I actually find ageism to be one of the most overt forms of illegal discrimination. People talk about how they are looking for young devs in a way that would seem insane if they were talking about white devs or male.
Yes, I've been astonished by how freely ageist hiring is discussed (at least behind closed doors of hiring committees). I assume it's because it's not even really being considered discrimination in the minds of the people who're doing the talking. Getting that recognition might be the part of the battle.
It's also astonished me how at least some of the people trying to find the young devs who will work long hours are going to be in the discriminated group in a few years time! They don't seem to realise that by perpetuating the discrimination they're making themselves the future victims. It's a bizarre kind of cognitive dissonance.
They are all going to be CTO's in the future, not future victims! I assume by saying hiring committee you work at Google. A whistleblower sued Google in March alleging overt age discrimination and illegal race quotas. They copied some damning information including screenshots of their quota tool. What kind of information do you know about it?
And still I see folks in this thread rationalizing the behavior of companies, explaining how there's no discrimination happening and how age-related patterns are due to some form of "merit".
It's no surprise so many people deny the less overt racism and sexism!
Ok, and what about discrimination against young people? I can assure that that discrimination against young people is significantly more prevalent. It is just wrapped up in pretty words about "experience" or "maturity".
Nobody seems to care about the 18 year who can produce a lot of good work, but isn't likely to be paid even a third of what an equally capable 40 year old makes. How is that fair?
It's hard to imagine you actually believe that maturity and experience are not related to job performance. Regardless, it might be helpful to think about experience as a hiring heuristic, like having a college degree: you certainly don't need it to be a good programmer, but having it is positively correlated with skill (in a way that is rationally causal, unlike, say, race). Recruiting, screening and hiring are massively expensive. Screening every inexperienced candidate who wants a senior position to find the rare gem would have an outsized cost.
“Experience” is a value producing parameter. Around here (Boston) people just starting out seem to make near what people with many more years experience. If you are somewhere that isn’t paying you, shop around and leave for a company that will pay/appreciate you like you deserve.
I never made decent money programming until I became an independent contractor. (For reference, I probably have been a developer longer than you’ve been alive.)
There is a lot that goes into 'producing good work' at a company, and a lot of those things can only be gained by experience. Of course, not all experience is equal, but experience is still important.
> Of course, not all experience is equal, but experience is still important.
Would you say the same thing if someone used similar dog whistles to talk about old people?
IE, "oh, being able to move quickly and think on your fit is important, and sometimes this can only be gained by being in good physical shape, and having good health, like a young person would have".
Either discrimination is OK or it isn't. One person's justifications aren't any different than another person's.
I mean, if you are going to be THAT loose in your definition of 'discrimination', then basically everything is discrimination. It would be discrimination to hire someone who is a better programmer, because you are unfairly advantaging people who have more skill.
So yes, you are allowed to discriminate on those sorts of things. If the attribute you are discriminating for is relevant to the job, it is ok to discriminate.
Take, for example, discrimination against the physically disabled - if a construction company requires that you are able to lift 50 pound bags of concrete, it wouldn't be guilt of unlawful discrimination because that is required for the job.
On the other hand, if you require someone be able to lift a 50 pound bag, but their job is to sit at a desk and program a computer... then you would be found guilty of unfair discrimination against the disabled.
I am not being loose in my definition of discrimination. Instead I am using the exact same definition of description that the people in the lawsuit are using.
IE age discrimination.
Either age discrimination is morally OK or it isn't.
I'd be fine with either the situation of age discrimination being disallowed or allowed, across the board, regardless of whether the discrimination is against young or old people.
Either way. I just want age discrimination against young and old people to be treated exactly the same.
Your example isn’t really discrimination if you’re looking for fire fighters. “Experience” is largely acquired by making mistakes. People don’t care how old you are, they care how many years of experience you’ve acquired. I guess you can call it discrimination but only if you think hiring people “who are good at their job” discriminates against people aren’t. Of course, this is a US centric view, it could be totally different where you live.
The post you're responding to specifically calls out "illegal discrimination" - for better or for worse, youth is not a protected class (in the US, at least). Age discrimination is only illegal against those 40+ years old.
