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Comment by trhway | Hacker News Reader

Another goodie from AMZN - hard cap on max of years of experience for a position. Nice way to filter out the old dudes like me. I suppose the trend will naturally spread through the industry.

Edit: it is max cap in hiring requirements. The requirements are directly from AMZN recruiter (AMZN email address, etc). The max is bullet pointed together with the min. The max is also additionally clearly stressed in the description to make sure that there is no misunderstanding (i'd definitely would have hard time believing my eyes if seeing it only once in the bullet points)

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I’m at Amazon now. This is not true.

Seconded. Haven’t seen this anywhere in Amazon.

Edit: Clarified that I meant within Amazon.

> Seconded. Haven’t seen this anywhere.

The military has it, and (news to me) it appears common in accountancy and management consulting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out

I wanted to chime in the the military part. This is not an age limit on positions to keep old people out, this is to weed out under performers at a time where the military has a glut of highly qualified volunteers.

So up or out means “if you’re passed over for promotion twice, you must suck and we don’t want you anymore.”

But I have seen old officers in the lower ranks because they were enlisted men, then warrant officers, then finally officers. They were far older than their peers, but still needed to tick the boxes and get promoted.

Ref: Military Officer

You're already an employee. I'm talking about requirements for candidates. As far as I see it is a relatively recent innovation, which I thought would be blatantly illegal in the US until I saw it myself - I suppose the AMZN lawyers found a loophole.

When people talk about glass ceiling - well, now i know what glass bottom feels like :) If any requirements you don't directly match you can try to make a case in say cover letter to substitute - education vs. experience, etc., there is no way though how one can "decrease" the number of the years.

> which I thought would be blatantly illegal until I saw it myself

it would seem to be:

https://www.eeoc.gov/regulations/questions-and-answers-eeoc-...

That document can absolutely be interpreted to say that this is blatantly illegal, but it doesn't explicitly address the question of maximum years of experience, so it's a matter of interpretation. Have they explicitly addressed this question somewhere else?

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/insight-cap... is a more recent article summarizing a court ruling from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in which, at least for the states covered by that court, it was determined that job applicants (as opposed to transfer or promotion applicants) can't bring disparate impact ADEA claims against theoretically age-neutral rules such as maximum years of experience. State or local age discrimination laws can go beyond the ADEA, of course, and some do.

Disclaimer work at Amazon.

Do you mind expanding on this a little bit on what position you were applying for?

I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II level already, or applying for that role with that amount of experience.

Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of experience but are applying for internships.

Although I doubt that's your specific case...

I'd be very surprised and extremely skeptical we have year caps on senior roles like SDE3/Principal

it was an unsolicited email from AMZN recruiter on what seems to be SDE3/4 judging by the requirements.

>I think it's perfectly reasonable if someone has 15 years of experience and being rejecting for an SDE I position. It's an absolutely fair question to ask why you aren't at an SDE II level already, or applying for that role with that amount of experience.

it is absolutely reasonable to ask and reject if unsatisfied with the answer. I think it is discriminatory to bar from applying (or reject automatically) based on such years based cap.

>Similarly it makes sense to reject people who have years of experience but are applying for internships.

again, i think such automatic rejection is discriminatory.

I didn't experience this while working at Amazon and I'm an old fart.

I guess you didn't represent us, old farts, well enough if the management now tries to limit intake that way :)

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