New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/07/business/economy/age-discrimination-jobs-hiring.html <comment><USER3> A few years ago I worked at a ~50 person startup, where an informal poll revealed everyone on the engineering team to be in an age range of ~24-30. One day we interviewed an insanely qualified dude in his mid-50s. He'd worked with technologicies up and down our stack, their competitors, and their predecessors, and could speak at length to their relative strengths and weaknesses. Tons of open source contributions, mentorship experience galore, super nice - super nice, but also clearly nervous during a few rounds.

At the team standup afterward, pretty much everyone was an unreserved yes except the engineering manager who directly said he was concerned about the candidate's age, and whether he would "fit in." He wondered out loud whether we could reject the candidate on this basis. The CTO was at the meeting and immediately shut that line of questioning down, although none of us ever heard from that candidate again. Something I'll never forget as I get older in this field.

<comment><USER4> Engineering manager was afraid a more experienced dev could call him out on his bullshit. Not being willing to manage someone older than you is likely a sign of cowardice.

The first and second really good developers I worked with were around 35 and 45 when I met them.

<comment><USER5> This - basically if you are overqualified, and dont jump on the hype-train anymore, and know that all the tech-"trends" are cyclic and have been there at least once - you could wake up the whole team, destroying the cult like atmosphere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Am 52. Served as IBM's "corporate webmaster" in the 1990s (sort of like being CTO but without the cool executive hat). Corporate Webmaster was responsible for all technical operations of IBM's corporate sites (from systems administration to application development), as well as theoretically responsible for all IBM web sites. As well as serve as the single point of contact inside IBM for anything "internet".

Have been mostly unemployed since leaving IBM in 2001, other than a few short stints with NYC area startups.

To F100 corporate organizations I was too "internet" and claimed far too much experience than possible (circa 2002), to startups I was (and apparently am) too conservative, too corporate.

And yes, I tried the non–profit track. Every non–profit I interviewed with decided that I was clearly going to drop them as soon as I could reacquire a job in corporate America.

I've found other ways to make money instead of being employed by others.

<comment><USER7> I'm almost 50 myself. I've been coding for 25+ years, and am looking for a new job myself. I have one at a well-known company but I want to make more hay while the sun shines. I currently have a week of onsites booked with the Big N, and I'm in study mode. Because I'm still technical and hands-on and never became a manager, I haven't had any trouble getting contacted constantly for new jobs.

<comment><USER8> What's the 'Big N'?

<comment><USER7> That's a term used on Reddit /r/cscareerquestions, it's basically FAANG

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm 45. I didn't start aggressively job hopping until I was 35, before then I stayed at one job for almost 10 years. I haven't once had a problem finding a job quickly. I was a generalist when I was 35 and started down the road of specializing in the Microsoft stack in 2008. I start pivoting in 2016 to more architect level roles but still staying hands on but with more cross platform languages (.Net Core, Node, Python), I also spent the last two years getting _a lot_ of experience with AWS from a development/Devops/netops standpoint.

I'm slowly getting more into the front end $cool_kids stack with React, etc.

But, I don't do the blind resume submittals to job boards and applicant tracking systems. I keep a very strong network of external recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers.

I have never studied leetCode, and won't go near a job that's more concerned with how well I've read over "Cracking the Code" instead of how well I can architect a system.

<comment><USER10> How many employers do you find yourself needing to exclude because of the "no Leetcode" thing? Do you think you're sacrificing anything in the way of comp by doing so?

<comment><USER9> None. I don't live on the West Coast and that seems to be mostly a west coast thing. According to all of the local salary surveys and anecdotal information that I'm getting from recruiters, former managers, and former coworkers, I'm slightly on the right side of the bell curve for architect/principal engineer, etc. Not bragging, the salary and cost of living is well below the west coast.

My last job where I thought I was being hired as a senior developer I was asked "what was my 90 day plan to create a modern software department to create two green field projects". It ended up they were looking for a dev lead.

The next job interview I spent most of my time white boarding architecture. I wasn't asked a single development question. I just explained what I did on my last job.

As far as comp, if I were in a position to travel a lot, there are plenty of consulting companies willing to pay me more than I am making now - all I would have to do is send out a few emails to my network. Again not bragging. After working 20+ years if you can't get some type of consulting gig you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. What region do you live in, and how do you think your bottom line compares to what you'd see in a comparable role in the Bay Area?

I'm not really architect / principal level just yet (probably 3-5 years of continuous improvement from that I would say), but I feel like I'm just barely getting ahead as a senior making $200k paying $2300/month in rent with no hope to buy and about a 40-60 minute commute (depending on whether I drive to BART or walk). Just wondering if there's something better out there.

<comment><USER11> Excuse me, but at $200k you're making $100k net so about $8k per month. With rent at $2.3k, you should be able to save enough to buy something at some point, no? Or at least you could rent something more expensive, closer to work?

<comment><USER12> He said BART so he is in SF bay area.

If he is only paying 2300 rent he is living in a small apt even 60 minutes out. The cost of everything in the bay makes you wonder where money goes.

Lunch is a minimum of 25 bucks, bottle of cheap beer 10.

<comment><USER13> Don't buy beer, meal prep?

<comment><USER10> Beer and lunch money isn't the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone tell me where the older software engineers in the Bay Area have gone? I recently moved into the software industry (after years in the telecom industry), and the lack of older software engineers is disconcerting in a Soylent Green type of way.

I guess some have moved into management, and others have made enough money to retire, or they've moved somewhere with better value than the Bay Area. They're likely to avoid companies where everyone's in their twenties and the offices looks like frat houses. But even so, I'd expect to see many more gray- haired engineers around here than I do.

<comment><USER15> A lot of people want to have kids and a yard, etc. You can work on interesting things for a decent wage outside SV and have these things...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm 48, on the West Coast, and recently finished interviewing, receiving multiple offers.

I did 250 Leetcode problems, practiced System Design, and Behavioral. In the end, I found doing 250 Leetcode was probably overkill, but it definitely helped.

This will probably get me severely down-voted, and I do understand the antipathy toward having to Leetcode, but the way I see it is that I'm really lucky. I get to sit on my butt, do what I love, and I get paid really well to do it. If interviewing is extremely hard and I have to study, yet again, at 48 so be it. There are plenty of people in the world who are so less fortunate than I am.

[Edit] s/250 Leetcode/250 Leetcode problems/

<comment><USER9> If leetCode is what you have to do to compete in your market so be it. In the grand scheme of things, it would be hypocritical for me to criticize someone for spending hours upon hours on leetCode considering the amount of time I've spent on books about architecture, spent a year learning the ends and out of AWS, and the time I spent networking.

Not to mention the fact that I will spend the next two year learning front end frameworks and Docker ecosystem. I'm 45

<comment><USER17> I think as our sector matures its more about emotional intelligence, and less about technical aptitude. I can't help but think leetcode is a echo chamber. I personally disagree with this approach, I've met a few folks who think the CLI is useless and can be learned in a few days. But they score really well in algorithms.

With today's data privacy concerns and tough European regulations I don't think this attitude is acceptable.

I hope the field makes a return to appreciating fundamentals.

<comment><USER18> I get why companies want to use Leetcode for evaluation. It basically quantifies an applicant down to a number which makes hiring easier and more scalable. There's a lot less room for bias if every candidate can be boiled down to pass or fail by a single test.

That being said, I was on the hiring committee at my last job and personally, I found the best way to hire engineers is to just chat with them about previous projects. I'd usually run through one or two, "just confirming you can code" whiteboard questions and then ask them to tell me about a project they are proud of that they had a large part in. If you ask questions that dig into the project ("How did you do X?", "Why did you do Y?", "Now that it's over, what would you change?") you can usually get a pretty good idea of their skill level and knowledge as a developer as well as some great insights into their personality.

Obviously, that's much harder to scale and more subject to bias, but it worked for me.

<comment><USER19> In addition to being hard to scale and subject to bias, it's hard to know, even for you, if it was actually a good system or not. The best you can hope for is to have decent confidence it had a low false positive rate.

Short of industry wide collaboration with some kind of longitudinal study, getting an idea of what does and doesn't work in terms of false negatives is nearly impossible.

<comment><USER20> I think you can tell if it's a good system for _your company_. As an individual employer all I care about are:

1\. are my false positives low?

2\. is the time it takes to fill a position low?

If the answer to both of those questions is "yes" then the system is great for me (and I've seen the system described above provide affirmative answers to both these questions in a startup setting).

Determining whether a hiring system is _locally_ good is significantly easier than determining if it's good in general.

<comment><USER21> You can say if it's acceptable ... but not necessarily good

The problem is that you don't know the cost of the false negatives; you don't know whether the people you didn't hire would have greatly improved your processes / code / business

<comment><USER4> Software is a collaboration. Almost by definition, all the stuff I don't know how to do well is at least as important as the stuff I do, even as full stack person.

It's probably not the stuff you know how to do that makes or breaks your company. Either someone else does it, or you "figure it out" and hopefully you know if you did it right before it's too late.

