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Age Discrimination at Work

nytimes.com

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Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#41

Post by wyclif »

I'm now over 50 years old, a full stack web developer, and I'm married and have two kids, an 8 year old and a 1 year old baby.

I've been in this industry for a while. I started out as a system administrator writing a lot of bash and Perl scripts, taking care of mail servers and DNS, and doing a lot of corporate backups. That job is now called "DevOps", and I've made the transition.

I now work in Python 3, Django, Ruby, JavaScript, Kubernetes, and AWS. I haven't been standing still, and I firmly believe the key to avoiding career stagnation is to be constantly learning and educating yourself and never being satisfied with the status quo.

I've been fortunate, as a remote worker, that I haven't really experienced severe negative consequences (at least not yet...knock on wood) from age discrimination. Yet the shadow of ageism is always there, and I hear stories from friends about incredibly insensitive and cringe-worthy age discrimination.

I'm content with my role as a "grey beard" (I'm actually clean-shaven now, but back in the day I had a huge red UNIX hacker beard). But I'm not happy with the way the tech industry treats older workers. I'm supportive of legal protections for older workers in tech. We are not all dinosaurs. Many of us know, for instance, how to sniff out fads from real forward leaps, and we have deep industry experience that can be leveraged by employers open-minded enough to hire us.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#42

Post by bilbo0s »

resoluteteeth wrote: post #28
jasoneckert wrote: post #15

I've seen and heard of age discrimination in non-tech industries, but in the tech industry I believe that age discrimination is often mistaken for skills obsolescence. As a software developer for as long as I can remember, I'm actually at the top of my game now in my 40s - I can software engineer (plan) off the top of my head, and my tenacity is balanced with a sense of direction I never had as a younger developer. I…

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…

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 highly unlikely that anyone's been coding go or rust services for 20 years in any case. (To be honest, it's even unlikely that anyone's been coding go or rust services for 5.) So any of those applicants, as long as their references check out, will do.

Which salary do I want to pay?

If I have a low level, quasi hardware layer service that I need coded in C or C++? Fine, yes, experience matters. It matters a lot in those instances, and I'd be foolish to hire some kid to do that. But there is less and less of that kind of work. (Flip side being that such work is more and more critical.) The dirty secret of the tech industry however, is that most work is just CRUD equivalent stuff that could be satisfactorily accomplished by any warm bodied techie. So it just makes no sense to pay more for those warm bodies.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#43

Post by geomark »

sdrothrock wrote: post #10
michalu wrote: post #6

> At 66, I am in excellent health.... Then presume I’m Miranda Priestly... I do not want a childproof cap on anything that threatens to ruin my expensive manicure ... I do NOT have any children or grandchildren! If you're 66 and you're still sitting around in a corporate job, and you have no children because you model yourself after a BS character from a BS movie then you're really just taking up space for someone wh…

> If you're 66 and you're still sitting around in a corporate job, and you have no children, 9/10 you're really just taking up space for someone who needs to feed their kids, has a potential to grow, and a better place to funnel the earned money than "expensive manicure" That seems very judgmental to me. I don't plan to have kids due to genetic conditions and other reasons, but by your reckoning, I don't deserve a jo…

When you are young and childless you get the difficult shift/all nighter/extra travel because the other guys have families. Then when you get older and the kids are gone you get the same screwing over because the other guys have family to feed. It's always something.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#44

Post by bluecalm »

mschuster91 wrote: post #25
noir_lord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're really just taking up space for someone who needs to feed their kids, has a potential to grow, and a better place to funnel the earned money than "expensive manicure" That's a ridiculous assertion, if someone is physically well and wants to work it's nobody's business how they spent then spend the money they earn. Choosing to have kids or not shouldn't give you any special status in the workforce at all (tho…

> That's a ridiculous assertion, if someone is physically well and wants to work it's nobody's business how they spent then spend the money they earn. No. It was part of the unwritten "societal contract" that old people retire to leave place for young people to rise. This worked for long times, but governments broke this contract decades ago by wrecking pension/retirement systems, and now the wannabe-pensioners have…

I don't agree it's part of the societal contract. I am already grateful to live in a world previous generations built. The wars are fought, the infrastructure is built. I get access to technology previous generations could only dream of. I can do business selling to the whole world wearing underwear sitting in my bedroom even if it's a 3rd world country.

