How has uptake been thus far among developers looking for a job? You may want to experiment with the way you frame this. As Adam Gopnik suggests in a recent New Yorker article on aging, one bias that works against your site could come from an unexpected source: aging developers themselves.

> In other words, many older people would sooner thrash on the floor in distress than press a button — one that may summon assistance but whose real impact is to admit, I am old.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/20/can-we-live-lo...

He's talking about products designed for baby boomers, but I suppose the same "eternal truth" as he puts it (i.e. "identity matters to us far more than utility") could factor in here.

He offers this observation in the article:

> The most effective way of comforting the aged, the researchers there find, is through a kind of comical convergence of products designed by and supposedly for impatient millennials, which secretly better suit the needs of irascible boomers. The best hearing aids look the most like earbuds. The most effective PERS device is an iPhone or an Apple Watch app.

Good luck and keep us posted on how things work out.

For what it's worth - I am a 52 year old programmer, and see ageism rampant in the industry where I am.

I'm the sort of guy who held off wearing glasses for about 2 years because I didn't want to seem "old", but I wholeheartedly embrace a community like this job board where I don't have to second guess whether I will make it past round one because my birth year predates man walking on the moon.

Programmers love short cuts. Older programmers are wise enough to see this as another way to bypass all those crappy hurdles that younger orientated startups will put in our way, IMO.

That might be one way to reframe this to avoid the AgeLab paradox mentioned by Gopnik: "Old people will not buy anything that reminds them that they are old."

Rather than, "Here's a site for older programmers," it could be, "Here's a site that will help you bypass all those crappy hurdles that younger orientated startups will put in your way."

Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of younger programmers started flocking to that site as well. I know I would. But then I'm old enough to be protected by the ADEA myself.

> For what it's worth - I am a 52 year old programmer, and see ageism rampant in the industry where I am.

Mind if I ask where you are? I'm almost 50 and haven't really seen any overt signs of ageism in my area. My pet theory is that it is much more regional than usually presented and am curious where which regions have it more than others. Thanks.

I am in Australia. In a remote location, not in the major cities. I just cannot seem to get meetings with VC people or meetings with government bodies etc. to discuss funding these days, even though I have a product that is active in the market and making money. Many younger colleagues whom I mentor get meetings for basic concepts and non existent products as soon as they ask.

I have other colleagues similar age to me who cannot get bookings for speaking gigs any more despite decades of experience doing so. One, who was instrumental in getting Microsoft off the ground in Australia back in the day is constantly told she is "not a good fit" when applying for a Product Manager position at local startups.

I'd say we are having a pretty good response. The website itself will not sort the ageism out. Companies first need to realise how important is to have a diversity staff not only because they are being forced to diversify but, as McKinsey and other researchers found out, diversity makes organisations "more effective, more successful, more profitable."

I love what you are doing. As in love. I wrote a whole essay on the postive and negative side of age (both old and young) in context of finding problems to solve for startups.

As a 45 year old I solved it by starting my own company and using that to my strength.

However I would caution against using the mcKinsey report as any kind of evidence or guide for thinking about diversity.

It's the same claims we see when it comes to gender too.

The reality is that there are no studies showing that in general companies who were not diverse and then decided to be more diverse by some of those mentioned metrics were suddenly performing better.

A much more likely interpretation is that companies who are doing well financially tend to be able to care more about ex diversity.

You could literally have a team of 20 old female/male geezers be just as diverse as a team with the most mixed combination of ages, genders and ethnic groups you could find.

What matters in my experience is what kind of diversity we are talking about and how it's used, not just whether there is diversity.

What matters is the market and that it allows for diversity itself.

You could have a team of only 20 year olds and you can have a team of +45 year olds and they would both offer something different to the market.

I don't think you even need to worry about that part to be honest.

The benefits of age are enough:

More experience, better ability in general to prioritize, focused on their work, less likely to work themselves too hard, more stability, less likely to switch jobs for the next great opportunity etc.

When people talk about ageism in tech, they aren't talking about great old people getting passed over for mediocre young people. They are talking about mediocre old people getting passed over for unknown young people with "potential".

They are talking about a lot of things including whether someone is too old for the dynamics on the team or in the company.

What prevents an ageist company from joining your job board and still being ageist? Vanishingly few companies admit being ageist

We believe if any company is ageist and don't want the more experienced ones working with them, the would have no benefits joining our job board. We can be wrong though

You know who isnt going to be ageist:

I left SV tech scene due to ageism, and retarded business models and joined Cannabis Tech Industry.

I am building out some serious tech-stack for managing cannabis cultivation and manufacturing.... (doesnt matter that the product is cannabis) - but this is the industry vertical that can really benefit from deeply experienced techs from SV into this space.