How do you hire someone to be good at stuff you aren't already good at? There's gonna be a lot of those in the false negatives pile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Anecdote: My dad (finance/accounting guy) lost his job in his 40's and was never able to find another one.

Thankfully my mom makes enough for things to work out, and they own a piece of rental property, and my dad stashed away a lot of money for retirement while he worked (to the dismay of my mother).

Additionally, the company I work at is half (or more) people hired straight out of college which kinda makes me feel weird. It's a small company that has been around ~15 years or so, and I feel like their hiring practices would lead to their ass getting handed to them in court.

I like the people I work with, but something definitely feels wrong.

<comment><USER23> Employment is not an efficient market. Transaction costs are very high, bidding is not public, and utility is a non-linear function of more than just compensation.

<comment><USER24> It's not a market at all, because participation, realistically speaking, is involuntary for most sellers. It's closer to a feudal contract than an actual market.

<comment><USER25> I love it. Economists are in total denial about such things. EVERYTHING IS A MARKET RUBBER STAMP.

Almost all of the US economy is a monopoly or cartel dominated by 1-3 corporations per segment.

<comment><USER24> Yep. Glad that there are at least a few people whose brains haven't been turned to mush by decades of propaganda and inflexible market fundamentalist orthodoxy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is this something exclusive to white collar jobs or is it mostly programming? Asking as my day job is in the skilled trade of engine mechanic.

If youre over 45 in a machine shop or in any trade (plumbing, electrical, automotive, HVAC, etc...) your biggest barrier to getting any job is picking up the phone when it rings. Johnson Control, Honeywell, heck even people like Nest and Ford are kicking down your door and offering you any money to join.

<comment><USER27> I feel like this applies more to programming. It should act as writing on the wall for anyone who thinks they can make a career out of it. You have 15-20 years and then you're considered old I suppose.

I don't find this to be the case with other areas of IT. We have a lot of folks in the late 40's to middle 50's working through out our IT Department and organization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As a generalist developer nearing 40, I worry about this all the time. I have extensive and valuable experience in certain areas, including management, but I have started investigating other directions I can take my career and more focused specialities I can pursue to extend my shelf life, because it's seems pretty clear that it's not really viable to continue my current path.

<comment><USER29> It is less of a problem if you focus on the IT departments of non-tech companies. Still exists, but nowhere near the same degree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> One thing I'm a bit confused about is why doesn't salary bidding fix this?

For example if a 25 yr old coder is $X per year surely, even if you have terrible age discrimination, there must be some salary level, say $0.75*X where having the older worker is preferable?

Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves out the market? Is it that people value youth so much they will pay a 3x markup for it or something?

If there's a large pool of super skilled people begging for work I don't quite understand why someone wouldn't want to leverage that. I get why maybe you pay older workers less if you discriminate, but to not hire them at all seems strange.

<comment><USER31> > Is it that older workers are much more expensive and are bidding themselves > out the market?

On one cost issue. Let's say you're in a city other than SEA, LA, SF, NYC and Boston. A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year old. The cost of a 45 year old employee further increases with time due to that (over 10 years, from 45 to 55, an employee's health benefits cost can easily climb by an additional $5k-$6k per year). So if the salary in question is $90,000 (again, outside the elite tech cities), that bumps the cost of the employee considerably as they age. Some states - such as NY - have laws that alter this equation though. When an employee goes from eg 20 to 35 years old, there's a far more modest healthcare benefits cost increase (30%-40% increase would be more typical, starting from a lower base cost versus the 45 year old; from 40 to 55 the cost can easily double, from a higher starting point).

This is another serious issue that people frequently run into with the US healthcare system.

<comment><USER32> > A 55 year old on a good insurance plan will often cost you anywhere from > $6,000 to $10,000 more per year in healthcare benefits versus a 20-25 year > old.

Jesus freaking christ I never realised that being European. This is a game changer for older folks, I guess I'm out of luck if I ever want to move to the US and I'm already over 30, ha :/

<comment><USER31> As things are now, with US healthcare being out of control on costs, it depends heavily on your salary and employment context.

If you're making eg $150,000 or $200,000 in SF or NYC and working for a stable company, an additional $500-$600 per month for the company isn't nearly the concern versus if you're working in Cleveland earning $75,000.

If you're with a decent company with good benefits, it's also not an unusual situation more generally speaking. Half the country receives its healthcare benefits from an employer. Companies in the US are used to forking over very high costs for healthcare benefits. It's an accepted cost of employing people here. Being unemployed at 55 in the US, with weak savings (can't bridge yourself to the next job) and struggling job prospects, is a very serious problem however. That's the sort of situation you want to avoid in the US.

If you're self-employed the healthcare costs can be a real killer also, obviously unless you earn enough to offset it properly. As a very young entrepreneur I simply went without healthcare coverage. I was fortunate to not have any meaningful health problems in those years, it's blatantly a serious risk to take.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Mid-40s, feel like I have been discriminated against based on age more than once. Not being one to fruitlessly blame my misfortune on things I can't change, I exited the rat race and started consulting. Doubled my already staggering pay working fewer hours, and from home. I realize this is not an easy thing to get up and running, but do at least consider finding your true value on the open market. The results could be surprising. The companies do need people who know what not to do, rather than just young-uns who do stupid things faster, with more energy.

<comment><USER34> I did this for 4 years and went back to full-time management. Even in NYC, I struggled as I (as a DevOps guy) never had the latest tech. If they needed AWS, I got AWS (experience and certs) but then they wanted Docker. Now Kubernetes. Despite years of programming experience in three languages, I still get whiteboarded. The point is, I was being treated like a full-time employee in consultant interviews. A few smaller clients I picked up were miniscule hours, we're talking 8 hours a month at most of work. Here on HN, these startup types wanted me to work for 50 pct less my rate.

I'd love to consult one day, but I haven't cracked that code. I have 18 years of systems automation, operations, and now management experience.

Something isn't good enough.

<comment><USER33> What "interviews" are you talking about? Your track record is supposed to speak for itself. The interview boils down to sitting down with a client and figuring out what they need and whether you can do it. Because you're a contractor you can be fired effortlessly, so there's very little risk for the client. You can also fire the client, so there's little risk for you.

I think you either don't have the right track record, or you're selling yourself incorrectly, by which I mean you're charging too little. Whiteboard interviews are out of the question as a contractor: I simply don't have time for this circus. One thing that helps with such things is pricing your services right. And that means charging more than you think is reasonable. The more you can charge, ironically, the easier these discussions get. The effect compounds further if you have several satisfied former clients who can give references.

My selling point is really simple, too: you've tried and you've failed, now let me show you what's possible.

<comment><USER34> Well it's partially a marketing issue, to answer your question of why interviews. It's recruiters who find me, and they present me as a contractor (when I signal I'm searching for this). The people I used to work with tend to ping me for full-time roles only, unfortunately, and word-of-mouth seems to be a common contractor route.

Finding clients outside of that requires what I expect is a social media presence, possibly publications and talks. None of which I've undertaken.

No one trusts the "resume/CV" track record, not in contracting and not in full-time roles. It's either word-of-mouth or some other method of trust, if it isn't a set of interviews.

I've picked up a decent full-time role to refurnish my image, as running an infrastructure with staff, you'd expect, should be impressive.

I'm skeptical of the contract market.

And to go back to the original thread, I found myself getting spurned due to age for any role which wasn't technical/managerial in the world of full-time work once I went back to it.

<comment><USER33> Fascinating. It's as though we operate in entirely different worlds. I have much more work available to me than I can handle.

<comment><USER34> Where are you operating and what exactly is your skillset that money is raining down so readily?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A friend of mine specialized in OSX USB drivers and did contract work for OEMS who make products for the Apple Macintosh. He used to work for Apple in the 1990s and did work on Mac System 7.5.4 with the team.

He recently killed himself, because he could not find clients and work due to ageism etc. He got sick as well and for a while was homeless. Once he got grey hair they didn't want to hire him anymore. He was 55.

<comment><USER36> This is eerily similar to my own story, except that I'm 59 and still alive, so far.

I didn't work on drivers; I worked on mostly higher-level stuff (Newton, HyperCard, Quicktime, AppleScript, and several projects that did not ultimately become products). I worked at Apple from 1988 to 1998, and after that moved on to a successful startup.

In 2004 for I developed an incurable chronic illness. It was one that is hard to diagnose and hard to treat. I eventually found a doctor who could figure out how to handle it, and became able to work again.

Before the illness, I was in that category where I never applied for jobs, because there was always someone bugging me to go to work for them. In fact, my work at Apple was in two chunks because someone bugged me to go to NeXT, then someone bugged me to join a startup, then someone bugged me to go back to Apple. After Apple laid me off in 1998, two startups immediately bugged me to go to work for them and I chose the one that looked better.

After the illness, it has never been like that again. Since 2004, I have mostly been self employed, mainly as a contractor writing code and technical documentation. I choose to live in a place with very low cost of living, so that when I'm working I can stack up piles of cash to live on between gigs. I'm using one of those piles now to work on a product of my own design.