I couldn't have asked for more of previous generations. The last thing I could complain about is people from the generation providing me with all that trying to still work and make money out of it.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#45

Post by onion2k »

factorialboy wrote: post #5

Allow me to provide a contrarian view. I'm not disagreeing that age-discrimination does not exist, however I must say it's not always the case. I'm 35, so I wouldn't qualify as young but neither old. Businesses tend to recruit younger devs for few reasons: - They can be easily convinced to work longer hours - They are typically paid much less However there is one trait in older devs that make them undesirable: - They…

Just in case it's not obvious, your assertion about what older people are like is absolutely textbook ageism.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#46

Post by cameronbrown »

mschuster91 wrote: post #25
noir_lord wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're really just taking up space for someone who needs to feed their kids, has a potential to grow, and a better place to funnel the earned money than "expensive manicure" That's a ridiculous assertion, if someone is physically well and wants to work it's nobody's business how they spent then spend the money they earn. Choosing to have kids or not shouldn't give you any special status in the workforce at all (tho…

> That's a ridiculous assertion, if someone is physically well and wants to work it's nobody's business how they spent then spend the money they earn. No. It was part of the unwritten "societal contract" that old people retire to leave place for young people to rise. This worked for long times, but governments broke this contract decades ago by wrecking pension/retirement systems, and now the wannabe-pensioners have…

I have to wonder, when people used to think about medicine extending the human lifespan, did they realise it just meant another 10 years of work. What a horrible outcome. If the people who wanted to retire were allowed, then kids wouldn't struggle to find jobs. Even starter jobs are difficult to find. Anecdata, but when I was looking for a starter job the median age of a shop worker was nearly 30. All the higher up jobs being taken just stops the mobility and hurts everyone.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#47

Post by cameronbrown »

bluecalm wrote: post #44
mschuster91 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a ridiculous assertion, if someone is physically well and wants to work it's nobody's business how they spent then spend the money they earn. No. It was part of the unwritten "societal contract" that old people retire to leave place for young people to rise. This worked for long times, but governments broke this contract decades ago by wrecking pension/retirement systems, and now the wannabe-pensioners have…

I don't agree it's part of the societal contract. I am already grateful to live in a world previous generations built. The wars are fought, the infrastructure is built. I get access to technology previous generations could only dream of. I can do business selling to the whole world wearing underwear sitting in my bedroom even if it's a 3rd world country. I couldn't have asked for more of previous generations. The las…

> The last thing I could complain about is people from the generation providing me with all that trying to still work and make money out of it.

But GPs comment was about pensioners who want to retire but cannot. Those who enjoy working - sure.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#48

Post by peteradio »

fiblye wrote: post #3

I was applying to a job with a large game studio. The interview was going pretty well, I'd thought. We talked a bit about how we'd implement certain gameplay elements, the content of the projects we've worked on, and overall it just seemed good and we all seemed to get along pretty well. Then they asked me how old I was. Their response to my age was, "Oh... maybe it's a little late then. You're not too old, but... ki…

I have a very hard time believing this happened. 26?

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#49

Post by gbacon »

Kudos wrote: post #16
factorialboy wrote: post #5

Allow me to provide a contrarian view. I'm not disagreeing that age-discrimination does not exist, however I must say it's not always the case. I'm 35, so I wouldn't qualify as young but neither old. Businesses tend to recruit younger devs for few reasons: - They can be easily convinced to work longer hours - They are typically paid much less However there is one trait in older devs that make them undesirable: - They…

> be prepared to compete with the fresh crop of talent coming in The whole point is that you're not given a fair chance to compete, with your resume being discarded simply because you are older.

Merely placing resumes onto lots of piles of other resumes is a losing strategy for job seekers because the cost of doing the same thing for competitors is so low, and as you noted, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd.

As a hiring manager, I’d much rather hire someone whose work I already know or based on a personal recommendation from someone whose opinion I value. Combing through resumes is risky and time consuming. Please (!) help me help you by dragging yourself out of the pool of resumes and into one of the top two categories.

Re: Age Discrimination at Work

#50

Post by markdown »

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.

Well that's just silly. If it's the norm, why penalise people who're just doing it the way they think everyone else will.

Better to specify in your job ad that you won't accept CV's with pics.

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