we actually had a better understanding of skill levels. We also used it to educate ourselves on what each employee would need in their on boarding and personal development plans.

> No need to quit your day job to do this gig

This might be true for the employer, but for the employee, I think there could be serious issues. For example, my present employer would be very unhappy if I agreed to this and I have no idea how it would play out. I'm almost positive it is in violation of my present employment contract.

Did the candidate that went for it actually have full time employment? If so, did they get approval first?

Re: We Hire Old People

#210

Post by kbenson »

yupper32 wrote: post #197
kbenson wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know why you think I don't understand that ageism is a problem. But if they're in the market for a job, and they have experience with Postgres internals, why would they not apply to this if it otherwise seemed promising? They have to apply to somewhere and they presumably have many years of experience applying to jobs and such. I get that it's a PR thing. This makes them stand out, and get to the top of HN. I…

> I don't know why you think I don't understand that ageism isn't a problem.

Because you're making statements that seem to indicate you don't understand how it works.

> But if they're in the market for a job, and they have experience with Postgres internals, why would they not apply to this if it otherwise seemed promising?

Because that's how discrimination works. When you feel your effort might be wasted, sometimes you are much more considerate of where you spend that effort. Sometimes you don't spend it at all.

> They have to apply to somewhere and they presumably have many years of experience applying to jobs and such.

No, they don't. The alternative may very well be people assuming there's no place for them in the market, so they stay at their current job even if unhappy or underpaid. Signalling to people that might be under the impression they have no place at your company that they actually might is worthwhile in many people's eyes.

This is a discrimination issue. Would you have the same perception if we were discussing women, or minorities, or people with disabilities? If you're a man, does "We hire women. (And men too.)" also make you think that you have no place at that company, or make you think they are trying to encourage diversity?

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