How is that not actionable discrimination?
Protecting yourself against discrimination doesn’t mean trusting the courts. It means being willing to lie or mislead people into thinking you aren’t in the category of people who gets discriminated against, making yourself too much trouble to fire, and finding open-minded employers.
If you’re in a disadvantaged group, you need to pick your battles, and accept that life isn’t fair.
Businesses have pushed heavily for at-will employment; this means that businesses don't need to say why people are fired.
So they don't have to write down why you were not hired, nor why you were fired.
So you have to prove that you were not hired/or fired for being in a protected class. This is extremely difficult short of a recording of the interviewer saying e.g. "so you're pregnant?" => can possibly argue discrimination, but it's still difficult. This kind of stuff works in a panel interviews or bad work environment when you can compel testimony from other workers who would rather risk their job over jail... but doesn't work well in 1:1 or 2:1 situations where one or two people just need to lie to avoid the lawsuit.
Personally, I don't take legal action even if I think I can win the case, because it's just too much time and effort, and I don't want my life to focus on said legal procedure for the next n months.
I assume other people also think they need to choose their battles.
Maybe isolating cubicle walls, snail mails, audio-only telephones, and non-engineer sales representatives were good things. And possibly VR avatars in the future too.
But anyway, the point is, threatening someone who hates you(for any reasons, not limited to their bigotry) to work with you is not the path of least resistance.
Also, I found out that some younger folks really hate us. A number of folks used the interview process to try humiliating me, and taking out their personal animus.
After a few of these, I decided "Bugger this for a lark," and just accepted that I shouldn't bother looking, anymore.
But I think people are being hoist by their own petard. I'm seeing folks in their forties, that never had any issue, finding work, hitting the wall. These were people that did it to others, when they were working.
We can't become other races, and we [usually] can't become other genders, but we all become old, so each of us will have a turn at the wheel.
Keeps me busy and up-to-date, and is extremely gratifying.
I'm getting ready to release an app that is a top-to-bottom system, involving a couple of servers that I wrote, along with a fairly robust native iOS frontend.
Works a charm. I've enjoyed it. Of course, I have to keep my scope humble, but I've always been able to punch above my weight, so it's working out.
If I was able to declare it, I'd never pay a dime in taxes.
I have heard that Steve Kamen, who wrote the "I Love New York" jingle, gave full rights to the state, and never has to pay state taxes. I haven't found anything that corroborates this, but it could very well be true.
The work I do, is for a demographic that tends to be ignored. I doubt there's any tax breaks, headed my way.
I've found that most non-tech folks don't have any idea how much it costs to have real talent working for them (or even crap talent). I don't feel like arguing about it. I can't declare it, so it's not worth the agita.
And half of the companies simply ghosting unwanted candidates with no response after the interview.