Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jswinghammer | Hacker News Reader

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I can't help but believe there is more going on here than just age. The reason being my own experience with hiring the last decade or so. I don't see too many older candidates come across my desk but I never really care much about their age when they do interview with me. I'm just trying to find out something simple:

- Can this person program a computer?

I always come back there because it's actually more rare than I would have guessed when I entered the industry. I have to ask if these people actually know what they're doing or if they're just getting turned down a lot and happen to be older. Given the number of tech firms in San Francisco I have to assume that at least one isn't making a stupid mistake based on age. How could it be that all of them are overlooking these awesome folks? Most companies typically have standing hiring requisitions open basically all the time for developers.

I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.

The research done is clear - you take two identical resumes but change the ages[1], and then send these in to a bunch of advertised jobs.

You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.

> and that companies are being insane en masse but it seems unlikely.

When we see companies making very stupid decisions very often that seems more likely than not.

> You see that the older applicants consistently receive less responses.

Less responses? Do you mean physically smaller responses, on little note-cards instead of letter stock? Or did you perhaps mean fewer responses?

http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/fewer-vs-l...

Prescriptivists demand a difference between less and fewer.

Those poor fools have lost! Thanks for the link though. HN has an international audience and people who speak English as a second language need to know that some people see a difference between less and fewer.

(I have upvoted your comment in an effort to cancel out the downvote that someone gave you.)

> Prescriptivists demand a difference between less and fewer. Those poor fools have lost!

Yes, I agree it's a lost battle. I also don't generally prescribe. But I make an exception for this and a handful of other usages, with the understanding that I can't tell people they're wrong -- which, if you noticed, I didn't do. I instead give both definitions and invite the recipient to choose between them.

My other recent pet peeve are the many people who say "reign in" when they mean "rein in". Reigning is what a monarch does to a kingdom, reining is what a cowboy does to a horse.

But these are annoyances, not a matter of right versus wrong.

I love to see usage explained and corrected, but doing to with sarcasm and disrespect achieves the opposite of what you presumably intend.

> ... but doing to with sarcasm and disrespect ...

A little sarcasm, but no disrespect.

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