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From the Silicon Valley Business Journal:
Here’s how big the age discrimination lawsuit against Google is
Aug 1, 2017, 3:06pmJennifer Elias, Technology Reporter
So far, 269 people have joined a class-action lawsuit against Google claiming they were discriminated against in the workplace based on their age. …
Fillelkes claimed that a recruiter told her she needed to put her dates of graduation on her resume so the company could view how old she was.
I can’t remember: is transageism a sacred right, like transgenderism, or an abomination like transracialism?
In October 2016, U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman ruled that more software engineers could join the lawsuit. The lawsuit represents over-40 job applicants who sought engineering jobs at Google but say they were discriminated against because of their age. …
In recent years, Google has maintained it has policies in place to guard against age discrimination in the workplace. Last year, Judge Freeman reportedly responded:”Having such a policy does not necessarily shield a company from a discrimination suit, particularly in light of the evidence and allegations presented here.” …
In 2004, Google was sued in a case that was ultimately settled out of court for an undisclosed amount. …
Silicon Valley’s tech industry skews young. As of late last year, the median age of workers at both Google and Menlo Park-based Facebook was just 29 years old, according to the Huffington Post.
… Two-thirds of older tech workers say they have either experienced or witnessed age discrimination at work, according to a 2013 survey taken by the organization [AARP].
A study by recruitment platform Hired cited by the Financial Times suggests that once tech industry workers turn 45, they often see the number of job offers fall and their salaries plateau.
“People brag about how young the average age of their workforce is and say downright derogatory things to older people, almost like they are above the law,” McCann said recently, speaking generally about ageism in Silicon Valley’s tech industry.
Sorry, 40-something Googlers, but you don’t have any Diversity Pokemon Points, so nobody cares.
Sorry, Walter Brattain. You may have made Silicon Valley possible by co-inventing the transistor and won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics, but you were too old to work there now: age 45 in December 1947.
And Shockley was 37, and Bardeen was 39 so they barely squeak by. Plus, Bardeen was definitely too old when he did the work, starting in his late 40s, that won him his second Nobel.
Geek tech favors the young. Just like sports.
But maybe older people can go for trans-age.
Time is fluid.
So, if you’re 45, claim to be 25.
There are 50 age-enders like genders.
Just a few…
Perpetuals: These remain same age all their lives.
Graduals. These age 1 yr over a decade. So, a 2o yr old is 21 after 10 yrs..
Reversals. These age backward. So, this birthday, you went from 20 to 19.
Randoms. These go from 12 to 60 to 43 to 24 to 33 to 78 to 31 and etc day by day.
Seriously, though, if people can be trans-gender and trans-racial, why not transage? Why can't we just decide our age?
If I decide that I'm 66, does that mean I'm Social Security eligible?
Who's the govt to discriminate against me like this?Replies: @res
1 is the new 4
I wonder when bright young geniuses in the tech industry wake up and realize they don’t have a career past 40.
The only ones who make it are those who get the stock option package or in on a IPO and can retire early as a millionaires and leave the region for good. The others get ground up and leave or burn out. You really think extended work hours is good for a relationship or family. It isn't.
The base pay isn't all that great either compared to other professions. $130K, my local community college instructors make that. The local prison guards pull that down yearly, techs at Lockheed can make that with OT.
I remember advising a young woman who was offered a good job at Autocad back in the Dot.com boom. She was torn between that and working at a famous winery doing their accounting where she would have a company car and own office. I told her to take the winery gig. As I told her Silicon Valley eats people up and spits them out. She didn't take my advice. Less than a year later EMT carried her out on a stretcher from Autocad - she had a heart attack at work induced by insane work loads(which is why the person she replaced had quit). She ended up working for the National Park service and was quite happy with that.
If you want longevity aim for a state or government gig or DoD contractor. You actually be treated decently and if you cross your dot your I's and cross your T's, you're golden.
Subway sandwich artists, on the other hand..
Are there any tests that would show a coding related ability that would decline with age? I can imagine that a continuously working coder would get better up to a substantial age. Is it possibly only a way to get cheaper, or more “diverse” workers?
