Older Workers Challenge Firms’ Aggressive Pursuit of the Young | Hacker News Reader

Older Workers Challenge Firms’ Aggressive Pursuit of the Young

wsj.com

92 pointspetethomas87 comments

The big problem with hiring older workers is that they're better at knowing what they're actually worth. They also tend to avoid personal sacrifices (mainly time and health) that are of net benefit to the company but not to themselves.

That sounds more like a systemic problem where companies profitability is put forward as an excuse for anti-social behavior.

> anti-social behavior

You say anti-social behavior. The courts say 'maximizing shareholder value'.

The courts also said that for slavery. They are not some be-all end-all argument.

> You say anti-social behavior. The courts say 'maximizing shareholder value'.

Do they now? https://hbr.org/2010/04/the-myth-of-shareholder-capitalism

Do you think that this is what honest you wants to say about the situation?

"The courts say 'maximizing shareholder value'."

there is no legal requirement to maximize shareholder value. That's just a myth.

Even if there was, it wouldn't automatically follow that you needed to maximize short-term value rather than long-term value.

Many of the things put forward as "maximizing shareholder value" are talking about short-term value, and do so at the expense of long-term value.

It just amazes me people can't see this. Workers produce value, their labour is the product. The difference between the value produced and the cost of labour is the profit.

Paying labour as little as possible is capitalism. Competition between companies means there is no choice other than to seek to maximize this.

No. I hate capitalism but this is not how economics works. Please, get a textbook or two (Barron's publishes some excellent revision guides that are well-written and cheap on a variety of business subjects, including economics), and study it for a year or two.

I disagree.

Exactly, it's one of the coordination problems inherent in a free market economy. It can be ameliorated or patched through regulation, unionizing, or solved indirectly through industry shifts causing increased labor bargaining power in a given sector. Although the trend doesn't seem to be heading in the direction of increased demand for labor.

> Paying labour as little as possible is capitalism.

Overly simplistic, and incorrect.

Well, as an economist, you're close, but not quite there. In truth, in the US, what we've had for a long time is NOT capitalism. It is what you get when you start with capitalism and then add in centuries of rent seeking behavior. Ultimately, at best, what we have is crony capitalism, where corporations and institutions (including labor unions and the government) lobby (aka "rent seek") for preferential treatment under law.

Crucially, I'd argue that we don't get fair capitalistic pricing of labor when there is asymmetric information in the market: Employers pay for access to salary data so they know how much you are worth (approximately), but you have no such knowledge (though this is better than it used to be with services like Glassdoor and Paysa and Salary.com). You're guessing as to the supply and demand for your skill set. Add in the common practice of requiring past salary history to be submitted as part of the application process, and you've got a recipe for suboptimal outcomes, at least on the employee side of the labor equation. If your price gets set below your market value early in your career, it may remain permanently below your actual value because employers often adopt policies which only allow for paying a candidate 10% (or some arbitrary number) more than their last position. This can happen because you underestimate your value initially, or price yourself according to the local market and then move to another market later (say from Salt Lake City to San Diego), or you're out of the labor force for some time (like mothers or fathers who spend them first couple years at home with their new child). The smart candidates will insist on keeping their compensation history confidential (I.e., not sharing it with potential employers), and pass on those organizations who insist that the data be shared. Force them to tell you how much your skill set is worth to them. I've used this strategy to move to a new employer with a 68% increase in compensation. I've also passed on opportunities which required compensation history to be submitted before an offer would be issued. Hopefully legislation will be enacted to make this unnecessary in the future and employers will simply be banned from asking for such data.

Plus, there's a host of policy-related distortions which I won't go into, but basically, no, what we have is not a free market, and not capitalism. What we have is a mess.

Interesting that the one reply that wasn't completely dismissive, in the economics hell-hole that is hacker news, was from an economist.

Funny. What I got from his response is that you're still wrong. He just said it in a nicer way than the rest of us.

You would think there would be plenty of demand from job-seekers to get accurate salary info.

How much would you pay to get an HR professional to give you an accurate quote, backed by solid data, on what your compensation should be at your next job interview? $250? $400? And if they could advise you in salary negotiations? Would you pay a % of the increase they help you get?

I bet there's a real business opportunity here.

