How does one determine the age of an applicant from the resume? It's not recommended to put your birthdate. Years in the workforce?

graduation year or first employment

though you can just list your education without specific years and also skip mentioning first worthless jobs anyway to make yourself younger

A fair number of people list graduation dates.

It's not about losing the ability to adapt. Older people are more expensive because they're more experienced. Businesses would rather skimp on quality. I say this as a 22yo.

Another aspect I suspect is that older people have been around the block and have better BS detectors. This makes them less easy to roll over, and also they are more likely to offer a counter-narrative to whatever BS mgmt is pushing down to the workers.

That's not entirely true. Also, "experience" doesn't necessarily mean "quality" - especially when it comes to tech. Older people are also more set in their ways, less versatile, less likely to think outside the box, have far less energy and also have more responsibilities.

In a startup I worked at, we didn't hire any developers over 30. The only people over 30 was out CEO and he got hired after our 2nd round of VC funding. We wanted devs who fit our culture and of course people who could be "molded".

A 40 year old just wouldn't have fit in with a bunch of 20 year olds and he certainly would have trouble keeping up when we developed into the early morning to meet our deadlines/milestones/go-live dates.

But then again, startup culture is very different than established oldschool corporate culture. But starting up a company ( especially in tech ) and trying to survive is geared towards younger people.

Also, a 40 year old with with 15 year of VB experience in corporate america is worth nothing to a startup building enterprise software in VC++. I would choose a fresh grad from a top CS school with strong GPA and good work ethic over some 40 year old VB developer.

Sounds like people over the age of 30 are too smart to work "into the early morning" in exchange for lottery tickets.

Might be smart at any age to take the cash plus the lottery tickets in addition to the technical progress which could be leveraged to greater worth than both combined.

It can be said that the increasing emphasis on growth rates over other factors in the 21st century has driven the need for average engineers in excess of the above-average engineers that could be supplied, resulting in an overall decline in the quality of the engineering as time goes by.

Most importantly, some 22-year-olds have higher quality standards than others to begin with, and among these some will have trouble maintaining their best quality while others can continuously improve with age in ways that can not be done over the short term.

When it comes to being set in your ways at work, this should not be confused with a lifestyle of non-trendy workwear and preferring to just grill out by the pool every Saturday. Someone whom by nature is more versatile at work, can also have further years dwelling outside more boxes than less experienced operators are aware of. And thousands of hours more training to develop more not less energy plus increasingly efficient application of it, and with more decades of responsibilty-handling experience, no wonder they are filtered out by age-limiting employers who can not yet comprehend the outsized possibilities.

Sometimes older workers are so old-fashioned they don't spend any time at work on Facebook at all, getting shit done out of habit when needed can have its advantages when progress needs to be measurable.

Someone with 20 years of this type of versatility at work is simply 10X more valuable than someone having only two years along the path. You have to expect them to be worth more in compensation.

An outfit that is truly capable of leveraging its people will get a 10X return, and will very rarely approach 10X the compensation.

Too bad for so many so-called leaders it can be beyond their inherent limitations to herd the cats when there is a much more experienced, better-compensated, or more-performant cat in the herd. You can not let team perception of a compensation multiple become inflated beyond reality, instead it should be used to inspire younger workers to double their own productivity as realistically as they can without expecting to get 2X their compensation either anytime soon, while still making visible progress toward being better compensated for years of increasing productivity themselves.

You too, could be there someday, but only if you manage to overcome the obstacles to survive some of which are geared towards younger people.

Or maybe you plan to stagnate if you think it is unavoidable as you get older, your choice.

You probably won't get 10X the appreciation either way.

Then again there are those having decades of preference for working without days off when meaningful milestones need to be reached, and they couldn't realistically depend on many in their 20's to keep up very productively anyway under those conditions during their early years in our 24-hour business. Plus even under ordinary conditions a super-hairy 36-hour day can still come up.

Younger workers just seem less motivated these days, I don't call it lazy like some oldtimers do but it can give an unfair advantage to a seasoned higher performance operator who is often able to overcome milestones in ways that make the difference between a deadline being destructive versus productive financially.

Plus it takes a few years of hand holding and confidence-building before I want you doing this on your own.

These are some expensive ships.

At any age, starting up a company full-in takes a certain particularity of ambition that not everyone will know or understand. If and when I start another company, I would want to be able to leverage both the dedicated top 40-year-old VB developer in addition to the dedicated top fresh academic performer, along with the dedicated top 60-year-old FORTRAN operator.

Anything less would be limiting the shareholders' upside to less than its full potential, I might as well give up if I can't afford the 20X 60+year-old this time (40X the first year recruit).

Not a strict rule, however. Seeking a job based on non-pay qualities is also a thing.

For me the environment and industry matter a lot and will drive my pay requirements down, when I'm job-seeking.

So, the "sense in discriminating against" people who're older has this and likely many other trivial logical flaws.

Anyone able to translate the PDF? Google Translate a Document gives me 'insecure connection error'.

translate.google.com works for me and gives this URL:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

but fern12's link to the English version is better.

So what are people supposed to do? lol Just die? Seems harsh.

The answer is obvious. Lower the retirement age to 40!

Then they would refuse everyone over 30.

Lower the retirement age to birth.

or just introduce basic income and no need to touch retirement

Prove it was an illegal action and defend your right to employment: https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types/age.cfm

"The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older."

I appreciate your straight answer, and the call to defend employment rights. However, isn't it quite difficult to prove age discrimination? How successful are these legal actions?

...and if you're filtered out at the resume stage, good luck proving the intent.

If you can get to discovery, consistent filtering at the resume stage is probably the easiest thing to prove is unambiguous age discrimination.

Wait... it protects against discrimination only if you're over 40? So if you're under 40 you can be discriminated against? Isn't that discrimination itself? Huh?

don't publish specific dates for your education and don't mention first few jobs which are anyway worthless, immediately you got few years younger

alternatively you could put your age data in some link with tracking to figure out if they had look at it

Yeah this will just drive intelligent folks to strip academics dates from their resumes, and limit things to one page containing only their recent employment history.

The article was horrifying because I'll be 40 next year, and am just now really getting rolling in my career. And I certainly don't think of myself as any less than my younger colleagues. Sure, I have more baggage and other priorities (bills, family, hobbies), but I still work hard and deliver a lot of value.