I've contemplated suicide a few times in what I think is a relatively dispassionate way. It was always during fallow periods when my buffer was getting threadbare, and I was in danger of becoming a financial burden to loved ones. I always decided against it because, first, it's irreversible and other choices aren't; and second, because the harm I would do to my loved ones by making that choice probably outweighed the harm I would do by becoming an expense to them.

Although I didn't make your friend's decision, I also don't judge it. I believe I understand in general how it can seem like a reasonable choice in some circumstances.

Since we're talking about ageism, I'll mention that I can't prove that the drastic change in my employability is a case of ageism, nor a case of discrimination against people with chronic illnesses. I suspect it of being both, though, partly because age and health are (not necessarily reliable) proxies for other qualities that employers are legitimately interested in, so I can see what the motivation might be, and partly because the differences between before my illness and since are just so stark and sudden.

<comment><USER35> Keep yourself alive. Keep looking for work, and stay active and exercise as well. Take care of your illness because it is a tough world out there.

<comment><USER36> Thanks. That's the plan. I don't think I'm in any danger. Well, not in any danger that we're not all in by virtue of being alive, anyway.

Exercise is tricky. Too much or the wrong kind makes my condition worse. Luckily, over the past few years I've discovered that I can walk several miles a day in modest-sized chunks, and I have a dog who reminds me regularly to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I just don't understand the bias. I'm too young to have experienced age discrimination like this yet, but its obvious at least to me that the best developers and hell, leaders, that I've worked with were all a part of older generations. Is it a shortcoming in pay for all these people? I feel like being out of work for 3 years would definitely lower whatever standard of pay I had prior to becoming unemployed. I just do not get the disconnect

<comment><USER38> Older workers = more experience = higher pay.

Younger workers = less experience = lower pay.

Older workers also cost more in insurance premiums, have more "life events" that pull them away from work and are potentially harder to sell on corporate environment.

<comment><USER39> Older workers = more opinionated. Younger workers = more malleable.

At least that's what management often think.

<comment><USER40> I was equally opinionated as a younger man, though I was wrong a lot more often :-)

<comment><USER41> Yes, well, you're Walter Bright, though.

The only name in this thread I recognise (although, to be fair, most people aren't using their real names), and as an aside, a name that a seventy- something year-old Vietnam veteran running an apartment full of automated test machines in Greater Tokyo was surprised I dropped when he told me that the Digital Mars compiler was testing well. That compiler was always well behaved. I wonder if his age would have been an impediment to finding work at in the US; in Tokyo he suffered only the problem of being a foreigner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think part of the problem is "protected classes". I learned the other day that if you're over 40 you're a protected class for engineering in California.

If you're a protected class and you have a job, that's great! It will help you a lot. But the unintended consequence is that companies are more reluctant to hire someone in a protected class, because if they are legitimately bad at their job, they are harder to get rid of.

I still think we should have protected classes, but the protection needs to reach into hiring too. Maybe make companies have to submit written justification for not hiring someone in a protected class? I don't know I'm just spitballing here.

<comment><USER43> Was completely with you until the last paragraph. As the poster above me says, the more you regulate hiring, the more reluctant companies are to do so. You can look at the entire continent of Europe for a 500 million person example of this- sclerotic uber-regulated hiring markets with intense bureaucratic rules around who can be hired or fired, who can be laid off, under what circumstances, etc. The end result of this regulation is dramatically higher unemployment rates and companies that are terrified to hire FTEs because it's so hard to get rid of a bad one.

Hiring needs to be less regulated, not more so

<comment><USER13> Unemployment rates:

Ireland: 5.4% UK: 3.8% Germany: 3.1% Portugal: 6.3% Poland: 3.5% Czech: 1.9% Sweden: 6.2% Finland: 6.7%

That about ~230mil people. Mate what are you talking about.

<comment><USER44> Worker protection isn't standardised. The countries with the lowest unemployment rates have relatively dynamic labour markets.

Try France: 8.7%, was 10% as recently as 2015. Italy: 10.2%

Of course, unemployment is much worse for young workers in these countries. If you can't fire anyone then hiring is risky, so jobs tend to end up taken by older workers who then "camp" in the jobs even if they suck. Reverse ageism at work!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is why I gave up on ever having a "real job". This thread inspired me to take a look at a job board and the first thing I saw was a mobile developer job listed as "entry level". Scrolling down, the requirements are 5 years minimum mobile development experience. This is entry level now? Five years experience? By the time I have five years experience working at some kind of theoretical pre-entry level job and finally qualify for "entry level", I'll be old enough to be age discriminated against for being too old. If I could afford it, I'd go back to school to be an accountant or something, but since programming as all I know how to do and can afford to do, it's monetize "side projects" or die poor. And yes I know, working for someone else would make way more money, but that's like saying to an Uber driver "Hey bro, you'd make way more money with an NYC cab medallion". Like they don't know that? Of course, but that is not an option.

<comment><USER46> There's some cruel irony of you bringing up accounting for more stability when another poster in these comments said his father was laid off from an accounting job in his 40s and never found another job again. Modern work is brutal in the developed world and our institutions both government and market are failing at utilizing the wealth of human experience and knowledge available primarily for the sake of institutions built upon generations of burn-out, complacency, and cronyism as the dark sides of the virtues of diligence, solidarity, and trust relationships.

<comment><USER47> Had lunch with a friend yesterday, who told me his daughter and her her husband, both under 40, are now partners at their accounting firm. Household income of $480k in flyover country.

Maybe accounting is like bimodal legal salaries, you either make it to the top, or you are out.

<comment><USER48> Key word there is "partners". They aren't just accountants, they are also business owners. Any field can give a good income if you own a successful business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Odd that in an article about age based discrimination, they don't mention that there is also age based discrimination against young people, for example, getting into C level positions in the non-tech world.

When I used to be employed by other people, I specifically remember being told "we can't really promote you to director, you are too young". I wasn't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that I hadn't earned it. It was because the old farts on the board wouldn't take me seriously.

Discrimination sucks.

<comment><USER50> > _I wasn 't inexperienced (I started working full time at 16). It wasn't that > I hadn't earned it._

Above middle management, political calculus dominates meritocratic concerns (in the short term). This is true in any organisation because we're primates. You won't "earn" your way into senior management and you won't help your case by informally complaining.

If you want a promotion you need leverage. Relationships with (potential) shareholders and creditors, a credible threat to decamp (and cause damage), _et cetera_. If you can't threaten to leave you have no leverage. If your leaving wouldn't cause the Board and senior management pain, you have no leverage. (If you have no leverage, that's fine—get it.)

Speaking as someone who spent a lot of their career being young (and impatient).

<comment><USER49> I was specifically told by the CEO I would be considered for the position if not for my age. I earned my place by proving my value and reliability for years.

Explaining why we discriminate is not helping those who want to see this stopped.

It's like explaining why old people get discriminated upon. Yes, there is a logic to it. No, it is not acceptable. Yes, that is how it works now. No, that is not how it will always work, humans are constantly evolving. The way you talk sounds defeatist. It sounds a lot like the old 'thats just the way it is' when people talk about change.

BTW, I totally agree with you as to the fact that the logic you are talking about is correct in that is how things work NOW. Though we have been overcoming this. Or else there wouldn't be black or women in any boardroom. Change is happening. I don't believe those who say it will always be the same.

P.S. this happened to me more than 10 years ago. I ended up quitting and since spent the majority of my life working for myself.

<comment><USER50> > _was specifically told by the CEO I would be considered for the position if > not for my age_

I've been told this and it sucks. I made the mistake of trying grovelling and complaining. Both failed for, with hindsight, fundamental reasons.

If you're ambitious, you have to develop a political sense. Keeping stock of leverage relationships is key. If you lack leverage, you can't make demands.

If you'd represented revenue and threatened to take it elsewhere, the CEO or Board may have overcome their biases. (If not, you'd get what you wanted by effecting the threat.)

<comment><USER49> Again, what you are saying can be summed up in 'get over it' and 'find a way around it for yourself'.

That's fine. I actually did.

But it seems really inappropriate to say this here.

We are discussing the insidiousness of discrimination with the hope of socially being more conscious and finding ways to improve this.

It's kinda like going into a place with victims of racism and saying 'get over' and 'use your white voice/dress more white' when talking about the issue of racism. It's out of place, even if the suggestion is coming from a good place of wanting the best for the other person.

P.S. I had a department with large numbers and strong growth on my side for leverage, that is why the CEO considered me in the first place. The numbers took a big hit after I left. If the board would have had more people in their 40s and less in their 70s-80s, I would likely have been accepted. Explaining to me that this is politics is a bit pedantic in assuming I don't understand politics.

<comment><USER51> "Again, what you are saying can be summed up in 'get over it' and 'find a way around it for yourself'."

That's not what I'm reading in the comment. They are telling you it's a different game, they focus on what kinds of value you bring that they actually care about, and you can have leverage in such situations if you are such a person. From there, you automatically know to be the person delivering on the metrics that matter to upper management. Maybe to see if you even can before getting a job in a specific organization. They're telling you how to be more effective in the event you want to win more at that level.

<comment><USER49> This whole thread is coming from an article discussing age bias.

Not ways to avoid getting biased against. Or justifications for biases. So it makes sense to keep the comments on topic.

