Hacker News Reader

Comment by monoideism | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com