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

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

#41

Post by rufus_foreman »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #29
glonq wrote: post #15

50ish here. If I'm ever looking for a new job again [hopefully never!], I'll be sure to dye my hair and drop dates from my job history.

Unfortunately many companies make use of their ATS mandatory when applying for a job and those systems usually require start and end dates for all but your current job. Even if ATS doesn't requirement, HR likely will when they do employment verification.

You mean they're going to make me put on a resume that I bagged groceries at Food Lizard in the mid 1980's?

No. No they're not.

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

#42

Post by elzbardico »

ericmcer wrote: post #39
dfgfek wrote: post #31

>After he was rejected for the sales job, 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,” according to the EEOC. And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.

I have had multiple companies tell me they are looking to hire female or PoC developers during an interview before, I never knew I could get 90k for it!

Believe me, you couldn't.

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

#43

Post by JohnFen »

BadCookie wrote: post #25
JohnFen wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can’t manufacture 3 years of experience with platform X Why would you have to? You get the experience by working with the technology, just like everyone else. The older worker and the younger worker both need to have X amount of experience. I don't see how this aspect is related to age at all. > How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody. (Am I wrong?)…

So your company did a rewrite using platform X? Interesting. I think being in that situation requires a bit of luck. Many companies (understandably) don’t want to or can’t afford to rewrite their legacy code. I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening. Learning something via a side project over a couple of weeks is hardly the same thing as having multiple years of professio…

> So your company did a rewrite using platform X?

Not at all. They've been new projects, not rewrites of old ones.

> I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening.

If I spent 3 years working with a platform on my own, that's still 3 years of experience with the platform.

> Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now.

I don't understand this point. An older dev can also have spent a few years working with whatever platform is popular right now as well. Age doesn't enter into this at all.

I sense, though, that we're not fully understanding each other about something. Are you thinking that "3 years experience" is both a hard and fast rule and that it means 3 years being paid to work with it? Neither of those things are true.

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

#45

Post by icedchai »

polski-g wrote: post #33
JakeAl wrote: post #26

Been dealing with this since my 40s. And good luck hiding it on your resume, most application forms these days require dates and even addresses. I am also discriminated against based on location. Some companies won't even interview you unless you are local, even for remote jobs, even if you're willing to relocate.

How are you filling out an application in your 40s? Shouldn't you be getting poached from every job due to former colleagues wanting to work with you?

Yes, but be careful. If you have an interview and the offer comes too easily, due to internal referral or whatever, it should raise a red flag. You may be stepping into a big pile of crap (based on personal experience where this happened a couple of times.)

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

#46

Post by fragmede »

JohnFen wrote: post #19
gosub100 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you program with any regularity, learning new languages usually gets easier as you age.

So much this. Once you learn a particular programming paradigm (functional, OOP, etc.), the differences between languages in that paradigm are mostly syntactic, and learning a new syntax is pretty easy. And there are only a small handful of different paradigms. If you've been developing long enough, you've probably become competent in most, if not all, of them.

> learning a new syntax is pretty easy.

Going from C++ to eg Python or Java isn't much fun. Try going to Haskell or Rust, with the borrow checker.

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

#47

Post by gosub100 »

ncr100 wrote: post #40
gosub100 wrote: post #36

I dont want to defend "age discrimination" proper, but I think it's a very fine line and companies should have the right to select someone with low experience. This, of course, means they have to treat an "older" tech newbie the same as a fresh sprout. But it should absolutely be their choice if they want a junior level vs a senior employee.

gosub100 - making this a "right" would be redundant. What is the benefit? I may be wrong - please let me know: It's my understanding as a worker in the US that there is no restriction on employers from hiring junior-experienced employees. My two bits: Age discrimination feels rampant to me, where I see Old being equated with Bad. I see this on a bi-weekly basis from my industry-following news-consuming habit, reading…

(tried to reply earlier but I got throttled)

by "a right", I didn't mean "there ought to be a law", which is a phrase that I can't seem to get away from lately. I just mean they should be able to, they should have the freedom to seek - a person of low experience if that fits with their plan or budget. But to avoid an older person on the basis of not liking old people is flat out wrong, hence a fine line. And to answer your question, there is no restriction on hiring junior-level employees. My comment just meant there shouldn't be any shame in a team saying "let's add a junior to the team".

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

#48

Post by em-bee »

JohnFen wrote: post #19
gosub100 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you program with any regularity, learning new languages usually gets easier as you age.

So much this. Once you learn a particular programming paradigm (functional, OOP, etc.), the differences between languages in that paradigm are mostly syntactic, and learning a new syntax is pretty easy. And there are only a small handful of different paradigms. If you've been developing long enough, you've probably become competent in most, if not all, of them.

when i hire people i look for those that have learned at least two programming languages. because learning the first language is somewhat hard. the second one is hard too, mostly because you think it's going to be as hard as the first one. but once you learned it you realize that it's really mostly the same, and from then on learning most languages is easy. same goes for frameworks

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

#49

Post by faeriechangling »

ericmcer wrote: post #39
dfgfek wrote: post #31

>After he was rejected for the sales job, 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,” according to the EEOC. And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.

I have had multiple companies tell me they are looking to hire female or PoC developers during an interview before, I never knew I could get 90k for it!

That discrimination is often explicitly legal, although one wonders how companies in the United States get away with such things since the US has constitutional protections against institutional racism.

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

#50

Post by nradov »

ilaksh wrote: post #38

I'm 46 and I think the last few small contracts that I picked up were from older clients, even though I applied to quite a few other ones. So age discrimination does seem to maybe be a factor. But maybe with those clients it helped being a little older? Don't know. But for me, my real concern is just trying to come up with an AI-powered business over the next few years before I am being discriminated against not only…

LLMs aren't competition, they're just another tool that allows human programmers to work at a higher level of abstraction. When the industry (mostly) switched from coding in assembly language to high-level languages the number of programmers went up. This trend will work out the same way. There is effectively infinite demand for new software.
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