You're Too Old for That: Age Discrimination in Japan Tech
tokyodev.com
tokyodev.com
I did go for a job recently where we had a great phone interview and the guy essentially said “everything looks great we just need to meet in person” and when we met in person I visibly saw his expression change. Something about my appearance, either age or weight or both. He emailed no thanks after.
By that logic [0] no amount of data can prove anything, and the label "unproven" becomes meaningless.
(Especially if the twist-ending is that you're trapped in a dream and this conversation isn't happening.)
"Hmm, all your hires are < 30 huh? OK, we don't care if you intended to discriminate or not, here's the fine".
Why was he thumbs down? "I don't think he's a good fit for the team." When pressed for what that means he simply repeated it.
Make of that what you will.
I'm in my 50s. I've been through the death marches, the unrealistic goals, the 60-hour weeks, the last minute emergencies, the all-nighters trying to get a release out or trying to recover from the fallout of a poorly tested release.
I won't do it anymore. Nobody I know who is my age will do that anymore. There's almost nothing that will keep me at work past 5:00. The sun will come up tomorrow and nobody will die.
So if you're looking to hire someone who will ask "how high" when you say "jump" then you probably don't want to hire an older person.
I know what you're saying though. I'm like you in that regard — so over the bullshit.
At the same time that can bring some levity (is that the right word in this case?) to the team.
I was often the cool head when deadlines were creeping up and the app was seemingly out of control. I was often the one that pushed back on management, pushed back on design, marketing.
A few younger engineers let me know when I retired that they appreciated my "honesty", ha ha.
I still don't mind working longer hours when I'm excited about something.
The all-nighters are definitely gone. But that was basically when I hit 30 or so. And when I did work all night, it's because I enjoyed doing it and I could do it. I started as a teen on personal projects.
On the pro side, I've got enough experience that I avoid a lot of mistakes that I've made when I was younger, and I'm able to help the teams I lead avoid those same mistakes. That makes a huge difference.
That's not altogether true. And it's going to get misinterpreted by young startup founders without a lot of experience.
Right now, I can still whip systems into shape. I am still massively effective. But if I squint I can see the horizon where I'm not effective and I'm slowly coming to terms with it. Maybe the economy and industry will be right at that point in time and I can pivot to my own thing. Maybe it won't and I'll be forced into early retirement. I'm planning for the latter but hoping for the former.
Oh, and move faster over the medium term because everything doesn’t have to be written three times.
That’s what experience does.
Sorry to tell you kids, age is not like race or sex.
There is a huge difference between what you are getting if you hire me now vs when I was 25. It is two completely different people.
At 25, I wouldn't have even asked how high. I would have just repeatedly jumped as high as I could.
Now, if I don't feel like jumping and you push me to jump I will just quit because I can.
Not to mention, if you learn new things as quickly at 55 as you did at 25 you are lucky because I surely do not.
If you are young and can't understand this perspective, don't worry. You will someday.
Moe from The Simpsons.
Pay is bad though.
I wonder if that is in any way correlated to this:
> Gov't study finds only 3,065 homeless people in Japan
https://japantoday.com/category/national/gov%27t-study-finds...
Second, your comment could be interpreted as saying that counties with high pay have (or should have) a lot of homeless people, which seems insane. So what did you mean?
Does it? Countries with high inequality I'd expect to have a lot of homeless people.
Except if you mean countries with high pay across the board. So how does that work, everybody gets high wages, and companies can afford it and hire the same number of people, (instead of the case of splitting wages more equally)?
> Last Friday, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released the results of an annual study of the number of homeless people *in the country’s parks and riverside areas.*
So this isn't the full count of homeless, just the ones living in specific park areas.
That's not true. YC startup Tailor, the first (and only?) Japan startup that YC funded, left me on read on LinkedIn. They ignored my application without a response, too. Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.
To be fair, the whole American tech culture of inclusitivity is not really a thing in Japan or most Asian countries. My freind works as a designer at a bank's tech arm, and told me wild stories of coworkers parading their sex videos around the office. Her boss straight up told her she was hired because she pretty, and that he was proud of forming a team of models (both male and female). I talked to other people who worked in East Asia, and they found these stories to be unsurprising.
Why do you think that? Was the job requisition in English? Did it ask for Japanese proficiency? If the answers are "yes" and "no", respectively, then it's very unlikely they're discriminating against non-Japanese for that job. If they don't want to hire non-Japanese, they'll simply post the job in Japanese only, or put "Japanese language proficiency (N2 or better)" or something like that in the ad. The reality is that not that many companies have an English working environment; this is a country where the national language is Japanese, and not that many people speak English well, after all.
However, the cost of living is much lower in Japan than in the large tech-hub cities in the US (and probably even mid-tier cities). Life in the US is really expensive these days.
However, salaries in general are high. Tech salaries are just not significantly higher like in the US.
Except if you mean outside IT hires.
There were levels and positions that were only available to employees of certain chronological ages (or above). I remember doing some fancy footwork, trying to get particularly bright younger engineers into positions of greater responsibility.
They did force you to retire at 60, though. I suspect that is an artifact of their "full employment" stance. I’ll bet they are revisiting that, now, as the population is actually declining.
More broadly, I think the problem with age discrimination is a problem with engineers that have 30 years of experience doing unimpressive things. For an IC code monkey I would definitely prefer someone younger with a lot of energy and potential to grow.