Basically, it works as a multiplier; in this space, one vet tech is worth 5X people for their needs. They wont hire 5X 20-somethings that only know one small portion of the stack requirements for all aspects of running a successful cannabis business, and will value those who are capable across broad reach.

If they don't want older devs, why would they pay to join the board? PR?

Since age discrimination laws only protect discrimination against people over 40 (you can legally exclude people for being young), I've thought it may be interesting to use this explicitly.

If age discrimination is actually happening in tech that means there is a large amount of people 40+ that are not being properly valued in the market.

It'd be cool to explicitly target these people by having jobs ads only for people 40+ (and it'd be neat to have mentorship of younger hires be a component of these jobs).

No idea how that would work out, but seemed interesting to target for recruiting.

Yes, that's an idea the could be explored.

Some countries age discrimination is not even considered a crime.

The problem detected is: in tech, the age discrimination starts earlier than 40, but at 36. What companies need to realise is a diversity staff can generate more money and produce more

> Some countries age discrimination is not even considered a crime.

It's not a crime in the US, either.

It is a statutory tort, though.

Is that in the US? Discrimination laws don't have a minimum age in the UK.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_Discrimination_in_Employme..., it appears so.

The reverse needs to be true, you can't bar someone for being young using the usual excuse of inexperience. Want anti age discrimination policies to get popular support? Make sure it goes both ways.

There's a certain asymmetry here. If you're under 25, that'll eventually fix itself, but once you're over 40, you're going to be over 40 for the rest of your life. Given that, it doesn't really make sense to treat these two cases exactly the same.

Intern is another term often used to prevent older, experienced workers from applying.

At Google Zurich intern mostly means female engineer under 23. Step intern means female engineer under 20 who had been 1 year in university. I haven't seen any male step intern.

STEP intern does explicitly mean female engineer under 20 with ~1 year of university. STEP is a diversity program and Google is quite explicit about its goals.

Also I don't like it as an internship program. Interns generally do useful work, their internship project is something that the hosting team needs. STEP interns generally don't, their project is educational (that is, won't be used), and the internship involves a lot more lectures (as in, sitting in a conference room and listening to somebody). It's good for some people I guess but if you wanted to "work at Google", STEP isn't it. It is a foot in the door towards getting in as a regular intern next year, though, so if you're OK with wasting a summer then it's a good option.

Oh, one more thing -- interns are currently enrolled in a university (which explains the ages).

Well, that explains my rejection at least in part.

I swear, some companies go straight from intern to senior team lead.

That's not always as absurd as it sounds. Particularly talented people can do it. The case of Seymour Cray, admittedly an outlier on the talent side, comes to mind. He was basically a senior team lead from the moment he got his first job, and that was in 1951.

I got that from this wonderful book, btw: https://www.amazon.com/Supermen-Seymour-Technical-Wizards-Su...

You giving an example all the way back to 1951 makes it sound like it is indeed almost always as absurd as it sounds...

I didn't mention Cray because there aren't others! He's just endlessly fascinating.

I mentioned 1951 because organizations were so much less flexible back then, making the example more compelling. I was going to say that, but then I remembered that in the book it talks about how the engineers at that company would bring their dogs to work, so it was obviously atypical.

My first job I accepted was a help desk tech. In 8 weeks I was a sr engineer. Why? I was the only person who stood up and suggested a way to test and isolate a problem that was happening on a few Sun servers. Mind you I had zero exp with sun at this point, but I showed initiative. This was circa 2000

That last paragraph says a lot. If you have a company and you want employees that are “tech-natives”, whatever that may mean, that is not the same thing as discriminating based on age. No, not even if they are wrong, and don’t actually need a tech-native.

This is just as silly as complaining that a moving company only hires people that are strong enough to lift a piano and women complain about sex discrimination because women tend to be much weaker.

It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else.

> That last paragraph says a lot. If you have a company and you want employees that are “tech-natives”, whatever that may mean, that is not the same thing as discriminating based on age.

"[W]hatever that may mean," indeed. It doesn't mean anything, and that's the problem. "The right sort of people," is what it really says, and it's not the first time in history that it's been used. All stereotypes are ineffective and self-defeating. If in your own mind you've associated "good engineers == tech native == young" then you'll probably miss out interviewing a lot of good engineers. And from their perspective that definitely constitutes discrimination. They never have a chance to demonstrate what they can do.

I think this is fortunately pretty rare in actual practice. I'm 58 and speak from some experience.

I love to hate the terms "tech native" or "digital native". In my experience of my kids and their friends they have far less knowledge about the workings of the technology they spend their days using than technology users even 20 years ago.

I suppose it's because we were self selecting as being interested in tech and as the tech was more primitive had to know more about it to get it working.

