More people seem to care about one sentence in the article than the rest of it.
In fact, many people are missing this sentence:
"I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then."
...and thus taking the following sentence out of context:
"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you."
Edit: that said, the author really needs to rephrase his words or he is going to piss more people off.
I think people seem to care more about that sentence because it is an honest summary of Dave's takewaway here: non-status-quo groups have a greater risk of screwing you over because they have this legal loophole they can exploit.
Which hey, I could see why that'd be controversial.
This is the real takeaway here. Statistically any class of people who have a 'special power' to use against you will eventually have a person who will use it against you if your exposed to enough of them. Applies to police, protected employment classes, a wild bear attacking you, etc.
I've also noticed that a lot of people complain when the statement immediately following "I'm not racist but..." is given more emphasis than the preceding disclaimer. /s
Part of the reason for this is that when people hear the word "but" they mentally remove all the words in the sentence preceding it. One way to get around this is by replacing "but" with "and." That's my opinion, but I'm not an expert.
The real problem here is that legal protections for certain classes by themselves create a disincentive for hiring those people. Discrimination/racism protections especially suffer from this.
I've had some experience with this as well. In Europe (Brussels) it's plain to see that most companies don't hire certain "bad" minorities, then fix their legally mandated "racism stats" (ie. a quota) by demanding the cleaning company provide them with contractor cleaners of the correct ethnicity.
Why ? Because if they sue, the damage is 24x their monthly pay, which is next to nothing.
This is a horribly bad factor for people like Jewish programmers, black sysadmins, and the like. They're doubly fucked : there's a very good legal reason for companies not to hire them, and they have a good legal incentive to be incompetent assholes, so they get fired and get legal damages from their legal anti-discrimination rights. In addition, the government's education incentives cause and strengthen the racist prejudices. Black sysadmins/programmers are worse than white sysadmins ... well of course ! If the law mandates a passing grade for black sysadmins in university is 40% where whites have to score 60%, this would be exactly the expected result wouldn't it ?
In the end there is no substitute to waiting for immigrants to naturally work their way up the food chain like has mostly happened in America. Problem is simple : this takes multiple generations.
This is one of the many reasons it's really bad to protect certain classes of people, doubly so when we're talking ethnicities or religious groups (as opposed to say, stem graduates, legal professionals, ...). Plus it generally seems to me to fly in the face of the idea of non-discrimination. You cannot achieve a colorblind society with racist law, in fact you're achieving the opposite.
Of course the problem is that discrimination laws are not trying to achieve a colorblind society. Rather they're trying to throw a religious/ethnic group a bone to prevent them from rioting, and making their situation worse in the process.
Let's face it, in Western Europe if you're muslim/jewish/black/... (and not self-employed) you want to be an incompetent asshole, because that's what the law rewards. You can effectively get 2 or 3 wages paid out if you do that. Nothing to do with ethnicity or religion, has a LOT to do with people attempting to take shortcuts in fixing observed injustices.
There are some that are creating their own companies and avoiding the problem this way. But this is much, much harder than making it as an employee. I have a lot of respect for the few that do this, though.
This isn't much different from someone getting mugged by someone from a different class or race and then concluding that "those people" can't be trusted. Sad.
Actually, it is different. The "normal" mugger gets caught and goes to jail, this one has a loophole that allows hum to walk off with your wallet without being arrested.
It's a basic scam created by a law. You see it with some injury cases[1] and many of the lawyers suing businesses based on the ADA. The law is meant to protect people from an injustice done, but can be used in the opposite manner.
Chilling affects like these are often mitigated by documentation by HR. Specifically, performance reviews and performance improvement plans. He was not equipped to provide the documentation.
This is just a reality and cold logic. You can say he is "Sad", but he is expressing the "stick hand in fire" learning of the situation. The sadness should be expressed to the folks who fit into the spirit of the law that has been abused.
1) often with headlines "X who collects disability enters a triathlon" or similar sensationalist stuff.
There's plenty of ways for people to take advantage of their employers and the law does effectively nothing for the aggrieved.
One case I directly encountered was a young, white male who was responsible for procurement for a small company I was working for. It turned out he was ordering all kinds of stuff for himself (the one thing I remember is he bought a game console with it). He was fired and the police were called. Their response was basically, since he had permission to order stuff, they weren't going to pursue it.
The law failed here, too! But let me tell you what didn't happen: nobody decided to use that as a reason to not hire young, white males. What did happen, correctly, was some additional controls were put in to prevent abuse.