Maybe the problem is that employers try to hire the young workers at a cheap rate instead of actually giving them a decent wage. Perhaps the problem is that we expect folks to sacrifice so much for a job when we should be able to provide a place that gives balance, including time off work and reasonable hours, instead of abusing the young workers. Perhaps this is a problem with skewed perspective.

Just remove the word "perhaps" and stop beating around the bush.

I had considered that as an afterthought, but was/am honestly too lazy (and tipsy) to bother changing it.

As an employer I do not care how old you are or if you know your "true" worth or not. All I care about is how you are going to contribute to my bottom line with the minimum of fuss. If you can do this at 100 I will hire you.

My experience is older workers are much better (and more productive) than young workers if you can provide them a stable work environment. If the nature of your business is such that this is impossible, then most older workers will struggle and blame the boss for everything. This does not make for a fun time if you are the manager.

If only all people with hiring responsibility were devoted to the bottom line of the business, as opposed to the bottom line of their personal careers.

Well I have a massive advantage in being the sole owner as well as boss of my business. This does tend to change your perspective on what is important.

You do raise why most manager are not so devoted to the bottom line - it is not their business. Who do you hire - the older employee that will make the business a ton of money, or the young employee who will do as they are told and make the manager's life easy?

In my experience, not only is it not their business, many middle managers are actively hostile to anyone who is working in the the best interests of the business, as that interferes with their ability to extract value from the business and put it into their own pockets in various different ways.

Yes the principle-agent problem has yet to be solved [1]. I wish I had a solution other than keeping the company small and the shareholders involved as managers.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem

Wouldn't having regular communications between workers and the manager's boss help here? If the manager's boss is only hearing from the managers directly below him, obviously he's going to get a skewed perspective.

what do you mean by "stable work environment"? Regardless of how you've defined it, according to your definition, it's something that is (at lest sometimes) beyond the control of management ("If the nature of your business is such that this is impossible....").

are you saying that it's your experience that older workers tend to "blame everything" on the manager--even when particular instability is beyond the manager's control?

i should think the more experience one has, the more likely they are to understand the source of a given impact on their work and the more patient they are likely to be--ie, they've seen it before, and don't take it personally.

at the same time, if indeed the instability is in fact the manager's fault, then i suspect one with more experience is more likely to identify that fact and bring it to the manager's attention.

I am saying that people who are struggling in their job blame their boss as the cause. If you put a person into a job that is beyond them they will find an external factor to blame. In my experience this is most commonly management. This is something both young and old do.

While I am not claiming to be a perfect boss (far from it), most of the causes of rapid change my employees have faced are external factors totally outside my control. Small companies are by their nature prone to being buffeted by outside forces. It makes things exciting, if not predictable.

Maybe the reason they are struggling in their job is because of the boss? Such as "If you put a person into a job that is beyond them..."?

In my experience if there are external forces beyond the manager's control causing problems for the workers, then the cause is likely someone further up the chain than the manager. Eventually you have to reach someone that is responsible for what happens inside the company.

Yes the boss has to take responsibility for putting a person into a job they are unsuitable for - I have done this thinking I could put smart and hard working older people into jobs that required a lot of context switching. I take full responsibility for the result.

My only defence is I was young and inexperienced. I thought I was being smart by hiring the people other businesses discriminate against. I did at least learn.

It's unclear to me that all the variables have been accounted for in a way that justifies the conclusion that younger workers handle high context switching better than older workers. It's entirely possible that younger workers are simply unaware that frequent context switching is very inefficient so they simply uncomplainingly though inefficiently plod forward in such situations. Sure, that makes for less immediate negative feedback to their immediate managers, but it also makes for less long-term value for the company. As a middle-aged employee, I am at least somewhat more aware of the situations in which I am highly productive and the situations in which I am less productive. When the latter types of situations are more prevalent without good reason, I raise those as problems to my manager since he or his managers should be aware of them. In my experience, my managers have appreciated my proactive feedback rather than my silently plodding through inefficient cycles of work. Perhaps there are situations where the latter is preferable, but I have not encountered them.

All I can go on is my personal experience which was putting older workers into jobs that have inherently high rates of context switching didn’t do well, while younger workers doing the same job thrived.

