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Comment by kabdib | Hacker News Reader

Fallout from this: Companies will go to great lengths to avoid contact with people who submit resumes that imply they are old. No phone screens, no responses. It's going to be wintertime for folks in their late 30s now.

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That would be great! Insta-lawsuit. Age is a protected class in the US, and if it is discovered that your company did something like this you are going to be paying out bigtime.

But, how would you ever know you were discriminated against? They never called you because your resume was filtered out before the initial contact.

Submit equal resumes that only differ in age. If a significant difference in responses exists, you sue.

There are several organizations that are doing this in my country, but for immigrants.

That's very difficult to do for age. If one applicant is 20 years older, he is expected to have longer work experience; if his work experience is too short, it's a red flag.

Of course they still might not hire the more experienced person because she is "overqualified".

You can fiddle and have them start their career in another field for example.

If the two applicants have equal qualifications and you only hire the younger applicant then you are going to be open for an age-discrimination lawsuit. Being older and having a shorter relevant work experience is the sort of 'red flag' that puts you on the losing side of these lawsuits, as the two candidates are manifestly equal by definition here other than differences in age. You can't say "person X is older and should therefore have more work experience, so we will pick person Y" and expect to not end up spending the next few years in court.

Who puts age on a resume? But if you're suggesting age as measured by years of experience, that's supposed to be the most relevant deciding factor, so...

Nobody puts age on a resume but you can definitely tell age based on their experience.

Which is exactly what makes an A/B test on age based on resume call-ins implausible.

So let's put together some assumptions:

1. Company X is smart enough to never record this illegal policy in documents/email/etc.

2. The policy is verbally communicated to all recruiters and many upper managers.

3. Company X is growing and employs hundreds of recruiters.

If the recruiter turn-over at company X is similar to other companies (i.e. it's pretty high), it's only a matter of time before a recently fired recruiter talks to a lawyer or the press.

The simpler thing to do is only advertise very low-level positions and pay new hires poorly enough that only new grads will apply in the first place. Of course, then you've got to develop the folks that you hire or have a model that is predicated on just throwing large numbers of people at problems.

As others have noted, you do it the same way EEOC and other orgs test for hiring discrimination based upon race or gender. You submit equal resumes (appropriately updated for age in this case) and see what response you get. You take a look at the company org details and do a few simple statistical runs to see how things net out. Since this is a protected class we are talking about it is a lot easier to make your case based on statistical evidence. "Gee your honor, it is purely a coincidence that all of our employees are <male/white/under-30>"...

And if that logic and result are buried in AI training sets used to drive hiring selection algos?

https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/post...

If the goal of your company is to avoid getting sued, then you don't actually have a company. Companies hire to achieve real goals.

You seem to be implying that a company that wanted to grow their workforce is better off actively filtering out people on the basis of their age. Why do you think that?

Enterprises are ultimately comprised of moultiple goals, many of which involve mitigating or controlling for both upside and downside risk.

That's reflected in the very names of some organisations, e.g., "limited liability corporation". Incorporation is itself fundamentally a risk-control technology.

There are definitely companies that structure their internal processes to avoid lawsuits. My father was the CFO at one company that didn't keep written or electronic performance review records for that reason.

This!

The permatemp lawsuit against MSFT ended up being completely counterproductive. Now temps have to take a "vacation" every X years for at least 100 days. So temps at MSFT have LESS job security after "winning" their lawsuit.

Be careful what you wish for - the laws of unintended consequences.

The goal of the temp lawsuits, at least when I was at microsoft (in a fulltime job) imho was to get tons of money for the stock options they would have received if they had been regular fulltime employees. They were almost full timers, except they didn't have stock, and they had a small chance of not being employed.

How screwed is a non-traditional recent college grad with a CS degree? I am talking late 30s early 40s.

As a programmer past my late 30's, my heart bleeds for you.

Righhht... only in silly valley perhaps. Ya can have the crowd that programmed Ashley Madison

Righhht...

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