You’ll never know if you’re being discriminated against due to age. Not here in Australia anyway, no one would ever say out loud. You just don’t get selected.
I did go for a job recently where we had a great phone interview and the guy essentially said “everything looks great we just need to meet in person” and when we met in person I visibly saw his expression change. Something about my appearance, either age or weight or both. He emailed no thanks after.
We (at Apple) interviewed a guy who was about my age (and I was already in my 50's at that time, ha ha). The interview(s) went great as far as I could suss but when we, the interviewers, met to go around and give the potential hire a thumbs up or thumbs down — one guy on our team was decidedly thumbs down.
Why was he thumbs down? "I don't think he's a good fit for the team." When pressed for what that means he simply repeated it.
There might be reasons you want to avoid hiring older software devs.
I'm in my 50s. I've been through the death marches, the unrealistic goals, the 60-hour weeks, the last minute emergencies, the all-nighters trying to get a release out or trying to recover from the fallout of a poorly tested release.
I won't do it anymore. Nobody I know who is my age will do that anymore. There's almost nothing that will keep me at work past 5:00. The sun will come up tomorrow and nobody will die.
So if you're looking to hire someone who will ask "how high" when you say "jump" then you probably don't want to hire an older person.
I'm pushing into my mid-40s and it's the same story here. I won't do it. I've pulled 90-hour weeks in my career. Weeks on end. Literally working > 12 hour days nonstop for over 30 days. Because someone else fucked up, lied, didn't properly manage the situation... The why isn't even important anymore. I see the why every single day at every single employer. Nothing seems to be changing on that front. Regardless, I'm done with heroics.
Right now, I can still whip systems into shape. I am still massively effective. But if I squint I can see the horizon where I'm not effective and I'm slowly coming to terms with it. Maybe the economy and industry will be right at that point in time and I can pivot to my own thing. Maybe it won't and I'll be forced into early retirement. I'm planning for the latter but hoping for the former.
I'm in my 50s and I don't think I changed that much. I pushed back on all these things when I was in my 30s. I avoided going to work for companies that had reputation of being badly managed. I never asked "how high" when someone said "jump". Never. I was good at what I did and that was more than enough. I was always highly opinionated and independent and it was never a problem finding great teams where that was valued.
I still don't mind working longer hours when I'm excited about something.
The all-nighters are definitely gone. But that was basically when I hit 30 or so. And when I did work all night, it's because I enjoyed doing it and I could do it. I started as a teen on personal projects.
On the pro side, I've got enough experience that I avoid a lot of mistakes that I've made when I was younger, and I'm able to help the teams I lead avoid those same mistakes. That makes a huge difference.
I know what you're saying though. I'm like you in that regard — so over the bullshit.
At the same time that can bring some levity (is that the right word in this case?) to the team.
I was often the cool head when deadlines were creeping up and the app was seemingly out of control. I was often the one that pushed back on management, pushed back on design, marketing.
A few younger engineers let me know when I retired that they appreciated my "honesty", ha ha.
All of the above should be illegal across the industry: "the 60-hour weeks, the last minute emergencies, the all-nighters", except for specific stuff on-call for an emergency (and paid overtime respectively or hired for night shifts, e.g. in case of datacenter stuff).
Similar here. Also, when I am learning the 20th framework for doing essentially the same thing in a slightly different way / in yet another language / better fitting some other framework, I am simply not as curious as I used to be.
Also the older I get in this profession the less my wrists and fingers will let me do. I honestly worry about my career later and whether I will qualify for any assistance if I am disabled from it.
Age discrimination is real, and impossible to prove. Unless there is a push like the diversity one we have now, it will remain that way. And it will affect all of us eventually (race and gender neutral), we all need to earn our FU money before 50 or else.
You know what japan always does though? They always respond to applications. Theres no instant automated rejection email. Theres no getting ghosted by 90% of companies.
That's not true. YC startup Tailor, the first (and only?) Japan startup that YC funded, left me on read on LinkedIn. They ignored my application without a response, too. Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.
To be fair, the whole American tech culture of inclusitivity is not really a thing in Japan or most Asian countries. My freind works as a designer at a bank's tech arm, and told me wild stories of coworkers parading their sex videos around the office. Her boss straight up told her she was hired because she pretty, and that he was proud of forming a team of models (both male and female). I talked to other people who worked in East Asia, and they found these stories to be unsurprising.
>Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.
Why do you think that? Was the job requisition in English? Did it ask for Japanese proficiency? If the answers are "yes" and "no", respectively, then it's very unlikely they're discriminating against non-Japanese for that job. If they don't want to hire non-Japanese, they'll simply post the job in Japanese only, or put "Japanese language proficiency (N2 or better)" or something like that in the ad. The reality is that not that many companies have an English working environment; this is a country where the national language is Japanese, and not that many people speak English well, after all.
