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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

A fellow older classmate of mine and I were looking for work after changing careers.

We were talking about his recent interview when he got a call from the recruiter and put her on speakerphone. She told them they were going with someone else because they thought the other person "fit the culture" better.

He asked if she could give some feedback on what that meant and she flat out said "Some people thought you were too old." Shocked he asked again and she repeated it. I don't think it even occurred to the recruiter that it was wrong.

My buddy chose not to do anything, both of us looking for work and etc really didn't want to get into some legal situation and looking for work.

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We tell tradespeople who are 40 years old to hit a bootcamp and get work in our magical software industry. Then, when those same people come to us to be hired our recruiting manager says stuff like "well... they're 40, but have only got 6 months of experience; we can't hire them as a new recruit, but they also don't have enough experience to hire as a senior developer — guess we can't hire them".

It's disgusting. Hire someone based on their experience, not their age.

I wonder if there’s a legal case here? A lot of companies only hire entry-level from new college grads (or even worse, returning interns). How is that not age discrimination?

There is no age requirement on being a recent college grad. They tend to be clustered tightly in a certain age range, but a 45 year old graduating would still have access to that same recruiting pipeline.

Non diverse results doesn't imply illegal discrimination.

> a 45 year old graduating would still have access to that same recruiting pipeline.

Do we really believe this?

Let’s say I only want to hire software developers with buzz cuts. Women are free to cut their hair short and apply. Is this not gender discrimination?

In fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seems to agree with me that this is risky:

“For example, a help-wanted ad that seeks "females" or "recent college graduates" may discourage men and people over 40 from applying and may violate the law”

https://www.eeoc.gov/prohibited-employment-policiespractices

Digging deeper, it looks like Facebook settled a 2008 case where they stated a preference for 2007 and 2008 graduates by saying they would no longer state the exact years they were looking for. At this point I’m willing to bet that hiring only new grads or returning interns is age discrimination but nobody’s brought the case to court.

There is the”disproportionate impact” argument. It is if course harder to prove, though.

I dont blame your buddy for not pursuing legal action, the legal system sucks. That said companies feel confident doing that largely because they know most people will not peruse legal action and even if they did they likely have the money to bankrupt them long before it ever got to a jury

Yeah I still think of that situation a lot. Feel a little dirty not able to do a thing, but needed to get a dang job.

You can still write scathing glassdoor reviews and send a letter to the state AG who should take an interest in such things.

Something that often gets overlooked is how much better older people are than younger people at getting information from others. That is a critical and time-saving skill in software development.

What would happen if you lied about your age (eliminate the first 10 years from your resume), both at the time of applying for the job and after joining the company? How much trouble can you get in for that? It doesn't seem unethical at all.

I wonder. For my buddy, he'd get found out in the interview, for me ... I might be able to pass, maybe...

Every job I've ever gotten I had to provide ID.

At a stage where a recruiter makes a decision to make you an offer or not?

Directly lying is a problem still (don't tell them a wrong age), but if they come to the wrong conclusions due to fuzzy data?

Every job that you have gotten has needed ID for background checks. I've never been asked for ID, age, or gender during the interview process. Nor would I give that information freely.

I recently filled an online application that asked for SSN and I dropped it right there. You only need my SSN for employer taxes, no way is that part of any job interview.

SSN also has an approximate timestamp encoded into it. The prefix can be linked to the time period it was given out, which is typically at or near birth registration.

This is public knowledge, and the prefixes are even used for identity verification at banks.

If you got your SSN at an age other than ~0, you may get flagged as a mis-match when e.g. applying for a new bank account, and it will require a human override to get past.

The one problem might be education on your resume. People can infer age from that generally. If you leave dates off it might also be seen that you are hiding the dates because of your age.

Have the work section chronological (And omit everything >10 years old), and the education section styled a bit differently, as a bunch of bullet points without dates.

It might be a bit weird, but I doubt it'll fail the HR filters. You can even do something like call it 'Education and Skills', in which case dates don't even make any sense to include. (Nobody ever says which year they've learned C#.)

A bit weird may be ~= failing HR filters.

I don't really have a strong opinion though. When I last switched jobs a number of years back a friend of mine strongly advocated for obfuscating age as much as possible. I don't even remember how much I did but it didn't really matter because I knew the person running things and a number of the other people involved in the process. So this wasn't really an HR filtering thing.

I don't work in HR, but I have a hard time imagining that any HR department has a bullet-point checklist they expect from resumes, that includes 'MUST SPECIFY EDUCATION DATES'. ('MUST SPECIFY EDUCATION' is certainly on there.) [1]

And unless these things are explicitly checked for, your resume won't look that weird.

[1] If they do, they should stop, because this sort of thing is great evidence for an age discrimination lawsuit, even if you don't engage in age discrimination.

I don’t specify education because I never even completed high school. I get significantly less recruiter spam vs friends with an education section on their linkedin.

Or do what I did, and drop out of college and go back to finish it several years later, and just put the year I graduated on there. My education makes me seem younger than I actually am for the people that judge by that.

I basically did this. I mean I wouldn't say it's a "lie" to simply omit things from you're resume that you don't feel are relevant or may hurt your chances. I shortened my resume to a single page and left high school and my attempt at college off of it completely. No one ever brought this up at the interview.

It's also not actually legal where I live for the employer to inquire about an applicant's age. After I was hired, the manager did ask me at lunch how old I was, I just replied, "I can't remember". Yeah, he probably didn't mean anything by it and he could probably look it up with HR. But I just honestly didn't feel like it should be relevant to my role at work.

I don't feel like this was unethical, perhaps slightly paranoid at most. Speaking of which, I didn't even tell anyone I had kids until I was out of my 90 day probation period.

I used this trick and started getting responses and phone screens. These are companies you know and possibly respect.

This is the thing that confuses me a little, fresh blood is important too but having people who've gone round the block a few times (especially somewhere else) can be very helpful even just as a second pair of eyes.

It certainly turned out that way later on.

I worked with a younger guy, very capable dude, but our differences in ability to talk to a customer and sort of shake out what they really want / need were like night and day.

But that's what working on a team is, I'd step in and help everyone take a step back and realize what we're all doing / can do for them and get back on track / save everyone weeks of trial and error. He'd show me some stuff too that I wasn't good at.

Good combo.

> after changing careers.

This is a big one. There are arguments for not hiring older experience programmers, then there is a different issue about hiring older people that want to be new programmers. I'd think the second group wont have much hope of getting hired.

Given equivalent coding experience and ability, I'd rather hire an older programmer than a younger programmer.

Likewise.

A decade or two of 'unrelated' experience dealing with people, solving problems, or hell, even just dealing with administrative and bureaucratic bullshit? And the same amount of 'related' experience? For the same price? All other things being equal, give me the older person any day.

Am over 40. I have no trouble getting hired.

Now every few years I make a massive time investment in an some new tech. I get hired for one thing. When chance comes up I take tech lead position on some something I’m not familiar with.

Keeps me up to date in a very practical manor.

Now I’ve seen lots of older people who learned something 20 years ago, and have barely changed since.

Maybe you should have used the old: How do you do, fellow new grads?

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