Males under 30-35 may still have the delusion they can work their lives away. But the day they come to the same conclusions as Peter Gibbons in Office Space does arrive eventually.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0001889/quotes
Age discrimination saves a bundle on employer-provided health insurance.
It's interesting that a lot of liberal policy proposals (high minimum wage, encouraging unionization, single payer healthcare, high regulation of workplaces) would probably have worked to keep immigration down. While a lot of conservative policy proposals (low minimum wage, union busting, minimal govt-provided healthcare, minimal regulation) encourages immigration from overseas.
It's no accident that Texas and SoCal have been so flooded by immigrants.Replies: @James Richard
Facebook is widely known to be the worst offender, at least among big tech companies. Other companies are more merit-based, like Netflix and Apple. But even then, this only applies if you are an older engineer in the top 5% of ability -- anything less, you are pushed out.
A large portion of the older engineer's plight stems from H1B's. For an older engineer, the effects are two-fold, either 1) attenuating the career of an engineer by several years or 2) or converting a mid-level, older engineer into a nervous, often childless, workaholic.
If you are ever looking for gold mine of material on tech companies, I would try to land an account on an app called Blind:
https://us.teamblind.com/ -- basically, where people post anonymously about their tech employers.Replies: @Ivy
Yeah, there’s no diversity points for all kinds of people who are fully qualified for the job but for being fat or bald or short or ugly or asocial (beyond nerdism) or with an odd voice or, presumably, very overtly Christian.
Damore at least proves that having a nose that looks like a schlong isn’t an impediment to employment, but otherwise he looks fairly normal – if criminally white.
Admittedly however, when it comes to age, rather than being a fat hunchback with facial blisters, it’s a fair guess that a young candidate is going to be better at the job than an older one. Yes, this is generalizing and I generally oppose it but what’s a hiring committee to do? 100 applications come in for a job, why not automatically toss out any non famous name of someone over, say, fifty?
When looking for a nanny for your kid you would probably do the same with all applications from black males. That isn’t to say that a good portion of them wouldn’t be excellent nannies but why take the risk when there are nice white ladies applying as well?
If age discrimination were accepted into the Pokemon Pantheon don’t you think it too would take over to a crazy degree such that the agent will be more likely to get a job then someone equally or more qualified who was younger? These things are a balancing act. And any company that can afford to honestly consider the applicants based on his or her own qualifications ought morally to do so, but how many companies can afford it?
WTF? He's not a bad looking guy, with or without the nose. He reminds me a little of Zach Braff (Garden State, Scrubs, etc.)Replies: @Moshe
There are plenty of reasons why younger workers could be considered worse: more entitled, poor work ethic, lack responsibility to carry out tasks on their own, less experienced etc. But I guess it's too complicated to consider all those factors so let's just make unfounded blanket statements.
Most of the young are People of ColOr
The Charlottesville terror murder is showing the world what white people are really like
Waydaminit.
Didn’t you once say that James Watson kicked every reasearcher who reached 40 years of age out of the lab?
And maybe you don’t want to give some under 50 year-old alt-righter ideas of suing Unz.com for age discrimination, too.
we realize on average at maybe 35. youve aged out of startups. need to change to management or figure out your version of maintaining COBOL code.
Steve,
We’d love to hear your take on Charlottesville. Your rhetoric and reasoning encourages this kind of behavior. Do you approve of it? Neo-Nazis and Klansmen? Is that your legacy? An answer is essential here for a man who takes ideas seriously, as you purport to do. Enlighten us.
Personally, I much prefer that you don't get it.
One sneaky reason Big Corporate is pro-transgender is that, as can be gleaned from Steve’s posts on the subject, it can be a way that Corporate can hire more men and then claim they are female, thus removing the sex-discrimination lawsuits. Big Corporate is also warm to transracialism for the same reason (hire whites who then declare themselves nonwhite), but clearly blacks and (((other people))) clamped down on that hard in the wake of the Rachel Dolezeal stuff, smelling the gravy train drying up. Women weren’t as quick on the draw.
