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Comment by ryanmonroe | Hacker News Reader

> I go out of my way to hire older devs that are eschewed by typical Bay Area startups

Going "out of [your] way" to hire older devs sounds like age discrimination. AFAIK, age discrimination in this direction isn't illegal in America, but it seems odd that you would respond to an article decrying age-discrimination by proudly declaring that you discriminate too, in the opposite direction. Maybe you just meant that you almost always find the qualities/compensation-demands you're looking for in older applicants rather than younger ones, but your phrasing doesn't seem to indicate that.

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It's not age discrimination if you accept and do not otherwise discriminate against young/younger candidates. There's a lot that goes into recruiting. Optimizing your job descriptions, creating multiple job descriptions, and targeting your ad spend are all things that can affect the age, race, gender, education level, etc of the people you reach without being discriminatory.

In fact, you should do this to be inclusive. There are a lot of unconscious things hiring managers do that remove themselves from the running of highly qualified candidates.

Want to remove yourself from consideration from young talented female developers? Create a laundry list of "requirements" even though you consider them "nice to haves." Also add plenty of trigger words to make your business seem unattractive.

https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless... https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2016/12/14/...

Avoiding hurting yourself in the eyes of candidates you'd like to include is far from being discriminatory to other groups.

> There's a lot that goes into recruiting. Optimizing your job descriptions, creating multiple job descriptions, and targeting your ad spend are all things that can affect the age, race, gender, education level, etc of the people you reach without being discriminatory.

Wait...isn't this exactly what the article is talking about?

'Targeting your ad spend' is the thing under fire here, and under a very specific attack.

Before online advertising you kind of had an idea of what the target audience of TV channels, news, and radio was like, but it was very fuzzy and you certainly weren't excluding people not in your target demographic that happened to utilize those media platforms. Women reading male fitness magazines or men reading female lifestyle magazines weren't the primary target of ads in those platforms, but they could certainly utilize what was being advertised if they so desired. The same is not true of online advertising today.

Facebook is more in the position of a newsstand than anything else, and it would be blatant discrimination if a newsstand wasn't allowing older people to buy technology magazines, for example.

AFAIK in USA, age discrimination is forbidden only against people older than 40, it's legal to discriminate against any groups younger than that (including 35-39 year olds) as much as you want.

The GP said "older devs" but what they are talking about isn't age, they are talking about skills and experience level.

Everything is discrimination - if you're seeking to hire a software engineer you're probably going to discriminate against people who don't know how to code, people with low IQs, people who can't get along with the team, etc.

The question becomes, is the discrimination legal and/or ethical and based on actual business needs? If the GP noticed they can get a seasoned developer for only slightly above the price of a jr developer (who sees themselves as "senior") , that doesn't really seem like immoral discrimination to me, especially if they are more than willing to also hire jr engineers at jr engineer prices. Most places cant, for business reasons, survive alone solely on senior engineers.

(Interestingly enough, in the US, discrimination based on age because "old people are stupid" is illegal whereas discrimination on age based on "young people are stupid" is not.)

Once upon a time "discrimination" had positive connotations, e.g. "he has discriminating tastes".

Somehow the word has been twisted to be almost exclusively negative.

But show me an organization that doesn't discriminate, and I'll show you an organization of utter incompetence.

The "somehow" is no mystery; discriminatory practice was (and still is) used to stack the deck against people in the United States based on the color of their skin for hundreds of years.

"President" was chosen as the title of the head of the US Executive Branch because it was a title with nearly no prestige; it was the sort of name you'd give to the Robert's Rules enforcer for community meetings. Words take on a connotation history provides them.

Not a complete mystery, but also leaves English without a good substitute.

"Differentiation" is the word I have to use now.

The word "judge" has become like that, too. "How dare you judge people" is a common rage. But having good judgement is critical for your very existence, that is, you must judge everything you come into contact with. Making good judgements can literally mean the difference between life and death. And making judgements about the people you engage with, i.e. judging them, can mean the difference between happiness and misery.

> Somehow the word has been twisted to be almost exclusively negative.

Webster gives pride of place to both the transitive and intransitive definitions that could fit your "once upon a time" definition.[1]

Furthermore, of the six definitions given, five are what I'd consider a trait or ability that is wholly positive to possess. Only the 2nd definition for the intransitive form has a negative connotation.

> But show me an organization that doesn't discriminate, and I'll show you an organization of utter incompetence.

Any organization that isn't utterly incompetent would avoid using the ambiguous word "discriminate" in place of the unambiguous phrase "use good judgment."

Also, HR is just one tiny and narrow domain of human affairs. Music, writing, even dating see way more use of the positive definitions of "discriminate."

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discriminate

> Webster gives pride of place

In practice, discrimination has largely negative connotations https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/183093/is-there-...

> "use good judgment."

"The screening exercise _____ aggressively."

* "The screening exercise uses good judgement aggressively." Awkward.

* "The screening exercise filters aggressively." No implication that choice is based on the candidate's characteristics instead of random chance.

* "The screening exercise distinguishes aggressively". Sounds odd, plus has positive rather than neutral connotations.

* "The screening exercise differentiates aggressively " Best one, though it doesn't hint at the pass/fail nature of the distinction.

You're right it's not illegal and all you have to do is say you want someone with at least 20 years of professional software development experience...

In this case, it sounds more like moneyball than age discrimination. By "moneyball", I mean that in very intense recruiting environments, you have to get strategic about ways to find talent that may have been overlooked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball

Age discrimination applies for workers/applicants >= 40.

Going out of your way to recruit and have older applicants apply is not discrimination as long as you treat all applicants equally once they apply.

Is there some kind of asymmetry that prevents this logic from being applied with "older" replaced by other inherent physical attributes like race, or do you think that wouldn't be discrimination either?

Maybe the fact that everyone becomes old, whereas with other protected classes, everyone does not eventually gain membership into that class. So society as a whole is more sympathetic to discrimination that favors the older maybe because we can see ourselves in their shoes.

I think you're confusing age with experience. The sad fact is that experience in important, and there's only way of getting it, letting time go by.

It sounds more like experience discrimination.

aka recruiting

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