Not sure what win this would be as companies will give zero feedback to avoid incriminating themselves, according to the article.
"The company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,”
Sadly it doesn't look like age discrimination will stop, just the feedback will.
Not really. The problem with companies is when there is wrong-doing, it's just pittance fines and ultimately, those fines are paid with other people's money.
IMO a judgement like this doesn't discourage anything, just reinforces that fact that breaking the rules is advantageous and fines are a small cost of doing business.
He didn't have to fight five years in court. All he did was submit the complaint to the EEOC and they handled the investigation and lawsuit against the company.
I guess at this point its time for me to be age-discriminated bc im starting to say the same cliches as my father, I viscerally understand the phrase "ffs."
We all know the wheels of justice turn slowly. A wrong was righted and we're throwing it away because it wasn't speedy enough?
And there's even a second win, god forbid! The defendant had a fair day in court so we can have confidence the right thing happened! Dont be too quick to demand reprisals and call it justice.
In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers execute on such schemes, even targeting specific workers who might have authority to block such platform shifts. Even in small startups where the hiring entrepreneur may have been working in a different field with plenty of high-skill mature workers or living at (a parent’s) home playing video games pounding caffeine drinks just a few months earlier, there still seems to be an instinctive bias to hire young (and cheap) tech people and embrace whatever tech du jour that they prefer to maximize their chance of success. Even Y Combinator reportedly got its start poaching college age kids with $6K all-in packages and “incubating” them. (Get away from me with that thing!) It’s not The Way, of course, but with most mature workers permanently taken out of the industry during the dot-com crash and that flood of technicians filling critical roles for a while, it’s also not going to change until the new generation (currently their most senior workers are at about 17 years experience by my clock) takeover the game like “The Ancients” before them (that they never knew).
Source: my six year education and 41 year pro career that began under people who had once fought in WWII and I’m still way (WAY!) younger than the youngest founder of Apple (#8)
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble
But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
Most people who have been in industry a long time, have great skills when it comes to picking up new platforms. Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003.
When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whacked out business models. The last thing they want is someone that has seen this three times and can point out the needless churn to support a CTO that doesn't know what they are doing.
> Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003.
True, although I wouldn't characterize it as being "jaded" as much as that experience makes the bullshit much easier to spot. And, generally speaking, the more experienced the dev, the lower the tolerance they have for bullshit.
So much this. Once you learn a particular programming paradigm (functional, OOP, etc.), the differences between languages in that paradigm are mostly syntactic, and learning a new syntax is pretty easy.
And there are only a small handful of different paradigms. If you've been developing long enough, you've probably become competent in most, if not all, of them.
I can switch to another programming language and write the For Loops and branching logic and all that jazz no problem. But there's often a lot of nuances that you just don't know and it takes a while to accumulate that knowledge. Those are usually referred to as "Best Practices" and there usually isn't a single source of truth document out on the Internet or anywhere to learn all of them.
They just come with experience and time, and maybe if you're lucky mentorship from a more experienced dev who knows those practices.
This is very clear to me having watched Java devs flounder their way through building JavaScript microservices using all of the old Gang of Four patterns and basically zero of the modern ES functionality.
when i hire people i look for those that have learned at least two programming languages. because learning the first language is somewhat hard. the second one is hard too, mostly because you think it's going to be as hard as the first one. but once you learned it you realize that it's really mostly the same, and from then on learning most languages is easy. same goes for frameworks
Sure, you can learn new platform X well enough to be productive in probably a matter of days, but you can’t manufacture 3 years of experience with platform X unless you lie about it. And many job postings expect you to not only have years of experience with platform X, but also significant experience with particular database Y and cloud service provider Z.
How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody who helped you get your foot in the door. (Am I wrong?)
> you can’t manufacture 3 years of experience with platform X
Why would you have to? You get the experience by working with the technology, just like everyone else. The older worker and the younger worker both need to have X amount of experience.
I don't see how this aspect is related to age at all.
