New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It

Post by mixmastamyk » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

ido wrote: post #323

Zenst wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a 50+ chap, I had an instance of a top company, referred by friend, whole team up for it and to not even get an interview as I got `filtered` by HR and the recruitment process. Turns out they rejected me as I was `overqualified`. Equally in my early years pre PC mainstream days, there was an age bias towards older people. With many personal experiences upon that in that time/culture - including, believe it or not…

Dare say starting out today is easier than it was pre internet boom. Hard to say without a time machine, but from talking to juniors & students (I have a lot of friends who teach) it sounds harder to get that first job than it was when I was starting out (I'm 36). My completely unscientific gut feeling was that it was the easiest to get started in tech in the late 90s & right as the industry started recovering from t…

Post by LifeLiverTransp » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 7:40 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #359

jtr1 wrote: post #256

A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He’d worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, men…

Engineering manager was afraid a more experienced dev could call him out on his bullshit. Not being willing to manage someone older than you is likely a sign of cowardice. The first and second really good developers I worked with were around 35 and 45 when I met them.

Post by mixmastamyk » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 8:29 AM UTC

Consultant32452 wrote: post #321

pmiller2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many employers do you find yourself needing to exclude because of the “no Leetcode” thing? Do you think you’re sacrificing anything in the way of comp by doing so?

I've got about 20 years of professional coding under my belt including a 5 year stint doing a lot of job hopping/consulting. I'd never even heard of leetcode until this post and won't bother to even visit the website. For most of my career I've been in the group giving interviews. I don't recall having ever seen it mentioned on a resume. It's a complete and total nothing for any employer I've ever worked for/with. Ba…

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 8:45 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #359

jtr1 wrote: post #256

A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He’d worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, men…

Engineering manager was afraid a more experienced dev could call him out on his bullshit. Not being willing to manage someone older than you is likely a sign of cowardice. The first and second really good developers I worked with were around 35 and 45 when I met them.

Post by mixmastamyk » Sun, Jun 09, 2019, 8:54 AM UTC

drchewbacca wrote: post #50

One thing I'm a bit confused about is why doesn't salary bidding fix this? For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable? Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x mark…