Even if my case wasn't an ageist thing, which is a lot of assuming on your end, it doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

It takes a certain type of person though to go out and doubt someone when they say they have suffered from something and have nothing to gain from it.

The assumptions are very pedantic, explaining them only furthers the pedantry. It's not that I don't understand them. It's that I understand them too well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm in that age bracket myself, and have fortunately avoided most of the abuses described here.

Like the other posters are saying, the real problem is that learning how to develop good software (or any other technical product) takes time. This is an experience-based subject - art? craft? - and while I have seen many very talented younger engineers and developers, their lack of experience with a whole list of factors that don't involve slapping some code into an IDE, or what have you, usually means they end up being far less productive than people like to assume.

Bay Area culture has produced a lot of great things, but this stereotype has got to go.

</comment><comment><USER53> I still require to work in a company where my manager/boss/CTO know much more than me. I'm almost 40. It's really hard to work for a 20-something guy who has almost no experience and is happily making all the mistakes he could read in books about.

Still, finding a job where my boss would know more is more and more problematic.

When I was 33 I was rejected by a recruiter with "you know, here I have dozens of resumes of people 10 years younger than you, who have lots of experience in managing teams. There must be something wrong with you, so I cannot pass your papers to the client."

Still, looking for a job is a very traumatic experience. The companies are looking for unicorns: young, cheap, without family (aka drinking in evenings, working on weekends), with lots of experience, and academic knowledge (which will never be used).

A couple of times I heard from guys, who would be my managers "oh, I'd love to have your experience"... the rest of the interviews went smoothly. In all the places I even didn't get to the step where they asked for the money requirements. They just didn't answer.

I'm looking for a remote job now. I even made a nicely stripped resume on one page. My normal has 3 pages. It's a very traumatic experience, especially that most of the remote companies require knowing almost only some new stuff, totally ignoring my 18 years of experience in everything else.

Btw... a surgeon of my age is usually not experienced enough to make surgeries on his/her own. A programmer of my age is usually a useless resource, which is happily replaced with someone just after the college.

All this makes me sad. The experience is not valued here. So what is? The lack of experience?

<comment><USER9> My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don't care what you did in the 90s.

No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.

In fact, I negotiated _not_ to be a team lead at my current job.

<comment><USER54> > _My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I > don't care what you did in the 90s._

This is _very_ culture specific.

Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.

Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, " _Where 's the rest of your work history since university?_"

That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?

/tableflip.gif

<comment><USER55> My solution to this has generally been to add a "1997 - 2000 Various Previous work history available upon request" at the bottom.

And then just carry a copy or two of the full CV with you to the interview. If someone wants to see it, let them. Generally interviewers have just been curious.

<comment><USER9> Even though I think ageism is overblown in the software development industry if you are buzzword compliant, I don't take any chances. I leave everything off before 2008, my year of graduation and I go completely clean shaven and bald in an interview. (I'm Black it's not abnormal). Most non-Blacks have no idea how old I am without the obvious signs of gray hair or a receding hair line.

<comment><USER56> White men can shave bald too, and anyone can dye their hair. There's even a famous hair dye brand that specifically advertises its product for use in gaming age doiscrimination! The product (Just For Men) and ads are gender- discriminatory, of course!

<comment><USER9> Isn't being bald culturally more of a negative among White men?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Is it just me or is there a way lower bar for evidence when it comes to age discrimination in tech on Hackernews compared to gender or race discrimination.

I'm not saying that it's not a real phenomenon, but pretty much all the evidence I've seen is anecdotal or fairly weak.

While it's true that a lot of older people are great programmers, I also think programming ability is only about 50% of what most people are looking for. The other 50% is about how well you work with others, and I have to say, when I read a lot of these anecdotes I can't help but feel like some of people these people aren't getting hired because they come off as stubborn assholes.

<comment><USER58> You're going to get anecdotes on HN because this is a discussion website.

Also, studies on this issue tend to not be well known without effort looking them up. The asshole factor is relevant but not as much as you would expect.

The actual perception that older workers haven't kept their edge is actually a common bias I've seen while gathering people for hiring. This bias is probably common amongst younger looking at older workers (eg 25 year old not hiring 35 year old) but also amongst older looking at less older. Eg a 50 year old won't hire a 40 year old because they wonder why the 40 year old even wants the position. Those two viewpoints seem to be recurring patterns at least in my experience.

You probably want hard data. I'm sure it is out here, Department of labor?

<comment><USER13> I'll go broad and say unemployment is below 4.0%, Fortune 500 have less age discrimination probably, and this particular comment section on Hacker News seems to be a lot of Bay Area/ San Fransisco perspective.

And the article isn't even about Software Devs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> If 70 year olds really are less productive software engineers than single Red Bull-fueled 22 year olds (on average), and you thus end up hiring less 70 year olds, is that really discrimination? I get the article has stories from older people that seem to suggest they are well-qualified for the job and literally just their age number seems to lose them the job, which of course would be discriminatory.

But the law suits of companies based on statistical analyses of the number of older people in the company made it seem like a company can be sued for not having an expected distribution of ages but it's not clear what assumptions are baked into these analyses (ie is it assumed a priori that all ages are equally productive). Certainly older people are more productive in certain contexts than others (eg I'll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I'll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility).

<comment><USER60> "(eg I'll take an older more experienced surgeon over the new junior attending any day, but I'll bet on the young person in a football match or tasks that require a lot of cognitive flexibility)"

You seem to be contradicting yourself there, why you would you think an older surgeon lacks cognitive flexibility?

<comment><USER61> Because "developers get dumb by 30" is an HN meme that just won't go away. So every new batch of impressionable 20 year-olds hears it, at the same time VCs and big corps are telling them "you're so smart, now just submit to this series of hazing rituals."

<comment><USER24> This is accurate. Age discrimination is rampant in tech because young people are essentially recruited as unwitting scabs against their older peers. Aside from depressing wages and increasing loyalty (via fear of precarity), it's also a very effective way to fight unionization, which software desperately needs (not for compensation reasons, although that will change, but for professional and ethical reasons).

It's easy to impress a 24 year-old with a decent salary, a stocked kitchen, and lots of dumb little perks they can brag about (never mind that they are being paid, sometimes literally, in peanuts). They don't start thinking about job security and labor power until it's too late.

<comment><USER62> Based on your description of your priorities one could argue that older workers are the ones depressing wages, not younger workers. Many older workers (including you, by your own admission) value job security and work life balance over raw compensation and are less willing to rock the boat. Younger workers are more likely to go "fuck you, pay me, and if you don't I'm going to move across the country to take up this other job offer I have". Older employees with a spouse and kids have much less geographic mobility.

<comment><USER24> I understand the point that you are trying to make, but it's off the mark. Older workers are almost always paid more than younger workers, all else being equal. Unless there is some seismic shift in the economy, this might as well be axiomatic. So, it's just not possible for older people to depress the wages of younger people, unless older people in their prime working years for compensation (35-55+) for most sectors of the economy (including IT) started volunteering to do the same work for less compensation. As others in this thread have already made clear, even when they do that (e.g., out of desperation due to age discrimination), they're still going to be considered more "expensive" than a younger worker.

Also, let's be realistic: the vast majority of entry-level software developers just are not good enough to pull off the kind of thing you describe. They would be laughed off.

<comment><USER62> People job hop and use competing offers as leverage for pay raises all the time. It's not as rare an occurrence as you seem to think it is.

<comment><USER24> I owe 100% of my salary growth to job-hopping, so your assumption is incorrect.

Look, you made a bad argument. It's not a big deal. The fact is that the situation you described is frankly ridiculous: the notion that, were it not for older workers depressing wages, entry-level workers would cause compensation to go up by being so good at what they do and geographically flexible that they can go from metro area to metro area telling employers to fuck off until somebody recognizes them for the genius that they are. (It's a nice fantasy, though.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Head of HR once asked me what type of people we needed. I said we desperately needed older people. 20-year-old project managers don't have a clue. Company went under, he sells air-conditioning now.

<comment><USER64> > 20-year-old project managers don't have a clue

maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more clues?

> he sells air-conditioning now.

probably makes more (and accomplishes more) than many engineers, especially ones at vapor-ware startups.

<comment><USER65> > maybe the company should have had policies that gave their managers more > clues?

Nah, I think management is just a job that requires experience and certification like any other job to be truly good at. People have this idea that "it's management, how hard can it be"... Turns out, really hard.

Only the qualified should be managers, not some 20 year old whose only qualification is being 'good with people'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Yeah, I am in my mid 40s, and it was wild to interview for a new job after 5 years. Things have really changed in that short time.

I posted a portfolio that showed, if you want this, hire me! My resume was standard, listing out my projects and summarizing my experience.

I had good references that I rarely shared unless it was the last stages, so they wouldn't get bombarded. I applied weekly to new opps, keeping track for the inevitable unemployment record as well.

Results: My huge project list showed my age. Some companies clearly weren't interested... they wanted new programmers, younger, not stuck in the past, etc. I couldn't understand some companies purpose, so new agey with today's internet and reddit culture.

