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Comment by ivany | Hacker News Reader

A similar problem is HR departments abusing the "knobs" on the position's requirements. For a software-based CRM company, they required something like 7 years of Java EE development experience for the lower level development positions, and 14+ for the team lead positions. How many 14 year Java developers are there? Furthermore, do you really need 14 years of experience in a particular language for this position? I think the HR desk is lamenting the lack of good applicants and turning up the "years of experience" knob, which is in all likelyhood counter-productive.

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I've seen several job ads requiring "5+ years experience with Technology X" where Technology X is not yet 5 years old.

Don't forget that companies also discriminate against old people in favor of young people.

The result? They don't hire anybody despite a looooooooooong line of overqualified greybeards.

(I am young myself, too!)

The problem is that age discrimination laws in the US aren't readily enforceable.

I believe age discrimination is being split into two chunks:

1) Some people with a mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation think that just because some programmers have let their skillsets atrophy implies that one should stay away from older programmers.

2) Older people by virtue of experience, skillsets are pricing themselves out of the job market. I have an older friend who is a phenomenal hacker but doesn't like going into management. He found himself either being offered VP of Engg type roles which required way more management than he was willing to do or being given Engineering roles with way less money than he was prepared to accept. Also, once you get a family, the amount of leeway you have in accepting a tiny fraction of what you are worth in exchange for money and stocks becomes quite limited.

"Position requires 7 years of iOS Programming experience" ... the iOS SDK is only 4 years old.

"Requirements:

- 25 years of HBase experience

- candidate must be 22 year old or younger"

Yes, absolutely. I remember back when Java was only a few years old, it was common to see jobs where the company wanted 5-6 years of experience. Now, it could have been agency recruiters who had no idea what they were talking about, or it could have been coming from HR. But the result is the same: flagged for spam.

Sure wish I had a nickle for every time I've heard/read this.

kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.

Where to? What is a good discussion site similar to HN nowadays?

You could make one. That's the easy part, though. Getting people to show up would be the hard part.

How did you see the hellbanned post?

Enable showdead in your profile.

I'm ready to jump ship too. It's gotten ridiculous. I wonder if they keep track of which mods are hellbanning people. Is it just a few bad apples or is it systemic? I've seen so many thoughtful, but invisible posts lately that it makes me feel sort of sick.

It's not necessarily a person - I think PG has a machine-learning algorithm that's trained on the decisions of actual human mods, and then uses various features of the comment history to determine whether to hell-ban.

Yeah, this is one of the most censored place around. It says a lot about the VC culture.

I don't actually mind censoring, but censoring someone without them knowing, and allowing them to contribute while thinking that their contributions are actually benefitting someone, is insane. In fact, just typing that out made me realize that I have to leave until they fix this issue.

That's how most large sites handle abuse & anti-spam protection. One of the cardinal rules of spam-defense is that you don't let spammers know that you've caught them, you just silently quarantine their spam. Otherwise, they'll adopt countermeasures and you're stuck in a rat race.

If you're going to do that, you have to be 100% sure that a person is a spammer. One bad comment a year ago doesn't make someone a spammer.

I think PG's testing the hypothesis of "What if we don't have to be 100% sure? What if we probabilistically ban people based on comments that are likely to have no value? Will that result in a higher or lower community quality?"

Presumably the assumption is that some good people will be banned and leave, and some other good people will just leave out of sympathy, but it's better to have good people leave than have bad people enter the community. It's an interesting hypothesis, and HN has been going strong for 5+ years now with minimal moderation effort, though I have to admit that it seems to violate basic rules of fairness and empathy. Then again, a lot of businesses are built on being unfair to people.

My argument is that you have some obligation to the person you are hellbanning, that a decent person can't just probabilistically waste a year of a stranger's life as part of an experiment on community quality.

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