Lol you idiots downvoting. I learned this fact from a law professor/attorney. You don't like it so you are downvoting? Lol. Go look it up on wikipedia, but I think maybe if your are getting this emotional about a fact I learned in a law class, then wikipedia may be too advanced.
Either age discrimination is morally OK or it isn't.
I don't care whether it is legal or not. If you are engaging in this discrimination you are exactly morally the same as any other person engaging in discrimination, whether that be based on age, sex or race.
It's not a question of morality. The act doesn't cover people under 40 because there was no finding of age discrimination. Just like there is no discrimination against white people or men ;). Don't like it, run for Congress or Supreme court.
Or instead of that, I could condemn people who engage in age discrimination in the same way that I would condemn racists, bigots, or sexists who engage in discrimination.
There are lots of places in the world where discrimination on race, gender, and sexual orientation is legal.
And people who engage in this kind of behavior, even when it is legal, are still horrible people, and should be treated as such, by society.
It is fully within my rights to judge horrible people, and to also treat horrible people as they deserve to be treated (ie, I will treat them poorly, as they deserve).
People are often under the mistaken impression that the only way to punish someone is through the law.
That's incorrect. There are many many perfectly legal ways to punish horrible people, and there are even methods of punishing horrible people that are illegal but you are unlikely to get caught for.
I would say 75-90% of hiring managers in the US are not even US citizens and couldn't give less of a shit about US laws. Execs are incredibly happy for people to break the law for them. If an expat gets in trouble, they just get sent home with a bag full of money. For jobs in India, "freshers" have to put their blood type and where their fathers were born on their resumes because discrimination is so bad.
Possibly because, unlike race or gender, age-related biases are much more exagerrated between individuals.
I would guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change or stray from their "tried and true" methods.
The same cannot be said of a white person vs. a black person.
Re: guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change...
As I mentioned elsewhere, as I got older I am more skeptical/cynical of many fads/trends, and this "attitude" is often not valued by management. The thing is, I'm right more often than wrong and would bet my own money on such if I could. The fear of keeping up with the e-joneses has made our industry stupid. Fads/trends are poorly vetted for fit.
Warren Buffett has made similar observations about faddism in the financial industry, and he has the fat bucks to prove he's right.
I find this to be true even just entering my 30s. I've made a few slips here and there, but it appears that there's a shift from mastering a skill to having decent domain knowledge for a specific tech.
So, you're not hired on how to solve a problem now, you're hired on how much you know their desired solution. This isn't engineering, you're not helping desig action, you're implementing it.
One of the huge failures in this sense is that tech has assumed priority over user value. Like your users give a shit about microservices, React, Vue, etc. etc. when you're using more of your runway on the infrastructure and not on the solution they want.
Most of this stuff has little value to most businesses. So if you push back you don't get hired; you have to find the places mature enough to understand why you would push back at all.
There are a bunch of different things wrapped up in your post and I won’t address them all. One thing though is that we don’t separate a technician vs an engineering in computing. Think about a plumber vs a water systems engineer. Both are valuable and paid well but they have very different roles.
Lots of people can be trained to be implementers and do valuable work. But we also don’t have stable best practices so that makes it harder. The line between engineer and implementer is blurred because an implementer constantly has to evaluate which new things should really be best practices.
I wish domain knowledge was valued more in tech staff, but I've just found that's often not the case. I'm not entirely sure why, and my theories (okay, guesses) would take a while to explain.
Further, if people don't see the "latest" UI on their screen, they become afraid that the underlying technology is "behind" even if it technically satisfies a business goal. Books are judged by covers.
My point is that with a white person vs. a black person, you can assume that they are in all ways equal and interchangeable. A white person with 5 years of Java experience == a black person with 5 years of Java experience.
Young vs. old is different. A young person with 5 years of Java << an old person with 5 years of Java. Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience.
Re: Hence you must pay the old person 3x more because of all of their non-Java experience.
Not necessarily. I suspect what happened is IBM used to pay that way, but the industry practice has changed (for good or bad), but they fired based on current industry practice instead of their original practice, making it come out lopsided by age.
This is bullshit and reflects the bias built into your own views. This is a deeply rooted viewpoint of many like you, most likely based on your experiences with your narrow network of "older" people.
