
After 48, you’re less likely to get jobs in Silicon Valley, report finds (2017) - mooreds
https://www.theladders.com/career-advice/old-job-silicon-valley
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_m96l
Age discrimination most widely known illegal employment practice in the entire
US technology industry.

We have the top executive of a major Valley tech company, on the record,
encouraging illegal discrimination against older people.

We have ongoing lawsuits by experienced engineers getting fired after their
co-workers and superiors openly mocked their age.

Yet this practice openly continues, with CEOs like Zuckerberg feeling brazen
enough to publicly tell their thousands of employees to break this law.

The legal prohibition is thus the most blatantly violated employment law in
the book. Anyone who ever worked in the Valley knows that most folks over 40
can't get hired, certainly not by the many companies and startups routinely
complaining about "talent shortage".

Incidentally, Mark, you are now 34 years old, which is "old" by Valley
standards. Shouldn't you be quitting?

~~~
SamReidHughes
Why don't you start a software company that takes advantage of this market
inefficiency by hiring people over 40? Why don't these unhirable 40-somethings
band together and start a consulting agency?

~~~
mikelevins
You mean, respond to clandestine illegal age discrimination by openly
advertising illegal age discrimination?

~~~
SamReidHughes
Legal age discrimination, in fact. Or you could not discriminate. You'll have
no problem slurping up all these high quality 40-50-somethings on the job
market, right?

~~~
mikelevins
Forgive my ignorance; it's legal in the US to discriminate on the basis of age
as long as you're preferring candidates older than a given age, rather than
younger?

~~~
SamReidHughes
As long as you aren't discriminating against people over 40.

~~~
mikelevins
I'll have to look into it. I'm an old fart myself, mostly self-employed since
my mid 40s (because it suddenly got way harder to get hired as an employee),
and I know a bunch of other old farts who are smart and have good skills.

Thanks for the idea.

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ahmedalsudani
While ageism is very likely a real problem, the methodology used in this study
is problematic.

Quote:

> “The tech industry is hiring a disproportionately higher ratio of workers
> than non-tech up until the age of 48—indicating bias does exist that favors
> younger candidates,” the report states.

It seems like the authors looked at how many people the software industry was
employing relative to the rest of the market.

The correct (albeit trickier) approach is to look at ratio of applications to
offers, grouped by age. Controlling for other variables would be ideal, but it
makes this doubly harder.

The approach taken by the authors (looking at the ratio in the software
industry vs. the wider economy) hides too many confounding variables. What if
people in software make more money and are able to retire, so they stop
seeking work around 50? What if there just aren't as many qualified people 48+
years old compared to other industries since software is a younger field?

Those and other questions are hard to answer when you take the approach taken
by the authors.

~~~
adfm
Folks that are 48 now are some of the first to grow up with PCs in the
classroom and are as savvy or more savvy than folks entering the workforce.
They're just now finding that folks born after the 2007 introduction of the
iPhone are becoming unfamiliar with keyboards, a still very necessary
technology. That leads me to think that there's likely a rolling window and
that we'll start to see increasing discrimination and exploitation on the
other end in a few years time.

