7 ms·
Ageism: a worsening epidemic
- WalterSear 11y agoBloviating presentation of anecdata. This problem may be getting worse, or better: there's no real evidence here, just scaremongery.
- hwstar 11y agoThere's lots of evidence, and older engineers are very vulnerable. If you are an engineer over 55 who gets let go, you'd better have investments and rental income, or you'll lose everything.
- umeshunni 11y agoCan you share the evidence?
- hwstar 11y agohttps://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/what-silicon-valleys-ageism-means/ https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/what-silicon... https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism https://newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brut... http://fortune.com/2014/06/19/tech-job-ads-discrimination/ http://fortune.com/2014/06/19/tech-job-ads-discrimination/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- DenisM 11y agoThat's some good stuff, thank you for sharing. I'm now inclined to agree that ageism is very likely, and deserves a formal inquiry.
- DenisM 11y agoSome factual data would certainly improve this conversation.
- WalterSear 11y agoThat's neither here nor there: the article had none.
- aklemm 11y agoAnecdotes have value. Stories have value. Opinions can have value. Evidence is not a condition that necessarily drives change. Your total dismissal of the piece seems misguided.
- BookmarkSaver 11y agoThere are over 300 million people in this country alone. The fact that anecdotes about ageism exist means almost literally nothing. There needs to be actual data that there is a problem. Several people just won over $100 million in the lottery. Just because you know one of them doesn't make your anecdote about lottery players a valid basis for writing an article encouraging readers to try the lottery. Without evidence, without actual data, attempting to make an argument about a societal trend is less than useless, it is just empty rhetoric that only exists to distract from actual discussions that might have a chance of encouraging positive change. "Anecdotes" and "stories" and "opinions" might have value, but in this context they can only be used to illustrate a point. Not as the basis for making that point. Total dismissal is warranted. This guy isn't a family member or friend venting to you, this is a guy publishing an op-ed on a big website. It requires either solid logic or data. He provides neither.
- aklemm 11y agoIt's in the opinion section where it belongs. You're setting a standard so high for public discourse that it's essential worthless (I'll get you a source for that asap.)
- SerLava 11y ago"Ageism: A Worsening Epidemic" can only be interpreted as an assertion that the incidence of ageism is increasing. Anecdotes can have value, but they have no value in confirming this assertion.
- ternaryoperator 11y agoHonestly, go to Google HQ at lunch time and count the number of people you see with mostly gray hair. It's scary how few there you see.
- WalterSear 11y agoIt's a pity the author didn't think to confer with you before writing the article.
- mccoolman 11y agoWhat benefit is there to hiring someone that could retire pretty much at any minute? Or someone who didn't have the foresight to plan for their future in a manner that allowed them to retire at a reasonable age?
- hwstar 11y agoMoney isn't everything. Some people enjoy contributing to a good cause.
- stock_toaster 11y ago> What benefit is there to hiring someone that could retire pretty > much at any minute? Experience? In addition, some people actually enjoy working, and choose not to retire the instant they can. > Or someone who didn't have the foresight to plan for > their future in a manner that allowed them to retire at > a reasonable age? This again seems to based on the premise that everyone who can, will of course choose to retire as soon as possible. I don't think that is always the case.
- lbarrett 11y agoI think that almost none of us will be able to retire comfortably at 62. You should plan for living expenses through your whole life, and you might well live to 100--and you pretty much have to plan for that, because being 90 and running out of money would be very unpleasant. But if you work from 22 to 62 and live 'til 100, then you'll have worked for only 40% of your life, so you have to cover all the expenses of your entire life during that short period. If, on the other hand, you work until you're 72, then you have an extra 25% of time to save and a 17% decrease in non-working time. The math gets much better. The results of this math get worse if you believe we'll see improvements in life extension during your life. If you live an extra 10 years, you probably need to work at least another few years. In summary, saying people should retire at 62 seems short-sighted to me.
- hwstar 11y agoI agree, the longer you can work, the more secure your retirement will be. In my case, I'm 55 and can pay for living expenses from savings, investments, and rental income. It isn't a comfortable life, but it is manageable provided the ACA stays in place. If the ACA is repealed, then I'll have problems and may have to emigrate to the UK where I also hold citizenship.
- jayess 11y agoThe unemployment rate of those 55+ is 3.2% while the rate for those 20-24 is 9.4%. God help you if you're a teen, where the unemployment rate is 16.1%. http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
- hwstar 11y agoWhile I suppose if you were forced to take any job, then those figures would hold. As for myself, I've found it next to impossible to get even an interview as a hardware engineer. Yes, I suppose I stayed a little too long at one company (26 years) and the company was failing towards the end of my tenure. The point is, I posted this here because the problem is even more acute with technical employment.
- seangrant 11y agoHow public is your age? I found myself having a very difficult time getting interviews being an 18 year old (I was applying for above my age's average skill level). I stopped mentioning my age as well as removed my birth year from my online profiles. After that, interviews started coming in.
