6 ms·

Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons are for preferring younger candidates over older ones, and then compare those same j

Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons are for preferring younger candidates over older ones, and then compare those same justifications transposed unto other well represented vs. underrepresented groups mutatis mutandis. If the reasoning is unacceptable in the latter case, why not the former?

hueving 11y ago
>Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons are for preferring younger candidates over older ones Old people tend to not want shitty deals.
- arethuza 11y ago
  I read a biography of Napoleon recently and it mentioned that he recognised that older more experienced troops tender to be much better at fighting but that they were also more cautious about picking their fights - younger inexperienced troops could actually be more useful in some circumstances in that they were more likely to rush in without any concerns for the risks in an, often vain, desire for glory.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Young devs today tend to be opinionated - you can't aim them at any random target. But in reality, that doesn't change much; just pick the devs with 'right' opinion and you get the same pattern of behaviour as with Napoleon's young soldiers. Opinion != experience.
    - arethuza 11y ago
      Young devs have, in my experience, have always been pretty opinionated.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    That was the preferred french tactic shock attack in column is much easier/cheaper to train as opposed to the well trained british musketry. It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits
    - arethuza 11y ago
      Interesting to see the requirements for the elite Old Guard unit of the Imperial Guards: - under 35 years of age at entry - at least 10 years' service - at least three campaigns (some had as many as 12 campaigns) - had to literally face enemy fire at the front and survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard I wonder what the tech equivalent is?
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        I'd guess some obscure teams of consultants that are known internally by big corporations, but otherwise unknown in the IT-showbusiness world. They show up where there is real work to be done, and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
      - pjc50 11y ago
        Most big organizations have a few of them. Sysadmins in particular tend to have operations "war stories", involving sorting out some incredibly stressful disaster. Servers on fire, company losing money by the second, that kind of thing. A lot of people found out on 2001-09-11 what "disaster recovery" meant. There are even literal combat sysadmins; I remember seeing a job advert for senior telecomms engineer in Iraq during the war, offering something like $100k/month. Programming involves less drama, but every now and again you need the services of someone who knows the system inside out and has a collection of weird tricks that will get you working again.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      > It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits I think Al Qaeda uses suicide bombers mostly because they're hard to detect and let you strike a target with zero warning; it's an ultimate guerilla tactic. That young engineers tend to be particularly happy to wear the explosive vests seem to be incidental and not the reason for this tactic. I agree with your French/British example though.
- michaelt 11y ago
  Right, but being unwillingly unemployed is the shittiest deal of all. If old people have a great deal from their current employer, they'll stay employed and the number of old people in the industry will remain constant. If old people find themselves unemployed due to a reorg or startup failure or whatever, they'll take the best deal on offer - and the number of old people in the industry will remain constant. If the number of old people in the industry is falling, I'd be interested in some statistics about where they're going.
  - scholia 11y ago
    Companies like IBM and HP are busy shedding experienced US-based staff and replacing them with relatively inexperienced but much cheaper workers in India. I don't know how many are getting jobs, but I'd guess that a lot are taking early retirement. If so, the number of older workers is falling....
- noarchy 11y ago
  Older people don't want shitty deals, and they've seen it all. They've seen the latest fads in both the development sphere (every new framework under the sun), as well as management (think: Agile, Scrum, etc). They can smell the BS, and many have lost their inhibitions enough that they'll call out the BS. That gets them labelled as "toxic" or "not team players". Younger devs, meanwhile, will put in the overtime every two weeks when the latest, predictable "sprint" crisis occurs.
x5n1 11y ago
Young people are easier to manipulate. Work harder. Are more agile. Are more inexperienced so less likely to judge your idiotic CEO mistakes. They keep working when an experienced person would have bailed ship long ago. They are also willing to learn the new fangdangled crap you have chosen to implement your app in that you will have to rewrite after round 3 of financing.
- danellis 11y ago
  On what do you base your claim that young people work harder?
  - Jtsummers 11y ago
    They're more likely to put in the suicidal levels of overtime that many companies want to see in their employees. This isn't to say that older employees (including myself, almost, I guess I'm middle-aged in this discussion) don't work hard. But we're more likely to clock out at 5 to go see a kid's recital or to commit to non-work related plans and actually follow through instead of being intimidated into staying until 7 or 9 or 11 at night. We've been there, done that, and now we want to do something other than forfeit our lives to work.
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    Working harder is immaterial. I don't subscribe to the labor theory of value, so I don't care how much you sweat while digging trenches with a teaspoon, if someone else can do it with a cool, dry brow from the air-conditioned control cabin of a deluxe hydraulic excavator. As a statistical aggregate, the amount of useful, valuable, monetizable work done by a human for a fixed quantity of effort positively correlates with the number of hours they have performed the same work over their lifetime. Even in tabletop RPGs, a level 20 character can soundly stomp a level 1 character of the same class. Why do so many people seem to think that experience only counts in games? If young people do indeed work harder, it is probably because they have not yet learned how to work smarter, and they still have to compete with older workers. They can work harder, accept lower pay, work more hours, produce less work-product, or some combination. Anecdotally, I know for a fact that I don't work anywhere near as hard as I did when I was younger. I don't need to.
yummyfajitas 11y ago
I can think of at least 2. 1) A young company, light on technical background, has build a castle on webscale sand. A few of the smarter young folks have become experts in this system, and get a lot of clout by solving "difficult" problems. Suddenly an old guy comes along and says "lets just use MySQL and CREATE INDEX". Basically, he's been there, done that, and realized that J2EE + MySQL will get the job done with a minimum of fuss, or that the "simplification" that comes from denormalizing carries a huge maintenance penalty. This old guy threatens the young "experts" - if the system is rebuilt according to industry standards, suddenly they are just another dev. 2) The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc. You can't transpose these justifications onto non-Asian minorities, women, etc. A non-Asian minority or female 25 year old is fundamentally equivalent to a white/Asian 25 year old male. Nodejs is equally "close to the metal" regardless of your demographics. Tech in 1996 was radically different - a CD ROM filled with a small subset of wikipedia was actually a huge technical challenge. As a result the old guy really is different. On a personal note, at my current company I'm both the oldest techie and also the only techie who isn't a member of the majority ethnic group (sliced in US terms, at least). My age is a significant factor - I'm sometimes out of touch (I know fuckall about angular.js) and sometimes I'm the voice of experience (we should have a metrics server and use it for all the things). My ethnic diversity is completely irrelevant.
- yodsanklai 11y ago
  > The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory Garbage collectors have been around since the 60s with LISP. I find it amusing to see that the first language I was taught in an academic setting in 1996, Caml Light (ancestor of OCaml), is still very relevant today!
  - arethuza 11y ago
    I had to write a garbage collector to get my SK combinator evaluator to run on a Unix mini (HLH Orion) in '88. Glad to see that functional languages eventually caught on though! I wish my application to Linn to work on the Rekursiv hardware had gone a bit further though...
karlkatzke 11y ago
I'm not sure that's a good comparison. I can think of lots of cases where there isn't a comparison. For instance, "More experienced people are likely to look down their nose at company culture" doesn't really have a comparison with any other protected class.

