I’ve given a hundred people advice on handling discrimination at this point, and the thing I always stress is that it only matters what you can prove, not what happened.

Protecting yourself against discrimination doesn’t mean trusting the courts. It means being willing to lie or mislead people into thinking you aren’t in the category of people who gets discriminated against, making yourself too much trouble to fire, and finding open-minded employers.

If you’re in a disadvantaged group, you need to pick your battles, and accept that life isn’t fair.

Pure Wisdom!

You do not often get an email to tell you you were not accepted for a position (unless you made it far in the process)

Businesses have pushed heavily for at-will employment; this means that businesses don't need to say why people are fired.

So they don't have to write down why you were not hired, nor why you were fired.

So you have to prove that you were not hired/or fired for being in a protected class. This is extremely difficult short of a recording of the interviewer saying e.g. "so you're pregnant?" => can possibly argue discrimination, but it's still difficult. This kind of stuff works in a panel interviews or bad work environment when you can compel testimony from other workers who would rather risk their job over jail... but doesn't work well in 1:1 or 2:1 situations where one or two people just need to lie to avoid the lawsuit.

Or, not even lie, but just be unaware of the subconscious biases influencing them. Then they can say with a completely straight face that your group had nothing to do with it, even if that isn't true.

Something being illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

I imagine it’s a lot harder to sue an industry for not hiring you than it is to sue your employer for firing you.

You call it discrimination, they call it employment at will.

I assume it's not that easy to prove, so most people don't take legal action.

Personally, I don't take legal action even if I think I can win the case, because it's just too much time and effort, and I don't want my life to focus on said legal procedure for the next n months.

I assume other people also think they need to choose their battles.

If they're in the US, only provable discrimination is actionable, and you'd have to hire a lawyer.

because they say “not a good culture fit” and you can’t prove anything

Yup. Also, the entire industry pretty much actively supports and accommodates ageism. It's not like a few "rogue actors." Everyone is in on it, and it starts from the top.

Also, I found out that some younger folks really hate us. A number of folks used the interview process to try humiliating me, and taking out their personal animus.

After a few of these, I decided "Bugger this for a lark," and just accepted that I shouldn't bother looking, anymore.

But I think people are being hoist by their own petard. I'm seeing folks in their forties, that never had any issue, finding work, hitting the wall. These were people that did it to others, when they were working.

We can't become other races, and we [usually] can't become other genders, but we all become old, so each of us will have a turn at the wheel.

We just hired a guy out of retirement a few years ago. Retired after 30 years of C dev but wanted to keep busy in the small town we're based in. He's beloved by all of the software devs and the cyber team (we're basically two companies in one). The first week he was asking questions about how git worked. Then like a week later he was explaining why massive amounts of python code we wrote for running simulations was inefficient and how it could be fixed.

Same thing here we hired a retired domain specialist, sure he had issues with all current dev environments, tooling etc. But that's still a really clear net positive. There is no way we could have built this without the decades of knowledge he has.

Have you tried the indie software thing like this guy? How has that been going? I feel like I have enough saved now that even if I can't get corporate work anymore due to age (which I kind of doubt due to the age of people I've worked with in FANG, and the fact I'm already pretty much a manager of managers, which tends to run older) that I would be pretty happy doing the indie thing too.

I'm working on apps for nonprofits that can't afford people of my caliber. I don't charge for my work, but take it every bit as seriously, as if I were. It's actually part of the satisfaction that I get from the work.

Keeps me busy and up-to-date, and is extremely gratifying.

I'm getting ready to release an app that is a top-to-bottom system, involving a couple of servers that I wrote, along with a fairly robust native iOS frontend.

Works a charm. I've enjoyed it. Of course, I have to keep my scope humble, but I've always been able to punch above my weight, so it's working out.

Do you invoice them anyway and zero out your fee, or just do the work for free and don't invoice them?

I don't invoice them. The outfit is really small. I am an officer of the 501(c)(3), though.

I've found that most non-tech folks don't have any idea how much it costs to have real talent working for them (or even crap talent). I don't feel like arguing about it. I can't declare it, so it's not worth the agita.

I had an org in NYC offer me a Director of Product role ... for $90K.

FWIW: For your non-profit work, I'd recommend charging full price as donation if your tax jurisdiction allows this.

Sadly, it does not. We're not allowed to declare "sweat equity."

If I was able to declare it, I'd never pay a dime in taxes.

I have heard that Steve Kamen, who wrote the "I Love New York" jingle, gave full rights to the state, and never has to pay state taxes. I haven't found anything that corroborates this, but it could very well be true.

The work I do, is for a demographic that tends to be ignored. I doubt there's any tax breaks, headed my way.

You might be able to donate the copyright. That’s worth basically as much as the labor.

I have this cynical recurring fantasy that when the Unix epoch rolls over and every legacy system is broken, they’re not going to have anyone left in the workforce who knows the difference between the stack and the heap, and who can debug through disassembly when the binary has no symbols; so they’ll hire us graybeards out of retirement to save the day. Then I wake up and admit that what’s more likely to happen is the 25 yr old Directors of Engineering would rather rewrite all the software in JavaScript rather than admit they need us.

Or: "Thank you for your time, we decided to continue with another candidate."

And half of the companies simply ghosting unwanted candidates with no response after the interview.

It's not worth trying to force people to work and share income with anyone they deem ugly. It will add cognitive load / dissonance and hurt their performance. Lookism is not okay, this is not about endorsing these kinds of behaviors, but nor it is something that can be instantly nullified by just coming up with the labeling.

Maybe isolating cubicle walls, snail mails, audio-only telephones, and non-engineer sales representatives were good things. And possibly VR avatars in the future too.

But anyway, the point is, threatening someone who hates you(for any reasons, not limited to their bigotry) to work with you is not the path of least resistance.