Age discrimination most widely known illegal employment practice in the entire US technology industry.

We have the top executive of a major Valley tech company, on the record, encouraging illegal discrimination against older people.

We have ongoing lawsuits by experienced engineers getting fired after their co-workers and superiors openly mocked their age.

Yet this practice openly continues, with CEOs like Zuckerberg feeling brazen enough to publicly tell their thousands of employees to break this law.

The legal prohibition is thus the most blatantly violated employment law in the book. Anyone who ever worked in the Valley knows that most folks over 40 can't get hired, certainly not by the many companies and startups routinely complaining about "talent shortage".

Incidentally, Mark, you are now 34 years old, which is "old" by Valley standards. Shouldn't you be quitting?

> Incidentally, Mark, you are now 34 years old, which is "old" by Valley standards. Shouldn't you be quitting?

Oh you know, this only applies to the rank and file. Management positions don't mind if you're a bit older, but if you didn't spend the last decade building out teams and people managing and just wanted to spend your career coding...tough cookies.

Why don't you start a software company that takes advantage of this market inefficiency by hiring people over 40? Why don't these unhirable 40-somethings band together and start a consulting agency?

You mean, respond to clandestine illegal age discrimination by openly advertising illegal age discrimination?

Legal age discrimination, in fact. Or you could not discriminate. You'll have no problem slurping up all these high quality 40-50-somethings on the job market, right?

Forgive my ignorance; it's legal in the US to discriminate on the basis of age as long as you're preferring candidates older than a given age, rather than younger?

As long as you aren't discriminating against people over 40.

I'll have to look into it. I'm an old fart myself, mostly self-employed since my mid 40s (because it suddenly got way harder to get hired as an employee), and I know a bunch of other old farts who are smart and have good skills.

Thanks for the idea.

Because that’s illegal?

Age discrimination is illegal only in one direction in America (federally, at least).

While ageism is very likely a real problem, the methodology used in this study is problematic.

Quote:

> “The tech industry is hiring a disproportionately higher ratio of workers than non-tech up until the age of 48—indicating bias does exist that favors younger candidates,” the report states.

It seems like the authors looked at how many people the software industry was employing relative to the rest of the market.

The correct (albeit trickier) approach is to look at ratio of applications to offers, grouped by age. Controlling for other variables would be ideal, but it makes this doubly harder.

The approach taken by the authors (looking at the ratio in the software industry vs. the wider economy) hides too many confounding variables. What if people in software make more money and are able to retire, so they stop seeking work around 50? What if there just aren't as many qualified people 48+ years old compared to other industries since software is a younger field?

Those and other questions are hard to answer when you take the approach taken by the authors.

Folks that are 48 now are some of the first to grow up with PCs in the classroom and are as savvy or more savvy than folks entering the workforce. They're just now finding that folks born after the 2007 introduction of the iPhone are becoming unfamiliar with keyboards, a still very necessary technology. That leads me to think that there's likely a rolling window and that we'll start to see increasing discrimination and exploitation on the other end in a few years time.