hueving 11y ago

>Employers should ask themselves what their implicit, and/or private reasons are for preferring younger candidates over older ones Old people tend to not want shitty deals.

arethuza 11y ago
I read a biography of Napoleon recently and it mentioned that he recognised that older more experienced troops tender to be much better at fighting but that they were also more cautious about picking their fights - younger inexperienced troops could actually be more useful in some circumstances in that they were more likely to rush in without any concerns for the risks in an, often vain, desire for glory.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Young devs today tend to be opinionated - you can't aim them at any random target. But in reality, that doesn't change much; just pick the devs with 'right' opinion and you get the same pattern of behaviour as with Napoleon's young soldiers. Opinion != experience.
  - arethuza 11y ago
    Young devs have, in my experience, have always been pretty opinionated.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  That was the preferred french tactic shock attack in column is much easier/cheaper to train as opposed to the well trained british musketry. It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits
  - arethuza 11y ago
    Interesting to see the requirements for the elite Old Guard unit of the Imperial Guards: - under 35 years of age at entry - at least 10 years' service - at least three campaigns (some had as many as 12 campaigns) - had to literally face enemy fire at the front and survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Guard I wonder what the tech equivalent is?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      I'd guess some obscure teams of consultants that are known internally by big corporations, but otherwise unknown in the IT-showbusiness world. They show up where there is real work to be done, and hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake.
    - pjc50 11y ago
      Most big organizations have a few of them. Sysadmins in particular tend to have operations "war stories", involving sorting out some incredibly stressful disaster. Servers on fire, company losing money by the second, that kind of thing. A lot of people found out on 2001-09-11 what "disaster recovery" meant. There are even literal combat sysadmins; I remember seeing a job advert for senior telecomms engineer in Iraq during the war, offering something like $100k/month. Programming involves less drama, but every now and again you need the services of someone who knows the system inside out and has a collection of weird tricks that will get you working again.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > It's why Al Queada use suicide bombers its cheap to train and does not need high quality recruits I think Al Qaeda uses suicide bombers mostly because they're hard to detect and let you strike a target with zero warning; it's an ultimate guerilla tactic. That young engineers tend to be particularly happy to wear the explosive vests seem to be incidental and not the reason for this tactic. I agree with your French/British example though.
michaelt 11y ago
Right, but being unwillingly unemployed is the shittiest deal of all. If old people have a great deal from their current employer, they'll stay employed and the number of old people in the industry will remain constant. If old people find themselves unemployed due to a reorg or startup failure or whatever, they'll take the best deal on offer - and the number of old people in the industry will remain constant. If the number of old people in the industry is falling, I'd be interested in some statistics about where they're going.
- scholia 11y ago
  Companies like IBM and HP are busy shedding experienced US-based staff and replacing them with relatively inexperienced but much cheaper workers in India. I don't know how many are getting jobs, but I'd guess that a lot are taking early retirement. If so, the number of older workers is falling....
noarchy 11y ago
Older people don't want shitty deals, and they've seen it all. They've seen the latest fads in both the development sphere (every new framework under the sun), as well as management (think: Agile, Scrum, etc). They can smell the BS, and many have lost their inhibitions enough that they'll call out the BS. That gets them labelled as "toxic" or "not team players". Younger devs, meanwhile, will put in the overtime every two weeks when the latest, predictable "sprint" crisis occurs.