You react to what your burned with. Most places put in the control measures I mentioned. Some go the way of the poster particularly if they cannot afford an HR solution. The stats on disabled employment since the passage of the ADA are problematic.
Its amazing how something that is "illegal" only has consequences when you are rich enough to defend your rights in court. This causes a situation where the only sane, fiscally sensible response is to not get burned again.
I think that what the author is saying is that every person who can sue for discrimination might (and by "might", I mean there is a very small chance of it). This is valid, I guess, (assuming the author's story is the whole truth of the incident) -- but like I said the author should rephrase his words.
> Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to focus. And be very patient. I imagine it's a lot like sitting in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for dinner.
> There is specialization in our species. It seems pretty clear that programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing. Which also raises the obvious question that perhaps we can make it so that it can better-use the abilities of the other half of our species?
"Here is how I came to my heartfelt conclusion: I have an intuitive understanding of what it is like to be a caveman, because of all my experience watching Captain Caveman on Cartoon Network. So I put myself in the place of a caveman, and think through what I would do in that situation. And what I would do is to sit quietly in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up, which I would then grab and bring home for my cavewoman wife to cook me for dinner. I outright reject other people's ridiculous theories that the rabbit would act like Bugs Bunny and that I would act like Elmer Fudd. Therefore it follows logically from my extensive experience thinking through what it is like to be a caveman that this applies to every other human being on the planet, for all time. Therefore I will now describe how I think people should live their lives, if you will please bear with me."
This is probably pretty easy to label as sexism - not to jump to the author's defense again (I don't know him at all). I wouldn't say women can't program (they can, obviously) or do anything else males can, but there is definitely a different set of interests between males and females (generally speaking). I don't think its because of market manipulation or brainwashing, I just think the two sexes are wired differently (psychologically and physically). So, I don't know if his point is valid, but I do know that males and females have different traits (we don't need to be equal to be treated as equals, I guess).
One parallel I would point out is sexes in other species. If you look at many other species, sometimes females play dominant roles, sometimes males do, but very often males and females have different roles. Even though we are an intelligent species, many of our primal traits still shine through. I'm not saying a male or female should be forced to any given role, but rather let people choose the roles they want and don't force diversity for the sake of diversity.
The thing I take issue with here is not that he's saying there are differences between genders. I believe evidence backs up the idea that there are (on average) differences between how men and women's brains work (on average). The problem is "men are better at deep focus and that's the only thing that matters when it comes to programming, therefore men make better programmers".
> "But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you."
Old white male, having accrued all the benefits of the privilege of his position, proceeds to use his power to make sure that only People Like Him can continue to succeed.
Rather than fix problems, he'd rather tell you all that Everything is OK, being Agist and Sexist isn't our problem, it's their problem.
Yeah, the day you have a dollar is the day someone shows up with their hand out. From what I've seen of the legal system it is just a proxy for brute force, the only thing it really accomplishes is to keep everyone from killing each other, beyond that it is pretty much the law of the jungle.
I think software development actually has an easier time than most professions to weed out freeloaders. You can make someone program right in the interview. Programming ability is an extremely perishable skill.
Setting aside the larger issues I find it's curious that Dave doesn't even take a moment to consider that perhaps "Roy" just didn't like working in the style that Dave demanded. Some people do need to think a lot before pooping out the golden gem or perhaps just need some reflection before they can move on. Some people are hard to collaborate with, maybe Dave was, for Roy?
Dave's position seems to have been "there's one way to work, you can't do it with me on these big things so let's try the same method on these smaller things. Oh that doesn't work either, let's try the same method with a different person."
Never any critique of the methods used by the authority structures.
I reckon this does, in fact, have great bearing on the larger issue.
Not liking the working style, or being unproductive because of it, isn't a reason to sue on being let go.
Not saying we're hearing the whole story and this "Roy" guy is totally wrong... it could easily be that Dave WAS discriminating against "Roy" because of his age. Or the firing was done in such a way that it seemed that way to "Roy".
Why can't I have 3 flag buttons? Even if they all registered the same single flag signal, it would be gratifying to be able to mash them all in this case. This is less a blog post than an elaborate, carefully timed troll.
I agree with you, and I regret posting this now. I found the article shocking, and I wanted to elicit some comments from this community. But now I see that it's better to leave articles like this out than to thrust them on others.