That said, Big Corporate won’t get behind trans-agism for this reason: older workers are more expensive. Even accounting for all the hormone replacement therapy and surgery, transgender workers are much cheaper than a 55 or 65-year-old coder with a bad ticker.
“What I learned from Google – You Get Fifteen Years”
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/what-i-learned-from-google-you-get-fifteen-years/
But what if you got that graduate degree and are not starting your career until 24-25 at least? What if like Damore you were working on you PhD?
Who really wants to go back a get an MBA in their mid-thirties without the guarantee of a management position. Use to be, 30-40 years ago, companies paid for your MBA so you were burdened with extra student loan during your rapidly shortening prime family formation years.
Now it looks increasingly like the "MBA option" is a dicey one unless you attend one of the top 5 schools or already have an in a willing employer.
Somewhere Richard Lynn is shaking his head at just how dysgenic this all is.
The company wanted to “view” how old she was? That’s an odd way of putting it.
“Hmm … I view on your application that you’re over forty, and … well, you view, we don’t hire grannies.”
There are none so blind, as those who will not view.
View you later!
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, earned $19.5 billion with just 72,000 employees. That’s about $270,000 per employee. That’s an insane rate of productivity unheard of at any company, oh, 20 years ago. Most companies would be lucky to earn revenues of $270k per employee. Health costs would probably only make a small dent in that (though I guess you gotta pinch your pennies no matter how rich you are). In all likelihood there’s something else going on. Older employees are more likely to want to have lives outside of work and can’t be bothered to spend 80 hours a week (or more) at the office, and even sleep there, as many Google employees allegedly do.
On a different point, it was either Facebook or Google that insourced its security personnel a few years ago. My guess was that by doing so it increased its diversity count, since security guards are a lot likelier than coders to be black or Hispanic.
Length of stay 1.1 years.
You get people in the prime of their health and competence who leave after a short period of time.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turnover_rates_by_company_how_amazon_google_and_others_stack_up.html
Google's money machine is selling ad space to companies and trying to suck in as much personal data off people on the web as possible to make their Ad software even better.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Damore at least proves that having a nose that looks like a schlong isn't an impediment to employment, but otherwise he looks fairly normal - if criminally white.
Admittedly however, when it comes to age, rather than being a fat hunchback with facial blisters, it's a fair guess that a young candidate is going to be better at the job than an older one. Yes, this is generalizing and I generally oppose it but what's a hiring committee to do? 100 applications come in for a job, why not automatically toss out any non famous name of someone over, say, fifty?
When looking for a nanny for your kid you would probably do the same with all applications from black males. That isn't to say that a good portion of them wouldn't be excellent nannies but why take the risk when there are nice white ladies applying as well?
If age discrimination were accepted into the Pokemon Pantheon don't you think it too would take over to a crazy degree such that the agent will be more likely to get a job then someone equally or more qualified who was younger? These things are a balancing act. And any company that can afford to honestly consider the applicants based on his or her own qualifications ought morally to do so, but how many companies can afford it?Replies: @Wilkey, @Jay Fink, @grapesoda
“Damore at least proves that having a nose that looks like a schlong isn’t an impediment to employment, but otherwise he looks fairly normal – if criminally white.
WTF? He’s not a bad looking guy, with or without the nose. He reminds me a little of Zach Braff (Garden State, Scrubs, etc.)
https://everipedia-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/NewlinkFiles/16940140/a04d0___james-damore/james-damore-with-two-tall-friends-at-thenbspa-cla_250x250.png
https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/150216163064126-1-e1502161381780.jpeg?quality=65&strip=all&w=782
Etc.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
WTF? He's not a bad looking guy, with or without the nose. He reminds me a little of Zach Braff (Garden State, Scrubs, etc.)Replies: @Moshe
My point was fully different but once you’re bringing it up, I have to point out that you are likely looking at his recent photoshopped picture. You should look at how he photographs from pretty much any picture a week ago. Again, this is entirely Irrelevant, in fact my point was that he himself isn’t particularly relevant to my point but, here it is:
Etc.