Still, I got 20–30 emails a day! Constant phone calls, messages, occasional scams. Did 2 in-person interviews. I found a great new job, remote programming, in 3-4 months! It was a blur!

The secret is respect, communication, wisdom and quick reflexes, in my case.

<comment><USER67> Where did you post these things for other people to discover?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> I'm 47 and have run my own companies, exited some of them with handsome returns, enjoyed many cool start-up projects, worked for some fortune-50 companies, have an IQ that is through the roof, but despite everything, since around 7 years am unable to get a job. Mostly I'm "overqualified" or "just too old" ... never mind I am still hands-on and happy to just get paid whatever the Junior gets, but nobody is interested. Since I've hit the end of 30ies I've become invisible.

This has costed me my marriage, the relationship with my kids who don't talk to me. That lead to a decline in my mental health and physical health. Lack of connections costed me a lot of friends too. I quit all social media because that too radicalized me a lot (nothing else to do when you're sitting on your arse).

For some parts of 2018 and most of 2019 I was homeless. In the past 6 months tried to kill myself twice. Once with heroin (never took it before), second time with Fentanyl. Making sure nobody would find me I went into the woods on a several day hike and shot enough to kill a horse, but both times I woke up with a massive hangover 2 days later. I can assure you it wasn't a cry for fucking help. Everything was done right and I am not supposed to be here, yet for some reason I still fucking am.

When I still had the energy to open up to people after they asked why I'm falling apart nobody listened. Everyone focused on me losing my family so they told me I should get "help", others told me I should just lower my expectation when it comes to jobs. How much lower can you go? Junior jobs are pointless because they don't want to talk to people my age but people who they can "shape" to their ideology.

But seriously fuck them, and fuck their ignorance. They dare to ask "what is the problem" yet when they hear they are so incapable of helping that their best and only suggestion is to "seek professional help". Yes why not outsource the problem to a professional because sure as fuck I have no time to bother with your problems (which compared to my non-problems sound pretty fucking real).

Nobody even considers that my problem isn't drugs, or being suicidal, or becoming estranged, and that my problem is simply that I don't get a job. I never thought I would end up at this point because everything went well for me. Well at least until I got "old". Guess we all gotta go at some stage. I had a great time so maybe I shouldn't complain. It's probably better to leave when you're still ahead (I made the mistake of still being here).

throwaway for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER65> Forgive me for going against the hackernews age discrimination rhetoric, but...

> have an IQ that is through the roof

Who talks like this? I would never unironically mention my own IQ. I can't help but feel something's missing in this suspiciously heartfelt story.

Still, I'm sorry this happened, if it happened.

<comment><USER69> It's a throwaway account, meaning one can be honest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> At a previous job an older coworker dyed his hair dark to get the job. He let it go back to gray afterwards.

<comment><USER71> I wonder what they thought of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> I suspect it is a deep seated human tendency to look up to and defer to the experience of those who are older than you (parents, community elders), so people are naturally uncomfortable with "senior underlings". Junior bosses will inevitably feel their decisions and position threatened by people older than them, especially in more general settings.

Throw in the conflation of skill with seniority, leading to an expectation of adjusting wage to age (not skill), our culture's infatuation with youth and the reliance on heuristics to save time and you have a situation highly unsuited to our present job-hopping lifestyles. Finding a job is more about "who you know, not what you know", which just makes things worse since age groups tend to cluster. This then gets explained as "cultural fit".

IME HR is all about risk avoidance. HR is not about finding the best candidate, it is concerned about finding the safest. The older folk may be the best, but they are not the safest, because they tend to have empty patches in their resume and the soft skills like wisdom, communication skills, tend not to be expressible in resume form.

It's never easy going against ingrained norms, especially when they are held by other people. Until the current millenial tech companies hit middle age, I don't see things changing much. Business opportunity?

</comment><comment><USER73> The ironic thing of course is that it's hard to imagine what actual advantage a practice of age discrimination might provide. All real and true criteria for a job can be tested for directly; there's no need to make age a dubiously- accurate proxy for any of those. It literally makes no sense. From the COMPANY'S point of view.

<comment><USER29> The perceived benefit is avoiding someone with reasonable salary and work hour expectations.

<comment><USER73> Yeah but you can do that by means of "salary and work hour discrimination," see what I'm saying? Those are things you can state outright, legally. Just make it clear that those are parameters of the job, and if they accept the job, they accept the job. I dunno maybe I've gone completely batshit crazy up in here.

<comment><USER29> No, you're right, they are just doing it the quick/lazy way. Older workers are also less liable to drink all the other corporate koolaid that might be harder to test for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Age is just one of the filters that companies use to cull the list of candidates.

Buzzword compliance is another set of filters.

Even being unemployed is used against you. Gaps between periods of employment are seen by some interviewers as evidence of possible prison time.

These same organizations then complain about not being able to find candidates for various positions.

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm 41 and still have recruiters contacting me and generally do well in interviews. I'm lucky in that the skills I have are harder to find (8 or so years doing iOS development). I also have to admit that one thing that helps me tremendously is that I look young. Just about everyone I work with assumes I am still in my 20s based on my appearance. They all act shocked once they do find out that I'm older. Looking young helps a lot with rapport in interviews since the interviewers feel more at ease that I'm "one of them" rather than some old guy.

<comment><USER75> In my experience attitude and connections count for the most. I'm 45 and I don't have any problems finding new opportunities. But I never go through the front door, it's always a referral. I can't imagine having a real problem until I'm in my 60s. At least around here, there just aren't so many programmers that we can afford to turn away qualified people just because they are in their 40s or 50s. If they know their shit, they're welcome to work for us. We've got developers ranging from 20-65, pretty evenly distributed.

<comment><USER76> What geographical area do you work in? Any skill in particular that you find helps you stand out?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> You know what I find really ironic?

The successes of startups in Silicon Valley really drove up the compensation of programmers. But these same startups have founders/managers who openly state they prefer younger programmers, and direct their HR/recruiters to act accordingly. And now, we have whole classes of programmers who can't get a job at all.

It's pretty obvious no recruiter lost his/her job for passing on resumes of younger programmers.

Also, the SV is really the bastion of anti discrimination. Which is great. But they replaced it with something else, ageism.

Just my 2 cents.

</comment><comment><USER78> > You're in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to > continue reading in private mode.

This is the first time I'm seeing this message and I hope this doesn't become a trend.

<comment><USER79> Do browsers announce that they're incognito? Would it be difficult to disable this flag?

<comment><USER80> Incognito can be detected by via javascript looking at how the browser behaves differently in incognito.

It looks like some of these detection mechanisms go away as Chrome gets updated but like seo, spam, viruses, and other such problems etc. there is a war aspect between trying to exploit and avoid exploiting.

Some details can be found here: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2909367/can-you- determin...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2909367/can-you-determine-if- chrome-is-in-incognito-mode-via-a-script/27805491#27805491)

<comment><USER79> I don't see how it'd be difficult to just obfuscate this. If it tries to write a cookie then let it write a cookie, just clear it on the next page reload. I don't see how it should be able to distinguish between an incognito browser and a non-incognito browser that has no history and is navigating to the page in question for the first time.

I guess some things around local storage can be used to infer incognito mode, but I think it'd be straightforward to just write all local storage usage to memory instead of disk.

<comment><USER80> The stackoverflow link I included says that the FileSystem API is disabled in incognito mode so its absence suggests the user is connecting via an incognito tab.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> What about older _junior_ developers?

I am 39yo, but I do not relate with these stories from people with 20+ years of experience in tech. I am a frontend developer for two years only, moving to Los Angeles just now and looking for a job.

Anyone would like to comment if my age and my lack of experience programming will compound and make extra hard for me to get a job?

</comment><comment><USER82> The way I look at it, when you work in tech, it doesn't take long for fields to become stratified. I've gotten turned down for a senior job for not having enough "agile experience." Really? Am you looking for an engineer or a project manager?

I think every single programmer needs to be looking forward to the day where every single job move is at best a lateral one, so it's going to make more sense to move towards business rather than staying in IC if you want upward mobility as a 'regular' coder.

I suspect IC technical jobs are going to be the next professional class, you're either going to be in when that happens or you're going to be out. You won't realize it's happened and you're not in until you get laid off and replaced by a contractor at a fraction of your salary, and you won't be able to find a job except as one of those contractors.

The reckoning is coming guys. Get ready for it.

<comment><USER10> I was recently rejected for a job for not having enough "API experience." I have been a backend engineer for 5 years. Regardless of whatever the hell "API experience" is supposed to be, my entire career has been designing, implementing, and calling APIs.

<comment><USER82> A recruiter gave me a great piece of advice, to ask the question towards the end of the interview, "is there anything that would cause you to think I'm not quite qualified for the position," this way you can get such concerns out in front and be able to address them while it's still convenient and before they reject you for it.

<comment><USER10> I did ask those things. Don't underestimate people's unwillingness to look you in the eye and tell you the truth when they think you might not like it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Seen on Mastodon (not me):

>Whenever I hear "We need more programmers! Make more young people interested in programming! Teach programming at kindergarten!" I always get the urge to ask "What did you do with the old ones you had?"

