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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

>> Employees who have historically been entrenched in the majority are also entitled to protection under laws that were intended to assure equal treatment for women and racial minorities.

>To me this is obvious. A plain reading of EOCC employment discrimination regulations make this obvious.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I think this is less obvious when looking at how they define age discrimination. Specifically the protected class is people over 40. Why is that distinction made instead of a blanket "no one can be discriminated against based on their age"? Doesn't that imply it is trying to protect a specific group rather than force equal treatment? Why can't a young person sue for age discrimination? How is that logically different from a white person suing for racial discrimination?

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Perhaps age is just an oddball compared to the other protected classes, because there are legitimate reasons not to employ someone young (e.g., if the position requires x years of professional experience but the candidate has only been of working age for <x years) while there aren't many legitimate reasons not to employ someone old. Gender, race, etc. don't have this natural asymmetry.

Another interesting angle is that everyone eventually will become old and therefore in this protected class. It's not like race, gender, etc. in that way.

Everyone old was once young, but not everyone young will live to be old.

There's similarly good reasons to not hire somebody old though - theyve already been trained in some other work method, have/spend time with their families, have retirement sooner, etc

> have retirement sooner

By that logic, you shouldnt hire women, since they may get pregnant and take extensive leave on your company’s dime. Or men, whose partner could get pregnant (or adopt).

> have/spend time with their families

Applies to anyone over the age of 18. Probably under 18 too.

> theyve already been trained in some other work method

Which is why once you learn one programming language, you are immediately banned for working with any other language.

I just want to comment that your comment reminded me of min wage requirements. I'd love to hire a really Jr DevOps engineer but because of min wage and benefits that makes it impossible. If there was no min wage requirements I could hire a high school student with interest and not get destroyed financially by regulations

Which is exactly why there are regulations in the first place, to protect also that high school student with interest from being kicked out next year when a new round of high schoolers with interest comes around.

Maybe you can't hire anyone because your business model just sucks.

No, the req just becomes a senior role because comp has to be adjusted accordingly. Do you think min wage creates jobs?

> By that logic, you shouldnt hire women, since they may get pregnant and take extensive leave on your company’s dime

Although you're presenting this as obviously absurd, taking that risk into account was long practice wasn't it? Forcing companies to pretend women are as likely to suddenly disappear for long periods as men is ultimately an economic choice and debatable as such in economic terms. It's essentially a kind of welfare that companies are made to pay, except instead of being an insurance scheme with actuarial rigor and smooth risk sharing over the entire population, it's a form of regressive taxation that disproportionately impacts smaller firms.

It can therefore be argued that it'd be better for society to take a different approach here, maybe more similar to (non-US) healthcare, e.g. mandatory maternity leave insurance, and then allow companies to simply price in the higher risk of extended absences. If they're no longer on the hook for paying wages this difference would be basically disruption risk and shouldn't be a particularly large difference for any but the tiniest firms, especially as motherhood comes with a much longer notice period than the typical resignation.

Feel free to not hire someone because they say that they're going to use obsolete methods, or because they say they're going to take leave in excess of what's offered, or because they say they're going to resign in short order. Just don't use old age -- instead of statements like these -- to make assumptions!

When someone is too young, however, there can be some guaranteed deficiencies that don't require any assumptions in order to know the requirements can't be met; for example, if you are looking to hire someone to create and execute a 10-year plan with prior experience doing so, it's impossible for a very young person to be qualified.

A young person could simply argue that requiring prior experience is a form of age discrimination no different to saying "We are looking to hire someone to run a project, no usage of obsolete methods allowed" and then not defining what that means. After all, "years of experience" is a rather arbitrary measure, it's easy for people to rack up years on projects and learn nothing, and it's common for young people to have insights their elders lack despite the YoE difference. See: Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, the young Steve Jobs etc. Lots of young world-changing founders out there who easily beat people with far more experience.

> theyve already been trained in some other work method,

We hired them for prior experience on purpose, yes.

> have/spend time with their families,

If that stands out, your company has a serious culture problem.

> have retirement sooner,

Isn't the average time at a job like 3 years in tech? Who cares if they leave for another company or retire at the end? Outside of tech I'm still skeptical that the odds of jumping for another job vs retiring is that different, actually.

One could argue that a younger person could still be developing mentally and their decision quality and impulsiveness is undergoing change. Someone under 21 or 18 for example. But the same argument would be pretty nasty if applied to race.

The cutoff for discrimination is 40. It is perfectly legal (at least at the federal level) to discriminate against someone for being 39. That seems to imply that mental development is not a consideration here. The law is pretty clearly "don't discriminate against older people" rather than "don't discriminate based on age".

Also for all the other comments mentioning experience. Decisions based on experience are not discrimination because experience is pertinent to one's effectiveness in a job. It isn't discrimination if an NFL team decides not to hire a disabled player because the job of being a football player has strict physical requirements. It doesn't matter that the player's disability might normally qualify as a protected class in another line of work. It isn't discrimination because the job requires that selection criteria.

It’s at least valid to consider a young person insufficiently experienced for the job, as long as the hiring decision is legitimately made according to experience not numerical age alone.

That's not age discrimination though, that's having insufficient experience. You can be denied for lack of experience at any age.

The similar concept of "protected class" exists in many states' race-crime laws. In New York, for example, only members of the protected classes are protected by race-crime laws, as per a statement by the NY AG office.

I think part of this is that, obviously it is totally fine to discriminate based on age. Children aren't allowed to work, vote, buy certain items, etc. You're also not allowed certain public offices if you're too young.

I don’t know if the term discrimination fits there. Employers would gladly employ children if not for the law.

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. I'm fairly sure this is the correct reasoning. We generally think it's acceptable to discriminate on the basis of age in many contexts, one of the most important of those being experience. If you are selecting candidates with more experience or "maturity" than is possible for someone of a particular age, you are effectively discriminating by age.

Perhaps people have morphed their internal definition of the word "discrimination" into something that differs from the dictionary and therein lies the objection?

The difference is that we can conclusively show that children are intellectually under developed.

Old people are often just as intelligent as their younger colleagues, and often wiser as well. Of course there are exceptions, but there are poor performers at every age bracket for a variety of reasons.

Let's abolish these discriminatory labour laws. If a child can go to school he can also work, why rob 8 year olds of this opportunity & force them to school when they could be working in a sweatshop?

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