10 ms·

Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k

64 points by rustoo 3y ago

paxys 3y ago
Be discriminated against, fight five years in court and get a $90K payout. Where's the win exactly?
- kevin42 3y ago
  Hopefully it is a societal win, discouraging companies from age discrimination in the future. For us old guys, that feels like a win.
  - onemoresoop 3y ago
    Not sure what win this would be as companies will give zero feedback to avoid incriminating themselves, according to the article. "The company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,” Sadly it doesn't look like age discrimination will stop, just the feedback will.
  - TeckPerspecc 3y ago
    All it will encourage is for companies to give zero feedback when they reject someone.
  - paxys 3y ago
    IMO a judgement like this doesn't discourage anything, just reinforces that fact that breaking the rules is advantageous and fines are a small cost of doing business.
    - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
      Five years of litigation is no cake walk.
  - sonicanatidae 3y ago
    Not really. The problem with companies is when there is wrong-doing, it's just pittance fines and ultimately, those fines are paid with other people's money. I wish it was more impactful.
- voxic11 3y ago
  He didn't have to fight five years in court. All he did was submit the complaint to the EEOC and they handled the investigation and lawsuit against the company.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  The win is in getting at least one of these bastards a penalty.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  go to a job interview, do something else for five years, get 90k. seems like a pretty good deal.
- halJordan 3y ago
  I guess at this point its time for me to be age-discriminated bc im starting to say the same cliches as my father, I viscerally understand the phrase "ffs." We all know the wheels of justice turn slowly. A wrong was righted and we're throwing it away because it wasn't speedy enough? And there's even a second win, god forbid! The defendant had a fair day in court so we can have confidence the right thing happened! Dont be too quick to demand reprisals and call it justice.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
With age comes wisdom. There is no shortcut.
- saulpw 3y ago
  It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  >We get wise too late >And old too soon. —Old Danish Proverb
vaxman 3y ago
In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers execute on such schemes, even targeting specific workers who might have authority to block such platform shifts. Even in small startups where the hiring entrepreneur may have been working in a different field with plenty of high-skill mature workers or living at (a parent’s) home playing video games pounding caffeine drinks just a few months earlier, there still seems to be an instinctive bias to hire young (and cheap) tech people and embrace whatever tech du jour that they prefer to maximize their chance of success. Even Y Combinator reportedly got its start poaching college age kids with $6K all-in packages and “incubating” them. (Get away from me with that thing!) It’s not The Way, of course, but with most mature workers permanently taken out of the industry during the dot-com crash and that flood of technicians filling critical roles for a while, it’s also not going to change until the new generation (currently their most senior workers are at about 17 years experience by my clock) takeover the game like “The Ancients” before them (that they never knew). Source: my six year education and 41 year pro career that began under people who had once fought in WWII and I’m still way (WAY!) younger than the youngest founder of Apple (#8)
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
  - nerpderp82 3y ago
    Most people who have been in industry a long time, have great skills when it comes to picking up new platforms. Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003. When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whacked out business models. The last thing they want is someone that has seen this three times and can point out the needless churn to support a CTO that doesn't know what they are doing.
glonq 3y ago
50ish here. If I'm ever looking for a new job again [hopefully never!], I'll be sure to dye my hair and drop dates from my job history.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I'm late 50s, and a couple of decades ago I stopped giving a complete job history for the most part. I did this because my full job history is lengthy and I don't want to have a CV that spans so many pages. Instead, I include my job history over the last 10-15 years, and include select items that are older than that if they are particularly relevant to the position I'm applying for. I don't try to hide my age -- my age/experience is a significant advantage I have over most other applicants. Age discrimination is a real thing, of course, but is very far from being a universal issue. If a company doesn't want to hire me because I'm too old, I count that as dodging the bullet of getting hired by a sketchy company.
- halJordan 3y ago
  Loved that episode of the office
- Mountain_Skies 3y ago
  Unfortunately many companies make use of their ATS mandatory when applying for a job and those systems usually require start and end dates for all but your current job. Even if ATS doesn't requirement, HR likely will when they do employment verification.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - rufus_foreman 3y ago
    You mean they're going to make me put on a resume that I bagged groceries at Food Lizard in the mid 1980's? No. No they're not.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
JakeAl 3y ago
Been dealing with this since my 40s. And good luck hiding it on your resume, most application forms these days require dates and even addresses. I am also discriminated against based on location. Some companies won't even interview you unless you are local, even for remote jobs, even if you're willing to relocate.
- polski-g 3y ago
  How are you filling out an application in your 40s? Shouldn't you be getting poached from every job due to former colleagues wanting to work with you?