There are probably more than 3000 people just trying to live out of net cafes. Pay is bad for SWEs because Japan mostly doesn't have the sorts of companies that generate millions in profit per SWE, and foreign companies lower their offers to be only a little above the local market rate. Pay is bad for other workers because huge amounts of labor are wasted on tasks like "staying at the office at least as long as my boss" or "replacing our successful product with a new one for the sake of demonstrating that we have done something" which are optimized for purposes opposed to creating value.
Second, your comment could be interpreted as saying that counties with high pay have (or should have) a lot of homeless people, which seems insane. So what did you mean?
>Second, your comment could be interpreted as saying that counties with high pay have (or should have) a lot of homeless people, which seems insane.
Does it? Countries with high inequality I'd expect to have a lot of homeless people.
Except if you mean countries with high pay across the board. So how does that work, everybody gets high wages, and companies can afford it and hire the same number of people, (instead of the case of splitting wages more equally)?
It’s not that insane. If pay is low then companies can afford to hire more people to do the same amount of work, leading to overall more employment and then presumably less homelessness.
Unemployment is just one factor in homelessness. Other factors are drugs (Japan is much more stricter), home availability (Japan has much less NIBMYies), etc.
> Last Friday, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released the results of an annual study of the number of homeless people *in the country’s parks and riverside areas.*
So this isn't the full count of homeless, just the ones living in specific park areas.
Where else are they going to live? Unlike America, Japan doesn't have massive homeless encampments full of tents in random places all around the city, so they generally all congregate in certain parks where their presence is tolerated. From my experience living in Tokyo, I'd say that looking at those parks and riverside areas is a very accurate way of counting the number of homeless.
The pay (for tech jobs) isn't that bad compared to other peer nations. It's bad everywhere, compared to the US, where salaries are much, much higher than pretty much everyplace else, except possibly Switzerland.
However, the cost of living is much lower in Japan than in the large tech-hub cities in the US (and probably even mid-tier cities). Life in the US is really expensive these days.
In the next 10 to 15 years, tech is going to have a lot of millennial who reach 50+. We'll have a similar challenge in the US where tech culture leans towards hyping youth, and the new reality.
If the AI progress in the next 10 to 15 years will be like the AI progress in the last 10 to 15 years, tech culture will no longer hype youth anyway, or human employees in general.
It won't be the progress in AI, but the ever increasing human tolerance to bugs and shitty software, hardware and products in general. This is what will enable AI to thrive.
In the company I worked for, it actually went the other way, from the US.
There were levels and positions that were only available to employees of certain chronological ages (or above). I remember doing some fancy footwork, trying to get particularly bright younger engineers into positions of greater responsibility.
They did force you to retire at 60, though. I suspect that is an artifact of their "full employment" stance. I’ll bet they are revisiting that, now, as the population is actually declining.
If we're working on a serious project(not tinder for dogs), I want to staff my senior positions with people that have tons of experience, not someone super bright.
More broadly, I think the problem with age discrimination is a problem with engineers that have 30 years of experience doing unimpressive things. For an IC code monkey I would definitely prefer someone younger with a lot of energy and potential to grow.
Not saying that I think age discrimination is okay, but that's too the reality of how people feel.
Preaching to the choir, here. If you know much about me, you know that SV’s ageism is one of my biggest peeves. I feel that many of these jurassic-scale disasters, we hear about, are likely the direct result of inexperienced, impulsive, decisions, made with no adults In the room.
I just feel that each employee should be managed as an individual; an attitude that doesn’t mesh well, with today’s business culture.
There's also the question of what a country even is anymore, other than a company that collects taxes when goods or money move across an arbitrary border, in exchange for using its brand image.
More than that, too. I bet you could guess my age within 2 years with solely a list of technology I've used. I don't think it would even have to be sorted by date.
Could I use a $0.02 microcontroller unit that has 48 bytes of RAM to function as the computer for a homemade networked camera package? Like, attaching the MCU to a one dollar WiFi module to begin building an amateur information technology system with a Raspberry Pi single board computer performing as the mainframe server?
You don't need to list the dates you obtained your degree.
When I was just getting started in the field, I already had some work experience from prior exploits and college employment. Leaving the dates off my degree helped me get a reasonable job early on, I think.
Just wear your ballcap backwards and folks will assume you're at least young at heart! (I jest)
Fortunately for me, I finished my degree much later in life than most folks. Pretty sure I could pass myself off as being at least 10 years younger than I am in a job hunt.
Though we could just normalize leaveing graduation dates off of resumes... I dont6think that is especially relevant for most jobs.
I completed my undergrad at a pretty normal age of 21, I did my Masters 20 years later... but that's now getting close to 20 years ago so I guess I should remove the date on that one now too.
Interviewing continues while on the job. People have been put on layoff lists, "encouraged" to quit, and passed over for promotion based on age, too. People have take these cases to court but it's not easy to prove.
