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Comment by pascalo | Hacker News Reader

I think he doesn't need to imply it, firing someone without explanation is bad management, no matter how young or old you are.

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Either that or proactive lawyers. California is a no-cause state. Only when you state a cause, can it be used against you for bias.

[Edit] Don't know about other states.

To provide an outside US perspective, it's not that easy to fire someone in Germany, the UK or Australia. Once you're past the probation period, you'd probably have to get one or multiple sorts of negative reviews and written warnings from HR or your superiors before being let go, otherwise you'd have ground to sue for unfair dismissal. That, or you'd be given a redundancy package.

There's no such thing as probation period in law. It's a company specific thing. The laws the same if your own a probation period or not.

In German law there is. In Australia unfair dismissal can only be claimed after 6 months of employment. Not really sure about the UK, but I am fairly sure it's not just cut throat firing like in the US, and you can claim unfair dismissal.

UK you can claim unfair dismissal after 2 years, unless there's Equalities Act stuff happening.

In Poland there is such thing as probation in law, so you should specify what country are you talking about.

Giving an explanation publicly would harm their future employment chances. But people should be told privately why they're being fired, of course.

This is correct. However, it's still strane to mention ages in this context.

Just replace age descriptions with race descriptions to see how weird and out of place that is.

> She was white, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her latino manager that she had two weeks to get out.

Age implies wisdom and experience, which I think was the point he was trying to get across. Comparing it to race is just silly.

> Age implies wisdom and experience

Age implies obsoleteness and poor health. (I can stereotype too!)

Not in your 30s. If you're trying to prove halestock wrong you're doing a poor job.

The way I read it he used the age and gender info in his comment to illustrate that it would be harder for the person to get a job. Hence it being extra cruel to use the weird lingo and act like it wouldn't be hard for her.

It does.

However, it's the matter of how strong that causation is and how hard are you going to rely on it. Because if you think that someone in their 30s is likely to be be significantly more experienced and wise, it also means that you should think that someone in their 50s is likely to be significantly burned out and slow.

My point is: the correlation (and underlying causation) is there, but it's not strong enough, compared to differences between individuals.

>> "Just replace age descriptions with race descriptions to see how weird and out of place that is."

How is that in any way a sound analogy? Your age likely has an impact on your experience. More experience doesn't necessarily mean you're better at your job but it's a decent possibility. Race has no impact on performance at all.

Race does not impact perfomance, but there's a correlation between race and education, for example (because ages of institutial discrimination, of course). Do you think people should take this correlation into consideration when talking about others?

I highly recommend double-checking your work on this line of thinking.

They're pointing out the flaws in the logic of biasing based on characteristics, of both race and age.

Obviously nobody is going to discount a manager because of their race, but on that same coin people shouldn't discount the same individual because of their age.

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