  - icedchai 3y ago
    Yes, but be careful. If you have an interview and the offer comes too easily, due to internal referral or whatever, it should raise a red flag. You may be stepping into a big pile of crap (based on personal experience where this happened a couple of times.)
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      I don’t remember filling in an allocation for google, where I have my current job. Maybe it came after the offer? I don’t think applications are very common in tech anymore, you just get an interview set up with a recruiter and the paper work only comes if they want to hire you.
dfgfek 3y ago
>After he was rejected for the sales job, the company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,” according to the EEOC. And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.
- ericmcer 3y ago
  I have had multiple companies tell me they are looking to hire female or PoC developers during an interview before, I never knew I could get 90k for it!
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    Believe me, you couldn't.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      They probably could, if they actually said that.
  - faeriechangling 3y ago
    That discrimination is often explicitly legal, although one wonders how companies in the United States get away with such things since the US has constitutional protections against institutional racism.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - phatskat 3y ago
    Those were their exact words?
- 1letterunixname 3y ago
  Yep. Only the moronic companies say why you weren't hired or were fired. Most just ghost their former and potential employees.
nadermx 3y ago
My friend's dad is a retired developer. Use to work for a jet company. Well into his 60's when his son asked for him to make him a dev engine for a game he was making, he dug right in and had a prototype rather quickly. I think as I've gotten older the only issue for me is motivation to actually want to work on projects, vs just doing any random thing.
- lsaferite 3y ago
  > motivation to actually want to work on projects, vs just doing any random thing. I can identify with this statement. I love learning new things and experimenting. Doing "any random thing" is generally much more appealing to me now.
gosub100 3y ago
I dont want to defend "age discrimination" proper, but I think it's a very fine line and companies should have the right to select someone with low experience. This, of course, means they have to treat an "older" tech newbie the same as a fresh sprout. But it should absolutely be their choice if they want a junior level vs a senior employee.
- ncr100 3y ago
  gosub100 - making this a "right" would be redundant. What is the benefit? I may be wrong - please let me know: It's my understanding as a worker in the US that there is no restriction on employers from hiring junior-experienced employees. My two bits: Age discrimination feels rampant to me, where I see Old being equated with Bad. I see this on a bi-weekly basis from my industry-following news-consuming habit, reading comments from "young" people in the tech industry. I believe it's an issue on the rise, since I believe the demographic of tech people still seeking employment is shifting to older.
  - gosub100 3y ago
    (tried to reply earlier but I got throttled) by "a right", I didn't mean "there ought to be a law", which is a phrase that I can't seem to get away from lately. I just mean they should be able to, they should have the freedom to seek - a person of low experience if that fits with their plan or budget. But to avoid an older person on the basis of not liking old people is flat out wrong, hence a fine line. And to answer your question, there is no restriction on hiring junior-level employees. My comment just meant there shouldn't be any shame in a team saying "let's add a junior to the team".
ilaksh 3y ago
I'm 46 and I think the last few small contracts that I picked up were from older clients, even though I applied to quite a few other ones. So age discrimination does seem to maybe be a factor. But maybe with those clients it helped being a little older? Don't know. But for me, my real concern is just trying to come up with an AI-powered business over the next few years before I am being discriminated against not only because I am older, but also because I am human that wants to be paid more than $1 per hour. On RunPod a 4090 is only like $.50/hor and can run Mixtral very easily in quantized mode. The open models like Mixtral are getting very, very good. And when you combine that with specialized agents for particular application areas, and then the ability to consult multiple agents per project, easily adding knowledge with RAG or automatically generated fine tuning datasets, etc.. There might be a lot of competition from AI programmers within a few years. But regardless, I needed to find a way to create a "real" online business. The new and anticipated abilities of AI make it a bit more urgent I think. I'm trying to build an agent hosting platform because I think that within a couple of years, everyone will expect to be able to run LLMs/agents on their own computer natively. So I am guessing we will have something like WordPress for agents. Hoping people will consider my tool.
- nradov 3y ago
  LLMs aren't competition, they're just another tool that allows human programmers to work at a higher level of abstraction. When the industry (mostly) switched from coding in assembly language to high-level languages the number of programmers went up. This trend will work out the same way. There is effectively infinite demand for new software.
gudbrandemilie 3y ago
[dead]
1letterunixname 3y ago
The message here is that ageism is protected and tolerated discrimination and only theoretically illegal in the rare instances when it can be proven. Always remember there is zero job security if you lack significant equity ownership, and there is no safety net except the one you (or collective action) demand or create.
millzlane 3y ago
I recently saw a job posting that said we want someone with less than 10 years experience for a gig that seemed like 10 years of experience would be beneficial. It was a sysops gig working with ASM/DEP and workspaceONE.

