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Comment by qnk | Hacker News Reader

I am not a lawyer, but is this not illegal in the U.S.? Checking The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission website[1], it says under the "PROHIBITION OF AGE DISCRIMINATION" section:

  (e) Printing or publication of notice or advertisement indicating preference, limitation, etc.

[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm

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They're not putting specific limitations on age, but on experience. I'm pretty sure the latter is as kosher as matzoh.

No... It falls under disparate impact.

Is "no more than 10 years experience" more illegal than "at least 5 years experience"?

At least 5 years experience is a requirement that is job related. You need 5 years of experience at X do lead others doing X.

No more than 10 years experience seems very much not job related. How does having too much experience hurt a person's ability to do a job?

It's simple. People who have more experience generally demand higher salaries. The company in question is probably seeking someone who's fairly experienced but doesn't have the budget to afford a superstar.

So then you put an "up to" salary number in the ad.

Yes, it's only illegal to discriminate against people age 40 or older.

so you're sayin "no more than 12 years experience" is not a code for "no oldies" ?

Theoretically, you could have worked the first 20 years of your career doing mainframe and SAP conversions (or, running a landscaping business), and then switched to agile software development within the past 10 years.

They don't say 12 years total experience, just less than 12 in Agile.

Seems like they're breaking the law to me, but it's not completely black and white. In the odd chance it would happen, wouldn't saying "20+ years of experience required", prevent anyone younger then 20 years from joining the company?

Actually, in the US, discrimination against younger people isn't illegal - it's only illegal to discriminate the other way 'round.

Oh, did not know. Thanks!

and iirc only applies to 40+ years of age or something along those lines.

40 is correct http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

It is actually legal to discriminate against young people. It's only illegal to discriminate against people over 40.

http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

Also, requiring experience is reasonable anyway since its easy to make a case about why it's required to do the work. I'd dying to here what kind of BS hand-waving argument could be constructed for why having too much experience prevents you from doing the work.

Hiring strippers. Must have no more than 30 years experience.

I'm not a lawyer but my guess is requiring years of experience isn't discrimination since it would only help, not hurt, the protected class (older workers).

The minimum isn't the important part - they're putting a cap on experience at 12 years which will exclude the vast majority of protected workers, basically anyone who didn't switch careers very late.

My response was to clone1018's comment/question that wouldn't anything saying X+ years of experience qualify as discrimination.

The act of "discrimination" per se is fine. In fact, when you select one candidate among many, that's exactly what you're doing. Exercising discrimination. It's just required to be the right kind of discrimination -- based on actual qualifications and perceived capabilities to do the job at hand.

What you are not allowed do is discriminate based on criteria that are not part of essential qualifications for the job. And I for one can't conceive of one single thing that disqualifies, say, Jeff Dean, from holding that job over a candidate a few years his junior.

See disparate impact It would hurt a large class of older workers more than a class of younger workers.

Nah, they can say "the Agile Manifesto was published in 2001, we were just screening out bogus resumes". Of course anyone submitting shitty resumes, who really wanted the job would just tailor their resume to make it appear that they'd been managing agile teams since the day after the manifesto was published. Probably not illegal.

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