Even so, if you want to employ somebody who knows how to make the technology sit up and dance, employ somebody over 40 who was using computers when they were 10. If you want to employ somebody who knows how to read twitter and facebook then just pick the next kid in the street with their head buried. Good luck in getting their attention long enough for them to do your work though.

I think the main idea is that words like "tech-native" are really just weasel-words that can be used as a post-hoc justification for rejecting someone.

If my first immersion in tech was BASIC on a PDP-8 in the 70's when I was 12, does that make me tech-native or not?

Depends upon how you define it. I think most people who use the term tech native and digital native are referring to people who grew up with social media.

If you are looking for somebody to do your social media campaign, then go with the "tech native". If you are looking for somebody to develop the next blockbuster social media platform, maybe you will need somebody who has done time in the trenches learning how to develop robust software.

Why wouldn’t it?

And if they don’t actually believe in the tech native concept, why would they use it? You think they dislike people over 40 out of principle and just come up with excuses to avoid them, even when they fit their profile?

How is growing up playing games on an iPad a better indicator of ability than decades of experience in the industry? You wave away the idea that these recruiters may be wrong in their criteria as if that's irrelevant, but that's the whole point of discrimination. If all black people were criminals then racists would be correct in their views. This dissonance is the core of the issue.

I’m not saying it is, just that they think it is. I think they are allowed to think that.

And for what it's worth, the moving company analogy is extremely flawed. Most people apply for jobs in good faith. Moving companies (one of which I used to drive and load for, years ago), don't look to hire males or females. They look to hire people physically strong enough to do the job and skilled enough to do it well. They don't screen applications to weed out females. If a female applies for a moving position I think the average employer is probably going to assume she either knows what she's about or misunderstood the position. If you were to assume the latter then you might miss out on a good employee. There are plenty of women strong enough to lift furniture.

Well this was my exact point.

> It must be allowed to discriminate based on ability, even if a certain ability correlates trongly with age, sex or something else.

Wow! I rarely openly disagree with strangers on the internet but wow! I am currently focused on improving diversity and inclusion within my teams and the diversity of thought, approaches and outcomes that are a direct result of this effort are a delight. Progress may not always be in the right direction or slower than one expects but zigging and zagging towards the right thing is a reward in its own.

If there is an argument in your reply i must have missed it. My argument is that you must be allowed to hire only strong people if the job requires that, even if men in general wre much stronger. What would the alternative be?

I don't want to put words in GP's mouth, but they seem to be making the argument that "ability" comprises multiple considerations, one of which is the meta-consideration that employees should have a range of talents and experiences which are different from one another.

In the moving company example, it would be a mistake to optimize exclusively for physical strength in the hiring process - you're going to want someone who can work out the dimensions of things in their head to tell whether that table is going to fit through that door frame, someone who can put the homeowner at ease while you put their priceless heirlooms on a truck, etc.

In knowledge work, which is the domain I daresay most of us around here will actually be applying this to, there are far more of these variables, many of which are invisible to us. They impact a team's ability to, for example, devise innovative and robust solutions to problems by drawing on a wide range of inspirations, or design products that appeal to target markets beyond what any one team member might be familiar with. Valuing a diverse staff makes a reasonable proxy for these hidden variables.

Your argument, as I understand it, is that a company has the right to choose some characteristic and require that characteristic to be present at or above some standard level in all of the employees it hires. Which is fine, so long as it isn't one of these [0] (in which age is included).

However, I would argue that a term like "tech-native" is not a characteristic - it's a label, and it's loaded from the start. Imagine the moving company puts out a job ad saying that they're looking for "powerlifters" or "muscleheads" or something. What they _mean_ by that (or what they think they mean) is that they want people who are physically strong, regardless of any other characteristic. What they're _saying_ is that they want men, and no woman is going to read that posting and think that the poster is expecting women to apply. And when the candidate gets to the interview, the interviewer is going to try out that label on that candidate, and the label will inevitably be overloaded with connotations far beyond "physical strength" - with the best will in the world, the interviewer will end up selecting men at even a higher rate than they apply, because "masculinity" is part of the implicit set of characteristics attached to that label. The use of language in the want ad, rightly or wrongly, appeals to a certain type of candidate, and not only indicates but reinforces a preference for that type of candidate.

What would have been wrong with just saying "Must be able to lift 100 lbs", or "Must be comfortable with social media"? The term "tech-native" is an opaque neologism that doesn't mean anything other than the big ball of mixed-up stereotypes the HR person had in their head when they typed it, and a company that asks for "tech-natives" either doesn't know what they really want, or isn't willing to tell us straight out. Either way, we should be celebrating companies who don't use bs terms like that, which is exactly what OP is doing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

My point, and I realise it wasn’t very explicit, was that even if you put up a very concrete requirement like being able to lift 200 lbs, a certain kind of person will still argue that this is discrimination because mostly men will be able to meet the requirement.