> How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody. (Am I wrong?)
You're wrong. Connections are important for getting any new position, but connections aren't what got me "in" on a new platform. I've learned new platforms either (usually) on my own, or because working with the platform became part of a job I already had.
So your company did a rewrite using platform X? Interesting. I think being in that situation requires a bit of luck. Many companies (understandably) don’t want to or can’t afford to rewrite their legacy code.
I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening. Learning something via a side project over a couple of weeks is hardly the same thing as having multiple years of professional experience already.
Are connections always important for getting a new position? I doubt that a doctor needs to already know somebody at a hospital in order to get an interview … but I could be wrong about that, I guess.
Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now. They also will probably accept lower pay and worse working conditions. So the older worker has little or even negative advantage if they’ve been using the “wrong” platform in their recent job and don’t have a strong personal network.
Not at all. They've been new projects, not rewrites of old ones.
> I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening.
If I spent 3 years working with a platform on my own, that's still 3 years of experience with the platform.
> Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now.
I don't understand this point. An older dev can also have spent a few years working with whatever platform is popular right now as well. Age doesn't enter into this at all.
I sense, though, that we're not fully understanding each other about something. Are you thinking that "3 years experience" is both a hard and fast rule and that it means 3 years being paid to work with it? Neither of those things are true.
Shops that legitimately need n years of Y experience spend the whole job description telling you why, so you'd know if similar experience counts before you apply.
From my perspective hard requirements turn out to be red flags more often than not. Asking for 6+ years in a single language kind of looks like you regret your tech stack. Requiring experience with project management software is a cry for help.
I'm late 50s, and a couple of decades ago I stopped giving a complete job history for the most part. I did this because my full job history is lengthy and I don't want to have a CV that spans so many pages.
Instead, I include my job history over the last 10-15 years, and include select items that are older than that if they are particularly relevant to the position I'm applying for.
I don't try to hide my age -- my age/experience is a significant advantage I have over most other applicants. Age discrimination is a real thing, of course, but is very far from being a universal issue. If a company doesn't want to hire me because I'm too old, I count that as dodging the bullet of getting hired by a sketchy company.
Unfortunately many companies make use of their ATS mandatory when applying for a job and those systems usually require start and end dates for all but your current job. Even if ATS doesn't requirement, HR likely will when they do employment verification.
Been dealing with this since my 40s. And good luck hiding it on your resume, most application forms these days require dates and even addresses. I am also discriminated against based on location. Some companies won't even interview you unless you are local, even for remote jobs, even if you're willing to relocate.
Yes, but be careful. If you have an interview and the offer comes too easily, due to internal referral or whatever, it should raise a red flag. You may be stepping into a big pile of crap (based on personal experience where this happened a couple of times.)
I don’t remember filling in an allocation for google, where I have my current job. Maybe it came after the offer? I don’t think applications are very common in tech anymore, you just get an interview set up with a recruiter and the paper work only comes if they want to hire you.
>After he was rejected for the sales job, the company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,” according to the EEOC.
And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.
I have had multiple companies tell me they are looking to hire female or PoC developers during an interview before, I never knew I could get 90k for it!
That discrimination is often explicitly legal, although one wonders how companies in the United States get away with such things since the US has constitutional protections against institutional racism.
I dont want to defend "age discrimination" proper, but I think it's a very fine line and companies should have the right to select someone with low experience. This, of course, means they have to treat an "older" tech newbie the same as a fresh sprout. But it should absolutely be their choice if they want a junior level vs a senior employee.
gosub100 - making this a "right" would be redundant. What is the benefit?
I may be wrong - please let me know: It's my understanding as a worker in the US that there is no restriction on employers from hiring junior-experienced employees.
