Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k

Be discriminated against, fight five years in court and get a $90K payout. Where's the win exactly?

Not sure what win this would be as companies will give zero feedback to avoid incriminating themselves, according to the article.

"The company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,”

Sadly it doesn't look like age discrimination will stop, just the feedback will.

With age comes wisdom. There is no shortcut.

In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers execute on such schemes, even targeting specific workers who might have authority to block such platform shifts. Even in small startups where the hiring entrepreneur may have been working in a different field with plenty of high-skill mature workers or living at (a parent’s) home playing video games pounding caffeine drinks just a few months earlier, there still seems to be an instinctive bias to hire young (and cheap) tech people and embrace whatever tech du jour that they prefer to maximize their chance of success. Even Y Combinator reportedly got its start poaching college age kids with $6K all-in packages and “incubating” them. (Get away from me with that thing!) It’s not The Way, of course, but with most mature workers permanently taken out of the industry during the dot-com crash and that flood of technicians filling critical roles for a while, it’s also not going to change until the new generation (currently their most senior workers are at about 17 years experience by my clock) takeover the game like “The Ancients” before them (that they never knew).

Source: my six year education and 41 year pro career that began under people who had once fought in WWII and I’m still way (WAY!) younger than the youngest founder of Apple (#8)

IMO a judgement like this doesn't discourage anything, just reinforces that fact that breaking the rules is advantageous and fines are a small cost of doing business.