8 ms·

Hi all Carmen here. A bit of my story below: my husband (leonagano) had faced ageism in his job hunting journey, especially because the tech environment someti

Hi all Carmen here. A bit of my story below: my husband (leonagano) had faced ageism in his job hunting journey, especially because the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind. Wearing my journalist hat, I started looking for ways to help and fight ageism. After further research, I realised this is actually a common problem among the IT industry as stated in some articles from the likes of The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/14/women-ageism-tech-startup-sexism https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/14/women-ageism...), Wired (https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-world/ https://www.wired.com/story/surviving-as-an-old-in-the-tech-...), Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/marenbannon/2019/04/10/the-biggest-bias-in-tech-that-no-one-talks-about/#278750a062e3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/marenbannon/2019/04/10/the-bigg...), Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-17/75-year-old-job-hunters-could-become-new-normal-in-aging-japan https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-17/75-year-o...) That's when I decided to start this job board and hopefully, try to reduce this problem to the minimum possible Sometimes, the problem happens during the job description, where the "older" professionals feel excluded when words like tech-native, ninja, etc are used, according to Dice (https://insights.dice.com/2018/02/28/employers-welcome-tech-job-hunters-over-40/ https://insights.dice.com/2018/02/28/employers-welcome-tech-...)

dba7dba 7y ago
Intern is another term often used to prevent older, experienced workers from applying.
- jpindar 7y ago
  I swear, some companies go straight from intern to senior team lead.
  - dang 7y ago
    That's not always as absurd as it sounds. Particularly talented people can do it. The case of Seymour Cray, admittedly an outlier on the talent side, comes to mind. He was basically a senior team lead from the moment he got his first job, and that was in 1951. I got that from this wonderful book, btw: https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Supercomputer/dp/0471048852/ https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...
    - sverhagen 7y ago
      You giving an example all the way back to 1951 makes it sound like it is indeed almost always as absurd as it sounds...
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        My first job I accepted was a help desk tech. In 8 weeks I was a sr engineer. Why? I was the only person who stood up and suggested a way to test and isolate a problem that was happening on a few Sun servers. Mind you I had zero exp with sun at this point, but I showed initiative. This was circa 2000
      - dang 7y ago
        I didn't mention Cray because there aren't others! He's just endlessly fascinating. I mentioned 1951 because organizations were so much less flexible back then, making the example more compelling. I was going to say that, but then I remembered that in the book it talks about how the engineers at that company would bring their dogs to work, so it was obviously atypical.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  At Google Zurich intern mostly means female engineer under 23. Step intern means female engineer under 20 who had been 1 year in university. I haven't seen any male step intern.
  - jxub 7y ago
    Well, that explains my rejection at least in part.
  - chaosite 7y ago
    STEP intern does explicitly mean female engineer under 20 with ~1 year of university. STEP is a diversity program and Google is quite explicit about its goals. Also I don't like it as an internship program. Interns generally do useful work, their internship project is something that the hosting team needs. STEP interns generally don't, their project is educational (that is, won't be used), and the internship involves a lot more lectures (as in, sitting in a conference room and listening to somebody). It's good for some people I guess but if you wanted to "work at Google", STEP isn't it. It is a foot in the door towards getting in as a regular intern next year, though, so if you're OK with wasting a summer then it's a good option. Oh, one more thing -- interns are currently enrolled in a university (which explains the ages).
fossuser 7y ago
Since age discrimination laws only protect discrimination against people over 40 (you can legally exclude people for being young), I've thought it may be interesting to use this explicitly. If age discrimination is actually happening in tech that means there is a large amount of people 40+ that are not being properly valued in the market. It'd be cool to explicitly target these people by having jobs ads only for people 40+ (and it'd be neat to have mentorship of younger hires be a component of these jobs). No idea how that would work out, but seemed interesting to target for recruiting.
- alexchamberlain 7y ago
  Is that in the US? Discrimination laws don't have a minimum age in the UK.
  - ajdlinux 7y ago
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employment_Act_of_1967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employme..., it appears so.
- carmenbr 7y ago
  Yes, that's an idea the could be explored. Some countries age discrimination is not even considered a crime. The problem detected is: in tech, the age discrimination starts earlier than 40, but at 36. What companies need to realise is a diversity staff can generate more money and produce more
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Some countries age discrimination is not even considered a crime. It's not a crime in the US, either. It is a statutory tort, though.
- sansnomme 7y ago
  The reverse needs to be true, you can't bar someone for being young using the usual excuse of inexperience. Want anti age discrimination policies to get popular support? Make sure it goes both ways.
klenwell 7y ago
How has uptake been thus far among developers looking for a job? You may want to experiment with the way you frame this. As Adam Gopnik suggests in a recent New Yorker article on aging, one bias that works against your site could come from an unexpected source: aging developers themselves. > In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button — one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/can-we-live-longer-but-stay-younger https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/can-we-live-lo... He's talking about products designed for baby boomers, but I suppose the same "eternal truth" as he puts it (i.e. "identity matters to us far more than utility") could factor in here. He offers this observation in the article: > The most effective way of comforting the aged, the researchers there find, is through a kind of comical convergence of products designed by and supposedly for impatient millennials, which secretly better suit the needs of irascible boomers. The best hearing aids look the most like earbuds. The most effective PERS device is an iPhone or an Apple Watch app. Good luck and keep us posted on how things work out.
- carmenbr 7y ago
  I'd say we are having a pretty good response. The website itself will not sort the ageism out. Companies first need to realise how important is to have a diversity staff not only because they are being forced to diversify but, as McKinsey and other researchers found out, diversity makes organisations "more effective, more successful, more profitable."