My two bits: Age discrimination feels rampant to me, where I see Old being equated with Bad. I see this on a bi-weekly basis from my industry-following news-consuming habit, reading comments from "young" people in the tech industry. I believe it's an issue on the rise, since I believe the demographic of tech people still seeking employment is shifting to older.
by "a right", I didn't mean "there ought to be a law", which is a phrase that I can't seem to get away from lately. I just mean they should be able to, they should have the freedom to seek - a person of low experience if that fits with their plan or budget. But to avoid an older person on the basis of not liking old people is flat out wrong, hence a fine line. And to answer your question, there is no restriction on hiring junior-level employees. My comment just meant there shouldn't be any shame in a team saying "let's add a junior to the team".
I'm 46 and I think the last few small contracts that I picked up were from older clients, even though I applied to quite a few other ones. So age discrimination does seem to maybe be a factor. But maybe with those clients it helped being a little older? Don't know.
But for me, my real concern is just trying to come up with an AI-powered business over the next few years before I am being discriminated against not only because I am older, but also because I am human that wants to be paid more than $1 per hour.
On RunPod a 4090 is only like $.50/hor and can run Mixtral very easily in quantized mode.
The open models like Mixtral are getting very, very good. And when you combine that with specialized agents for particular application areas, and then the ability to consult multiple agents per project, easily adding knowledge with RAG or automatically generated fine tuning datasets, etc..
There might be a lot of competition from AI programmers within a few years.
But regardless, I needed to find a way to create a "real" online business. The new and anticipated abilities of AI make it a bit more urgent I think.
I'm trying to build an agent hosting platform because I think that within a couple of years, everyone will expect to be able to run LLMs/agents on their own computer natively. So I am guessing we will have something like WordPress for agents. Hoping people will consider my tool.
LLMs aren't competition, they're just another tool that allows human programmers to work at a higher level of abstraction. When the industry (mostly) switched from coding in assembly language to high-level languages the number of programmers went up. This trend will work out the same way. There is effectively infinite demand for new software.
The message here is that ageism is protected and tolerated discrimination and only theoretically illegal in the rare instances when it can be proven.
Always remember there is zero job security if you lack significant equity ownership, and there is no safety net except the one you (or collective action) demand or create.
I recently saw a job posting that said we want someone with less than 10 years experience for a gig that seemed like 10 years of experience would be beneficial. It was a sysops gig working with ASM/DEP and workspaceONE.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread"The company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,”
Sadly it doesn't look like age discrimination will stop, just the feedback will.
I wish it was more impactful.
We all know the wheels of justice turn slowly. A wrong was righted and we're throwing it away because it wasn't speedy enough?
And there's even a second win, god forbid! The defendant had a fair day in court so we can have confidence the right thing happened! Dont be too quick to demand reprisals and call it justice.
>And old too soon.
—Old Danish Proverb
Source: my six year education and 41 year pro career that began under people who had once fought in WWII and I’m still way (WAY!) younger than the youngest founder of Apple (#8)
But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whacked out business models. The last thing they want is someone that has seen this three times and can point out the needless churn to support a CTO that doesn't know what they are doing.
True, although I wouldn't characterize it as being "jaded" as much as that experience makes the bullshit much easier to spot. And, generally speaking, the more experienced the dev, the lower the tolerance they have for bullshit.
And there are only a small handful of different paradigms. If you've been developing long enough, you've probably become competent in most, if not all, of them.
Going from C++ to eg Python or Java isn't much fun. Try going to Haskell or Rust, with the borrow checker.
I can switch to another programming language and write the For Loops and branching logic and all that jazz no problem. But there's often a lot of nuances that you just don't know and it takes a while to accumulate that knowledge. Those are usually referred to as "Best Practices" and there usually isn't a single source of truth document out on the Internet or anywhere to learn all of them.
They just come with experience and time, and maybe if you're lucky mentorship from a more experienced dev who knows those practices.
This is very clear to me having watched Java devs flounder their way through building JavaScript microservices using all of the old Gang of Four patterns and basically zero of the modern ES functionality.
How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody who helped you get your foot in the door. (Am I wrong?)
