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Comment by stakkur | Hacker News Reader

Last year, I built a local/regional tech job listing website, targeted at helping 'older' people (35ish and up, of any gender) looking to find work--experienced or not. $100 listings.

Plenty of traffic. Totally failed. Started MVP by pulling in listings from elsewhere, but couldn't get a single listing.

Why did it fail? I think because:

1. Companies had zero interest in targeting 'older' workers in tech, despite them being the second-largest discrimination group (after women) in technology. I got more than one 'why would we target them?' response.

2. I didn't solicit the right people (or in the right way) for listings

3. Inexperience: I'm not very skilled at marketing, and saw a real need but clumsily approached it

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I don't know what it's like on your jurisdiction (although I'm still laughing a bit at the notion that I'm an 'older' worker at 30 something), but could part of the problem be that it's technically illegal/regulation risk?

By which I mean, we all know that age discrimination happens, but you're not 'supposed' to do it. By setting up a website that explicitly discriminates based on age, you're exposing the employer to a verifiable action that they're taking to discriminate on age. It doesn't matter that it's an attempt to counter the widely perceived current discrimination.

Imagine if you set up a website for another protected group (sex, religion, pregnant). Most companies would run a mile from that. The whole thing about structural discrimination is the plausible deniability that you're consciously doing it...

In the U.S. you can discriminate against someone for being younger all you want. You just can't discriminate against someone for being too old when they are over age 40.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Hey, I might be in a similar boat, building a job listing, still I haven't pushed it out yet. Is there a way to get in touch with you?

you could say 'get woke go broke' applied.

Why would companies put themselves at a net disadvantage by actively targetting older SE's who are more likely to know their rights and not accept 18 hour days.

Maybe because they want to avoid the chickens coming home to roost from all those submarine age discrimination lawsuits that are out there just waiting to be filed.

Ever notice how U.S. flight attendants tend to be older nowadays, compared to the Cute Young Things you see in old movies (and on many non-U.S. airlines)? The U.S. airlines had to learn a harsh (and expen$ive) lesson there.

Some of them are still learning it... United recently had to pay two flight attendants $800,000 apiece after a jury decided that they'd been fired because of their age rather than the technical infractions United had used for cover.

Edit: if I were the OP, I'd collect a bunch of age discrimination cases where Big Bucks had been awarded to the employees and make those part of my marketing material.

Edit #2: in engineering, specifically, in 2017 Lockheed Martin was ordered to pay $51.5 million to an engineer for age discrimination.

How old are you?

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