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A comment on Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare. Parent comment

Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by DanBC on Sunday September 23, 2012 @06:09PM (#4562255)
> Bumping your college degree by 5 years in order to seem 5 years younger is, in my opinion, ethically OK

No. Not only is it lying, which is obviously not acceptable, but it is pandering to discriminatory attitudes.

It is not legal to discriminate based on age when employing people in the UK, and thus it should be pointless to lie about age.

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Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by danielweber on Monday September 24, 2012 @12:23PM (#4565419)
It is not legal to discriminate based on age when employing people in the UK, and thus it should be pointless to lie about age.

Yeah, we more or less have that in the US, too. (The details matter for specific cases, but not for general discussions.)

Yet, we still have people posting job offers like this, which demands you have gotten your PhD in the past two years.

http://parezcoydigo.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/old-phds-need-n...

I have a lot of appreciation for "you shouldn't ever lie on your resume," but I also feel for the people who feel they are being discriminated against. If someone black thought that he stood a better chance of being hired by pretending to be white (we used to call this "passing"), who am I to tell him that he should sacrifice his employment for the greater good?

If you want people to not lie about age, take away the incentive to do so.

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Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by DanBC on Tuesday September 25, 2012 @07:17AM (#4569718)
You're right. It's very easy for me to say "Don't pass, don't use a 'white' name." I live in a country with good laws, and quangos intent on upholding those laws, and free legal advice for people who feel they're being discriminated against. And yet it's still a problem.
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Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by vacri on Sunday September 23, 2012 @08:39PM (#4562679)
How do you prove that the HR person thought you shouldn't get a return call because you were a little too old?
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Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by DanBC on Sunday September 23, 2012 @08:50PM (#4562712)
Individually, you can't. That's why collectively resisting the temptation to play to discriminatory tactics is so important.

But, if you're researching, it's trivial. You send out a bunch of CVs / resumés that are identical apart from age. You then compare the return rates.

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Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by scarmig on Sunday September 23, 2012 @09:14PM (#4562769)
Out of curiousity, have people done this study about tech workplaces, particularly in the Bay Area?

If it's incredibly trivial to prove, I'd be surprised if it hadn't. (I'd be equally surprised if it had been attempted and shown no age discrimination--it'd push against my priors, but I'd try to keep an open mind.)

In reality, I suspect it's much harder than you suggest to prove, and even harder to litigate on.

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Re:Facebook's Gen Y Nightmare by michaelochurch on Sunday September 23, 2012 @09:38PM (#4562820)
The biggest problem with age discrimination is that it's subtle-- not overt. It exists in the form of harsh age-grading for accomplishments, because the delta between the average and the maximum possible at a given age grows, so the average person's deficit compared to where they "should be" becomes more of an issue. No one would pass on a 55-year-old CS luminary who's still writing papers, but 40-year-olds with the careers expected of 35-year-olds are screwed. After a certain age, being merely above average isn't acceptable anymore.

Most companies would rather bet on a young 6 than an old 8, because they overestimate their ability to mold the 6 into a 9 (which is actually very hard to do).

That's why establishing age discrimination is impossible. You'd have to generate identically indicative/"qualified" resumes at very different ages, which is probably impossible to do.

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