>Where are all those programmers you hired 5-20 years ago? Why is no programmer at your company older than 40? Why do you have _senior_ software engineers that are 25 years old? What did you do to all those people?

>If you can't take care of your employees, no wonder you never have enough.

<comment><USER84> there are obvious answers, likely interrelated

older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no matter whether they liked coding or management more. the ones that failed in some way - meaning a disruption in their spending and earning capability - <USER2> the only ones on the market trying to get programming jobs, and complaining about it.

fixing the earning trajectory in a programming track helps fix this outcome too. FAANG companies seem to have figured it out for people they've already hired.

<comment><USER39> > older devs had to go into management to keep their career trajectory, no > matter whether they liked coding or management more.

This just implies they like keeping their career trajectory more than coding.

<comment><USER85> They like paying their mortgage and providing for their families more than coding.

<comment><USER9> If you live anywhere besides the west coast in a major city and have 7-10 years of experience you can easily make $130K as a senior developer. That puts you right at the 5th quintile of household income.

If your spouse is making even $50K that puts you in the top decile.

[https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile- calculator/](https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/)

You don't need to move into middle management to comfortable support a family.

<comment><USER85> And how are the schools? The quality of life?

Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech.

So hack on the cool stuff at home. Treat your job as a job. There's no principal broken by going into management.

<comment><USER9> _And how are the schools? The quality of life?_

Like I said in another post, I just bought a 5 bedroom/3-1/2 bath house, 3000+ square foot house with a large office for $330K two years ago in the northern burbs of Atlanta where the school systems are ranked in the top 15% nationwide. It is the most affluent county in GA and one of the fastest growing in the nation. Three exits down the same size house is going for about $450K and you're in one of the 10 most affluent cities in the nation -Johns Creek GA. ([http://money.com/money/collection-post/4504851/richest- towns...](http://money.com/money/collection-post/4504851/richest-towns- america/))

 _Vs just sucking it up and doing your own hacking on the own time. Even if you write code all day at work, you should be doing some at home, because we need to keep up on the latest tech in a risk-tolerant environment (like personal projects that can fail with no loss). Companies can 't afford to take on the project risk of leading edge/research level tech._

When I'm at home, I'm exercising, spending time with my wife and son, and just relaxing. If I can't keep up with the latest tech at work, it's time to change jobs.

Yes I will do work related side projects to learn a new to me technology, or proof of concepts with newer technology that aren't on the critical path. I also work at small companies where I do get my hands dirty with everything from the front end to playing around with whatever I want to with a DEV AWS Account.

I don't do "leading edge technology". They are probably not widely marketable yet. I stay on the far end of "the slope of enlightenment" going to "Plateau of Productivity" of the Hype Cycle.

My resume is very buzzword compliant

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> It's interesting that corporate diversity reports provide population breakdowns for demographic categories involved in heated political debates but seldom (never, in my experience) provide breakdowns according to other categories that might be just as important for diversity of thought, e.g. age and political affiliation.

<comment><USER10> Political affiliation? What would that have to do with working as a software engineer (for instance) at most companies?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry, but this comment section is primarily focused Bay Area, LeetCode, California, and Software Devs.

Mean while the story doesn't focus on any of those things in particular. How is an old gentleman getting turned away from a job at a restaurant chain, Season 52, for, "Not looking young enough" relate to any of that and the broader issue of Age discrimination across the board. The anecdotal stories are cool and fine obviously.

But normally non-tech postings on Hacker-News, especially political news stories/articles, lead to discussion about what was discussed _in_ the article at least somewhat... And I'd like to see that. Just found it odd. Don't mind me if this sentiment isn't shared.

</comment><comment><USER87> Can anyone tell me if this is felt all over specifically in areas like the midwest or the south? Or does this problem happen mainly in the weird zones of silicon valley and NYC?

</comment><comment><USER88> I am going to hit 37 this year. I am still a student doing a PhD (an international student). These kind of story scares me.

</comment><comment><USER89> I would be more than happy to help find work for anyone who is unemployed due to being "overqualified."

</comment><comment><USER25> .... why not contract?

</comment><comment><USER90> There is also a whiteboard bias

</comment><comment><USER91> Age is not a problem, just avoid companies younger than yourself and I think you'll do just fine.

</comment><comment><USER92> In IT, employers find it much easier to scale with junior employees. It is not about their age, but rather the fact that they are cheap and available. Old people tend to be expensive and less likely to change jobs.

Job ads address people more likely to be a good fit. That's it.

</comment><comment><USER93> Young people have more variable potential. If you hire a young person they might be 100x or 10x or 1x in a couple years. If you hire an old person you already know they aren't 100x or 10x otherwise they would be above you in the org chart or retired. There's nothing wrong with 1x, but preference for young people is common sense all else being equal. And it's never equal in terms of salary expectations and extra effort.

<comment><USER94> Advancement is typically a pyramid, which means not everyone can reach the top. It is impossible for everyone to "be above you in the org chart or retired."

<comment><USER93> You made my point better than I did. "Not everyone can reach the top." Young people have had fewer opportunities to reach the top. Not being at the top is a negative signal that gets stronger every year.

<comment><USER95> There's no room for those young people, so the chance one will be 100x, whatever you mean by that, is effectively 0. Young people are malleable and cheap. The majority of workers are never more than commodity labor. As the saying goes anyone can be replaced. That being the case cheaper and easier to exploit is what's being optimized for. But they'll let you think you got a shot at 100x, it's how the scam work kiddo.

<comment><USER77> ONLY a kiddo would say something like

> If you hire a young person they might be 100x or 10x or 1x in a couple > years.

100x?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Germans Are Coming for Their Gold - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/us_news/49540593

<comment><USER2> Try: <http://www.cnbc.com/id/49540593>

Interesting article, I liked this part:

"The compartments do not have labels reading "Germany's gold" and so on. They are instead numbered, and only a few people at the Fed know what numbers correspond to which country. The Fed says it does this to protect the privacy of the depositors. But this also makes actual inspection less reliable. There's no way for Germany to know that the gold it is being shown is Germany's, as opposed to some other depositor's. In an extreme case—which I have no reason to believe is true—miscreants at the Fed could just show everyone who came to visit the same pile of gold."</comment>


Show HN: Linux's most powerful performance monitoring - <AUTHOR> https://my-netdata.io/ <comment><USER2> Some bold statements I see here: "powerful", "stunning", "unparalleled insights". Care to justify them and prove they're at least remotely valid? As far as I remember, it was a non-trivial UI for most trivial charting of easily collectable Linux statistics, only collected in sub-minute intervals. And it didn't look like it would be useful for more than a few servers.</comment>


Does Our Industry Have a Drinking Problem? - <AUTHOR> http://alistapart.com/column/does-our-industry-have-a-drinking-problem

<comment><USER2> No, our industry has a blogging problem.

Tech (is that our industry?) is not unique in it's practice of hosting happy hours, _especially_ after conferences.

People like drinking. We could ask more conferences to host 5k jogs as an alternative meeting event, and it would be novel and fun, but it likely wouldn't ever be as inclusive as a happy hour (Also, it's hard to get 5 people in a circle talking while on a jog).

Not everyone drinks or likes drinking, but as a practical matter, it's:

        1. convention
        2. inexpensive for organizers
        3. easy to organize
        4. likely to encourage mingling and conversation

Which are important goals for organizers that aren't as easily met by alternate activities.

<comment><USER3> Has anyone considered that blogging might be a disease?

<comment><USER4> Commenting on comments about a blog post, on the other hand, is the highest form of human expression.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this phenomenon unique to the information technology industry? I don't know what they do for fun at pharmaceutical conferences, but I suspect alcohol is often involved.

<comment><USER6> Society has a bit of a drinking problem. (Some other societies, like Russia, have a bigger one. Some have less.) Next question? :P

<comment><USER7> The next question is that if it's a problem how do we solve it?

> _That said, I am still struggling to find good alternatives to the pub > meetup, particularly in the UK. Other than taking over the corner of a > larger coffee shop for a daytime meet, what kind of things are possible and > inexpensive for small groups?_ //

So ditch alcohol and go with caffeine instead ... hmm.

Maybe with the right groupings gaming could be part of the solution?

You need something that people can share, that requires communication and so initiates conversation. (That gives people something to do with their hands? That fosters a sense of shared experience?) Some types of gaming can do that and in certain sectors gaming may be as universal as drinking.

So, everyone back to my place for a game of tiddlywinks then?? [I did mean computer gaming but ...?]

<comment><USER8> _You need something that people can share, that requires communication and so initiates conversation. (That gives people something to do with their hands? That fosters a sense of shared experience?) Some types of gaming can do that and in certain sectors gaming may be as universal as drinking._

It also needs to be sufficiently unstructured that people can drift in and out as individual conversations move past small talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does our industry have an anxiety problem?

Does our industry have an overgeneralization problem?

Does our industry have a busybody problem?

Does our industry have a problem with emotional overindulgence?

<comment><USER10> "Hey, don't look at me, I'm just asking questions!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every trade show I've ever been to has some kind of "reception" near the end of the first day, if not the night before the opening. Everyone is finally in one place and there's a bit of socializing going on at this point.