Not saying that I think age discrimination is okay, but that's too the reality of how people feel.
I just feel that each employee should be managed as an individual; an attitude that doesn’t mesh well, with today’s business culture.
Same as Spain and Jamaica, higher than China and Korea.
Here is an example of an MCU with 48 bytes of SRAM that is relevant in 2024 because it costs less than 2 cents: https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/span-style-background-co...
So, there's already entire systems on chips? Like the Raspberry Pis and ESP32s?
Are they robust and general purpose though? Can they be integrated into any little home project? Or would you have to design and make your own microchips for your own cases?
Depends on your project if it will work, but I use them around the house to report on temperature and humidity, and I've got one setup on an arcade video converter that I was hoping I could get better output from (but it didn't really work).
You could always not list "Expert on Symbolics machines, Smalltalk, Algol 68" and keep the newer/evergreen stuff.
Though we could just normalize leaveing graduation dates off of resumes... I dont6think that is especially relevant for most jobs.
Until you get an in person or zoom interview.
When I was just getting started in the field, I already had some work experience from prior exploits and college employment. Leaving the dates off my degree helped me get a reasonable job early on, I think.
Just wear your ballcap backwards and folks will assume you're at least young at heart! (I jest)
Pretty early in one warm-fuzzy FAANG, around the time a friend of mine finished a big-name CS-ish advanced degree, and he was at an event where the FAANG was recruiting. It might've been a campus event.
At the event, he happened to overhear some of the 20-something recruiting representatives of the FAANG, making fun of a candidate they'd interviewed for being "old".
I didn't ask, but, based on the way he said it, he might've been the one they were making fun of. (Then again, he's always defending others, and might've just been very upset on someone else's behalf. Though, if he'd been defending someone else, he probably would've ripped those representatives a new one, at least three different ways.)
I think he was still in his 30s, despite two successful earlier careers (one as an old school tech-ish entrepreneur). He went to the gym and was fit, but he looked like what he was: a kid from humble upbringings, who'd seen some rough situations, including being gay when and where that was not OK, and had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, to success despite all that. And while also doing a lot of activism to help some of the most disadvantaged and persecuted, when it was unfashionable.
He showed some of that weathering, and -- I suspect this might've been a barrier with that group -- didn't look like an affluent Palo Alto recent-grad. So, "old". Or, if those airhead representatives had had HR training, they would've called it "culture fit".
Which is doubly ironic in his case, since, in principle, he was pretty much a poster-child for the warm-fuzzy FAANG's PR: socioeconomically-diverse, cross-disciplinary, whole-self, make-the-world-better, with LGBTQ+ sprinkles on top.
He seemed very disappointed in those representatives of the FAANG, and had some choice words about who that FAANG "was hiring now". And in the couple decades since, he never did go there, even though, on paper, it would've been the obvious choice at multiple points of his career accomplishments.
Say what you want about the US, but the level of protection workers have is so much better than most other countries.
The US has summary firing. In Japan if you're a permanent employee you can reasonably expect to remain so.
From the people pissing in bottles at Amazon your protections don't sound any better.
Hiring discrimination against child bearing aged women is universal - it's just in the US they have to be more careful how they do it.
“you know, every time we interview a woman in her late 20s/early 30s, I just have to wonder if she’ll take maternity leave 6 months in to working with us. As a startup we just can’t afford that”.
Of course the public face of the company was all about fighting inequality, supporting diversity, etc.
I'm trying to imagine an insurance policy that a) protects against financial losses related to losing a pivotal member and b) pays out because they got pregnant, and it sounds insane.
Airline companies of all sizes are really hesitant to hire women pilots, because training and certifying pilots is fucking expensive in both money and time. They really do not want to invest in a new pilot only for her (or him, for that matter) to say "Yeah, I'm quitting/taking leave for my new baby." and have to write off their investment that could have gone to another would-be pilot who would fly with them for many decades.
For an early stage startup the potential loss of an important person is incalculable. 3 month delay could put you irrecoverably behind in the market, it could cause you to run out of funding as your efficiency tanks. Treating it statistically the same way you would for airlines does not work for startups that are fundamentally about being an exception to statistics.
For pilots, airlines refuse to hire people with zero experience and pay for them to go through pilot school: they expect people to pay for all that on their own: get their licenses and enough hours of flying time to be eligible for working for the big airlines. Guess what? That costs a lot of money and not many people want to do it any more. If the airlines really want to hire more pilots, then they need to invest in their training, all the way from zero experience. Of course, they don't want to do that, so they whine and complain.
* Not undergoing training (if applicable, eg: a new hire).
* Not gaining and maintaining experience and knowledge in the field.
* Not making business connections with others in the industry and elsewhere.
* Not keeping up (in regards to new standards and ways of doing) with her workplace and the industry at large; IT industries especially so.
* Not providing her manpower, which must be compensated by another employee(s) who can't just be fired or transferred away when (or if) she returns.
Basically, the overhead of accomodating and compensating for employees that maek babby is simply unacceptable for many businesses, especially the smaller ones and particularly if the babby is had very early in their employment or career.
You might say this is sexism and discrimination (even though it's not; childbirth is a choice to be made), but this is the cold harsh reality. People who agree to be employed are expected to work, not maek babby.
This is also a reason for falling birthrates: More people just want to live and work without the sacrifices demanded by childbirth and rearing. They know their life or career they have or dream of could end right there if they choose to have children.