Hmm, I’ve had fresh people hired into management positions because that was age appropriate, never mind that those people were not interested in managing and had only one or two token reports.
On age discrimination closer to home for US techbros...
Pretty early in one warm-fuzzy FAANG, around the time a friend of mine finished a big-name CS-ish advanced degree, and he was at an event where the FAANG was recruiting. It might've been a campus event.
At the event, he happened to overhear some of the 20-something recruiting representatives of the FAANG, making fun of a candidate they'd interviewed for being "old".
I didn't ask, but, based on the way he said it, he might've been the one they were making fun of. (Then again, he's always defending others, and might've just been very upset on someone else's behalf. Though, if he'd been defending someone else, he probably would've ripped those representatives a new one, at least three different ways.)
I think he was still in his 30s, despite two successful earlier careers (one as an old school tech-ish entrepreneur). He went to the gym and was fit, but he looked like what he was: a kid from humble upbringings, who'd seen some rough situations, including being gay when and where that was not OK, and had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, to success despite all that. And while also doing a lot of activism to help some of the most disadvantaged and persecuted, when it was unfashionable.
He showed some of that weathering, and -- I suspect this might've been a barrier with that group -- didn't look like an affluent Palo Alto recent-grad. So, "old". Or, if those airhead representatives had had HR training, they would've called it "culture fit".
Which is doubly ironic in his case, since, in principle, he was pretty much a poster-child for the warm-fuzzy FAANG's PR: socioeconomically-diverse, cross-disciplinary, whole-self, make-the-world-better, with LGBTQ+ sprinkles on top.
He seemed very disappointed in those representatives of the FAANG, and had some choice words about who that FAANG "was hiring now". And in the couple decades since, he never did go there, even though, on paper, it would've been the obvious choice at multiple points of his career accomplishments.
Japan requires photos of woman on their resumes, and their age. Japanese employers don't like hiring women who are in their child-bearing ages because they might get pregnant.
Say what you want about the US, but the level of protection workers have is so much better than most other countries.
They don't "require photos of woman", passport-style portrait photos are standard period. It's really no different from LinkedIn being the standard in Western countries where you're suspicious if you don't have a personal photo on your profile and where you can just as easily be discriminated against based on your looks or whatever other criteria you can think of. The only difference is that they'll use euphemisms or outright bullshit you, if they even bother getting back to you about your application.
Yep. I once had the CEO of an early stage, venture backed SF startup I worked for confide to me:
“you know, every time we interview a woman in her late 20s/early 30s, I just have to wonder if she’ll take maternity leave 6 months in to working with us. As a startup we just can’t afford that”.
Of course the public face of the company was all about fighting inequality, supporting diversity, etc.
I wonder if that CEO was dropped on his head as a child or what else might have been wrong with him to have such a bizarrely spiteful attitude towards humans, and I would have asked him that. People with that type of attitude need to be confronted wherever they are found whenever they express something that fucking stupid. Hopefully he was able to mend his ways.
Yeah that's spot on because like nope never have I had a male friend go now that my wife and I have a kid what I need is more money and flexible work hours. So bye. Okay I'm breaking the site guidelines because every man I knew at my age has done that.
The cost isn't just about things money can compensate. A new mother on maternity leave (or father on paternity leave for that matter) is:
* Not undergoing training (if applicable, eg: a new hire).
* Not gaining and maintaining experience and knowledge in the field.
* Not making business connections with others in the industry and elsewhere.
* Not keeping up (in regards to new standards and ways of doing) with her workplace and the industry at large; IT industries especially so.
* Not providing her manpower, which must be compensated by another employee(s) who can't just be fired or transferred away when (or if) she returns.
Basically, the overhead of accomodating and compensating for employees that maek babby is simply unacceptable for many businesses, especially the smaller ones and particularly if the babby is had very early in their employment or career.
You might say this is sexism and discrimination (even though it's not; childbirth is a choice to be made), but this is the cold harsh reality. People who agree to be employed are expected to work, not maek babby.
This is also a reason for falling birthrates: More people just want to live and work without the sacrifices demanded by childbirth and rearing. They know their life or career they have or dream of could end right there if they choose to have children.
You can't insure against losing someone important in the early days of a startup. You lose the context and knowledge invested into the person, and replacing them will take time, which is even more valuable for a startup. Sure, things don't matter at a megacorp that has enough of a buffer to weather these leaves, but I'm sympathetic to startups that don't want to hire women. I don't know what the solution is, but it can't involve maternity leave. Maybe the state should provide free daycare so that the women can get right back to work.
I'm trying to imagine an insurance policy that a) protects against financial losses related to losing a pivotal member and b) pays out because they got pregnant, and it sounds insane.
I did go for a job recently where we had a great phone interview and the guy essentially said “everything looks great we just need to meet in person” and when we met in person I visibly saw his expression change. Something about my appearance, either age or weight or both. He emailed no thanks after.