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    I love what you are doing. As in love. I wrote a whole essay on the postive and negative side of age (both old and young) in context of finding problems to solve for startups. As a 45 year old I solved it by starting my own company and using that to my strength. However I would caution against using the mcKinsey report as any kind of evidence or guide for thinking about diversity. It's the same claims we see when it comes to gender too. The reality is that there are no studies showing that in general companies who were not diverse and then decided to be more diverse by some of those mentioned metrics were suddenly performing better. A much more likely interpretation is that companies who are doing well financially tend to be able to care more about ex diversity. You could literally have a team of 20 old female/male geezers be just as diverse as a team with the most mixed combination of ages, genders and ethnic groups you could find. What matters in my experience is what kind of diversity we are talking about and how it's used, not just whether there is diversity. What matters is the market and that it allows for diversity itself. You could have a team of only 20 year olds and you can have a team of +45 year olds and they would both offer something different to the market. I don't think you even need to worry about that part to be honest. The benefits of age are enough: More experience, better ability in general to prioritize, focused on their work, less likely to work themselves too hard, more stability, less likely to switch jobs for the next great opportunity etc.
jarofgreen 7y ago
How are you handling the data? I see your just asking companies to email you, but then somehow you have positions - do you pull them automatically or do you process them by hand? I ask because we just finished a job round, and it was so annoying posting our job on all the specialist job boards that apply to us. Every single one had a different enough form that I had to spend time working out how it would be displayed, what went where, dealing with the various problems (eg, we offer full time and part time and the number of sites that make you choose one was frustrating.). I would love there to be a standard data file format where I could have written up our job once, then just uploaded the same file/URL to each job site. That said, well done for starting this and I wish you luck in tackling this problem.
- carmenbr 7y ago
  At the moment, what we ask is just 4 things and then, we ask the company 4 or 5 different open opportunities to include on the website. We then include those by hand, linking to the original company's job post. Agreed this is annoying for job posters and we can discuss more how we could help you on that as well
  - jarofgreen 7y ago
    > then, we ask the company 4 or 5 different open opportunities to include on the website. Wait, so the company might have more job positions than the few you list on the website? I didn't realise that when I browsed, that should definitely be made clear. Actually, if I can just email you a link to our own job page on our website that sounds nice and easy ... For me :-) But, if you want this project to survive long term, you really need to sort out systems so your not doing manual work like that by hand. I've seen several projects in other areas that relied on the founder doing that, and they usually stop after a year or two. Your time is more valuable and is better spent on other things, too.
    - leonagano 7y ago
      Yes the idea is to make easy for those who want to post jobs. Just a link to your job page is enough, but bear in mind your jobs descriptions not use words like tech-native, ninja, etc At the momwnt we can do manually but yes, in the long run we need to automate those job posts
ikeyany 7y ago
How much of the problem is a genuine bias, and how much of it is companies wanting to save money in the short term? Older employees are less expensive (smaller salary, fewer health/family events) and are less willing to work in poor conditions or work long hours to get ahead.
aiyodev 7y ago
> the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind Why exclude the older and inexperienced?
- marton78 7y ago
  Various reasons. They have families and might thus not be willing to work crazy hours, are more confident and won't put up with all the bullshit, etc
  - jpindar 7y ago
    How is that not stereotyping? Not all older people are like that.
    - Grustaf 7y ago
      The correlation is very very strong though.
      - o-__-o 7y ago
        I end my day at 6pm, I don’t touch my laptop on most weekends, I say no to projects that I can easily solve but delays less user facing work, I get paid well into 6 figures. Now if you asked me 20 years ago to do any of the above for a job that pays < $40k (about $65k today) I would have said yes in a heartbeat. Many late nights spent at work because they offered free pizza. Weekend work because without money what else can I do? I said yes to every project because of the fear of saying no and being replaced. And it wasn’t being replaced that bugged me out so much, it was having the find a new job. Today I know my worth and I’ll leave a company in 30seconds if they treat me wrong. Amazing what 10+ years of experience (edit: and savings) does to your psyche. Still gotta play the game of dumb exploitable tech expert to get through interviews to negotiations, but once there get paid bruh
        Grustaf 7y ago
Grustaf 7y ago
That last paragraph says a lot. If you have a company and you want employees that are “tech-natives”, whatever that may mean, that is not the same thing as discriminating based on age. No, not even if they are wrong, and don’t actually need a tech-native. This is just as silly as complaining that a moving company only hires people that are strong enough to lift a piano and women complain about sex discrimination because women tend to be much weaker. It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else.
- markbnj 7y ago
  And for what it's worth, the moving company analogy is extremely flawed. Most people apply for jobs in good faith. Moving companies (one of which I used to drive and load for, years ago), don't look to hire males or females. They look to hire people physically strong enough to do the job and skilled enough to do it well. They don't screen applications to weed out females. If a female applies for a moving position I think the average employer is probably going to assume she either knows what she's about or misunderstood the position. If you were to assume the latter then you might miss out on a good employee. There are plenty of women strong enough to lift furniture.
  - Grustaf 7y ago
    Well this was my exact point.
- farazbabar 7y ago
  > It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else. Wow! I rarely openly disagree with strangers on the internet but wow! I am currently focused on improving diversity and inclusion within my teams and the diversity of thought, approaches and outcomes that are a direct result of this effort are a delight. Progress may not always be in the right direction or slower than one expects but zigging and zagging towards the right thing is a reward in its own.
  - 7y ago
rbanffy 7y ago
I think I know Leo. Small world...