Most don’t. That’s why there is a endless stream of fools trying to get hired by these glorified sweat shops.
The only ones who make it are those who get the stock option package or in on a IPO and can retire early as a millionaires and leave the region for good. The others get ground up and leave or burn out. You really think extended work hours is good for a relationship or family. It isn’t.
The base pay isn’t all that great either compared to other professions. $130K, my local community college instructors make that. The local prison guards pull that down yearly, techs at Lockheed can make that with OT.
I remember advising a young woman who was offered a good job at Autocad back in the Dot.com boom. She was torn between that and working at a famous winery doing their accounting where she would have a company car and own office. I told her to take the winery gig. As I told her Silicon Valley eats people up and spits them out. She didn’t take my advice. Less than a year later EMT carried her out on a stretcher from Autocad – she had a heart attack at work induced by insane work loads(which is why the person she replaced had quit). She ended up working for the National Park service and was quite happy with that.
If you want longevity aim for a state or government gig or DoD contractor. You actually be treated decently and if you cross your dot your I’s and cross your T’s, you’re golden.
I know Steve that Google’s hiring practices are so much more important than the state joining antifa and the cat ladies in crushing the peaceable assembly of conservatives in Charlottesville but do you think you could address it ? I mean after all I am the only real NAZI here . Let us face it the people attempting to have a meeting in Charlottesville are at best conservatives . I am “far right ” . I want to see a real extreme right arise and take a can of Black Flag to our own racial traitors and then turn it on the vermin that have infested the west . While we still can we should make the mud people terrified to face the wrath of the White man . Nothing has changed since life first emerged in the primeval oceans it is eat or be eaten . We can never get along with or even housebreak these subhumans . Will we submit to be ruled by people who are slaves by nature ?
Are you sure you can get along with Steve, or is he dinner, too?Replies: @donut
The Uber office in my city only has one employee over the age of 30. How do they get away with that? Most of the positions aren’t even tech.
Norm Matloff has made a compelling case that the H-1B visa is effectively an age discrimination tool, something not even the detractors of H-1B realize.
Software companies want workers who can commit to spending very long hours at the office. That’s built into their business model. So that disfavors older workers who can’t commit to as many hours.
These days when software programmers get “old,” they replace them with H-1bs.
The H-1bs have created a very loose software labor market, which is one reason why the proportion of women and minorities is declining in software firms.
Between 2000 and 2010, blacks went from 3% of Silicon Valley engineers to only 2%. Hispanics fell from 5% to 4%. Women fell from 27% to 17%.
So it doesn’t appear that promoting “diversity” is much a priority for software companies.
Too many of these age discrimination suits and employment discrimination suits seems to be successful by people at the top of the ladder. For the age ones, the lawsuits seem to happen by people who are well off, just forced out of their jobs in their 70’s. In Maryland, there has been a rash of employment suits won by people who are head of school boards, law enforcement, college professors and other like minded jobs. For people at the bottom, their jobs can be outsourced, or they are not hired in their late 50’s, and no lawsuits or recourse available to them. It reminds me of an old iSteve post/comment about having unions for Nuclear Submarine Captains.
“I wonder when bright young geniuses in the tech industry wake up and realize they don’t have a career past 40.”
Subway sandwich artists, on the other hand..
That’s one reason why immigrant labor is so popular in high-injury industries like construction and agriculture.
It’s interesting that a lot of liberal policy proposals (high minimum wage, encouraging unionization, single payer healthcare, high regulation of workplaces) would probably have worked to keep immigration down. While a lot of conservative policy proposals (low minimum wage, union busting, minimal govt-provided healthcare, minimal regulation) encourages immigration from overseas.
It’s no accident that Texas and SoCal have been so flooded by immigrants.
Of course Diversity is a huge priority for Silicon Valley. Diversity does not mean hiring more Blacks and Hispanics and Women. It means FIRING White males and replacing them with dirt cheap H1-Bs. That’s the Microsoft Model, and explains btw why its products are so uniformly lousy, to the point where Linux is a better UI and reliability experience for even Joe Average user.