Do you believe the facts claimed are incorrect? Or that the analysis of the incentives is flawed? What's your specific objection?
I'd normally ignore comments like this. But coming from you I feel like there might be some substance to the criticism that I simply don't recognize. Can you explain?
Happily, this story appears to have been buried shortly after I wrote that comment, sparing us both any incentive to hash out the merits of Winer's post.
It is extraordinarily difficult to fire people, at least in some countries. This is perhaps for good cause, it stops managers being able to boot people out of the door like you see in movies.
It's very easy to 'discriminate' against someone without realising. You need to make sure that the terms of employment are very well defined in the contract. If terms are hazy then they may well turn back and say that they were doing nothing wrong. If you don't record absolutely everything that happens, the employee could turn around and say this is the first time they heard of the problem.
In some jurisdictions you need a second opinion that would be considered impartial before letting someone go; don't have that? Instant discrimination case. Didn't have a disciplinary meeting so they could have their say? Unfair dismissal.
You have to jump through all the hoops to keep things above board.
That had me puzzled too. If the CEO would have documented every interaction with the employee in writing (e.g., "on 3/17/85 I gave him job #1, explained what I wanted done, and he failed to do this, and said..."), he would have had a pretty solid case for having fired him for incompetence. It's what any competent HR person or employment lawyer would have advised him to do, especially since the employee was a member of a protected class.
What really surprised me is that the same guy could have later been hired at Apple.
This whole story is a bit scary, since I'm over 40 (the age at which U.S. age discrimination laws kick in) and I wouldn't want bad experiences like this to deter an employer from hiring me.
But Dave could have just given him severance instead. "Here's a week's pay, go away." It seemed that Roy was there for several weeks, so one more week to make Roy go away forever is money well spent.
I would rewrite this blog post and use "Roy's" real name...he deserves to be shamed.
Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but as usual I appreciate any reasoning behind them...I don't think what I said was irrelevant? This guy is apparently dangerous and his real name should be exposed.
You heard one side of a story about a contentious situation between two people and you want to publicly shame someone based on this? What if the older guy has a completely different story that explains why he had trouble working there? Just don't dox people -- and if you really think it's necessary to try to publicly shame someone make sure you have truly irrefutable evidence to back you up.
Also a good point - thanks I did not really think of that -- just a gut reaction to lawsuits. That said, if this guy really did what he did, I hope that real justice eventually prevails.
Dave's point was to avoid a lawsuit, not to attract one. The article is using a single incident to warn about a whole class of people. It's not just about one guy.
Ah I see - thanks. But shouldn't this guy's real name be used? He is clearly a scam artist if he joins a company, produces nothing, then sues over a completely valid firing...regardless of his age.
Honestly, this! I feel like almost every person in the world, white males included, could come up with a reason for a bogus wrongful dismissal suit if they so desired.
In France it's very hard to fire. What ends up happening is that consulting companies are popping up left and right, the result is that salaries are lower for employees (less leverage when negociating, no room for promotion, company cut, smaller term contracts, terrible perks), and for the company "renting" the consultant: higher costs and less commitment.
It's tough to find the right balance: at will employment can lead to unfair situations for the employee, and strong regulations can lead to people abusing the system (like that guy I worked with who had been there for so long that he was cheaper to pay than to fire).
Increasing the cost of new employees – compared to, say, overtime, outsourcing, automation, or other kinds of employees – decreases the hiring of the more-costly employees.
I haven't actually done this, not to this extent. Still, I absolutely see myself morphing more in Roy's general direction as I get older. I see it a little like extracting karma from the world on my own terms. That is, in my youth, some companies got a slice of my brilliance at a deep discount, because of my young age. Now, having lost much of the naivety of youth, particularly with regard to what companies and executives want to tell me the "deal" is, I take advantage any way I can, at every turn.
It goes without saying that you shouldn't hire me, but you won't know any better.
I agree it's too bad. I also think the problem is many orders of magnitude larger than I am. That is, the ol' "being the change I want to see in the world" will most likely end with me getting shafted.
Until the day pigs fly, and managers and executives stop lying, milking plausible deniability for all it's worth, wasting everyone's time with re-orgs and resets, surprise-laying people off two days after telling them they're doing great, generally playing shady politics, etc, etc...
In fact, many people are missing this sentence:
"I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then."
...and thus taking the following sentence out of context:
"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you."
Edit: that said, the author really needs to rephrase his words or he is going to piss more people off.