dba7dba 7y ago

Intern is another term often used to prevent older, experienced workers from applying.

jpindar 7y ago
I swear, some companies go straight from intern to senior team lead.
- dang 7y ago
  That's not always as absurd as it sounds. Particularly talented people can do it. The case of Seymour Cray, admittedly an outlier on the talent side, comes to mind. He was basically a senior team lead from the moment he got his first job, and that was in 1951. I got that from this wonderful book, btw: https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Supercomputer/dp/0471048852/ https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...
  - sverhagen 7y ago
    You giving an example all the way back to 1951 makes it sound like it is indeed almost always as absurd as it sounds...
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      My first job I accepted was a help desk tech. In 8 weeks I was a sr engineer. Why? I was the only person who stood up and suggested a way to test and isolate a problem that was happening on a few Sun servers. Mind you I had zero exp with sun at this point, but I showed initiative. This was circa 2000
    - dang 7y ago
      I didn't mention Cray because there aren't others! He's just endlessly fascinating. I mentioned 1951 because organizations were so much less flexible back then, making the example more compelling. I was going to say that, but then I remembered that in the book it talks about how the engineers at that company would bring their dogs to work, so it was obviously atypical.
xiphias2 7y ago
At Google Zurich intern mostly means female engineer under 23. Step intern means female engineer under 20 who had been 1 year in university. I haven't seen any male step intern.
- jxub 7y ago
  Well, that explains my rejection at least in part.
- chaosite 7y ago
  STEP intern does explicitly mean female engineer under 20 with ~1 year of university. STEP is a diversity program and Google is quite explicit about its goals. Also I don't like it as an internship program. Interns generally do useful work, their internship project is something that the hosting team needs. STEP interns generally don't, their project is educational (that is, won't be used), and the internship involves a lot more lectures (as in, sitting in a conference room and listening to somebody). It's good for some people I guess but if you wanted to "work at Google", STEP isn't it. It is a foot in the door towards getting in as a regular intern next year, though, so if you're OK with wasting a summer then it's a good option. Oh, one more thing -- interns are currently enrolled in a university (which explains the ages).