European trade shows tend to have fully stocked bars and bartenders _in the booths_.

</comment><comment><USER12> Here's a point that gets forgotten in a lot of discussions of this issue:

> We're also underlining that our events are for over-18s, maybe even > over-21s, by holding them in licensed premises. Most of us know students or > even those who are working professionally in our field long before they are > "adult." Should they be excluded?

<comment><USER13> Under-18s can still enter licensed premises. At least here in the UK they can. And they often do, if my local that is more "5-year-old's playground" than "pub" is representative.

<comment><USER14> the former UK prime minister forgot his daughter at the pub.

<comment><USER15> Former?

Do you know something I don't?

;-)

<comment><USER14> [http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jun/11/david- camero...](http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jun/11/david-cameron- daughter-behind-pub)

<comment><USER16> Right, but David Cameron has been prime minister since 2010, and still is, so "former" doesn't yet apply to this case.

<comment><USER14> oops sorry I thought the story was older, I didn't check the time frames.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> People _drinking_ at a social event? Who would have thought.

</comment><comment><USER18> I would say it's our society that has a drinking problem. It seems to me that overall, people drink less in our industry.

<comment><USER19> I agree - if you are go to school in the US you're exposed to binge drinking on a weekly basis - also - software engineers seem to drink a lot less than other industries like Finance, etc.

<comment><USER20> Real courses require more time to study. :)

You could tell which dorm rooms had business majors by the number of beer cans in the trash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Almost every conference's second day opens with attendees being asked how their hangovers are. Second day early-slot speakers joke that no one will turn up anyway, or they'll all just be staring into their coffee. It has become normal, in fact expected, that drinking and staying out late is what we do while at conferences._

There are a number of issues here: drinking (to excess), staying out late, and scheduled events early the day after these are known and expected to happen. I would think that drinking is actually the least of them.

 _Of course it's possible to attend these events and not drink, but being the sober person at a party gets tiresome._

It's also possible to drink without ending up drunk, by not drinking too much. Alcohol is metabolized at... I think it's around 1h20m/drink or so.

 _I attended Monitorama EU recently, where one attendee had proposed a 5K run around the Tiergarten in Berlin on the morning of the second day._

It sounds like this actually worked, which I find surprising (really, talking while running?). Something to note tho, is that it was a "small group" that did this which sounds even less all-inclusive than leaving out underage participants is.

 _Photo or history walks around cities can be attractive to a lot of people in our industry_

Yes.

 _These are all good examples of simple things that can be organized around conferences to create alternatives or additions to the parties._

Something to keep in mind for these is that they're _outdoors_. Which means they're subject to weather and to daylight hours. They also involve moving around / doing things in an organized fashion.

 _That said, I am still struggling to find good alternatives to the pub meetup, particularly in the UK. Other than taking over the corner of a larger coffee shop for a daytime meet, what kind of things are possible and inexpensive for small groups? In particular I find it hard to organize alternatives for the type of meeting where the numbers that might turn up are hard to predict._

The thing about coffee shops and pubs is that everyone is in one place with no organized activities to pay attention to. This is the important part, and the drinking only comes in because that's what society says to expect when you have a group of people "hanging out" with no agenda in the evening.

</comment><comment><USER21> The only drinking problem I see here is that people are drinking whiskey out of plastic cups. Philistines.

</comment><comment><USER22> Conference (a.k.a. Symposium) is "by definition" a place for such activities. :-) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium)

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting. Drinking isn't confined to "this industry." But, aren't most technical people control freaks more or less? Wouldn't they rather keep tight control of their thought process? Maybe being tipsy is the only way out of the exhausting, taxing aspect of continuous over-analysis and wanting to remain in control; the occasional forced-break that would otherwise be consciously difficult to attain.

This is veering a tad bit on the ironic side...

</comment><comment><USER4> Personally, as someone who has a strong aversion to drinking to excess and has never been to a conference--the fact that I hear so much about drunken partying at these events is the single biggest reason I have never attended one. I keep hearing about fascinating conferences. Then I hear people talk about their experiences at conferences, which sound essentially like stories about partying in college, and think--well, if the main social activity is "partying," then I'll miss most of the social aspects of the conference. So I just watch videos of the talks online instead. (Maybe this is dumb, so I'm open to suggestions that my impressions are incorrect.)

The reactions here--which range from "everyone does it" and "there's no solution" (which may well be true!) to "stop being a whiny busybody," are unfairly dismissive. The author didn't say that drinking should be banned. She simply suggested a few alternative activities that didn't involve drinking, many of which can be organized by attendees themselves, and pointed out that a culture of partying may turn off some people, which is certainly true in my case.

</comment><comment><USER24> Nice link bait by the author, wow.

<comment><USER7> It's a curated collection of articles with only a byline to the author. It seems a worthy subject of introspection. So do you think it's really link bait?

<comment><USER24> Yes I do. She merely just says she'd rather find another meetup spot that's not a pub and offers suggestions. Doesn't go into boorish drunken behavior that she witnessed at these meetups or something equally alarming that one would expect from someone who presupposes 'Does our industry have a drinking problem?' That's a pretty weighty title, but unfortunately in today's world where it's all about getting page views, people will now dilute once-weighty- sounding titles for to increase clickthrough rate.

<comment><USER7> A drinking problem doesn't need to be drunken rowdiness. I just take it that she's saying "the focus of our social time appears to be consumption of alcohol, is that true, is that right?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Uff.. I haven't read A list apart in some years now as my interests shifted. But, is this what a once quality website/blog has become? Don't even want to open the article with such a bogus title.

Also, I have read and heard what has happened these last few weeks and can't seem to change my mind that the US folks are much more 'sensitive' to this kind of things then in EU.

</comment><comment><USER26> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

</comment><comment><USER27> Betteridges Law of Headlines is applicable here. What a remarkably silly and sanctiminous piece.

</comment><comment><USER28> I've concluded that white people from Anglo cultures have a drinking problem in general.</comment>


Sitting straight 'bad for backs' (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6187080.stm

<comment><USER2> This is such bullshit. The problem with all forms of sitting for long periods is that (without corrective exercise) your spinal muscles waste away.

This is where the pain comes from - your spine is not supporting itself any more and the discs become compressed and misaligned and the muscles more easily strained.

In this context, sitting in a more relaxed position where "less strain is placed on the spinal disks and associated muscles and tendons" might temporarily avoid some of the pain from strained muscles but is going to make the problem worse in the long run.

To get away from this cycle of back pain you need to do one thing: targeted exercise to build up the atrophied muscles.

Personally I have found that a more 'active' (i.e. straight upright) sitting position also helps, now that my back is fit enough to cope with this.

'Ergonomic' office chairs like the Herman Miller seem to make the problem worse for me, I believe because they are all designed with the misguided notion that they should support your back for you.

It is well known that bones, joints and muscles all need loading and working in order to stay healthy (for example: [http://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/guide/osteoporosis- exercis...](http://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/guide/osteoporosis-exercise))

If any of you are suffering from back problems and are lucky enough to live in Europe near one of these gyms [http://www.kieser- training.com](http://www.kieser-training.com) I highly recommend them (there are others with similar programme) ...I'm not associated in any way but they have made a massive improvement to my life.

The suggestion that 'strain' on 'muscles and tendons' is bad for your back is a dangerous one IMHO ...yes this is why you have pain right now, but the answer is to strengthen the back so the muscles can cope, not to use the muscles even less!

<comment><USER3> My spine has become crooked since I stopped lifting for a while, it's actually quite pathetic. The only thing that sorts it out and relieves the pain is core and lower back exercises. Fortunately these are the most accessible exercises: you don't need machines or weights. One thing I like to do is go to the gym and dangle from the tall pull-up bars, completely relax my muscles and let my spine decompress and hang. Then, I do a rowing/pedaling motion with my legs while I dangle, as well as do high kicks. I have to keep doing it, though, if I don't go every alternating day my back will be crooked and painful once again.

<comment><USER4> I do the same thing (hang from the pull-up bars). It seems to sort things out, but I get light-headed nearly every time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The problem is people are in the habit of slouching forward, pulling on the muscles at the front. In order to "sit straight", they will likely tense the opposite muscles and pull both front and back muscles at the same time, making the problem worse.

Far better is to reeducate yourself how to release the forward pulling muscles. This however is no easy task. Thommas Hanna has a good book about this with very interesting exercises to practice.

[http://www.amazon.com/Somatics-Reawakening-Control- Movement-...](http://www.amazon.com/Somatics-Reawakening-Control-Movement- Flexibility/dp/0738209570)

The Alexander Technique is another discipline that teaches you how to re- educate your mind / body control.

Watch professional dancers, how they appear to be both straight and relaxed and fluid with their movements. Not stiff and rigid. Also people who practice Yoga are both flexible, yet have better than average posture.