64 points by rustoo 3y ago

paxys 3y ago

Be discriminated against, fight five years in court and get a $90K payout. Where's the win exactly?

kevin42 3y ago
Hopefully it is a societal win, discouraging companies from age discrimination in the future. For us old guys, that feels like a win.
- onemoresoop 3y ago
  Not sure what win this would be as companies will give zero feedback to avoid incriminating themselves, according to the article. "The company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,” Sadly it doesn't look like age discrimination will stop, just the feedback will.
- TeckPerspecc 3y ago
  All it will encourage is for companies to give zero feedback when they reject someone.
- paxys 3y ago
  IMO a judgement like this doesn't discourage anything, just reinforces that fact that breaking the rules is advantageous and fines are a small cost of doing business.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    Five years of litigation is no cake walk.
- sonicanatidae 3y ago
  Not really. The problem with companies is when there is wrong-doing, it's just pittance fines and ultimately, those fines are paid with other people's money. I wish it was more impactful.
voxic11 3y ago
He didn't have to fight five years in court. All he did was submit the complaint to the EEOC and they handled the investigation and lawsuit against the company.
JohnFen 3y ago
The win is in getting at least one of these bastards a penalty.
s1artibartfast 3y ago
go to a job interview, do something else for five years, get 90k. seems like a pretty good deal.
halJordan 3y ago
I guess at this point its time for me to be age-discriminated bc im starting to say the same cliches as my father, I viscerally understand the phrase "ffs." We all know the wheels of justice turn slowly. A wrong was righted and we're throwing it away because it wasn't speedy enough? And there's even a second win, god forbid! The defendant had a fair day in court so we can have confidence the right thing happened! Dont be too quick to demand reprisals and call it justice.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

With age comes wisdom. There is no shortcut.

saulpw 3y ago
It's a necessary but not sufficient condition.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>We get wise too late >And old too soon. —Old Danish Proverb

vaxman 3y ago

In the post-mainframe era, tech centric companies have learned to age discriminate by shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble, typically laying off those older workers and/or turning around and hiring younger workers who are pre-trained (or willing to and cheap enough to be trained) in the new platforms. Sometimes the platform vendors themselves help their customers execute on such schemes, even targeting specific workers who might have authority to block such platform shifts. Even in small startups where the hiring entrepreneur may have been working in a different field with plenty of high-skill mature workers or living at (a parent’s) home playing video games pounding caffeine drinks just a few months earlier, there still seems to be an instinctive bias to hire young (and cheap) tech people and embrace whatever tech du jour that they prefer to maximize their chance of success. Even Y Combinator reportedly got its start poaching college age kids with $6K all-in packages and “incubating” them. (Get away from me with that thing!) It’s not The Way, of course, but with most mature workers permanently taken out of the industry during the dot-com crash and that flood of technicians filling critical roles for a while, it’s also not going to change until the new generation (currently their most senior workers are at about 17 years experience by my clock) takeover the game like “The Ancients” before them (that they never knew). Source: my six year education and 41 year pro career that began under people who had once fought in WWII and I’m still way (WAY!) younger than the youngest founder of Apple (#8)

JohnFen 3y ago
> shifting the platform out from underneath their workforces causing older workers to stumble But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
- nerpderp82 3y ago
  Most people who have been in industry a long time, have great skills when it comes to picking up new platforms. Granted, sometimes we can be jaded when new stack Foo claims to have all the same hotness as stack Bar did back in 2003. When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whacked out business models. The last thing they want is someone that has seen this three times and can point out the needless churn to support a CTO that doesn't know what they are doing.

glonq 3y ago

50ish here. If I'm ever looking for a new job again [hopefully never!], I'll be sure to dye my hair and drop dates from my job history.

JohnFen 3y ago
I'm late 50s, and a couple of decades ago I stopped giving a complete job history for the most part. I did this because my full job history is lengthy and I don't want to have a CV that spans so many pages. Instead, I include my job history over the last 10-15 years, and include select items that are older than that if they are particularly relevant to the position I'm applying for. I don't try to hide my age -- my age/experience is a significant advantage I have over most other applicants. Age discrimination is a real thing, of course, but is very far from being a universal issue. If a company doesn't want to hire me because I'm too old, I count that as dodging the bullet of getting hired by a sketchy company.
halJordan 3y ago
Loved that episode of the office
Mountain_Skies 3y ago
Unfortunately many companies make use of their ATS mandatory when applying for a job and those systems usually require start and end dates for all but your current job. Even if ATS doesn't requirement, HR likely will when they do employment verification.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rufus_foreman 3y ago
  You mean they're going to make me put on a resume that I bagged groceries at Food Lizard in the mid 1980's? No. No they're not.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago

JakeAl 3y ago

Been dealing with this since my 40s. And good luck hiding it on your resume, most application forms these days require dates and even addresses. I am also discriminated against based on location. Some companies won't even interview you unless you are local, even for remote jobs, even if you're willing to relocate.