x5n1 11y ago

Young people are easier to manipulate. Work harder. Are more agile. Are more inexperienced so less likely to judge your idiotic CEO mistakes. They keep working when an experienced person would have bailed ship long ago. They are also willing to learn the new fangdangled crap you have chosen to implement your app in that you will have to rewrite after round 3 of financing.

danellis 11y ago
On what do you base your claim that young people work harder?
- Jtsummers 11y ago
  They're more likely to put in the suicidal levels of overtime that many companies want to see in their employees. This isn't to say that older employees (including myself, almost, I guess I'm middle-aged in this discussion) don't work hard. But we're more likely to clock out at 5 to go see a kid's recital or to commit to non-work related plans and actually follow through instead of being intimidated into staying until 7 or 9 or 11 at night. We've been there, done that, and now we want to do something other than forfeit our lives to work.
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  Working harder is immaterial. I don't subscribe to the labor theory of value, so I don't care how much you sweat while digging trenches with a teaspoon, if someone else can do it with a cool, dry brow from the air-conditioned control cabin of a deluxe hydraulic excavator. As a statistical aggregate, the amount of useful, valuable, monetizable work done by a human for a fixed quantity of effort positively correlates with the number of hours they have performed the same work over their lifetime. Even in tabletop RPGs, a level 20 character can soundly stomp a level 1 character of the same class. Why do so many people seem to think that experience only counts in games? If young people do indeed work harder, it is probably because they have not yet learned how to work smarter, and they still have to compete with older workers. They can work harder, accept lower pay, work more hours, produce less work-product, or some combination. Anecdotally, I know for a fact that I don't work anywhere near as hard as I did when I was younger. I don't need to.

yummyfajitas 11y ago

I can think of at least 2. 1) A young company, light on technical background, has build a castle on webscale sand. A few of the smarter young folks have become experts in this system, and get a lot of clout by solving "difficult" problems. Suddenly an old guy comes along and says "lets just use MySQL and CREATE INDEX". Basically, he's been there, done that, and realized that J2EE + MySQL will get the job done with a minimum of fuss, or that the "simplification" that comes from denormalizing carries a huge maintenance penalty. This old guy threatens the young "experts" - if the system is rebuilt according to industry standards, suddenly they are just another dev. 2) The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory, FooBarFactoryFactory, etc. You can't transpose these justifications onto non-Asian minorities, women, etc. A non-Asian minority or female 25 year old is fundamentally equivalent to a white/Asian 25 year old male. Nodejs is equally "close to the metal" regardless of your demographics. Tech in 1996 was radically different - a CD ROM filled with a small subset of wikipedia was actually a huge technical challenge. As a result the old guy really is different. On a personal note, at my current company I'm both the oldest techie and also the only techie who isn't a member of the majority ethnic group (sliced in US terms, at least). My age is a significant factor - I'm sometimes out of touch (I know fuckall about angular.js) and sometimes I'm the voice of experience (we should have a metrics server and use it for all the things). My ethnic diversity is completely irrelevant.

yodsanklai 11y ago
> The old guy hasn't kept up with the times, and is stuck in ancient (and outdated) ways of doing things - manual management of memory Garbage collectors have been around since the 60s with LISP. I find it amusing to see that the first language I was taught in an academic setting in 1996, Caml Light (ancestor of OCaml), is still very relevant today!
- arethuza 11y ago
  I had to write a garbage collector to get my SK combinator evaluator to run on a Unix mini (HLH Orion) in '88. Glad to see that functional languages eventually caught on though! I wish my application to Linn to work on the Rekursiv hardware had gone a bit further though...

karlkatzke 11y ago

I'm not sure that's a good comparison. I can think of lots of cases where there isn't a comparison. For instance, "More experienced people are likely to look down their nose at company culture" doesn't really have a comparison with any other protected class.