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Comment by Siddarth1977 | Hacker News Reader

Siddarth1977

Comments like this make me wonder if other posters are living in an alternate universe from me.

The engineers I've known and worked with were more likely to judge someone as being "like them" for their usage of Emacs vs Vim than their race, and everyone is always trying to recruit more women.

The ageism is more tied to actual technology things. The young engineer thinks the latest blog post they read about how to do async programming or manage deployments is the greatest thing in the world and only wants to hire people who think the same. The elder engineer recognizes it all as slight tweaks and rehashes on older ideas, frameworks and systems and is more ambivalent and not as excited to dive into learning their hundredth new way to accomplish the same task.

If management cares about business outcomes, the elder engineer is great. If management cares about vanity metrics and using the latest, coolest frameworks, the younger engineer is great.

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> The engineers I've known and worked with were more likely to judge someone as being "like them" for their usage of Emacs vs Vim than their race

There's such a thing as conscious and unconscious bias. People don't sit in the interviewing room and think to themselves "well this person is white, like me, so I like the idea of hiring them more", but the thought is still there at the back of their mind (and before someone jumps down my throat, no, I'm not saying everyone has this bias, I'm not accusing you personally of being a racist, I'm saying that this kind of unconscious bias is prevalent throughout society)

Emacs vs Vim is a far more conscious bias.

Unconscious bias is not a well supported psychological construct. The Implicit Association Test, upon which the theory of unconscious bias is based, has a poor track record for consistency and does not predict actual discriminatory behavior.

Some of the scientists who originated this work have since distanced themselves from it, because people have run with the concept far beyond what the science supports.

I think you're referring to this:

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/unconscious-bias-roger...

But there are lots of these:

https://www.6seconds.org/2018/09/04/the-science-of-unconscio...

https://www.npr.org/2020/07/14/891140598/understanding-uncon...

https://www.mevitae.com/resource-blogs/science-of-bias

Here are my sources:

- https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

- https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psyc...

- https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201712...

- https://psyarxiv.com/dv8tu/

Edit: your contrary sources do not discredit the thesis of the national review article. They conflate the many different (often legitimate) heuristics or subconscious influences on cognition with Unconscious Bias, which is specifically the idea that people can be racist/sexist/whatever without even knowing it, and that the presence of this latent bigotry can be measured with an Implicit Association Test.

The latter, stronger claim is complete BS and is not supported by the science. This is a classic motte-and-bailey tactic.

Nope. Not emacs vs vim. The biggest thing is what kind of music. Also, what kind of slang. I know this because I was young once, too. When I got a coworker who was twenty years older than me, it made me uncomfortable. Weird 'dad' jokes. Musical references that were completely out of it. Stories about the past. I like people and I liked them but, it was also, always a little uncomfortable. We were peers but they, well, nobody is a true peer with a twenty year gap. Uncomfortable.

Today, hiring authorities are more likely to be young. They also feel uncomfortable with someone who has a huge amount more experience.

Ageism is real.

> nobody is a true peer with a twenty year gap.

I don't think that is necessarily true. It really helps if the older peer is comfortable showing weakness at times.

Something I learned from my father when I was really young. When you don't know something, say "I don't know" first, then "We can probably figure it out".

Always, always, lead with "I don't know"

I am 65, and there are still things I don't know.

What I've seen is that most people dumb enough (I say this about myself) to join startups are young, privileged, and foolish. So even if you have hiring initiatives and strategies to make a diverse company (in age, identity, whatever) the pool of people that will even reply to your recruiters is pretty homogeneous.

So I don't think it's just management and business outcomes, the pool of people that you can even hire for the smaller/riskier businesses is just very different than at big tech (or even non-tech businesses with sizeable software and GIS teams).

Don't get me wrong, I love working for startups. But if I were twenty years older I might care a lot more about the bad 401k matching and progressively longer time/lower outcomes for liquidity in startup equity.

Once they see salary expectations, cheaper wins almost every time. Most business doesn’t care much for quality.

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