polski-g 3y ago
How are you filling out an application in your 40s? Shouldn't you be getting poached from every job due to former colleagues wanting to work with you?
- icedchai 3y ago
  Yes, but be careful. If you have an interview and the offer comes too easily, due to internal referral or whatever, it should raise a red flag. You may be stepping into a big pile of crap (based on personal experience where this happened a couple of times.)
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    I don’t remember filling in an allocation for google, where I have my current job. Maybe it came after the offer? I don’t think applications are very common in tech anymore, you just get an interview set up with a recruiter and the paper work only comes if they want to hire you.

dfgfek 3y ago

>After he was rejected for the sales job, the company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,” according to the EEOC. And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.

ericmcer 3y ago
I have had multiple companies tell me they are looking to hire female or PoC developers during an interview before, I never knew I could get 90k for it!
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Believe me, you couldn't.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    They probably could, if they actually said that.
- faeriechangling 3y ago
  That discrimination is often explicitly legal, although one wonders how companies in the United States get away with such things since the US has constitutional protections against institutional racism.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- phatskat 3y ago
  Those were their exact words?
1letterunixname 3y ago
Yep. Only the moronic companies say why you weren't hired or were fired. Most just ghost their former and potential employees.

nadermx 3y ago

My friend's dad is a retired developer. Use to work for a jet company. Well into his 60's when his son asked for him to make him a dev engine for a game he was making, he dug right in and had a prototype rather quickly. I think as I've gotten older the only issue for me is motivation to actually want to work on projects, vs just doing any random thing.

lsaferite 3y ago
> motivation to actually want to work on projects, vs just doing any random thing. I can identify with this statement. I love learning new things and experimenting. Doing "any random thing" is generally much more appealing to me now.

gosub100 3y ago

I dont want to defend "age discrimination" proper, but I think it's a very fine line and companies should have the right to select someone with low experience. This, of course, means they have to treat an "older" tech newbie the same as a fresh sprout. But it should absolutely be their choice if they want a junior level vs a senior employee.

ncr100 3y ago
gosub100 - making this a "right" would be redundant. What is the benefit? I may be wrong - please let me know: It's my understanding as a worker in the US that there is no restriction on employers from hiring junior-experienced employees. My two bits: Age discrimination feels rampant to me, where I see Old being equated with Bad. I see this on a bi-weekly basis from my industry-following news-consuming habit, reading comments from "young" people in the tech industry. I believe it's an issue on the rise, since I believe the demographic of tech people still seeking employment is shifting to older.
- gosub100 3y ago
  (tried to reply earlier but I got throttled) by "a right", I didn't mean "there ought to be a law", which is a phrase that I can't seem to get away from lately. I just mean they should be able to, they should have the freedom to seek - a person of low experience if that fits with their plan or budget. But to avoid an older person on the basis of not liking old people is flat out wrong, hence a fine line. And to answer your question, there is no restriction on hiring junior-level employees. My comment just meant there shouldn't be any shame in a team saying "let's add a junior to the team".

ilaksh 3y ago

I'm 46 and I think the last few small contracts that I picked up were from older clients, even though I applied to quite a few other ones. So age discrimination does seem to maybe be a factor. But maybe with those clients it helped being a little older? Don't know. But for me, my real concern is just trying to come up with an AI-powered business over the next few years before I am being discriminated against not only because I am older, but also because I am human that wants to be paid more than $1 per hour. On RunPod a 4090 is only like $.50/hor and can run Mixtral very easily in quantized mode. The open models like Mixtral are getting very, very good. And when you combine that with specialized agents for particular application areas, and then the ability to consult multiple agents per project, easily adding knowledge with RAG or automatically generated fine tuning datasets, etc.. There might be a lot of competition from AI programmers within a few years. But regardless, I needed to find a way to create a "real" online business. The new and anticipated abilities of AI make it a bit more urgent I think. I'm trying to build an agent hosting platform because I think that within a couple of years, everyone will expect to be able to run LLMs/agents on their own computer natively. So I am guessing we will have something like WordPress for agents. Hoping people will consider my tool.

nradov 3y ago
LLMs aren't competition, they're just another tool that allows human programmers to work at a higher level of abstraction. When the industry (mostly) switched from coding in assembly language to high-level languages the number of programmers went up. This trend will work out the same way. There is effectively infinite demand for new software.

gudbrandemilie 3y ago

[dead]

1letterunixname 3y ago

The message here is that ageism is protected and tolerated discrimination and only theoretically illegal in the rare instances when it can be proven. Always remember there is zero job security if you lack significant equity ownership, and there is no safety net except the one you (or collective action) demand or create.

millzlane 3y ago

I recently saw a job posting that said we want someone with less than 10 years experience for a gig that seemed like 10 years of experience would be beneficial. It was a sysops gig working with ASM/DEP and workspaceONE.