- civilian 11y agoIt's probably not simple enough to just look at unemployment-- we should look at workforce participation. The economist had a good chart on the breakdown of: working, unemployed, long-term unemployed, disabled, and retired: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/10/21/what-we-know-about-the-92-million-americans-who-arent-in-the-labor-force/ http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/10/21/what-we-know-about... (It confirms what you said--- young people have the hardest problems with unemployment.) I also found this graph: http://www.economist.com/node/21610975 http://www.economist.com/node/21610975 People over 54 are doing great! It's the 24-54 cohort that is getting kicked to the curb.
- TinyTimZamboni 11y agoI think people were let go because they weren't good at their jobs, not because they were old. People who have been fired because they weren't good enough are going to have a harder time finding a new job. Our education system is teaching more advanced topics at younger and younger ages. Hence younger people may be more "up to date". An older person will experience ageism, but they can combat this by always learning new things throughout their life. I'll take a 50 year old javascript developer who's proactive about testing and CI over a less experienced younger developer. But I'm going to choose an inexperienced javascript developer over an 50 year old experienced COBOL deverloper if I'm building websites.
- DiversityinSV 11y agoThank you for the 'mansplaining' and for reinforcing stereotypes that older people 'must not have been good at their jobs' and by showing your ageism proudly. You are doing us all proud TinyTim. You go boy!
- civilian 11y agoI'm 29, and I'm not a hiring manager, but here's where my ageism lies: People in their 60s tend to be less open to new experiences. My ~50 year old guitar teacher told me a story about how he refused to even try guitar hero. I agree that, as an accomplished musicians, it would be kind of insulting to be asked to play guitar hero by your student. But it's such a good opportunity to learn where the student is coming from, and understand how it could teach timing and patterns, even if it doesn't teach fingering or picking. My ~65 year old dad is still working as a consultant and actively gives paid speeches, and he plays a lot of solitaire and minesweeper on the computer. I've tried to get him to try a few videos game-- I even pitched Kerbal Space Program, from the educational aspect of understand our own space program better. (When I was in D.C. at the National Air and Space Museum, I was recognizing parts that KSP had copied the models of.) He has no interest in it. My mom, and my aunts on both side of the family are extremely stubborn about their political beliefs, and phrase their responses as: "oh, well, I believe that ____". Not trying to seek a consensus, not trying to crack an argument. Just laying out their own belief. (Their political beliefs range from: common Democrat, pro-choice conservative, global-focused liberal.) I get the idea that, as we grow older, we've kind of discovered what we like and what we don't like. I usually just have Cookies & Cream ice cream, because it's my favorite. I don't try rocky road again because the nuts give it a bad texture. But if a young person strongly recommended Rocky Road Version 5, I hope I would try it for the sake of trying it. So that's where my ageism comes from. I've told my younger brother to call me out on not being open to new experiences, if that's something that happens to me in my old age. At the very least, it'll be a good source of brotherly humor.
- danielschonfeld 11y agoThat! but with a grain of salt. Unopenness and the self proclaimed belief in one's abiltities/thoughts/notions all based on "I'm older, I've been there" is the root of friction between young and older employees causing valuable loss of productivity in such homogenous groups. Even more important tho and less of a subjective statement, I think most jobs today are menial in that technology offers a lot and the humans powering those jobs are really only doing a lot of rote stuff that can easily be taught. In such an environment, is it a surprise to anybody that an employer would always wanted to dump seniority over a junior employee that costs less and is just as trainable? Also in jobs requiring more than just rote menial production from the employee, quality of the service given has been lowered to a very low baseline. With that again, experience is tossed out of the window and with it the costs that are associated paying for it.
- dillon 11y agoI think this is a very opinionated and one-sided article. Prejudices exist everywhere and ageism definitely exist. You're most likely to complain about a particular prejudice when: it directly affects you, you think it directly affects you, or it affects someone you know. As far as ageism I definitely understand the point of view the author has. I think the other side of the story here is in the workplace the "more experienced" engineers "may" dismiss the ideas and contributions of a younger engineer even if they are completely valid and logical. This is the kind of social prejudice I have witnessed in the workplace. There are most certainly even more prejudices that exist in the workplace regarding age. I think it's unfortunate that the author decided to rant about an issue and not present all the facts as if a particular group of people have it easier than a different group.
- WalterBright 11y agoI plan on working until my mind doesn't work anymore. If nobody will pay me, I'll just work on open source projects. I'm really not interested in retiring.
- tetraodonpuffer 11y agoI think a lot of people here feel the same way, the problem is, if nobody will pay you, how are you going to eat and have a place to work on open source projects in?
- WalterBright 11y agoThat's a separate problem, because if you are not doing something, you're still in the same boat.
- hwstar 11y agoWhen you are young, you feel invincible. You think: I can continue working till I die. This reasoning is flawed. When you are young, a wise thing to do is to live below your means, save and invest, and prepare for the day when your employer will kick you to the curb.
- zepto 11y agoIf nobody pays you, it's a hobby. A person who can pursue hobbies all day without income is otherwise known as retired.
