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Comment by mwattsun | Hacker News Reader

I'm 64 and been programming for 40 years. I am fortunate that I am able to not work due to a small military disability pension, plus I'll take social security soon.

My last experience was Facebook contacted me a few times, which I blew off because I knew they would never hire me. Finally I told them "You know I'm over 60, right?" and they got off the phone and never called back.

I'm thinking about doing some part time programming on one of the job sites. I'm not thrilled with throwing PHP together, so I haven't tried yet, and program for fun now. In the last couple of pandemic years I've learned Rust, Flutter and lately Blazor, which I just gave up on today. I installed Nodejs to learn React this afternoon. I'm looking for a pleasant way to earn money building front ends.

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I conduct interviews for Facebook and we do not discriminate on age. I assume the recruiter just got the impression you really didn’t want to interview with us. I only do the coding interviews but every piece of interview feedback I write is focused on the same criteria and that definitely does not consider age. We don’t even refer to the gender of an applicant in the feedback, and comments on an applicants age would be a quick way for me to get dropped from the interviewer pool.

There is a feeling that you (being big tech) discriminate.

Not trying to say its true or false... Just saying that it's no different than race or gender.

Your coding interviews are THE filter that discriminates older people. They designed in leetcode-manner and that's clearly a sign that you want younger developers.

I said "You know I'm over 60, right?" in a friendly and informative way in case that could be an issue. The correct response would have been your comment, but instead was a quick exit and putting me on the no call list. You may not age discriminate, but that doesn't mean everyone one at Meta (Facebook at the time) does not.

I was aware of Mark Zuckerberg's comment which is why I brought up my age.

“I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” he said. “Young people are just smarter. Why are most chess masters under 30? I don’t know. Young people just have simpler lives.” -- Mark Zuckerberg, Stanford University in 2007

https://www.quora.com/Is-that-true-that-Mark-Zuckerberg-dont...

Edit: I believe you when you say you don't age discriminate. That's because everyone is watching everyone else, including internal lawyers, to make sure you don't so as to avoid law suits. However, the person that called me was on a private phone call with me that wasn't being recorded, so they could get away with it.

This may be off topic, but I don't believe "most chess masters" are under 30, whatever MZ meant by that exactly. ("Chess master" is not a term used in chess.) Most top players seem to reach their highest rating between 35 and 45. Looking at ages of the current world top 100[0], about half seem to be over 30, half under. There are not so many players over 40 or 50 at the top these days though. A classical chess game often goes for 5,6,7 hours, and playing a tournament means doing that every day for a week or two. As most players reach 40 or 50, they start to fade after 5 or 6 hours play. It's stressful and tiring - a single mistake often can lose the game, and lose many hours work, sometimes lose weeks/months/years work.

[0] https://www.2700chess.com/?per-page=100

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