Donut/PrissFactor/Anon made me laugh with that one.
Seriously, though, if people can be trans-gender and trans-racial, why not transage? Why can’t we just decide our age?
If I decide that I’m 66, does that mean I’m Social Security eligible?
Who’s the govt to discriminate against me like this?
I remember reading, about 20 years ago, that Goldman Sachs and a couple of other exclusive, bulge-bracket Wall Street firms of the 1980s and 1990s were making earnings per employee of that order of magnitude.
http://imgur.com/a/pffilReplies: @EdwardM
Damore at least proves that having a nose that looks like a schlong isn't an impediment to employment, but otherwise he looks fairly normal - if criminally white.
Admittedly however, when it comes to age, rather than being a fat hunchback with facial blisters, it's a fair guess that a young candidate is going to be better at the job than an older one. Yes, this is generalizing and I generally oppose it but what's a hiring committee to do? 100 applications come in for a job, why not automatically toss out any non famous name of someone over, say, fifty?
When looking for a nanny for your kid you would probably do the same with all applications from black males. That isn't to say that a good portion of them wouldn't be excellent nannies but why take the risk when there are nice white ladies applying as well?
If age discrimination were accepted into the Pokemon Pantheon don't you think it too would take over to a crazy degree such that the agent will be more likely to get a job then someone equally or more qualified who was younger? These things are a balancing act. And any company that can afford to honestly consider the applicants based on his or her own qualifications ought morally to do so, but how many companies can afford it?Replies: @Wilkey, @Jay Fink, @grapesoda
If there is that much age discrimination in the labor force in general there needs to be some kind of guaranteed income for people age 50-social security. Disability covers a lot of this group but not everyone qualifies for it.
The solution to all these labor market "failures" is simple: close the border and stop immigration.
Minimum wages, lawsuits, unions ... all window dressing if there's a continual (and semi-infinite) supply of labor.
But make the nation a "closed system" and employers will use the labor that's available.
You might still have a crappy job at 45--if you're stupid, and didn't learn anything in the previous 20 to make yourself useful. But most people can make themselves modestly more productive and are good workers for an employer to have ... as long as there isn't someone dirt cheap they can bring in from Timbuktu.
It's interesting that a lot of liberal policy proposals (high minimum wage, encouraging unionization, single payer healthcare, high regulation of workplaces) would probably have worked to keep immigration down. While a lot of conservative policy proposals (low minimum wage, union busting, minimal govt-provided healthcare, minimal regulation) encourages immigration from overseas.
It's no accident that Texas and SoCal have been so flooded by immigrants.Replies: @James Richard
That and their shared border with Mexico!
Age-related savings don’t stop at healthcare. Also look at how pension, deferred comp and related items are back-loaded as many companies expect “turnover”, now accelerated by such tactics as H1-B contract employees, to thin the herd. There is a cottage industry of HR consultants to help the progressive company to curate its employee base to reduce present and future costs.
I work at a top tech company in Silicon Valley. The age discrimination is blatant and something you have to factor into your career path.
Facebook is widely known to be the worst offender, at least among big tech companies. Other companies are more merit-based, like Netflix and Apple. But even then, this only applies if you are an older engineer in the top 5% of ability — anything less, you are pushed out.
A large portion of the older engineer’s plight stems from H1B’s. For an older engineer, the effects are two-fold, either 1) attenuating the career of an engineer by several years or 2) or converting a mid-level, older engineer into a nervous, often childless, workaholic.
If you are ever looking for gold mine of material on tech companies, I would try to land an account on an app called Blind:
https://us.teamblind.com/ — basically, where people post anonymously about their tech employers.
With an over 40 relative employed at Google, our next family event will be interesting..!
And I assume the Damore situation is really because of the threat of D’Amore:
Age is real. A 50 year old worker is quite a different product than a 25 year old worker. It’s quite reasonable to discriminate and treat the two differently.
Some older workers have amazing relevant tech skills and work ethic and they can get jobs. But many older workers, lose their value, unfortunately.