I agree with you that there maybe other confounding variables and that there are certainly older workers that are able to thrive in such jobs, just my experience makes me wary. I am also wary of putting younger workers into positions where sustained focus is required. Ultimately neither old nor young workers are bad, they just have different strengths and weaknesses and you need to match the best person to the job.

>> they just have different strengths and weaknesses and you need to match the best person to the job

No need to say more.

Well if they can't get hired then it sounds like they don't know what they're actually worth, do they.

I recently had an idea for a startup, related to the mis-use of the old.

I have been working with startups that are using a hybrid approach to data gathering, using both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and also humans. The NLP works best as a lead-generator for the humans, the NLP can pick out sentences that we are 95% sure have the information we need. Then we have humans read over the data to look for bits that should actually go in the database.

One evening I watched a fellow on the data team as he read through a dozen newspapers, looking for any clues that we might have missed. He is part of an 8 person team, and they are all in their 20s.

That weekend I went to visit my mom, who has been retired for more than 15 years. As is normal for her, she was reading over The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and a few business magazines. She majored in history, at Hunter College, back in the 1950s, then she did her masters degree in economics.

The week before last, Hunter College had its reunion for alumni. More than 2,000 women showed up. I met my mom outside as the event was ending. I saw the thousands of smart, retired women, and it occurred to me: why don't we use these women to read through all the data fetched by the NLP scripts? Why do we rely on people in their 20s? These women are smart, well trained, highly educated, many of them are looking for part-time work with flexible hours, something they could do from home. Most of them have the life long habit of looking through newspapers for interesting data. Most are willing to work very cheap. Most are eager to be in the workforce, most are sad about being out of the workforce.

There is, in fact, a whole category of startups that are opening in this area, using the hybrid approach of both NLP and also humans. And it would be an ideal place to use retired people. Only stupid bias keeps startups from pursuing this.

"These women are smart, well trained, highly educated, many of them are looking for part-time work with flexible hours, something they could do from home. Most of them have the life long habit of looking through newspapers for interesting data. Most are willing to work very cheap. Most are eager to be in the workforce, most are sad about being out of the workforce."

If they actually need the money to survive, why would they work very cheap if they're well trained and highly educated? There's freelance work out there that pays better than "very cheap", e.g., editing or translation. Retired professionals such as lawyers or CPAs can also probably find freelance work in their fields.

If they don't need the money (they have enough savings for retirement) and are just looking for something to do, they'd have the option of doing volunteer work for charitable organizations that are probably more fulfilling to work for than some random startup.

They don't need money to survive, but they don't want to do volunteer work. They want to be in the workforce. Being given money carries meaning for them that goes well beyond the value of the dollar. Just talk to them and this is a theme they repeat over and over again.

This is a great idea. Human being goes crazy if they are not working, we now have 2-3 solid decades after retirement left due to all the advances in healthcare.

I think this is a perfect example to test the theory they bring up about the gender pay gap. If so much value is being left on the table ignoring older workers, gather them all up into a company and beat the market.

The study referenced in this article hypothesizes gender pay gap exists because companies are willing to pay more to people who are willing to spend more hours at the office. (They looked at more careers than programming.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/upshot/the-pay-gap-is-bec...

On the one hand this seems fair, on the other hand, the escalating arms race to spend all your time at the office doesn't seem like a great way to live for the ordinary employee without some ownership stake. The careers with the most gender parity were the ones without excessive time in the office associated with success.

If the time spent in office theory is true, it also makes that theory about gathering all the employees of a certain class to start a company not relevant.

Well, I've seen lots of studies over the years that claim that extra time spent in the office (beyond 40 hours per week) doesn't translate into extra productivity. Some reasons mentioned include:

- Tired employees make more errors, which then take time to fix. And if you've been working for 12 hours, you'll be mentally tired even if you're not physically tired.

- If you spend 12 hours a day at the office, lots of things you need to do in your life (e.g., arranging your social life, running errands, going to the gym, eating meals) will get done while you're at the office.

- A lot of programmers (myself included) get their best thinking done when they're relaxing away from the office.

Maybe not extra actual productivity, but extra imagined productivity and when it comes time to raises, it's not reality, or what could have been, but your boss's imagination that counts.

