“Attractability” of a candidate was not limited to their skills. As in some parts of the world today we know that these things are largely orthogonal to performance at job. As rational and simple as that sounds today, back in the day knowing these details was equally rational and simple. We just find it difficult to get that point of view since we didn’t live in that time. This is the same as ageism today. “Young people are just smarter”. What do you think people will say on hacker news 30 years from now when they read that was the thinking of some of today’s tech leaders
It’s the same issue as gender or race discrimination. There are often differences in means, but because within group differences are an order of magnitude larger than between group differences, from the perspective of any two individuals trying to understand each other, group membership gives you no meaningful information.
Knowing the averages will actually make you worse at assessment.
I've seen that in action. An older dev was an absolute burden on a hack day moving at a snail's pace. But for long term architecture he always had super valuable "oh I didn't think of that" things to say.
He was so awesome to have on the team, at the cost of sometimes having to watch him crawl toward a few lines of code. Not a hard choice in my opinion.
Of course I've seen the whole spectrum. Useless old people. Useless young people. It's best to simply be a meritocracy.
True. But I do just the opposite. Even though they aren’t allowed to ask me if I am married, I go out of my way to mention off handedly that I am married. I want them to “discriminate” against me if they have the type of culture that expects people to work for 60 hours a week regularly.
I mentioned my newborn in all of my job interviews because I didn't want any surprises on either side of the table. I interviewed at six places and got five offers - two at FANGs, three at unicorns. I don't think there's a culture of discrimination against young fathers at large companies, and I don't think it's necessarily bad if there is at early-stage, high-growth start ups.
Not OP, but i dont think they would have an issue getting hired at any good tech company worth working for because of that.
As an anecdote, last year we hired a woman who outright told us she would like to start working next month, but then would immediately need to take 4-6 months off for a paid parental leave, as she was due somewhat soon (i forgot whether we provide 4 or 6 months; i think it is 6, but i dont remember 100%).
She was a good candidate, so of course we hired her, she worked for about a month, and then went away for the parental leave. Then she got back to work after her leave, and everything went on as normal.
We also had candidates before who went on parental leave on their first day of work, so they essentially had paid months off before they even started working.
For the record, it wasn’t some obscure small family-run business, it was at one of the big N companies.
In India, I remember submitting a passport size photograph with all the resumes I submitted during college/campus interviews. When I moved to US, I realized that was not a requirement.
And yet with the rise of software recruitment platforms this practice seems to be creeping in to the US. Linkedin and Hired for example both "nudge" you to add a photo. From Hired.com: "Adding a photo will help your profile get noticed and improve the likelihood that you receive more interview requests. (Optional)"
Even in countries where it was the norm (like Germany), this is not really true anymore. For tech positions or anything remotely close, the impact will be zero or even negative, don't do it.
FYI I worked for a largish UK recruitment company. A lot of CVs had photos. They made not a whit of difference to the recruiters. When the CV was entered onto the database, any images were stripped anyway. I imagine - though did not see - any especially hot chicks were noticed but I guarantee it did not change their chances of being placed. The recruiters just don't care.
As I understand it, resumes were more like a personal trading card with things like your hobbies and clubs you belonged to. As time went on it, it shed a lot of the details that wouldn't be of interest to employers. So maybe height & weight stuck around in a more standardized resume.