- WalterBright 11y agoUnder that definition, every business one starts is a hobby. I'd put it more that if you intend to make money off of it, even if you don't, it's not a hobby. (Note that the IRS uses such a rule.)
- zepto 11y agoThanks for refining the definition. Having done so, it still seems to fit your case.
- zanewill9 11y agoI see a strong conflation of "older" with "lots of personal responsibilities" that affect job performance. It's clearly true that 30 year olds are more likely to have kids then 20 year olds, but it seems 40 and 50 year olds get "blamed" for being unproductive because of things like kids, mortgages, etc, than do the 30 year olds. The interesting study is the 45 year old with no kids, house or marriage. Are they "old" too ?
- DKnoll 11y ago>If the company is a small company and screens applications manually, it is simple to Google a person and find their age as well as other private information about them. You only have yourself to blame for making those 'private' details publicly accessible.
- TrevorJ 11y agoSo if minorities are discriminated against in the hiring process, they should just stop posting their picture on LinkedIn? That's not a solution. Secondly, what you are suggesting is at complete odds with the realities of our connected online world. You are basically asking someone to stop taking part in a huge part of the social experience in our society.
- DKnoll 11y agoI'd argue that what you call a "social experience" is really just giving your information away for the sake of vanity, but to each his own. Personally I don't use a profile picture on LinkedIn because my appearance is irrelevant.
- gozur88 11y agoIn real life you can't really hide your age. They can figure it out from your CV or just by looking at you when you come in for an interview. Personally, if they're not going to hire me because I'm not young enough, I'd rather get screened out as early as possible so I don't waste any time pursuing opportunities that aren't there.
- lutusp 11y agoThe irony of editorials like this is that it will reduce the likelihood that companies will hire older workers. Who wants an employee who is simultaneously less productive and more narcissistic than a younger one? Imagine the effect of government saying, "You have to keep any older workers you hire." Think really hard. :) By the way, lest someone get the wrong idea, I'm 70 years old.
- aklemm 11y agoMoreso even than ageism, it's frustrating the way young and old struggle to exchange ideas. The young, I think, are to blame for not being interested. But the old need to come to terms with the possibility that the judgmental attitude which comes easily after a lifetime of forceful experiences may just be too off-putting for the young to put up with.
- guhcampos 11y agoUnfortunatelly this is a simple matter of math. Hiring someone is costly, and there has to be a return for the time and money invested. As you get older, you get closer and closer to retiring, so the time you have to return the investment made by the company in you is just not enough to justify such investment. There's no easy answer. There are too much advantages (as mentioned in the comments: young people are more open to new ideas, easier to manipulate, easier to manage, willing to be paid less, while the older people's only advantage is experience, which may not really be an advantage if your experience is too biased to a single market, company or position). The more competition there is in the market for talents, the wider the gap is. That's not a vice, or inherently evil, that's just a fact of life: as we get older, we get less useful. We lose efficiency both physically and mentally - some more than others, but that happens to everyone. It's sad, revolting and definitely not fair, but I - personally - can't see a way around this that makes rational, not emotional, sense.
- DrScump 11y ago<As you get older, you get closer and closer to retiring, so the time you have to return the investment made by the company in you is just not enough to justify such investment.> That argument makes sense... in 1980. In the modern era of frequent job-hopping, who is more likely to jump ship the next time a competitor dangles something shiny in front of her/him? The 25-year-old or the 50-year-old?
- threatofrain 11y agoAside from the fact that it's the young who are being wrecked in employment, there are logical reasons why a company in some area of competition may choose a younger person over an older person. Obviously where experience matters more, companies might choose an older person, such as in a high-level executive position, where I presume most people are older. But experience isn't everything, and g tests have consistently beaten years of relevant work experience as a single-metric predictor of work performance. I don't doubt that you'd want your kernel security team to be veterans, but other companies are justified in hiring young people out of college and having them learn as they go.
- mchahn 11y agoI am a hardware engineer with a lot of software experience to go with it. I have had no work since the "crash" in 2008 when I was 58. Since then no company even returns a "no thanks" letter. However I must admit there is a lot of karma involved. When I was 30, head of engineering, I was responsible for hiring a total of 30 to 40 engineers. I would have never hired anyone at my age. I didn't even think about it. It just seemed obvious. So I tell people I am retired, which means I'm old and unemployed. Like others in these comments I am continuing to work, but only on FOSS projects, like the Atom editor. I can now sling full-stack code with the best of them and I figure I could for 10 or so years. But there is no hope of gainful employment.
- hwstar 11y agoYour story almost matches mine. I didn't have the people skills to become a manager though. Because no one will hire older hardware engineers, we've been forced into semi-retirement against our ultimate wishes. I like you spend a lot of time on open source hardware and firmware projects and post them on github. It's the only way to remain sane.
- hwstar 11y agoMy prescription for a fix: 1. Require age diversity in the workplace. 2. Replace "at will" employment with "just cause" employment 3. Get rid of noncompetes at the federal level. 4. Replace binding arbitration with employment tribunals (as used in the UK).