I don't think bosses who want long hours are all that interested in actual productivity (which, especially with software, they don't seem all that capable of measuring anyway). I think they simply see it as a signal of loyalty.

I think you (and I have noticed it elsewhere here) have nailed the main cause for the discrimination based on gender (and probably also age) that is really counter productive for the society as a whole.

I'm an older worker, and I say bring it on!

"After careful review of your background, we have elected to pursue other more properly ignored candidates. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!"

>If so much value is being left on the table ignoring older workers, gather them all up into a company and beat the market.

That's actually exactly my plan should my startup receive funding. I'd say of the first 30 people I'd hire, most are probably above the age of 30. Most have families. All are at the top of their fields. In the Bay Area, those factors probably translate to an average salary of at least $250k, which is roughly double what a typical startup pays in its early days.

I genuinely hope you receive funding.

Thank you.

What is your company? What does it do? Have you considered remote workers, aka: experienced older people who want to live in a better place for their families?

>What is your company?

I'd prefer not to say.

>What does it do?

Put vaguely, delivers on the promise of future UI (think Iron Man), but does so solving some hard real-world problems in the process.

>Have you considered remote workers ...

Absolutely. While most already live in the Bay Area, there are several people from other countries. I'd have no problem with remote workers. There's definitely additional challenges involved, but nothing that can't be solved, especially with a mature team.

I tried this. Older workers are great if you have a stable problem (better than young workers on average), but are terrible if the job requires a lot of context shifting. Startups and stable problems are rarely found in the same room.

Dan, what do you mean by ^context shifting?^ Switching from one problem in a different area to another problem?

Yes. As you get older this gets much harder (I know from personal experience). I wish it were otherwise, but like grey hair and wrinkles it seems just part of getting older.

Well I'm 50 and my job involves a lot of context shifting, solving sudden problems with systems I'm not an expert at (thus requiring research) and generally being a jack of all trades.

I find it easier to do now than I did when I was younger, I see it as just what the job is. When I was younger, a sudden demand to do something different would have me annoyed because it was distracting me from what I really wanted to be working on.

Now I know that everything will be different in 5 or 10 years, so it doesn't really matter what I'm working on as it will be irrelevant soon.

Do you find it easier than when you were young or are you just more accepting now that it is required?

My job requires a ton of rapid context switching, but I do find it much harder now than when I was younger (I am 46).

How about mix the groups together and gain the best of all possible outcomes? Groups of workers are like components in a dish and older workers are often the salt/sugar/umami of the recipe.

I'm surprised to see anyone put forward such an argument, it doesn't hold up under even the lightest scrutiny.

The whole reason the problems of gender, age, and race discrimination are hard to tackle today are because they exist as widespread cultural biases, not as official corporate policies. Any company attempting to implement a sort of "reverse bias" as an official policy immediately opens themselves to legal action and a PR nightmare (because it's exploitative). Few companies are that stupid, which is why it doesn't happen.

Legally, companies can choose to be better at hiring and to try to keep their biases in check using training, policies, corporate culture, etc. This can be effective but because it also goes hand in hand with paying everyone equitably the major advantage is pulling from a larger talent pool. And make no mistake, tons of companies do just this and are successful at it. It is a significant competitive advantage. However, there's also no strong feedback mechanism that causes a company who can "beat the market" by doing things better to somehow change centuries of ingrained socio-cultural biases. That's just not how it works.

Moreover, the idea that businesses are somehow universally run by god-kings who act purely rationally is sheer fantasy that has zero relationship to reality. Business managers and owners are just human beings. They are flawed and they work against their own self-interest just as much as anyone else does. They are driven by their own desires (ego, power, status, etc.) as much as they are by a sense of trying to maximize their RoI.

After 33 years in my trade over 14 years at the most recent place I was let go. Not fired not laid off just quietly let go. I suspect it is due to my age I'm 48 and was told I wasn't being considered since I am " not the right fit".

> over 14 years at the most recent place

That's the issue. You made a mistake believing there is such a thing as "loyalty". Move every 2-3 years to get "raises" and fuck everyone else, no company has any loyalty to you.

agreed. I was at my last job for 20 years. From here on in, I'll try to not stay so long in one place. But I stayed mostly because I was friends with everyone. I was paid well enough, but work was fun.

