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Comment by pacaro | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about this, I don't dispute that there is an issue here, but I think that this, and similar analyses, fails to take into account the change in the size of the IT workforce over time. I'm currently 47, I started my first paid developer role (job title "Analyst/Programmer"!) 25 years ago. The size of the job market then was a fraction of the size that it is now. Inevitably there are fewer older people in the workforce.

I'm much more interested in attempts to quantify age-related hiring discrimination, something that I have been fortunate enough not to encounter (yet), but that my brother (50) currently feels like he is running up against.

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Age discrimination is real, if for no other reason that the older you get, the more likely you are to have had a major health issue.

Try getting hired after being out for 12 or more months after having a heart attack, or cancer, or whatever. Even if you're medically cleared. From personal experience, it can be difficult regardless of reputation.

Edit: And yes, I also tried the whole "took some time off to be with my family" thing as well, and that turned potential employers off even more (had one tell me, "we're not really interested in hiring people who aren't driven to work every single workday" regarding my "time off"). Happily, I did find a good company several years ago that pays well and offers a great environment, but it took significantly longer than I had hoped.

Group health insurance mitigates this... but if it is a major concern then single payer is the way to go.

How does health insurance mitigate against this, group or otherwise?

A better short-term disability policy would have helped me, but health insurance wouldn't have helped me find a job.

And just to be clear in my response: I had "good" health insurance (luckily, but still ended up with many tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills).

But that didn't have anything to do with finding a job after I got better.

I understand that you took time off to recover and yes short term disability would have been ideal for that but that medical information should be private. Was it simply accounting for the time off that you took?

> Was it simply accounting for the time off that you took?

Yes, precisely. Even if you try to say something like "took time off for family reasons" or "ran my own company and contracted for a year", they seem to sense something's up. In fact, I think hiding the reason why I was off hurt me more than it helped, because people tend to assume the worst (ie, "I can tell this guy's hiding something, wonder what it was...maybe he was in jail!").

In the end, I only got interviewed by those places I was honest to about being out for medical reasons (and one of those places was where I ended up working). And just getting that handful of interviews was fairly challenging, given the supposed high demand for people like me (I have experience/expertise in a high-demand area).

I went through this fairly early in my career. I think the career impact is more severe than a mother taking maternity leave (and without the legal protections). Apart from explaining the gap in employment, there is a disruption to the career momentum that is near impossible to regain.

When asked what you did, just say that you wanted to become an independent contractor, but in the end you realized that you were a much better programmer than a salesperson, so you had really happy clients but not enough of them.

Or maybe you wanted to start a SAS, but again couldn't get enough customers.

Companies die all the time, take your pick.

Age discrimination in hiring is real. Companies get around it by saying, "Oh, we can't possibly pay what someone with your level of experience expects."

Usually even before a dollar figure has even been discussed.

For sure, I encountered a related issue about 18 years ago, I had been working for a company that was paying well, but that had closed down the project I was working on, as part of due diligence I was talking to other companies in addition to considering lateral moves. Several of the other companies were very clear that they couldn't pay me what I was accustomed to, and that was a show-stopper for them, regardless of whether I was interested in taking a lower income

i.e. some potential employers will be leery about employing someone at a lower salary that they had previously earned, for a variety of reasons. I can imagine this being part of a double whammy with age discrimination.

Well that leaves two possible cases: (1) the company does not value person's experience correctly and fails to understand the value they deliver or (2) the candidate is not going to be able to deliver the value they're requesting to be compensated for relative to younger candidates.

#1 is real, I'm sure, but #2 likely happens a lot, as well, due to the American worker expectation of yearly raises and seniority-based pay, regardless of performance.

Is number 2, in your view, bad? I can’t really tell but it seems that way.

Raises are how workers get a share of the profit being generated. Otherwise it nearly all goes to shareholders.

that is a very good point.

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