After 48, you’re less likely to get jobs in Silicon Valley, report finds (2017)

We have the top executive of a major Valley tech company, on the record, encouraging illegal discrimination against older people.

We have ongoing lawsuits by experienced engineers getting fired after their co-workers and superiors openly mocked their age.

Yet this practice openly continues, with CEOs like Zuckerberg feeling brazen enough to publicly tell their thousands of employees to break this law.

The legal prohibition is thus the most blatantly violated employment law in the book. Anyone who ever worked in the Valley knows that most folks over 40 can't get hired, certainly not by the many companies and startups routinely complaining about "talent shortage".

Incidentally, Mark, you are now 34 years old, which is "old" by Valley standards. Shouldn't you be quitting?

Quote:

> “The tech industry is hiring a disproportionately higher ratio of workers than non-tech up until the age of 48—indicating bias does exist that favors younger candidates,” the report states.

It seems like the authors looked at how many people the software industry was employing relative to the rest of the market.

The correct (albeit trickier) approach is to look at ratio of applications to offers, grouped by age. Controlling for other variables would be ideal, but it makes this doubly harder.

The approach taken by the authors (looking at the ratio in the software industry vs. the wider economy) hides too many confounding variables. What if people in software make more money and are able to retire, so they stop seeking work around 50? What if there just aren't as many qualified people 48+ years old compared to other industries since software is a younger field?

Those and other questions are hard to answer when you take the approach taken by the authors.