Roy Wildstein
scripting.com
scripting.com
In fact, many people are missing this sentence:
"I don't know if there's any solution to this. I certainly don't advocate not hiring people Roy's age -- I'm now older than he was then."
...and thus taking the following sentence out of context:
"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you."
Edit: that said, the author really needs to rephrase his words or he is going to piss more people off.
Which hey, I could see why that'd be controversial.
I think it was Tim Bray who said that lots of folks don't get along with Dave Winer.
I don't find Dave's stuff useful, including here on HN.
I've had some experience with this as well. In Europe (Brussels) it's plain to see that most companies don't hire certain "bad" minorities, then fix their legally mandated "racism stats" (ie. a quota) by demanding the cleaning company provide them with contractor cleaners of the correct ethnicity.
Why ? Because if they sue, the damage is 24x their monthly pay, which is next to nothing.
This is a horribly bad factor for people like Jewish programmers, black sysadmins, and the like. They're doubly fucked : there's a very good legal reason for companies not to hire them, and they have a good legal incentive to be incompetent assholes, so they get fired and get legal damages from their legal anti-discrimination rights. In addition, the government's education incentives cause and strengthen the racist prejudices. Black sysadmins/programmers are worse than white sysadmins ... well of course ! If the law mandates a passing grade for black sysadmins in university is 40% where whites have to score 60%, this would be exactly the expected result wouldn't it ?
In the end there is no substitute to waiting for immigrants to naturally work their way up the food chain like has mostly happened in America. Problem is simple : this takes multiple generations.
This is one of the many reasons it's really bad to protect certain classes of people, doubly so when we're talking ethnicities or religious groups (as opposed to say, stem graduates, legal professionals, ...). Plus it generally seems to me to fly in the face of the idea of non-discrimination. You cannot achieve a colorblind society with racist law, in fact you're achieving the opposite.
Of course the problem is that discrimination laws are not trying to achieve a colorblind society. Rather they're trying to throw a religious/ethnic group a bone to prevent them from rioting, and making their situation worse in the process.
Let's face it, in Western Europe if you're muslim/jewish/black/... (and not self-employed) you want to be an incompetent asshole, because that's what the law rewards. You can effectively get 2 or 3 wages paid out if you do that. Nothing to do with ethnicity or religion, has a LOT to do with people attempting to take shortcuts in fixing observed injustices.
There are some that are creating their own companies and avoiding the problem this way. But this is much, much harder than making it as an employee. I have a lot of respect for the few that do this, though.
It's a basic scam created by a law. You see it with some injury cases[1] and many of the lawyers suing businesses based on the ADA. The law is meant to protect people from an injustice done, but can be used in the opposite manner.
Chilling affects like these are often mitigated by documentation by HR. Specifically, performance reviews and performance improvement plans. He was not equipped to provide the documentation.
This is just a reality and cold logic. You can say he is "Sad", but he is expressing the "stick hand in fire" learning of the situation. The sadness should be expressed to the folks who fit into the spirit of the law that has been abused.
1) often with headlines "X who collects disability enters a triathlon" or similar sensationalist stuff.
One case I directly encountered was a young, white male who was responsible for procurement for a small company I was working for. It turned out he was ordering all kinds of stuff for himself (the one thing I remember is he bought a game console with it). He was fired and the police were called. Their response was basically, since he had permission to order stuff, they weren't going to pursue it.
The law failed here, too! But let me tell you what didn't happen: nobody decided to use that as a reason to not hire young, white males. What did happen, correctly, was some additional controls were put in to prevent abuse.
Who did the company next hire for procurement?
"But every time a company hires someone who is not a young male, they run the risk that the new hire isn't there to work, rather is there to scam you." http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html#aIDKIT
the best part about this article is how it will be used against him in court http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html
https://twitter.com/codeslinger/status/445665523632984064
And if anyone needed any evidence to back up a discrimination lawsuit against @davewiner, they certainly have it now. http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html
https://twitter.com/Mickipedia/status/445665545514668032
No, don’t worry everything is fine with startup culture http://scripting.com/2014/03/17/royWildstein.html (side note, pretty sure roy might want to sue over this too)
https://twitter.com/whatidoissecret/status/44566292849965056...
If you've only got 140 characters, do you really need to spend any saying that he's wrong, because I certainly don't need that spelled out for me.
> Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to focus. And be very patient. I imagine it's a lot like sitting in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for dinner.
> There is specialization in our species. It seems pretty clear that programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing. Which also raises the obvious question that perhaps we can make it so that it can better-use the abilities of the other half of our species?
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Old white male, having accrued all the benefits of the privilege of his position, proceeds to use his power to make sure that only People Like Him can continue to succeed.
Rather than fix problems, he'd rather tell you all that Everything is OK, being Agist and Sexist isn't our problem, it's their problem.
I think software development actually has an easier time than most professions to weed out freeloaders. You can make someone program right in the interview. Programming ability is an extremely perishable skill.
EDIT: also, obviously, REAL reference checking.
Dave's position seems to have been "there's one way to work, you can't do it with me on these big things so let's try the same method on these smaller things. Oh that doesn't work either, let's try the same method with a different person."
Never any critique of the methods used by the authority structures.
I reckon this does, in fact, have great bearing on the larger issue.
Not saying we're hearing the whole story and this "Roy" guy is totally wrong... it could easily be that Dave WAS discriminating against "Roy" because of his age. Or the firing was done in such a way that it seemed that way to "Roy".
I'd normally ignore comments like this. But coming from you I feel like there might be some substance to the criticism that I simply don't recognize. Can you explain?
It's very easy to 'discriminate' against someone without realising. You need to make sure that the terms of employment are very well defined in the contract. If terms are hazy then they may well turn back and say that they were doing nothing wrong. If you don't record absolutely everything that happens, the employee could turn around and say this is the first time they heard of the problem.
In some jurisdictions you need a second opinion that would be considered impartial before letting someone go; don't have that? Instant discrimination case. Didn't have a disciplinary meeting so they could have their say? Unfair dismissal.
You have to jump through all the hoops to keep things above board.
What really surprised me is that the same guy could have later been hired at Apple.
This whole story is a bit scary, since I'm over 40 (the age at which U.S. age discrimination laws kick in) and I wouldn't want bad experiences like this to deter an employer from hiring me.
But Dave could have just given him severance instead. "Here's a week's pay, go away." It seemed that Roy was there for several weeks, so one more week to make Roy go away forever is money well spent.
Edit: I don't mind the downvotes, but as usual I appreciate any reasoning behind them...I don't think what I said was irrelevant? This guy is apparently dangerous and his real name should be exposed.
You heard one side of a story about a contentious situation between two people and you want to publicly shame someone based on this? What if the older guy has a completely different story that explains why he had trouble working there? Just don't dox people -- and if you really think it's necessary to try to publicly shame someone make sure you have truly irrefutable evidence to back you up.
This goes for employees in general, and subgroups ("protected classes") that public policy may be trying to help.
Housing anti-discrimination law can backfire in a similar way.
It's tough to find the right balance: at will employment can lead to unfair situations for the employee, and strong regulations can lead to people abusing the system (like that guy I worked with who had been there for so long that he was cheaper to pay than to fire).
Increasing the cost of new employees – compared to, say, overtime, outsourcing, automation, or other kinds of employees – decreases the hiring of the more-costly employees.
It goes without saying that you shouldn't hire me, but you won't know any better.
Until the day pigs fly, and managers and executives stop lying, milking plausible deniability for all it's worth, wasting everyone's time with re-orgs and resets, surprise-laying people off two days after telling them they're doing great, generally playing shady politics, etc, etc...