fossuser 7y ago

Since age discrimination laws only protect discrimination against people over 40 (you can legally exclude people for being young), I've thought it may be interesting to use this explicitly. If age discrimination is actually happening in tech that means there is a large amount of people 40+ that are not being properly valued in the market. It'd be cool to explicitly target these people by having jobs ads only for people 40+ (and it'd be neat to have mentorship of younger hires be a component of these jobs). No idea how that would work out, but seemed interesting to target for recruiting.

alexchamberlain 7y ago
Is that in the US? Discrimination laws don't have a minimum age in the UK.
- ajdlinux 7y ago
  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employment_Act_of_1967 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employme..., it appears so.
carmenbr 7y ago
Yes, that's an idea the could be explored. Some countries age discrimination is not even considered a crime. The problem detected is: in tech, the age discrimination starts earlier than 40, but at 36. What companies need to realise is a diversity staff can generate more money and produce more
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Some countries age discrimination is not even considered a crime. It's not a crime in the US, either. It is a statutory tort, though.
sansnomme 7y ago
The reverse needs to be true, you can't bar someone for being young using the usual excuse of inexperience. Want anti age discrimination policies to get popular support? Make sure it goes both ways.

klenwell 7y ago

How has uptake been thus far among developers looking for a job? You may want to experiment with the way you frame this. As Adam Gopnik suggests in a recent New Yorker article on aging, one bias that works against your site could come from an unexpected source: aging developers themselves. > In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button — one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/can-we-live-longer-but-stay-younger https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/can-we-live-lo... He's talking about products designed for baby boomers, but I suppose the same "eternal truth" as he puts it (i.e. "identity matters to us far more than utility") could factor in here. He offers this observation in the article: > The most effective way of comforting the aged, the researchers there find, is through a kind of comical convergence of products designed by and supposedly for impatient millennials, which secretly better suit the needs of irascible boomers. The best hearing aids look the most like earbuds. The most effective PERS device is an iPhone or an Apple Watch app. Good luck and keep us posted on how things work out.

carmenbr 7y ago
I'd say we are having a pretty good response. The website itself will not sort the ageism out. Companies first need to realise how important is to have a diversity staff not only because they are being forced to diversify but, as McKinsey and other researchers found out, diversity makes organisations "more effective, more successful, more profitable."
- ThomPete 7y ago
  I love what you are doing. As in love. I wrote a whole essay on the postive and negative side of age (both old and young) in context of finding problems to solve for startups. As a 45 year old I solved it by starting my own company and using that to my strength. However I would caution against using the mcKinsey report as any kind of evidence or guide for thinking about diversity. It's the same claims we see when it comes to gender too. The reality is that there are no studies showing that in general companies who were not diverse and then decided to be more diverse by some of those mentioned metrics were suddenly performing better. A much more likely interpretation is that companies who are doing well financially tend to be able to care more about ex diversity. You could literally have a team of 20 old female/male geezers be just as diverse as a team with the most mixed combination of ages, genders and ethnic groups you could find. What matters in my experience is what kind of diversity we are talking about and how it's used, not just whether there is diversity. What matters is the market and that it allows for diversity itself. You could have a team of only 20 year olds and you can have a team of +45 year olds and they would both offer something different to the market. I don't think you even need to worry about that part to be honest. The benefits of age are enough: More experience, better ability in general to prioritize, focused on their work, less likely to work themselves too hard, more stability, less likely to switch jobs for the next great opportunity etc.