<comment><USER6> I've always wondered how dancers do it, even though I'm athletic and more flexible than the average person (hypermobile in some joints actually). So that sounds like potentially useful reading. I've been standing at work for a few years, full time since I got an Ergotron Workfit a couple of years ago. It probably would be healthier to go for a balance of sitting and standing, but I think I do tend to be a little too rigid when sitting up. Additionally, I'm not much more than five feet tall and it seems like chairs and desks just aren't designed for people of that sort of stature. Even ones that are otherwise relatively ergonomic.

I wish it were easier to find a healthy balance without having to treat oneself as a longitudinal case study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hip angle is not the issue, or at least, it's a secondary concern. The main concern is spinal flexion. You want to be sitting with a neutral spine, regardless of hip angle. You'll start to get issues like bulging discs and strained muscles if your lumbar spine is in flexion for long periods of time.

Problem is, most sedentary people, especially men, do not know and cannot feel the difference between hip flexion and lumbar spinal flexion. When you ask them to touch their toes, they keep their hips mostly extended and flex their spine instead. Very bad.

Strength training (particularly powerlifts like weighted squats and deadlifts with proper form, as well as assistance movements like back extensions and good-mornings) can help strengthen the muscles of the lower back, making it much easier to keep your lumbar spine neutral while sitting.

<comment><USER8> _" Problem is, most sedentary people, especially men, do not know and cannot feel the difference between hip flexion and lumbar spinal flexion. When you ask them to touch their toes, they keep their hips mostly extended and flex their spine instead. Very bad."_

Agreed. This is something I didn't know I was doing until I started doing Yoga regularly -- after a while, you become very aware of the weakness of your back muscles, the tension of your hamstrings (if you're the typical male), and how the overall tendency is to tip your pelvis backward while seated, which makes your spine bulge to the rear. And when you're standing, you tend to tip your pelvis the _other_ way (due to weak abs), leading to the "beer gut" phenomenon, and impinging the lower back. It's no wonder that people have back trouble as they get older!

For men especially, Yoga focuses on stretching the hamstrings, straightening/strengthening the back, and increasing range of motion in the hips and legs. I highly recommend it -- if you keep at it, it really helps reduce pain in the lower back (plus, you get addicted to the stretching).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The thing you should be doing is not sitting at all, at least not for hours at a time.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure why you were downvoted - I thought it's pretty well-accepted that prolonged sitting is bad for you.

<comment><USER11> It's also fairly well accepted that prolonged standing is bad for you.

<comment><USER12> In case anyone is curious, an explanation of this from Cornell ergonomics researchers: [http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html](http://ergo.human.cornell.edu/CUESitStand.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I switched to a yoga ball a few years back and my lower back pain went away completely. While sitting in general might not be ideal for long periods of time, at least with a yoga ball my back is forced to support itself, is constantly moving/adjusting and I get the adult equivalent of a bouncy chair at my desk.

For me personally it's been a great success, but I have yet to see any conclusive "yoga balls are better than chairs" articles that didn't read like new age dribble.

<comment><USER5> That's a problem I find with a lot of these activities. There is some good stuff, mixed in with a lot of mystical / new age bullshit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They've only tried 3 positions (<90 deg, 90 deg and 135 deg), and in any case they aren't working with an explanatory theory, so how on earth are they entitled to claim that 135 deg is optimal?

However I believe the optimal position _is_ slightly reclined, for two reasons: (1) only then is there enough passive friction between the chair's back and the sitter's back to provide lateral support, (2) our spines evolved while we were walking and running around in Africa, looking mostly not at the horizon but at the ground several metres ahead, checking for snakes, pitfalls, stones, etc). thus our most natural viewing angle is less than 90 deg wrt to the spine

</comment><comment><USER15> Advice from someone who has been studying spine biomechanics for a while: [http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/strategies- to...](http://www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/excerpts/strategies-to-make- seated-work-less-demanding-on-the-back)

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm always putting my feet up so I'm more lying than sitting. I'm probably screwed anyway. I'm way overweight so worrying about my seating or standing position is like worrying about which orientation my deck chairs are facing. Standing vs sitting is for the ultra-healthy.

<comment><USER17> If you are fat, you have one extra reason to be carefull about your body positioning, any strain created by bad posture increases with weight.

<comment><USER16> You look at these standing desk types, they're usually skinny and already healthy. Standing for long hours when you're overweight is not a reasonable, nor probably healthy suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well, you should not seat for long periods of time.

If you do you train your body, the same way that if you look just with one eye you modify the eye you don't use, you modify your spine if you seat or use heels for long periods of time.

A good chiropractic professional could read your body in an amazing way.

Once you have modified your body by use, being "comfortable" is not the same as "healthy". Smoking is comfortable for a smoker, taking drugs is comfortable for a drug addict and covering one eye is more comfortable than using it once you have used only the other for a long time.

<comment> a-priori There is no evidence that chiropractic treatments are any more effective for treating back pain than other manual treatments (e.g. massage). And it comes with much higher risks. There is no evidence it does any good for anything elsewhere on the body.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic#Effectiveness](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiropractic#Effectiveness)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there any type of sitting that isn't bad for backs?

<comment><USER10> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding- like_sitting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riding-like_sitting) might be. I personally use a saddle chair at work these days, although there are fewer serious studies done on the subject than I'd like. One of the evident benefits of sitting higher is that it's less effort to stand up, walk around, and also work standing up (if you have an easily adjustable desk).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I switch back and forth with a chaise lounge in my (luckily, home) office. I'm getting a sit/stand desk, so I'm hoping that the three positions should enable lots of healthful motion (lying/reclining, sitting, standing).

</comment><comment><USER21> Has anyone ever figured out how to type at a 135 degree angle? It always seems to put too much pressure on my wrists and shoulders, and I return to slumping.

<comment><USER22> Get one of those adjustable keyboard trays that allow you to control the angle of the keyboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is exactly how I have been sitting this week, on a sofa actually, since my chair was getting too uncomfortable, and now my neck feels alarmingly stiff.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure it's the sofa, not the posture.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any front end stack recommendation? - <AUTHOR> I'm a system programmer trying to build a mobile friendly web interface. The backend will be basically a django application with an API (data heavy). Any recommendation on the best stack to go with? It should be easy to work with for a python/C++ developer. <comment><USER2> Just use React. The frontend SPA frameworks are thankfully converging so there's not a huge advantage to using one over the other. So if you're just getting into the fray, use the most popular one because it has the best support and documentation.

Avoid Angular. It's a massive and complex framework with a vertical learning curve, and relatively poorly documented.

I also highly recommend using Typescript throughout with Tslint on very strict settings using Microsoft's extensions and VsCode as your editor. This will provide the least painful experience for a front end transition that's already going to be....shocking

</comment><comment> un-devmox To really give a proper recommendation, it would be nice to know more about the interface. Does it need to be a SPA? Really think about this before making a decision and committing to a javascript SPA framework.

If it doesn't need to be a SPA, then just stick with Django + Bootstrap.

Before jumping into a javascript SPA framework,</comment>


Display Ads: My 3¢ Worth - <AUTHOR> http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2017/01/display-ads-my-3-worth.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Personally, I spend hundreds of $$ for almost zero results. How you are right.</comment>


RIAA Undergoing Massive Layoffs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/riaa-undergoing.html <comment><USER2> I would offer to play the world's smallest violin, but I don't have the rights to any appropriate music.

</comment><comment><USER3> From what I've collected (I don't follow all this very closely), around two months ago, the Supreme Court somehow made it clear that they would _not_ reopen internet law anytime soon, which, in effect, shut down the RIAA's main purpose: to take test cases to the Supreme Court in hopes of changing the laws. Layoffs would make sense in that context.

<comment><USER4> Hmm, I thought the lawsuits were profitable and the purpose was not to go to trial but generate settlements as quickly as possible.

<comment><USER5> Yes, but they've targeted so many people that they've started getting people who have the balls to fight back. The worst thing for the RIAA would be if a judge ruled that they cannot sue individuals for copyright infringement.

You have to consider that the RIAA is currently going up against Harvard, including a counter-suit alleging that their practices is unconstitutional. If ruled unconstitutional it can be retroactively enforced, meaning _all_ money they took will have to be paid back even if they paid peoples wages with it.

So essentially the counter-suit from Harvard could potentially destroy the RIAA in one bang of a judges gavel. The RIAA could be trying to get themselves protected by the whole statute of limitations, I'm unsure how this applies as I've never really looked into it (not living in the US and all).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good to see they're finally running out of money.

</comment><comment><USER7> As happy as I am to see this news, the RIAA is only an organization that represents the labels, therefore layoffs there only represent a tiny fraction of the member workforce (which I'm sure is shrinking too).

"Hypebot.com reports dozens of RIAA workers are being let go."

Not exactly massive.

</comment><comment><USER8> And it's all because of those damn kids and their recordable cassette tapes.

</comment><comment><USER9> What, Faustus, weepst though now?

Tis too late! Despair, alack, farewell!

Fools who laugh on earth must weep in hell!

</comment><comment><USER10> Every cloud has a silver lining it seems.

</comment><comment><USER11> HA-ha!

</comment><comment><USER12> Pass the lmaoaise!

</comment><comment><USER13> Ah, yes, the sweet sweet sound of FAIL!</comment>