> Not fired not laid off just quietly let go.

How does that work, logistically?

"Your last day will be X."

Isn't that getting fired?

Getting fired usually involves cause being shown.

he could sign new fixed term contract if they really wanted to avoid laying off

I think he means there wasn't a bunch of layoffs where a whole department was let go or the company had fallen on hard times and needed to drastically cut the workforce. So the gp was laid off it was personal rather than structural. You could say that technically the person was fired without cause but 'fired' and 'laid off' don't have any legal meaning, an employment lawyer would likely just say the person's employment was terminated without cause.

That's the fun I now have to explain it on my resume and in interviews.

I received severance so I was not fired otherwise no severance. I asked HR "So then I'm laid off?" but was told no it's because I was not the right fit. My job is or was very specific and I live in a small town with elderly sick parents so moving is not an option for me.

All my performance reviews were perfect great comments from my manager and I got along with all the staff. I was struggling to fit my tasks into a workday cut in half to four hours but I had the same duties as I did in an eight hour day. Which used to be done by three people!

Backstory I was officially an employee of the head office but worked in a satellite office but I wasn't an employee of the satellite office. The satellite office said they wanted to hire their own for the job I was doing and the head office said they had no job for me. Poof! Job gone. But the weird part is I was an employee of the satellite office for six years then "moved" to become a head office employee but my desk never moved I was always in the same place, same office, same building.

Then I see my job advertised one week later, I was barred from setting foot on the premises and was also told not to apply since I was "not the right fit", a direct quote from HR.

Sorry for the rant it just spilled out. I'm getting better no more panic attacks and I can breathe better. Onward and upward.

same thing happened last week to one of my coworkers who is in his late 40's . If one is making significantly more money and drawing more benefits than your lowest paid peer then they should be prepared to be let go any moment.

Two axes: Voluntary/involuntary and for cause/no cause

Based on the above, you get "resigned before being fired," "quit," "fired," or "laid off/let go." Three of those likely also mean "may not be eligible for unemployment."

Size of the action isn't really relevant except that large actions are generally in the last cell even it they're being used to clear underperforming people.

Not fired not laid off just quietly let go.

Very sorry to hear. But it's either one or the other, by definition. And if it doesn't meet the strict legal definition of a "layoff" -- that means you were fired. (No matter whether they called is "separated", or "we're ending your work here" -- it's all the same thing).

I'm the same age, and I was let go too. Corporate did a death by database search and got rid of a lot of people. I rather not speculate the reasons.. :)

I mean it is a pyramid scheme in that you have a few partners at the top and the bottom are the young PowerPoint analysts who grind out the work. Law is/was the same way. Software can be as well. Grad school as well. The whole thing is setup this way by design. Same with startups as well if you don't guard against it.

There are so many professions where you study/work extremely hard for say 10 to 15 years, and then just pump out the big bucks executing (aka "putting in time") on what you've learned.

Are there many professions other than software where you have to work so hard continuously (because everything is always new and you are competing with people with a fifth your experience) to make a good income?

Well, i couldn't read article because it's behind paywall, but PwC is surely a place for young people. It is a sweatshop where you get paid a pittance, worked till you drop, but learn fast and earn a good line in resume, as well as build industry contacts quickly. Great place to start but if you are stuck there for long, something is wrong. If you are over 40 and under the partner level, it makes no sense to stay there.

I think a lot of on-site consultant roles are for young recent graduates. My friend worked right out of college for Epic Software as a consultant managing their medical software integrations. He was supposed to fly home once a month for 3 days off (he had normal weekends off too, but stayed at the client's location in a hotel) but often deadlines would cause him to have to stay. He wound up drinking a lot, smoking way too much weed, and essentially had a nervous breakdown after a year of doing this.

To add insult to injury, because he didn't make it long enough to fulfill his contractual obligations, Epic made him pay back his signing bonus and moving costs they reimbursed him for.

He then moved back home with his parents, got his shit together, and a few months later got into IT project management at an eCommerce company. No travel, normal weekends, normal hours. He's back to himself again.

The consultant life just seems so brutal, you don't make close friendships, you're never home, difficult to have a romantic relationship, difficult to eat healthy and exercise. No thanks!

