[quietthrow]

“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

[jimmaswell]

Is the belief really that age is irrelevant to mental performance, or do we just want people to be able to continue being employed for moral reasons?

[erikpukinskis]

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.

[tasuki]

Oh, of course it is related. Also, apart from declining mental performance, with age comes valuable experience.

[Waterluvian]

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.

[lrem]

Also: this one is more present today. I can just not mention I'm married, while still reaping the benefits of being attractive.

[scarface74]

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.

[lrem]

Hehe.

I've been going around telling how my wife is nine months pregnant, asking how the paternity benefits are.

[cosmodisk]

Any success getting a job after mentioning it?

[a1pulley]

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.

[sidlls]

Why is it not necessarily bad at "early-stage, high-growth start ups?" Some things we regulate are appropriate to carve out exceptions for based on the size of a company, but why is this one?

[cosmodisk]

Any company worth working for would accept it as a fact of life- most people end up having kids at some point. If the opposite is the case,well, it's better to stay away from them.

[filoleg]

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.

[scarface74]

Why is that surprising? At a larger company, one person being missing is not a big deal. At a small company where you are not trying to get as many smart people (tm) as possible, but you have an immediate need, you can’t afford to keep a req open for six months waiting on someone to come back from maternal/paternal leave. Unpaid leave is one thing - you can usually find a contractor to make up the difference.

[ycombinete]

That makes sense really, I’m sure smaller businesses have a harder time with people not working for long periods

[lrem]

Got an offer from every single one of them. Chose the one least surprised by this (Google).