I find age discrimination more unreasonable at public universities student admission. An older students should have the same rights to buy education and compete for education slots as younger people. Ideally, publicly funded universities would be forced to have transparent admissions criteria. They can
Secondly, it's insane. There is an age beyond which people cannot go back to school and expect to have full fledged careers.
All sorts of people right now are going into retirement age with student loan debt. They are mostly older, single women whose lives didn't work out as they planned. They're going to work and get that career - at age 52?
If saddling a 20 year old with $35K worth of debt is stupid, doing so to a 55 year old is beyond that. We will all end up paying for the loans of 55 year old.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Massimo Heitor
Seriously, though, if people can be trans-gender and trans-racial, why not transage? Why can't we just decide our age?
If I decide that I'm 66, does that mean I'm Social Security eligible?
Who's the govt to discriminate against me like this?Replies: @res
I’m with you on that. Now if I could just convince my body…
From Business Insider.
I guess their brands and distribution footprint are worth a lot. The "Master Settlement" of 2008 is really the gift that keeps on giving to the state.Replies: @Ivy
And to work there they have been laying huge bucks in living expenses with no ability to set up a retirement plan. And the computer and phone screens they spend tens of thousands of hours looking at will give a high percentage of them retinal issues like macular degeneration in their 50’s. Yeah, but the world couldn’t have lived with that travel fare aggregator app.
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/
N=234, no observable gender bias
What’s this about Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley and the transistor?
Everyone knows the history of the US is obscenely distorted by racist spin on the contributions of disadvantaged minorities such as George Washington Carver. But no one, till now, has revealed the truth behind the real founders of Silicon Valley and why all those Spoiled American Boomer Engineers who are flying their planes into IRS buildings and the like have only themselves to blame for the great need for more immigration to save the US economy.
Read on for the revised history of Silicon Valley…
https://majorityrights.com/weblog/comments/the_revised_history_of_silicon_valley
Perhaps my math and reading skills have diminished with age, heh, but isn’t “earning” “about $270,000 per employee” the same as “earn[ing] revenues of $270k per employee”? Is there a word missing or something?
Older men have families or they would at least finally like to have one. Or they have come to the point in their lives where they are unwilling to spend all week in endless meetings in order to give their females coworkers something to do and then come in on the weekends or stay into the evenings just to try to get real work done.
Males under 30-35 may still have the delusion they can work their lives away. But the day they come to the same conclusions as Peter Gibbons in Office Space does arrive eventually.
http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0001889/quotes
H. G. Wells’ flower children are inheriting our house.
It will crumble into disrepair around them.
Yet many of these same youth-obsessed tech guys in Silicon Valley fantasize about transhumanism and “living forever.” How can they reconcile that notion with their disdain for people over 40?
BTW, I’ve come around lately to agreeing with Gary North’s observation that Christians who believe in the rapture reveal a “lower-class” mentality, which he equates with having a high time-preference:
http://reformed-theology.org/html/issue11/left_behind_culturally.htm
This reminds me of how critics of transhumanism call it “the rapture of the nerds,” in that the less rational transhumanists show a lower-class, high time-preference as well which conflicts with their propaganda about “living forever.” One of them, an economics professor at Smith College named James D. Miller, has actually written that we shouldn’t save for retirement because of the Singularity.
http://www.sullivan-county.com/nf0/fundienazis/gary_north.htm
"For decades Gary North has made a living predicting modern society will end in panic and ruin. In 1980, he forecast rationing of housing and a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He warned his followers to buy "gold, silver, a safe place outside the major cities." Then AIDS became the threat: "In 1992, we will run out of available hospital beds.... The world will eventually panic," he wrote in 1987.
Now North has found Y2K and a skittish audience receptive to predictions of doom. A recent advertisement for his Remnant Review newsletter proclaims: "A bank run like no other will bankrupt banks all over the world in 1999." "Replies: @advancedatheist
Atheism is 100% part of the SJW mindset. No amount of "I'm better than those Christian losers over there" will divorce the role of atheism of us devolving into the madness we're descending into. It is in losing sight of God, in losing sight of something greater than us that we are becoming much less than who we could be.Replies: @advancedatheist
A quote for the ages, really. Who are you to claim that I’m 50 just because of the way I look, or when I graduated from school? (Or, even more tellingly, what music I favor?) If I say I’m 25 you have to believe I’m 25 or I haul your ass into court. And win.
