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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand the bias. I'm too young to have experienced age discrimination like this yet, but its obvious at least to me that the best developers and hell, leaders, that I've worked with were all a part of older generations. Is it a shortcoming in pay for all these people? I feel like being out of work for 3 years would definitely lower whatever standard of pay I had prior to becoming unemployed. I just do not get the disconnect

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The reasons age discrimination happen are fairly complex (and I'm not ready to write all the ones I understand out), but to your point about the best in the field being part of the older generation, it is my anecdotal experience that top performers don't seem to have problems with employment as long as they can work (generally). My own mother was exceptional in her field, thought not so much as to be written about, and continued to get job offers out of the blue years after illness had robbed her of the ability to work or even speak, purely off reputation. Her friends and colleagues that I've spoken to have had similar experiences as they've retired having lead similarly successful careers.

Of course, by definition, most people aren't exceptional or even in the top 10% and our society unfairly (and unwisely) punishes them for getting older.

So sorry to hear about your mother.

But it seems to be a rule of life.

Rich get richer. Top performers get more/better offers.

Poor get poorer. Non-top performers get less/worse offers.

I remember reading something where Paul Graham of Ycombinator said top performers never apply for jobs. They are often referred and handed jobs. And on the other side, you have ton of (supposedly) not so great workers who are sending out job applications by the dozens trying to get a job.

I'm not familiar with the PG essay you mention, but there's one by Joel Spolsky that says something similar to what you describe, that great developers rarely apply for jobs[0], that I've found to generally be true. If you do great work, and are great to work with, former coworkers will jump at the chance to work with you again and recommend you to their own colleagues.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/06/finding-great-deve...

Older workers = more experience = higher pay.

Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.

Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.

Older workers = more opinionated. Younger workers = more malleable.

At least that's what management often think.

I was equally opinionated as a younger man, though I was wrong a lot more often :-)

Yes, well, you're Walter Bright, though.

The only name in this thread I recognise (although, to be fair, most people aren't using their real names), and as an aside, a name that a seventy-something year-old Vietnam veteran running an apartment full of automated test machines in Greater Tokyo was surprised I dropped when he told me that the Digital Mars compiler was testing well. That compiler was always well behaved. I wonder if his age would have been an impediment to finding work at in the US; in Tokyo he suffered only the problem of being a foreigner.

other HN threads have debated heavily about why the startup industry is centered in SV, given its ultra high cost of living and labor. and yet, despite everything, SV remains at the center.

and that's why i think your explanation is closer to the truth. higher salaries for older workers wouldn't matter. what does matter is that management thinks older workers will bring the wrong sauce to the product, exhibit reasonable skepticism of the (probably unsuccessful) product concept, generally fail to buy in to the vision and sass their 24 year old masters.

The startup sector is centered here because the money (VC firms) is here. The reason for that is largely historical accident.

Money can easily move. Money chooses to be there due to wanting to be there, good weather, terrain, politics, etc. There is some due to historical effects, but more people than not consider CA coast weather to be pretty ideal, hence the higher cost of living.

Why move if you can entice people to move into your back yard with all that money and not have to go anywhere?

And, weather doesn’t adequately explain the high CoL anywhere outside California or Hawaii. “It’s where the jobs are, so everyone wants to be there does,” and it also explains California. (Hawaii is special— it’s an archipelago, so, cost of shipping goods plus weather is really the best explanation, given the lack of a compelling employment story.)

Because there is more money in SV. All else equal financially, as it was in 1960s, CA is better. Now all else is not equal, except that cost of living may have finally caught up so residents are paying what the weather is worth.

And why is there more money? Because more people want to live there than other places. Why is that? That’s where the jobs are. You’re not rebutting my argument at all.

The jobs were in other places too, but generally people with money move away from less desirable to more desirable places. How many people desire to move to a place is shown by the prices people are willing to pay.

In a lot of industries opinion is less of an issue. Wait staff, mechanics, and a lot of other places. Yet, they are experiencing the same thing.

For many industries it's something other than opinion

If you've ever sat in a hiring meeting, you'd know it's straightforward discrimination, but it's positive discrimination in favor of young people . It goes like this:

"Old guy here is a low/mid level person after 20 years, so he clearly isn't a superstar. Young guy here is low/mid level person, so he has potential to be a superstar."

Hiring committees, smothered by the legal ass covering around race and sex discrimination, never even think twice about making this discriminatory argument. It's even officially enshrined in hiring plans as "expectation of trajectory", a rule that only applies to old people. And before you say "ok but that's a logical argument", it's exactly the same logically correct argument as the (illegal) "bases on my limited knowledge, a white/Chinese/male candidate I just met is more likely to be successful at this job than a black/Hispanic/female candidate".

> Older workers = more experience = higher pay.

> Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.

If that's really the case then "age discrimination" doesn't necessarily indicate deliberately avoiding older workers to the sake of the fact that they're old. Say you have to fill a software developer role and the highest TC you can offer is $100k. Not unheard of for a company, say, one standard deviation below average. You interview a bunch of 40 year olds and 50 year olds and all of them have existing salaries way above that. What is the recruiter supposed to do, keep interviewing people that they almost certainly won't accept the offer? Ostensibly that' the law, but in reality anyone in that situation is going to shift their attention to people that would be willing to work for that kind of compensation.

This is partly what it's probably best to publish salary ranges as part of the job description, at least for companies other than top companies. The above scenario does mean that the minority of older devs that would accept that salary range get filtered out, and that's suboptimal.

Older workers = more experience = higher pay.

You missed a step.

Older workers = more experience = more responsibility = higher pay.

Without that extra responsibility there's no reason to pay someone more simply because they're older. The pay should be based on what the job is, not the age or 'experience' of the person doing it.

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