
Ask HN: Older developer hiring platform? - twunde
A while back, someone built and posted a hiring board for older developers. Does anyone remember the name or have a link for it?
EDIT: retitle to be a Ask HN
======
gesman
Why do we (or anyone) need a platform segregating people by the age (or gender
or color or whatever)?

This is plain stupid idea.

Hire people based on their abilities and skills to help you to build (or
execute) what you need.

Who cares about the age of a person who can help you?

~~~
twunde
I'm going to take a nuanced response to this because frankly that anyone would
want or need a segregated platform is stupid, but yet that need/want does
exist.

If you have a team all from the same background (say a prototypical startup,
everyone white, upper middle class and went to Stanford), that team will
suffer from groupthink and will miss opportunities and/or challenges to
different groups. These can be minor issues or can be big PR blowups like when
facial recognition systems can't recognize the difference between people with
dark skin or just missed opportunities. In general, the solution is to try and
build teams with a diversity of backgrounds.

How do we do that? If you have applicants come in from different backgrounds.
But what happens if you're never seeing any diverse applicants apply? Are your
recruiters/hiring platforms redlining (intentionally or unintentionally) and
preventing candidates from applying? At that point you go out of your way to
reach out to diverse candidates. They still have to go through the same
interview process, but you're adding them to the funnel. If you're more
familiar with marketing, then you know that digital advertising, direct mail,
billboard ads, radio ads, tv ads etc will hit different parts of the
population (with some overlap). You can't just go through one marketing
channel because you'll miss a large customer population. This is essentially
the point of these targeted hiring platforms. The ideal is to use these
platforms to combat unconscious and conscious bias. This works as long as
they're used in ADDITION to other more generic platforms.

~~~
gesman
Agree with diversity approach.

It's like in a military service where tank crew consists of soldiers from
maximally opposite backgrounds to minimize cultivation of
bias/conspiracy/hidden agendas from crew members.

~~~
twunde
I didn't know that but that's a great tidbit and example

------
gcatalfamo
It was oldgeekjobs.com, but he website doesn’t work anymore it probably
shutdown.

~~~
twunde
Oh man, I'm totally bummed. Thanks for letting me know!

------
andrei_says_
I am working on one and am wondering if you (OP and not) would consider
telling me about what would make such a service productive and attractive to
you?

~~~
cimmanom
As a candidate: attractive because I'd have confidence that employers there
are going to value my experience (in contrast to those who slap "senior
software engineer" labels on positions where they're looking for 3 years in
the workforce).

As a hiring manager: being able to find engineers with lots of experience
instead of having my "senior software engineer" opening spammed with resumes
from kids just out of school.

~~~
andrei_says_
Thank you.

Would you be interested in hearing about the service in beta?

~~~
cimmanom
Sure