Anecdotally, my company is an ANSI C + ClearCase shop. Anytime discussion comes up about transitioning to safer languages like C++ or about using different VCS like Git or Mercurial it is shot down immediately by the senior developers who feel that those things are faddish.
Anecdotally, my parents always hated Windows and Microsoft Office upgrades because they would no longer be able to navigate the UIs. They became extremely resistant to upgrading anything that required them to relearn anything.
Heck, there's ancient adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" - why does that saying exist if it doesn't contain a kernel of truth??
There may be some older developers who are the exception to this, but my argument is that generally the older you get, the more entrenched your opinions and patterns become.
That's not necessarily a bad thing since those opinions and patterns were forged through decades of experience and hence contain much wisdom, but at a certain point when you are still using ANSI C and ClearCase in 2018 because there's "no need to switch to faddish version control like Git when ClearCase works perfectly fine" you are no longer fairly evaluating the technologies available on the market.
You disagreed, then confirmed that, as the comment you replied to said, your view is 'based on your experiences with your narrow network of "older" people'.
In addition, switching the VCS your company uses is possibly not what your engineering organization should focus on. I don't know enough about your company to say if switching away from ANSI C is worthwhile.
Don't discourage them from writing lots of code fast. That's a good way to learn. In your mind you need to stack rank the places where they should have done it differently, and just address the most important ones.
>> Heck, there's ancient adage "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" - why does that saying exist if it doesn't contain a kernel of truth??
A lot of people will also cry "oh god!" or something similar when they find themselves in a difficult situation, but that doesn't mean they believe in god; some do, many don't and still use the phrase. What's more, it doesn't mean there is a god. It's just something that people say.
Calling bullshit on an argument that is not made from fact is not being uncivil. I'd argue that making an argument that is such bullshit is far more uncivil than saying the word "bullshit".
You have a point, but it's trumped by the cruder point that when people get into the habit of hurling nasty words at each other, it leads to stupid discussion. Not from everybody, of course, but from most; the systemic effect is what dominates. That's why we don't allow that name-calling on HN (though that comment was hardly a serious instance of it).
Or the fact that the older people at my job still barely know how to type or use the printer or heaven forbid, scan to email! Even though they've had decades to learn it?
Im not a young dev anymore, but I can see why the older crowd has the rap they do. It doesn't make ageism right, at all.. but I can understand how it has happened.
An entire generation of people like me who have heard our older loved ones say they need their "foxfire" fixed or whatever.
10 years ago this was more palatable. Now a days it is dissolving as more older people learn the technology and more older people want to learn the technology. I personally never want to stop learning. My colleague is well into his 50's and still takes college course in math and CS. It has challenged my own personal prejudices and pushes me to be better as well.
When you say "young people" and "older people", do you mean all young and older people, or the average young or older person?
If you mean the average, then you're saying something no different from any other prejudice. You can't judge an individual by the statistics of some group s/he belongs to.
If you mean all young/older people, you've been really lucky with the young people you know and really unlucky with the older ones.
Why is it bad to judge an individual by the statistics of the group they belong to? I assume that drunk drivers are dangerous because many are, even though I know that some people can safely drive drunk. I assume that tigers are dangerous even though I know some are very tame — I wouldn’t hop into a tiger cage hoping for the best.
Because most of the time there is greater variation within a group than there is between groups. If you use group statistics to judge individuals you will be wrong more often than if you don't.
But beyond that, we as a society have decided that in many cases the benefits of using group based heuristics aren't worth the damage done to individuals within groups who are judged negatively.
Imagine you toss out all resumes with non-white sounding names because white people are statistically more likely to have x, y, or z characteristic. Even if there is a correlation to some characteristic that you are looking for (more likely to have a college degree, statistically higher income etc...), the damage you do to the individuals in the groups you are tossing out far outweighs any benefit you receive.
I don't quite understand what you mean by all vs average, but I think he was saying that if you have 100 random old people and 100 random young people, there will be more people in the young group that know React, for example, than in the old group.
Take that same sentence and substitute "women" for "old people" and "men" for "young people". If you used such a statistic to say "Women tend not to get React" wouldn't that be obvious sexism?