Why would you have to? You get the experience by working with the technology, just like everyone else. The older worker and the younger worker both need to have X amount of experience.
I don't see how this aspect is related to age at all.
> How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody. (Am I wrong?)
You're wrong. Connections are important for getting any new position, but connections aren't what got me "in" on a new platform. I've learned new platforms either (usually) on my own, or because working with the platform became part of a job I already had.
I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening. Learning something via a side project over a couple of weeks is hardly the same thing as having multiple years of professional experience already.
Are connections always important for getting a new position? I doubt that a doctor needs to already know somebody at a hospital in order to get an interview … but I could be wrong about that, I guess.
Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now. They also will probably accept lower pay and worse working conditions. So the older worker has little or even negative advantage if they’ve been using the “wrong” platform in their recent job and don’t have a strong personal network.
Not at all. They've been new projects, not rewrites of old ones.
> I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening.
If I spent 3 years working with a platform on my own, that's still 3 years of experience with the platform.
> Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now.
I don't understand this point. An older dev can also have spent a few years working with whatever platform is popular right now as well. Age doesn't enter into this at all.
I sense, though, that we're not fully understanding each other about something. Are you thinking that "3 years experience" is both a hard and fast rule and that it means 3 years being paid to work with it? Neither of those things are true.
From my perspective hard requirements turn out to be red flags more often than not. Asking for 6+ years in a single language kind of looks like you regret your tech stack. Requiring experience with project management software is a cry for help.
Instead, I include my job history over the last 10-15 years, and include select items that are older than that if they are particularly relevant to the position I'm applying for.
I don't try to hide my age -- my age/experience is a significant advantage I have over most other applicants. Age discrimination is a real thing, of course, but is very far from being a universal issue. If a company doesn't want to hire me because I'm too old, I count that as dodging the bullet of getting hired by a sketchy company.
No. No they're not.
And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.
Well into his 60's when his son asked for him to make him a dev engine for a game he was making, he dug right in and had a prototype rather quickly.
I think as I've gotten older the only issue for me is motivation to actually want to work on projects, vs just doing any random thing.
I can identify with this statement. I love learning new things and experimenting. Doing "any random thing" is generally much more appealing to me now.
I may be wrong - please let me know: It's my understanding as a worker in the US that there is no restriction on employers from hiring junior-experienced employees.
My two bits: Age discrimination feels rampant to me, where I see Old being equated with Bad. I see this on a bi-weekly basis from my industry-following news-consuming habit, reading comments from "young" people in the tech industry. I believe it's an issue on the rise, since I believe the demographic of tech people still seeking employment is shifting to older.
by "a right", I didn't mean "there ought to be a law", which is a phrase that I can't seem to get away from lately. I just mean they should be able to, they should have the freedom to seek - a person of low experience if that fits with their plan or budget. But to avoid an older person on the basis of not liking old people is flat out wrong, hence a fine line. And to answer your question, there is no restriction on hiring junior-level employees. My comment just meant there shouldn't be any shame in a team saying "let's add a junior to the team".
But for me, my real concern is just trying to come up with an AI-powered business over the next few years before I am being discriminated against not only because I am older, but also because I am human that wants to be paid more than $1 per hour.
On RunPod a 4090 is only like $.50/hor and can run Mixtral very easily in quantized mode.
The open models like Mixtral are getting very, very good. And when you combine that with specialized agents for particular application areas, and then the ability to consult multiple agents per project, easily adding knowledge with RAG or automatically generated fine tuning datasets, etc..
There might be a lot of competition from AI programmers within a few years.
But regardless, I needed to find a way to create a "real" online business. The new and anticipated abilities of AI make it a bit more urgent I think.
I'm trying to build an agent hosting platform because I think that within a couple of years, everyone will expect to be able to run LLMs/agents on their own computer natively. So I am guessing we will have something like WordPress for agents. Hoping people will consider my tool.
Always remember there is zero job security if you lack significant equity ownership, and there is no safety net except the one you (or collective action) demand or create.