My office in (NYC) had 80-some employees, and only the two principals were over the age of 40. We had one administrator who went over 40, had a couple health issues to boot, and was summarily dismissed. She was furious, and I have no idea why she didn’t sue. But this was the 1990s.
Quoted for comedy. It’s hardly just the tech industry.
Average age of Google workers is 29.
Length of stay 1.1 years.
You get people in the prime of their health and competence who leave after a short period of time.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turnover_rates_by_company_how_amazon_google_and_others_stack_up.html
Google’s money machine is selling ad space to companies and trying to suck in as much personal data off people on the web as possible to make their Ad software even better.
Steve:
I think it is cool how you find connections amongst things, including from your life. But on this story, what ever became? Did you ever figure out of Martin was your teammate?
https://www.unz.com/isteve/more-than-i-care-to-know-about-martine-luther-queen-highest-paid-female-ceo/
That’s pretty funny, since North is infamous for his chicken little predictions about imminent apocalypses, from nuclear war to the Y2K bug:
http://www.sullivan-county.com/nf0/fundienazis/gary_north.htm
“For decades Gary North has made a living predicting modern society will end in panic and ruin. In 1980, he forecast rationing of housing and a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He warned his followers to buy “gold, silver, a safe place outside the major cities.” Then AIDS became the threat: “In 1992, we will run out of available hospital beds…. The world will eventually panic,” he wrote in 1987.
Now North has found Y2K and a skittish audience receptive to predictions of doom. A recent advertisement for his Remnant Review newsletter proclaims: “A bank run like no other will bankrupt banks all over the world in 1999.” ”
Austrian economists invoke hyperinflation as their scare tactic, while leftists seem to have fixated on catastrophic climate change as their strategy to terrify the population.
Now some transhumanists I could name have come up with "Unfriendly Artificial Intelligence" as the latest version of this scam.
Or defunct, like Trans World Airlines.
Or goes on and on forever, like the Trans-Siberian Express.
Can anyone discuss these two carriers without smirking anymore?
(And the Transamerica Building… let’s not even go there…)
Length of stay 1.1 years.
You get people in the prime of their health and competence who leave after a short period of time.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turnover_rates_by_company_how_amazon_google_and_others_stack_up.html
Google's money machine is selling ad space to companies and trying to suck in as much personal data off people on the web as possible to make their Ad software even better.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
They get tired of constantly playing table tennis on the job.
Ever notice that all of those part-time baristas who qualify for Starbucks’ generous health insurance are young and healthy?
Facebook is widely known to be the worst offender, at least among big tech companies. Other companies are more merit-based, like Netflix and Apple. But even then, this only applies if you are an older engineer in the top 5% of ability -- anything less, you are pushed out.
A large portion of the older engineer's plight stems from H1B's. For an older engineer, the effects are two-fold, either 1) attenuating the career of an engineer by several years or 2) or converting a mid-level, older engineer into a nervous, often childless, workaholic.
If you are ever looking for gold mine of material on tech companies, I would try to land an account on an app called Blind:
https://us.teamblind.com/ -- basically, where people post anonymously about their tech employers.Replies: @Ivy
You may have been around when a proto-Blind was still available from 2000-2007. More like the Wild West compared to the moderated boards these days. FuckedCompany.com.
http://www.giveitlove.com/hilarious-kid-answers-to-test-questions/20/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_ThatReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Twenty years ago I was having email discussions with “reporters” at the SJMN about how I was seeing on-the-ground that H1B was primarily a vehicle for age discrimination — that companies could hire two H1B indentured employees for every primarily older white guy who was either laid off or wasn’t hired — mostly they didn’t want to hear it — this was after the race/ethnicity of perpetrators had been expunged from crime stories, around the time of the rise of ‘Dilbert’, and just before William McGowan published ‘Coloring the News’ — also not coincidentally when I lost whatever respect I had left for “reporters”.
h/t to commenter Mick Jagger gathers no Mosque
https://www.unz.com/isteve/americans-shocked-to-learn-the-symbolic-poem-technically-isnt-us-law/#comment-1954563
Reading the comments section under an article entitled ‘White men not biologically suited to writing diversity memos’: Columnist destroys sexist Google bro, I am reminded that the sorts of people who read RawStory must be living in an alternate universe.