jarofgreen 7y ago

How are you handling the data? I see your just asking companies to email you, but then somehow you have positions - do you pull them automatically or do you process them by hand? I ask because we just finished a job round, and it was so annoying posting our job on all the specialist job boards that apply to us. Every single one had a different enough form that I had to spend time working out how it would be displayed, what went where, dealing with the various problems (eg, we offer full time and part time and the number of sites that make you choose one was frustrating.). I would love there to be a standard data file format where I could have written up our job once, then just uploaded the same file/URL to each job site. That said, well done for starting this and I wish you luck in tackling this problem.

carmenbr 7y ago
At the moment, what we ask is just 4 things and then, we ask the company 4 or 5 different open opportunities to include on the website. We then include those by hand, linking to the original company's job post. Agreed this is annoying for job posters and we can discuss more how we could help you on that as well
- jarofgreen 7y ago
  > then, we ask the company 4 or 5 different open opportunities to include on the website. Wait, so the company might have more job positions than the few you list on the website? I didn't realise that when I browsed, that should definitely be made clear. Actually, if I can just email you a link to our own job page on our website that sounds nice and easy ... For me :-) But, if you want this project to survive long term, you really need to sort out systems so your not doing manual work like that by hand. I've seen several projects in other areas that relied on the founder doing that, and they usually stop after a year or two. Your time is more valuable and is better spent on other things, too.
  - leonagano 7y ago
    Yes the idea is to make easy for those who want to post jobs. Just a link to your job page is enough, but bear in mind your jobs descriptions not use words like tech-native, ninja, etc At the momwnt we can do manually but yes, in the long run we need to automate those job posts

ikeyany 7y ago

How much of the problem is a genuine bias, and how much of it is companies wanting to save money in the short term? Older employees are less expensive (smaller salary, fewer health/family events) and are less willing to work in poor conditions or work long hours to get ahead.

aiyodev 7y ago

> the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind Why exclude the older and inexperienced?

marton78 7y ago
Various reasons. They have families and might thus not be willing to work crazy hours, are more confident and won't put up with all the bullshit, etc
- jpindar 7y ago
  How is that not stereotyping? Not all older people are like that.
  - Grustaf 7y ago
    The correlation is very very strong though.
    - o-__-o 7y ago
      I end my day at 6pm, I don’t touch my laptop on most weekends, I say no to projects that I can easily solve but delays less user facing work, I get paid well into 6 figures. Now if you asked me 20 years ago to do any of the above for a job that pays < $40k (about $65k today) I would have said yes in a heartbeat. Many late nights spent at work because they offered free pizza. Weekend work because without money what else can I do? I said yes to every project because of the fear of saying no and being replaced. And it wasn’t being replaced that bugged me out so much, it was having the find a new job. Today I know my worth and I’ll leave a company in 30seconds if they treat me wrong. Amazing what 10+ years of experience (edit: and savings) does to your psyche. Still gotta play the game of dumb exploitable tech expert to get through interviews to negotiations, but once there get paid bruh
      - Grustaf 7y ago

Grustaf 7y ago

That last paragraph says a lot. If you have a company and you want employees that are “tech-natives”, whatever that may mean, that is not the same thing as discriminating based on age. No, not even if they are wrong, and don’t actually need a tech-native. This is just as silly as complaining that a moving company only hires people that are strong enough to lift a piano and women complain about sex discrimination because women tend to be much weaker. It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else.

markbnj 7y ago
And for what it's worth, the moving company analogy is extremely flawed. Most people apply for jobs in good faith. Moving companies (one of which I used to drive and load for, years ago), don't look to hire males or females. They look to hire people physically strong enough to do the job and skilled enough to do it well. They don't screen applications to weed out females. If a female applies for a moving position I think the average employer is probably going to assume she either knows what she's about or misunderstood the position. If you were to assume the latter then you might miss out on a good employee. There are plenty of women strong enough to lift furniture.
- Grustaf 7y ago
  Well this was my exact point.
farazbabar 7y ago
> It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else. Wow! I rarely openly disagree with strangers on the internet but wow! I am currently focused on improving diversity and inclusion within my teams and the diversity of thought, approaches and outcomes that are a direct result of this effort are a delight. Progress may not always be in the right direction or slower than one expects but zigging and zagging towards the right thing is a reward in its own.
- 7y ago

rbanffy 7y ago

I think I know Leo. Small world...