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I retired a year ago, but before retiring in 2013 I was invited to work at Google on a Knowledge Graph project and I don’t feel like there was any age discrimin
by mark_l_watson 6y ago
I retired a year ago, but before retiring in 2013 I was invited to work at Google on a Knowledge Graph project and I don’t feel like there was any age discrimination. In 2017 I interviewed at Capital One for a deep learning team manager job, which I got, and I never felt like there was any real age discrimination there either.
So, try those two places.
I did feel like I was the target for extreme age discrimination at WikiMedia Organization. All the phone interviews went great until one was a video call and the interviewer literally started laughing when he saw me and he quickly ended the call, and their HR immediately sent me a no thank you, thanks for applying email. The same thing happened at Electronic Arts about 15 years ago. They kept calling me with invites to come up to Vancouver for an interview. Three of people, when they saw me and realized that I was in my 50s, they literally started to laugh.
So, I would say to stick with quality companies and you will have better results.
- scambier 6y ago> the interviewer literally started laughing when he saw me and he quickly ended the call Wow. I have a hard time imagining being an interviewer and literally laughing at the face of a candidate before he even said anything. Unless he's dressed as a clown or something...
- mark_l_watson 6y agoIt was disappointing. But such is life and I would not have had the experiences of working for other companies if they had hired me. In Latin “Amor Fati” means to love your fate. Accept what happens and move on.
- sizzle 6y agoLove this mindset, hope you get something worthwhile friend.
- ryandrake 6y agoI wonder if they would dare do this in a face to face context, or does the videoconference medium enable this extreme antisocial behavior? I've never ever considered laughing at a candidate face to face or for that matter even politely ending an interview early. Don't all companies give potential interviewers at least basic training that shows them what things you shouldn't do on an interview?
- artsyca 6y agoI had an interview once with a team that was all remote and the person on the other end had literally just crawled out of bed a few minutes earlier I treat interviews as a two way street hence the word "inter" and it definitely behooves both sides to be on best behaviour. You'd think that an industry full of analysts and theorists would have understood the game theory of interviews by now?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago> the person on the other end had literally just crawled out of bed a few minutes earlier To be completely honest, I've been brought on interviews myself for this reason... in a sea of fucking business guys, I ended up being the person from engineering they wanted on the interviews.
- artsyca 6y agoHow do you mean because you actually brushed your hair or because they were going for toxic chic?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoNo, the HR guys always want 'business professionals' doing the interviewing.
- fortran77 6y agoA lot of kids today (I'm 57) look like this! I don't think Jack Dorsey, for example, owns a comb.
- artsyca 6y agoSteinbeck wrote that only the rich can afford to dress badly, the poor are forced to dress well There are are deep sociological undercurrents to all this behaviour but people who ought to know better are too busy denying the evidence
- vmlinuz 6y ago
- karlkatzke 6y agoWikimedia was also one of the worst interviews I've ever had, but it wasn't a video interview. They sent me a take-home "test" that needed to sort some files into different folders based on the file contents and said it should take about three hours to complete but it needed to scale to several million files. So I set a timer, and started working on it, and got a simple solution working, which ran using Docker so that I could package the dependencies... (some ruby gems, the test's stock files, etc.) I included a readme that said 'simply docker build and docker run'. At the 3 hour mark, I stopped iterating and sent the github link. The recruiter called me the next day and said that the person who looked at the code said it didn't run, when he looked at it, it was the worst code they'd ever seen, I didn't use object-oriented design and didn't unit test it. Wut? A 3 hour script to sort some files should be properly structured OOP with unit tests, and the examiner didn't know how to run docker? Wow, I guess I dodged a bullet there.
- DangitBobby 6y agoThey expected 15 hours worth of work on it.
- ignoramous 6y agoThat's 3 hours in sprint time.
- imhoguy 6y agoAnd the remaining done over a weekend. Yep, he dodged a bullet.
- quickthrower2 6y agoWhat’s this Haskell you speak of? No classes, no factories? Get out!
- deepspace 6y agoMaybe it's a Vancouver thing. I seldom experienced age discrimination when dealing with SV companies, but in my experience it is rampant in Vancouver. Last time I was job hunting I was 45 and I was also literally laughed out of a couple of offices. The ones who did not laugh for the most part ghosted me after the first in-person interview when they saw my white hair.
- moneywoes 6y agoIs this Vancouver, BC? If you're comfortable would you mind privately sharing what sort of companies treated you like that? Just started my career here and would greatly appreciate any insights about the market. Thanks
- deepspace 6y agoYes, Vancouver BC. The companies with the worst attitude were mostly startups, up to 5 years or so. Which was ironic because my previous experience was exactly what they needed - elevating the business practices of startups towards sustainability. It is a small comfort that these companies are mostly long gone now. I eventually found a great position at a more mature company, and am very happy with my career there.
- nonines 6y agoSimilar experience here for wikimedia. Unbelievably unprofessional.