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Comment by throwawaysbdi | Hacker News Reader

The free market optimizes in a way that isn't "fair". Young people are measurably quicker thinking and willing to work longer hours for less pay. They cost the company less in insurance and sick pay as well. Young males tend not to have familial responsibilities and don't get pregnant.

Then you have race, where hiring white people is seen as the safest option for the business because they generally aren't discriminated against. It minimizes the risk of your company getting a bad reputation with certain groups, and minimizes the risk of lawsuits when you need to fire people.

With business the market isn't cultural as much as it's about maximizing profitability. That still doesn't make it fair.

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Young people may be measurably quicker thinking and willing to work longer hours for less pay, but that doesn't help when they lack the skills and experience and end up making the wrong decisions.

Older people generally aren't willing to work for the same low pay because we have enough experience to justify it.

This kind of discrimination is peculiar because the exact same people are often sought after if you only change their title. E.g. as a consultant I'm sought after at a far higher price point, and my age and experience are a big selling point, where trying to apply as a regular developer would make people wonder what's wrong.

This is more of a perception and marketing issue than it is about young people having an edge, and the pereception comes down to the same reason we ascribe more value to e.g. an expensive watch than a cheap one: Signalling effect.

Being a developer at 40 signals to a lot of people that someone doesn't have the skills to get promoted, because they don't understand that you can be a developer and do stuff any random CS graduate could do, or do stuff that makes you one in a million without getting fancy titles.

Conversely, being a consultant signals to people that I must be able to do stuff other people can't.

You see the signalling effect clearly when pitching for work as a consultant: I have conversations with people that are 90% about me telling them whether or not I can do the work, rather than being interviewed by someone who is trying to figure out if I can do the work. The assumption is that my judgement can be trusted because I'm a consultant rather than some "lowly developer" applying for a job.

Seeing the difference in respect and attitudes (and money...) makes me even more determined not to go back to normal employment.

(There's also a subtle difference there between attitudes to presenting yourself as a "consultant" vs. "contractor")

> you can be a developer and do stuff any random CS graduate could do, or do stuff that makes you one in a million without getting fancy titles

This seems to be the problem at the heart of a dozen disparate issues in software hiring and management. Standard HR and management systems are largely unprepared for the idea that two people with the same title (or even the same degree, from the same school, in the same year!) may have almost-unrelated skillsets. Treating two people on the same team with the same job title as completely non-interchangeable just doesn't happen.

I'm not sure what you mean by "getting a bad reputation with certain groups", companies fall over themselves to appear "diverse", to the extent of hiring people to make it so..

A lot of companies try to have their cake and eat it too, and continue practices they know will lead them to stay white and male while putting together "diversity committees" and the like to appeal to minorities.

E.g. my ex works for a bank where she is on a diversity commitee, where the constant frustration is that the bank is only willing to take actions that everyone knows will have very little effect: The underlying problem is that they continue to insist to hire mainly from schools that predominantly have students from wealthy families, and are skewed heavily towards white students to the extent that if they took the entire graduating classes for the next decade without considering results, they'd still not solve their diversity problems.

But any suggestion of widening their search to less elitist schools and focus on results instead gets shot down instantly.

Thus they remain mostly white, while holding all kinds of diversity events etc. to look like they're trying hard to solve the problem.

To be fair to them, they're happy enough to hire minorities from those schools. The point is they know that will not address their imbalance, and all their other diversity work is window dressing. I don't think it's because they have anything against hiring non-white people, but simply because they care more about the prestige of the schools they hire from than they care about diversity (even if you could guarantee to only consider candidates with equally good results).

I think you will find this many places.

TBH 'prestige ' is fine, sounds like the schools have a diversity problem?

Any school were admission is wealth driven has a diversity problem, and it is self-perpetuating.

As for whether it is fine, that depends on whether they actually care about their diversity goals, and whether prestige is in fact more important to them than job performance. I'd argue that it is likely "prestige" here is simply used to enforce informal social connections and to some extent to avoid diversity at the cost of job performance. If I'd been an investor of said bank, I'd consider it a major concern.

You're saying investors would be concerned that they are hiring for diversity, rather than from prestigious schools?

What do you mean by "avoid diversity at the cost of job performance" - are you saying diversity improves performance?

No, I'm saying investors should be concerned that they are preferring prestige rather than hiring the best candidates regardless of school background, and that given how unrepresentative the schools they hire from are, this is contributing to keeping diversity down and makes a mockery of their own stated commitments.

The internal data that the group that is tasked with improving diversity (and that is largely being ignored) at this particular bank shows that being equally strict about results but considering a wider range of schools would increase diversity and would allow them to actualy do so while making their hiring cirteria stricter. This gets brushed aside, and then the bank keeps complaining about how hard it is to be more diverse afterwards.

In other worse: They are hiring less qualified candidates and use the prestige of the schools as an excuse for avoiding hiring more qualified candidates that would also bring more diversity.

Political realities can ruin your reputation with some customers. The business goal is to maximize profits even if that means not hiring black people in the southern US, or LGBT in Russia for example

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