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Comment by klancaster | Hacker News Reader

I first felt this when I was asked by a sales rep if I would be interested in coming to work for his company since I had exactly the credentials and experience they were looking for. He said he would talk with the head of development and get back to me. Time passed, and when he did get back to me, he said that the dev manager was looking for someone under 35 and that my resume - which did not have my age - told him that I must be older (I was around 45 at the time). In retrospect, I should have sued, but instead just let it drop.

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If it was in writing you should have absolutely sued. That is clear age discrimination.

I don't know anyone who was ever happy when they had to deal with lawyers...

To what end? Do you really want to work at a company that you sued and as part of the settlement they had to give you a job? What sort of damages do you think you could convince a judge or jury to give you for 'not hiring' you?

I get that it is wrong, and that the employer's should have some downside for discriminating against older employees (other than losing out on some great employees) but as an individual seeking a job, the downside is much greater for the individual to sue than the company.

Rather than sue, send a note to the National Labor Relations board and have them set up a sting operation and catch them in the act. Justice is served and your life isn't impacted by being part of a lawsuit that would do you no good anyway.

I'm pretty sure that's not what the court would award you, i.e., a job. They would award damages in the form of lost potential income plus punitive damages.

First, Yuuuuge disclaimer, I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and the rules are different pretty much everywhere so, in this context I'm speaking as a California resident about employers in California, and there are reasons it is hard to win a hiring based case[1] ...

To award damages you have to make the case that you were harmed. It is one thing to sue a company that dismisses you for discriminatory reasons, you had a job and a salary, and a court could find that you were discriminated against, so you were "harmed" by the loss of pay. The court could award back pay and punitive damages to make you whole. However if you had yet to be hired, there isn't any way to prove either what your salary would have been, or if you had worked there that you would not have been dismissed for any of a million completely legal reasons. As a result and claim for damages would have to somehow prove that by not hiring you you were somehow not hireable or through perhaps a long an tortuous interview process you were financially harmed. Both very hard to do.

The big difference is that you've never worked there, so you haven't been harmed. However, it is illegal to discriminate and the remedy for illegal discrimination is a fine administered in response to a criminal complaint. That is why you get the NLRB involved, they can bring criminal charges, you can't[2].

[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/lawsuits-based-the-hi...

[2] Not strictly true, you could swear out a complaint but it would be up to the District Attorney to decide if they were going to prosecute based on your complaint.

I agree with your response, but you could probably assume someone would make it 2 weeks, couldn't you? Aren't there laws about hiring and having to pay for the first 2 weeks or something, or am I just making that up?

As a California resident who has gone through this, you don't contact the NLRB, you contact the Department of Labor Standards Enforcement first, who in turn takes the case to the NLRB if you can not reach a settlement agreement with the company that discriminated against you.

That's why it's so hard to win a case like this in CA, nobody knows the proper steps to take.

I'm pretty sure suing a potential employer would be a career-damaging move in the eyes of other employers.

most places don't even seem to ask for/call references these days. they're hardly going to conduct a westlaw search to see if you've been involved in litigation.

if you specifically try to get a job with the golf buddy of someone you sued, maybe you'll run into an issue, but there's an elevated likelihood that they're the same brand of asshole you had to sue.

> To what end?

To show the company they were wrong?

In my opinion, the better way to do that. in the US at least, is to report them to the NLRB. The NLRB does take such complaints seriously and they do follow up on them. That can lead to hefty fines. What is more you don't have to pay for a lawyer so it costs you nothing.

Would the company sue you if they had damages to collect from you?

And maybe even if not in writing (they would have to swear that they never said this)

There is a reason whey employees over the age of 40 are an legally protected class: your story isn't unique.

Well, they're protected because pretty much all lawmakers are over 40. And over 40s have great lobbyists.

They shouldn't be discriminated against because of their age, but neither should anyone else. Hiring young people because they're cheaper or easier to overwork is pretty messed up across the board.

