Company refused to hire 49-year-old due to his age, feds say. Now he's owed $90k
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But for me, my real concern is just trying to come up with an AI-powered business over the next few years before I am being discriminated against not only because I am older, but also because I am human that wants to be paid more than $1 per hour.
On RunPod a 4090 is only like $.50/hor and can run Mixtral very easily in quantized mode.
The open models like Mixtral are getting very, very good. And when you combine that with specialized agents for particular application areas, and then the ability to consult multiple agents per project, easily adding knowledge with RAG or automatically generated fine tuning datasets, etc..
There might be a lot of competition from AI programmers within a few years.
But regardless, I needed to find a way to create a "real" online business. The new and anticipated abilities of AI make it a bit more urgent I think.
I'm trying to build an agent hosting platform because I think that within a couple of years, everyone will expect to be able to run LLMs/agents on their own computer natively. So I am guessing we will have something like WordPress for agents. Hoping people will consider my tool.
"The company’s recruiter also told him that Exact Sciences Corporation was “looking for someone more junior that can ... stay with the company for years to come,”
Sadly it doesn't look like age discrimination will stop, just the feedback will.
I wish it was more impactful.
We all know the wheels of justice turn slowly. A wrong was righted and we're throwing it away because it wasn't speedy enough?
And there's even a second win, god forbid! The defendant had a fair day in court so we can have confidence the right thing happened! Dont be too quick to demand reprisals and call it justice.
Source: my six year education and 41 year pro career that began under people who had once fought in WWII and I’m still way (WAY!) younger than the youngest founder of Apple (#8)
But the older workers don't have to stumble. They can learn the new platform. I'm an older worker and have done so many times over my career. It's not a huge deal -- especially because keeping up with changes in technology is a thing that everyone of every age has to do anyway.
When I have encountered age discrimination, it is usually because the org wants young gullible people with "passion" who put up with horrid working conditions, broken tech stacks and whacked out business models. The last thing they want is someone that has seen this three times and can point out the needless churn to support a CTO that doesn't know what they are doing.
True, although I wouldn't characterize it as being "jaded" as much as that experience makes the bullshit much easier to spot. And, generally speaking, the more experienced the dev, the lower the tolerance they have for bullshit.
And there are only a small handful of different paradigms. If you've been developing long enough, you've probably become competent in most, if not all, of them.
Going from C++ to eg Python or Java isn't much fun. Try going to Haskell or Rust, with the borrow checker.
I can switch to another programming language and write the For Loops and branching logic and all that jazz no problem. But there's often a lot of nuances that you just don't know and it takes a while to accumulate that knowledge. Those are usually referred to as "Best Practices" and there usually isn't a single source of truth document out on the Internet or anywhere to learn all of them.
They just come with experience and time, and maybe if you're lucky mentorship from a more experienced dev who knows those practices.
This is very clear to me having watched Java devs flounder their way through building JavaScript microservices using all of the old Gang of Four patterns and basically zero of the modern ES functionality.
How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody who helped you get your foot in the door. (Am I wrong?)
Why would you have to? You get the experience by working with the technology, just like everyone else. The older worker and the younger worker both need to have X amount of experience.
I don't see how this aspect is related to age at all.
> How did you get your first job for each new platform that you learned? Let me guess—you knew somebody. (Am I wrong?)
You're wrong. Connections are important for getting any new position, but connections aren't what got me "in" on a new platform. I've learned new platforms either (usually) on my own, or because working with the platform became part of a job I already had.
I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening. Learning something via a side project over a couple of weeks is hardly the same thing as having multiple years of professional experience already.
Are connections always important for getting a new position? I doubt that a doctor needs to already know somebody at a hospital in order to get an interview … but I could be wrong about that, I guess.
Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now. They also will probably accept lower pay and worse working conditions. So the older worker has little or even negative advantage if they’ve been using the “wrong” platform in their recent job and don’t have a strong personal network.
Not at all. They've been new projects, not rewrites of old ones.
> I still don’t see how learning a platform on your own got you past HR resume screening.
If I spent 3 years working with a platform on my own, that's still 3 years of experience with the platform.
> Age matters because someone just out of college probably at least did their internship in whatever platform is popular right now.
I don't understand this point. An older dev can also have spent a few years working with whatever platform is popular right now as well. Age doesn't enter into this at all.
I sense, though, that we're not fully understanding each other about something. Are you thinking that "3 years experience" is both a hard and fast rule and that it means 3 years being paid to work with it? Neither of those things are true.
From my perspective hard requirements turn out to be red flags more often than not. Asking for 6+ years in a single language kind of looks like you regret your tech stack. Requiring experience with project management software is a cry for help.
Instead, I include my job history over the last 10-15 years, and include select items that are older than that if they are particularly relevant to the position I'm applying for.
I don't try to hide my age -- my age/experience is a significant advantage I have over most other applicants. Age discrimination is a real thing, of course, but is very far from being a universal issue. If a company doesn't want to hire me because I'm too old, I count that as dodging the bullet of getting hired by a sketchy company.
No. No they're not.
I may be wrong - please let me know: It's my understanding as a worker in the US that there is no restriction on employers from hiring junior-experienced employees.
My two bits: Age discrimination feels rampant to me, where I see Old being equated with Bad. I see this on a bi-weekly basis from my industry-following news-consuming habit, reading comments from "young" people in the tech industry. I believe it's an issue on the rise, since I believe the demographic of tech people still seeking employment is shifting to older.
by "a right", I didn't mean "there ought to be a law", which is a phrase that I can't seem to get away from lately. I just mean they should be able to, they should have the freedom to seek - a person of low experience if that fits with their plan or budget. But to avoid an older person on the basis of not liking old people is flat out wrong, hence a fine line. And to answer your question, there is no restriction on hiring junior-level employees. My comment just meant there shouldn't be any shame in a team saying "let's add a junior to the team".
Well into his 60's when his son asked for him to make him a dev engine for a game he was making, he dug right in and had a prototype rather quickly.
I think as I've gotten older the only issue for me is motivation to actually want to work on projects, vs just doing any random thing.
I can identify with this statement. I love learning new things and experimenting. Doing "any random thing" is generally much more appealing to me now.
Always remember there is zero job security if you lack significant equity ownership, and there is no safety net except the one you (or collective action) demand or create.
>And old too soon.
—Old Danish Proverb
And that's why companies don't tell you why they didn't choose you.