Comment by epx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epx | Hacker News Reader

Never understood this employer fixation on unbroken careers.

A career break may happen to anyone by infinite reasons beyond motherhood. Most people have such career-pausing or career-delaying events (health issues, depression, fatherhood, taking care of an elderly relative), most conceal it, motherhood just happens not to be concealable.

And things don't change as fast. Not even in IT. And even if changed, legacy is always there, begging for someone to take care of it instead of going to the newest shiny thing.

People out of the market need some warm-up time? Yes, they do. Even machines need to warm-up, dammit.

What people should understand, is that the economy turns because there are mothers, fathers, and kids. I would be retired at 35 if didn't marry and hadn't a kid. Once upon a time I was buying a car, the saleswoman was worried about her job because of her pregnancy. I said "I am buying a new car because of the kid. No pregnant women, no car sales." (If I were single or divorced, would have a couple vintage cars.)

I’ve been doing this stuff for over 30 years and I don’t think technology has appreciably changed in 30 years, it’s just refinements of the same old stuff over and over again with slightly different focuses depending on what has recently improved. The paradigm shifts are usually just caused by some bottleneck in the architecture getting a significant improvement allowing stuff that everyone knew could be possible to be possible using largely established techniques.

As a hiring manager, As long as someone can think about technology in the right way I’m happy to hire them and let them grow into a new tool chain. The thinking right part is the rare piece, the knowing XYZ tool of 2022 that’s an improvement on XYZ’ of 2012 doesn’t concern e.

> As a hiring manager, As long as someone can think about technology in the right way I’m happy to hire them and let them grow into a new tool chain. The thinking right part is the rare piece, the knowing XYZ tool of 2022 that’s an improvement on XYZ’ of 2012 doesn’t concern e.

Fantastic attitude.

The intent is to neg you. That's why no matter how much impressive stuff there is on your resume at the end they'll say "oh but you're not a rocket scientist, whoops, yeah our advertised wage required rocket scientists." Neg you and get you to take in the neg.

In addition, one obstacle I've encountered is they want people that are pliable and easy to browbeat. That means they can be robbed with wage theft. I've heard the term "good little bitch."

There is no fixation except in candidates hiding it and lying abt it. A large explained gap is entirely fine, a secret gap is an immediate no: beyond whatever you were doing in jail or whatnot, the fact our first interaction started on a lie is an issue.

I d take a proud jail reformed who's trying to change though.

The intent is to neg you. That's why no matter how much impressive stuff there is on your resume at the end they'll say "oh but you're not a rocket scientist, whoops, yeah our advertised wage required rocket scientists." Neg you and get you to take in the neg.

> What people should understand, is that the economy turns because there are mothers, fathers, and kids.

The problem is that capitalism by nature cannot and will not account for this, at least not for publicly traded companies. Capitalism always ends up optimizing for the maximum amount of profit allowed by the law - and simple maths explain what is going on. When you have 10.000 employees, a turnover rate of 5% annually and a person that has been out of a continuous career for a year needs a month more time to get up to speed (to simplify, I assume they operate at 50% of the productivity during that time) than someone who is freshly hired from somewhere else, that is 500 person-months or (assuming 50k/year) ~1 million $ a year. Obviously the larger the company and the larger the salaries, the bigger the cost savings. And I didn't include the loss of productivity in the people who on-board the new hires either.

This is why employment and anti-discrimination laws and regulations matter: they level the playing field for everyone.

This type of “optimisations” is not unique to capitalism. In fact, in USSR some positions were simply semi-officially unavailable to young married women due to assumption that if you hire one she’d be away on maternity leave within weeks.

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