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Age Discrimination at Work

nytimes.com

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Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#111

Post by scarface74 »

crispyambulance wrote: post #71
bilbo0s wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My take is a bit different, and it may explain the phenomenon you've noticed on HN. TLDR; I believe a lot of people mistake price discrimination as age discrimination. Long version: Let's say you need some code monkey to slap together go or rust services. Well, sure, you get a lot of people applying with 25 years experience, you also get a lot of people applying with 5 years experience. Now here's the rub, it's highl…

> ...the dirty secret of the tech industry however, is that most work is just CRUD equivalent stuff No. I see this a lot on HN, the idea that "CRUD" applications are trivial, but it's a myth. It simply is not true. I think folks are just extrapolating from "Pet-shop" or "Northwind" examples that they've seen in tutorials/docs and assume that that is what, say, enterprise developers actually do at the same level of co…

CRUD apps are simple. You need one or two architects and seniors to make sure that things don’t go off the rails and to gather the requirements and once you have that, some boot camp grads can do the grunt work.

When I was a team lead, I wouldn’t overpay for a crud developer.

I call myself an “enterprise developer/architect” on HN for context - meaning I don’t work for the cool hip startups but let’s call a spade a spade, I’ve spent the last 10 years working on yet another software as a service crud app or bespoke internal apps. Yeah I spend some time in meetings, dealing with “cloud native” infrastructure and I can hold my own up and down the stack.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#112

Post by mdorazio »

Jordanpomeroy wrote: post #81

In my experience age discrimination is real. All large companies explicitly discriminate against young employees because US law does not prevent it (50+ becomes the protected class). Most young corporate employees are promoted on a schedule. The inputs to that algorithm are age and performance. Large companies explicitly discriminate against young employees by paying them less and refusing to promote them without con…

This is a common young person view.

You're probably conflating age and experience level here. You also seem to be assuming that people necessarily get promoted at regular intervals based on age - that's flat-out demonstrably not true. If it was true, everyone at age X would be a manager, everyone at age Y would be a director, etc. I've consulted with a lot of big cos and it's extremely common to see people well into their 40s who haven't made it to a manager role, and certainly most people will never make director no matter how old they get.

What happens is that there tend to be implicit experience minimums, not age minimums. To get to manager you need X years experience in the industry/department, director requires Y years, etc. If you start later in life, the age at which you hit that minimum will change. Big co promotions are also tied into politics and visibility of things you've worked on. Plenty of young people shoot up the ranks quickly because they're either well-connected or talked/lucked their way into working on something of high importance and visibility to the company early on.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#113

Post by scarface74 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #61
rfrey wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that solved by specifying “junior developer” or “intermediate developer”? Or by including the salary range?

It should be - but I’m positive that everybody with over 10 years experience is calling themselves a “senior developer” by now. There’s no level after that, so most everybody over 35 is a senior developer.

There are “principal developers” and architects, but just like with products and the “Innovator’s Dilemma” at some point, your skillset overserves the market. After a certain level of competence, experience doesn’t add value if you’re applying to be a developer for yet another software as a service crud app. Either be happy with salary stagnation and cost of living raises (if that) or move on to greener pastures.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#114

Post by mdorazio »

rco8786 wrote: post #34
Zenst wrote: post #2

30 years ago the discrimination was firmly against young people, today it has flipped on its head. Yet we have larger HR departments, rules, etc etc. So some serious questions need to be asked. But having felt the brunt of age discrimination when I was young and now older, I kinda angst. Kinda feel like generation discriminated sometimes having caught it at both ends.

Guessing you’re Gen X? As a millennial (albeit a slightly older one) this is the reason I tend to not worry about this. We’ll be the dominant age group in the workforce for the next 20 years, there’s no reason for us to discriminate against ourselves.

Hahahaha, I see you've never been around startups. Try walking in the door of an SV tech startup in a few years and tell me there's no age discrimination going on. There's little evidence to suggest the trend is generation-dependent.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#115

Post by jeremydeanlakey »

klingonopera wrote: post #27
robin_reala wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the UK (and I suspect all of the EU?) it’s specifically illegal to discriminate on age ( https://www.gov.uk/employer-preventing-discrimination ), and when I was last interviewing there HR would remove any birthdates that came in on CVs before passing them over to the interviewers.

In Germany, it's customary to include a picture of yourself in your CV. ...I think you can figure out your chances, if you don't include one. EDIT: I'm saying this to show how the German (who are European) employers will try to circumvent such age discriminating laws. You get it taught in school, in vocational training, at jobless centers, self-help books and the Internet, that the picture must be of "high-quality",…

Here in the US, we had a candidate include a picture of himself... wearing a captain hat and striking a dramatic pose. He said he put it there to filter out the wrong kind of companies. We hired him.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#116

Post by rco8786 »

mdorazio wrote: post #114
rco8786 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guessing you’re Gen X? As a millennial (albeit a slightly older one) this is the reason I tend to not worry about this. We’ll be the dominant age group in the workforce for the next 20 years, there’s no reason for us to discriminate against ourselves.

Hahahaha, I see you've never been around startups. Try walking in the door of an SV tech startup in a few years and tell me there's no age discrimination going on. There's little evidence to suggest the trend is generation-dependent.

Startups represent a tiny fraction of the workforce.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#117

Post by WomanCanCode »

68020 wrote: post #55
resoluteteeth wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever topics like this come up on HN, there are always tons of people in their 30s and 40s posting comments like this, which boil down to something like: "I'm not old enough to experience age discrimination yet, and I'm scared but I'm going to keep up with the latest languages/frameworks so I will be special and not be discriminated against like all the other developers, who allowed their skills to deteriorate whe…

I'm 54. Have been in sw dev for 40 years. I have kept my skills (aws api / node.js / css / html5 / etc) up to the point were I am over qualified for many of the positions (laid off 3 years back from IBM) I apply for. Before I updated my LinkedIn profile pic I received many interview invites. Now I get none. Recently I started looking at the people that these sw dev companies _actually_ hire. They ask for 3/5/10 years…

I'm a middle age female software developer and also found similar experience when I was in the job market recently. The software development positions generally are below 2 years, under 5 years and the senior position at 6-8 years. What do you do if you have 20 years of software development experience?

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#118

Post by dexterdog »

rco8786 wrote: post #34
Zenst wrote: post #2

30 years ago the discrimination was firmly against young people, today it has flipped on its head. Yet we have larger HR departments, rules, etc etc. So some serious questions need to be asked. But having felt the brunt of age discrimination when I was young and now older, I kinda angst. Kinda feel like generation discriminated sometimes having caught it at both ends.

Guessing you’re Gen X? As a millennial (albeit a slightly older one) this is the reason I tend to not worry about this. We’ll be the dominant age group in the workforce for the next 20 years, there’s no reason for us to discriminate against ourselves.

This mindset is the reason age discrimination exists and always will.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#120

Post by carstenhag »

tjungblut wrote: post #36
klingonopera wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, it's customary to include a picture of yourself in your CV. ...I think you can figure out your chances, if you don't include one. EDIT: I'm saying this to show how the German (who are European) employers will try to circumvent such age discriminating laws. You get it taught in school, in vocational training, at jobless centers, self-help books and the Internet, that the picture must be of "high-quality",…

For that exact reason I'm rejecting everybody that puts a picture on a CV in Germany.

So... You throw 90% of CVs away because... you do?
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