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Comment by simplestats | Hacker News Reader

This is bs, sorry. This isn't pro basketball. Your eyes degrade slowly and your memory does too eventually. But unless you're talking about 60+ when such issues really start to catch up with you (still to variable degree depending on the person), you can't possibly make such a generalization.

The average age people do Nobel prize winning work is 44, with a standard deviation of ten years. EDIT: for physics it's actually 42. The 35 is from a prior publication for 1901-1950 (if I'm skimming that right).

https://orbit.dtu.dk/en/publications/the-age-at-which-noble-...

As for niavette, age isn't a guarantee of wisdom by any stretch.

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Most software engineering work is far from Nobel prizes work, or even research. In an organization, more than 50% of the workers are basically intellectual assembly line workers. In the remaining people, a few will specialize on each technology, a few will specialize on company-specific stuff, a few on the build system, a few on talking with marketing/business. But the majority of people are doing a medium-intensity job that doesn't require much creativity or genuis.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that or those people. But this means that your output will be a function of your experience and energy. When you're older and inexperienced, you're compared against people that have the same experience but (statistically) more energy. Thus it is the logical choice to prioritize the younger people.

If you're older, you either have to have something new grads don't, or the supply has to be so limited that they're ready to take you too. If you don't have an answer to "why should we hire you over a young graduate?", this means that you don't understand the basis of the business, which is a heavy red flag for an employer.

It's not so different in the ways that matter here. The point is that hard mental work isn't a "young man's game". It's about time and energy still. You need to work very very hard for years to win a nobel prize. In another universe (different only in choice of career path) that nobel prize winner would be an entrepreneur doing 80 hours a week, or a star employee somewhere. You'd be lucky to hire them.

If the nobel prize winner went into basketball, however, there's no way they'll be a top athelete when they're 44. Unless they happen to also be seven feet tall, and even then they have biology heavily stacked against their performance.

Statistics aren't what I'm talking about. Statistically, some perentage of young women will get pregnant. If the stat is not a guarantee which applies to everyone in the group, it's wrong to use it to stereotype people.

> In another universe (different only in choice of career path) that nobel prize winner would be an entrepreneur doing 80 hours a week, or a star employee somewhere. You'd be lucky to hire them.

But most of the people you recruit aren't nobel prizes or entrepreneurs or star employees. They're not doing hard mental work. Regular development is closer to working in a factory or at McDonald's than to research. "Factory" type code is at least 80%-90% of the work being done in that field. And for that, younger employees are just better. They ask for less, can usually work more, put in more energy, don't have familles to go back to.

> Statistics aren't what I'm talking about. Statistically, some perentage of young women will get pregnant. If the stat is not a guarantee which applies to everyone in the group, it's wrong to use it to stereotype people.

No, it's not. At some point you have to make a choice, as a recruiter. If I have a 25 years old and a 35 years old, both with 2 years in tech, equal on the rest, why should I take the 35 years old? This choice won't work 100% of the time. But it will work more than 50% of the time. Companies are about risk management and making a profit.

It's not wrong to discriminate against women? where?

And where are you getting these statistics you refer to?

I think I disagree with pretty much every point you made here. Tech jobs more like fast food than research?

If you're not even trying to make the argument about raw mental abilities (which at least has some kind of support, in narrow situations like chess) then I'd bet the stats regarding work ethic support older workers too.

That "all things being equal" trick you keep pulling is the problem. Yeah they're so equal except you're presumimg one is a hard worker and the other one is a slacker and you can't tell from the resume or interview for some reason. Does the older applicant come in with amnesia?

> It's not wrong to discriminate against women? where?

I don't think I said that in my message? I interpreted your "wrong" as "not reflecting reality" rather than "morally wrong". Also, plenty (most?) countries don't have laws against discrimination. For example, here's the list of countries that have some on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anti-discrimination_ac.... That's 20 countries, so a bit more than 10.25%.

> That "all things being equal" trick you keep pulling is the problem. Yeah they're so equal except you're presumimg one is a hard worker and the other one is a slacker and you can't tell from the resume or interview for some reason.

I don't think saying that younger people have more energy than older people is a "trick". This isn't about being a hard worker or not. I'm trying to explain why employers would prefer younger people. Something that get thrown around a lot here on HN is that younger people have more energy. You may disagree, but most people (and thus employers/recruiters) seems to think this way. Thus someone older switching careers has to prove themselves more than a new graduate. You can make the argument that all these people are wrong, but you're going to have to defend your position with things stronger than baseball , raw mental abilities and work ethic. If young people have no issues with doing unpaid overtime and older people do, an employer will prefer them for example.

Er you think I was saying that women getting pregnant more often than men was not a reflection of reality?

I did make the argument with more. I gave you actual stats. Where's yours again? (other than a thorough analysis of undesirable countries). You continue to make unsupported anecdotal arguments countered by my stats. At the most elite levels of accomplishments requiring "more energy", your little biological advantage isn't there. I have more actual stats for you: older students get higher grades and graduate at higher rates than younger students.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7044164

No point discussing in someone that calls 90% of the world "undesirable countries".

Hey I have anecdotal evidence proving it. It's all about risk management. At some point you have to make a choice.

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