Hmmmmm, I wonder if people in their 20s are equally discriminated against but our society as a whole just have less sympathy for them.

> Hiring young people because they're cheaper or easier to overwork is pretty messed up across the board.

But hiring employees who are willing to work for less, or for longer hours, is basically exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to work.

> But hiring employees who are willing to work for less, or for longer hours, is basically exactly how a competitive free market is supposed to work.

Unless you are willing to work for less or longer hours, but are still not considered because of some external factor..

I'm not that inclined to interview for certain positions because of my age. For instance, I had an internal Facebook recruiter try, pretty aggressively, to get me to interview for a devops position a couple of years ago. I spent a couple of hours on the phone with him, over a couple of sessions, but in the end I declined even an initial interview.

There were a number of reasons:

1) I'm not a devops guy. I've done what amounted to devops in the past as a matter of wearing many hats, but I don't think I've ever done devops well, and I don't think I know how to.

2) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, one that had clients like Google (though not Facebook,) and there is no chance that Facebook would have offered me as much as I was making at the time.

3) I was running a reasonably successful software services company at the time, and, while dealing with clients, employees, contracts, etc. was stressful, and not something I particularly enjoyed, I did kind of like being the boss. Have you ever thought a bit of code was just bad, and wanted to tell someone to re-write it, but refrained from doing so because... reasons? You still have to take people's feelings into account when you're the boss, but you can sit down, pair with them, and eventually hammer out something you're both happy with, but that you have final say over (as an aside, I'd strongly recommend pairing as a method of conflict resolution- sometimes you're very wrong about what you're insisting on, and pairing tells you that, and why.)

4) I wasn't done with my work. I was working on a project that I cared a great deal about, inventing novel algorithms that solved long-standing problems in computer science, and I wasn't finished doing so.

and, wait for it...

5) According to Zuckerberg: "Young people are just smarter." OK, lets be fair: he also said "I don't know...young people just have simpler lives. We may not own a car. We may not have family."

I do not have a car (I really ought to get one, but they are such a pain in the ass,) and I do not have a family (I think it might be a bit late for me to get one of those,) but I'm inclined to think that I know things about solving problems hard enough that they take years to crack by virtue of having spent years cracking hard problems. I'm also inclined to think that that distinguishes me from even very smart young programmers.

The truth is that I think even doing devops for Facebook would be an interesting proposition. I imagine there are hard problems to crack there. If there's one thing I really regret about my career, it is that I've almost always been on top, and I have never had the opportunity to learn from people better than me.

But I am not very interested in working for Facebook, because I think the culture there is not welcoming to people my age, and their recruiting was very scattershot. If I really wanted to move to a big company I'd look at Akamai first. They also recruited me kind of heavily a while back, but they had spent the time to understand who I was, and were recruiting for a serious R+D position in Cambridge, working with other greybeards.

That said, I can't imagine suing someone over things like this. Srsly.. if Facebook doesn't want me, or can't handle me, I think it is their loss.

SV thinks it's hot shit, but things like this clearly demonstrate how dumb it is. It matches well the stereotypical "brogrammers" in whose image it was built.

Investors feed the narrative because they need the naive (that is, the young) to pour in and accept the wages of "an apartment split with 8 other guys and some ramen".

Hasn't anyone noticed that Silicon Valley has lost its position as THE place to start a business. There are startup clusters all over the place now, and not just in the USA but in Germany and Moscow and many other countries.

The only thing left that SV has a lock on is some very big VC funds and some part of the buzz around startups. But successful companies are now found in Austin, Vancouver and so on. Perhaps part of the reason is that there is greater diversity in those cities.

>> According to Zuckerberg: "Young people are just smarter."

Well, I come from the future, just fresh off my time machine, and according to Zuckerberg in 2032, "Old people just know more stuff".

Indeed. But I'll be dead, wicked old, or immortal by then, right?

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