But: very good money, and a lifestyle that can be pretty glamorous at times (if you want it, of course).

I'm currently in the process of slowly moving away from it because of external forces, and to be honest I know I'll miss it. The first couple of years were as harsh as you describe, but then I learnt to pace myself (and VPNs got truly mainstream so traveling decreased dramatically). Is still a pretty good life, all considered; after all, any good career these days requires brutal hours and lots of flying.

A lot depends on the sort of consulting probably. There are some cannon fodder sort of jobs certainly. There are others, as you say, where you learn to create some semblance of balance even if you still live on planes. (Though I would dispute that all good careers require both brutal hours and lots of flying; some do some don't.)

Out of school I was supervising projects on-site and it was a really good out of school job. Would I have been wanting to spend weeks in shipyards at 40 or 50? No way.

I do a lot of flying these days but I'm in control of my schedule to at least a certain degree.

The drinking and the weed probably had as much to do with his breakdown as the job.

he had normal weekends off too, but stayed at the client's location in a hotel

Long spans away from home, with no friends or family around, and a high-visibility deadline constantly hanging over your head...how would you relieve some of that stress?

I've personally known people that did this kind of job right out of college, it's a hell of a meat grinder.

Personally, I wish I could find a job where I traveled for about 1 week per month, like to customer sites to do support work. I used to have a job like this, but it didn't last long for various reasons, and I haven't found another since. It's a lot of fun IMO: I get to travel someplace new, I can eat at nice restaurants on the company's dime, I get access to a nice swimming pool and gym at the hotel, and since the customer isn't generally going to stay late I get plenty of free time to explore the city or just hang out in my hotel room (or a coffee shop, or wherever) working on a personal project on my computer, etc. As long as it isn't more than 1-1.5 weeks/month, it doesn't feel like I'm "never home" or that I can't have a romantic relationship, and I actually eat better and get more exercise than when I'm at home where I don't have my own pool or gym. The only really big downside is the TSA, and sometimes the misery of flying (though it helps a lot to only fly with Southwest if possible).

Some people prefer to exclusively hire blond women with D cups. Or white mainline protestant men.

Both of those things may be a big part of how a hypothetical company works. Problem is, it's illegal.

https://www.propublica.org/article/is-it-age-discrimination-... covers the same set of discrimination lawsuits as this WSJ article without the paywall. It also goes into more depth about the legal precedents involved.

The tl;dr: the companies argue that the discrimination laws only apply to current employees and not applicants so it's OK for them to intentionally discriminate against older applicants.

Serious question: Is any interesting software written in places like PWC?

Not really.

Mostly (when I was pimped out to them) they did almost exclusively "business constantly" work (read: outsourcing blame and repaying favours, greasing the revolving door, putting projects on a project code with an existing vendor instead of hiring staff who come out of the overall budget etc etc), they made tech stuff something to "throw in" as a bonus to some deals. Started out with reporting (remember crystal reports and oracle appex?) but that grows with kickbacks until they're subcontracting Fujitsu or CapGemini to manage desktops as part of a deal.

After a while the tech bit ended up being one of the biggest money makers they had, thanks to clever/corrupt SLA's which enabled them to have terrible staff who got paid nothing, and pocket the difference.

They had an nice/huge domino setup in the 2000's though(sol/sparc), and some of the excel macros the audit folks wrote and used allowed me to grow up from thinking that working ksh perl and c made me "better" than the windows folks.

They would share these 10mb+ packages of excel macros which were all compressed text, they extremely complicated and also controlled by various regulatory bodies, it was harder than most of the code we were writing for their backends...

Tl;dr -- nope, but if you ever see how some serious financial auditors code, you might stop dismissing the MS crowd so readily.

I never have dismissed the MS crowd, in fact I was part of it for years. Interestingly enough there's a lot of Excel-Macro wizardry in aerospace too.

Thanks for sharing your memories. Having known some people on the business side of PWC I'm not surprised, but I am amused.

PwC's primary business is audits, assurance, and tax per wikipedia. So you might get software in those areas or in business valuation. I don't believe they do IT integrations.

Accenture may do more interesting work on the consulting and software side.

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