It sounds like OP was arguing along those lines in her last paragraph.

But that’s untenable, if we consider that discrimination then we can’t advertise for people with skills in anything related to IT since 9 out 10 people with the skill will be men, yet it’s quite reasonable to want your web developer to know Javascript.

>Imagine the moving company puts out a job ad saying that they're looking for "powerlifters" or "muscleheads" or something. What they _mean_ by that (or what they think they mean) is that they want people who are physically strong, regardless of any other characteristic. What they're _saying_ is that they want men, and no woman is going to read that posting and think that the poster is expecting women to apply.

There are plenty of female powerlifters...

Btw isn’t tech-native just shorthand for “good with social media”? Then why not use that term?

Some companies have a Head of D&I specifically to promote it within the company. Yes, you are in the right direction.

Happy to share more details about your company?

How are you handling the data? I see your just asking companies to email you, but then somehow you have positions - do you pull them automatically or do you process them by hand?

I ask because we just finished a job round, and it was so annoying posting our job on all the specialist job boards that apply to us. Every single one had a different enough form that I had to spend time working out how it would be displayed, what went where, dealing with the various problems (eg, we offer full time and part time and the number of sites that make you choose one was frustrating.). I would love there to be a standard data file format where I could have written up our job once, then just uploaded the same file/URL to each job site.

That said, well done for starting this and I wish you luck in tackling this problem.

At the moment, what we ask is just 4 things and then, we ask the company 4 or 5 different open opportunities to include on the website. We then include those by hand, linking to the original company's job post.

Agreed this is annoying for job posters and we can discuss more how we could help you on that as well

> then, we ask the company 4 or 5 different open opportunities to include on the website.

Wait, so the company might have more job positions than the few you list on the website? I didn't realise that when I browsed, that should definitely be made clear.

Actually, if I can just email you a link to our own job page on our website that sounds nice and easy ... For me :-)

But, if you want this project to survive long term, you really need to sort out systems so your not doing manual work like that by hand. I've seen several projects in other areas that relied on the founder doing that, and they usually stop after a year or two. Your time is more valuable and is better spent on other things, too.

Yes the idea is to make easy for those who want to post jobs. Just a link to your job page is enough, but bear in mind your jobs descriptions not use words like tech-native, ninja, etc

At the momwnt we can do manually but yes, in the long run we need to automate those job posts

Just had a quick Google - https://schema.org/JobPosting has a data format

How much of the problem is a genuine bias, and how much of it is companies wanting to save money in the short term? Older employees are less expensive (smaller salary, fewer health/family events) and are less willing to work in poor conditions or work long hours to get ahead.

> the tech environment sometimes attracts young people and the more experienced professionals are being left behind

Why exclude the older and inexperienced?

Various reasons. They have families and might thus not be willing to work crazy hours, are more confident and won't put up with all the bullshit, etc

Also in my experience often tend to be more actually productive, partially by having the experience to avoid more bad ideas/approaches and dead ends. And by on average being much better at the non-typing parts of the job, which are just as important.

One difficulty is that real productivity is difficult to measure quantitatively, especially without putting actual effort into the measurement. Metrics like loc or hours-in-office are fairly meaningless but very easy to measure. Having weak middle/group management (very common in tech, for various reasons) relying on poor metric like this can easily lead you to a negative feedback cycle where you believe you are "better off" hiring a slew of young people, and your metrics "prove" it.

How is that not stereotyping? Not all older people are like that.

The correlation is very very strong though.

I end my day at 6pm, I don’t touch my laptop on most weekends, I say no to projects that I can easily solve but delays less user facing work, I get paid well into 6 figures.

Now if you asked me 20 years ago to do any of the above for a job that pays < $40k (about $65k today) I would have said yes in a heartbeat. Many late nights spent at work because they offered free pizza. Weekend work because without money what else can I do? I said yes to every project because of the fear of saying no and being replaced. And it wasn’t being replaced that bugged me out so much, it was having the find a new job.

Today I know my worth and I’ll leave a company in 30seconds if they treat me wrong. Amazing what 10+ years of experience (edit: and savings) does to your psyche. Still gotta play the game of dumb exploitable tech expert to get through interviews to negotiations, but once there get paid bruh

Yes exactly. Clearly a lot of companies will prefer 20 year old you, if they don’t need, or think they need, your extra 20 years of experience they won’t want to pay for it.

Young, inexperienced people tend to not know their worth and are easily manipulated into working longer for less.

Sometimes the hiring calculus maximizes quantity over quality.

I think I know Leo. Small world...