Exhibit A.
Exhibit B-1
Exhibit B-2 (a reply to B-1)
Exhibit B. (Rachel Dolezal? Never heard of her)
Some older workers have amazing relevant tech skills and work ethic and they can get jobs. But many older workers, lose their value, unfortunately.
I find age discrimination more unreasonable at public universities student admission. An older students should have the same rights to buy education and compete for education slots as younger people. Ideally, publicly funded universities would be forced to have transparent admissions criteria. They canReplies: @AM
First of all, they already do.
Secondly, it’s insane. There is an age beyond which people cannot go back to school and expect to have full fledged careers.
All sorts of people right now are going into retirement age with student loan debt. They are mostly older, single women whose lives didn’t work out as they planned. They’re going to work and get that career – at age 52?
If saddling a 20 year old with $35K worth of debt is stupid, doing so to a 55 year old is beyond that. We will all end up paying for the loans of 55 year old.
If there were transparency requirements, discriminating on race and age would become impractical. It's only practical to do so when the university admissions office have the cloak of secrecy to hide their dirty deeds.If a 40 year old wants to buy a math class for full credit, why not? There are realities of aging, he probably can't start a full fledged career from scratch, but he can advance a career he has. And why should some back office administrative faculty have the right to cast judgement on him?
If giving loans is a bad deal, don't do it. If the 55 year old can pay the standard price for education, why block him?Replies: @AM
You know what’s really low class? Assuming that atheists are “advanced”. At least Christians who believe in the rapture manage to acknowledge forces beyond them and their control.
Atheism is 100% part of the SJW mindset. No amount of “I’m better than those Christian losers over there” will divorce the role of atheism of us devolving into the madness we’re descending into. It is in losing sight of God, in losing sight of something greater than us that we are becoming much less than who we could be.
Not to put too too fine a point on it, but earnings aren’t revenues. Revenue is the ‘top line’ and earnings are the ‘bottom line’.
In 2011, Dan Rather did a report on ageism in the tech industry called No Thanks for Everything.
I do believe that there's ageism in the tech industry, but I'd question every word that came out of Dan Rather's mealy mouth.
No one at Google understands the difference between equality and meritocracy.
https://everipedia-storage.s3.amazonaws.com/NewlinkFiles/16940140/a04d0___james-damore/james-damore-with-two-tall-friends-at-thenbspa-cla_250x250.png
https://heavyeditorial.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/150216163064126-1-e1502161381780.jpeg?quality=65&strip=all&w=782
Etc.Replies: @Dave Pinsen
I doubt his profile pic was photoshopped. It’s just a professionally taken photo. Most of us would look a lot better in a professional photo than in a snapshot.
https://youtu.be/t6p6oGY7NwsReplies: @Anonymous
In 2011, Dan Rather did a report on ageism in the tech industry called No Thanks for Everything.
I do believe that there’s ageism in the tech industry, but I’d question every word that came out of Dan Rather’s mealy mouth.
Thanks to all for the comments here. My inner libertarian says companies ought to be free to hire whom they want and discharge whom they want, but, wages and salaries ought to properly reflect that uncertainty, and perhaps generous stock options ought to be standard.
FWIW-I got out of sales and sales management years ago after the company I helped grow was shut down. I was pretty good at what I did. Pains me to this day to not do what I was demonstrably pretty good at doing. What happened? I saw the same burn ‘n’ churn pattern of hiring and discharge of talented salesmen over and over again by our corporate masters. They’d get baited by the promise of extraordinary commissions and other spiffs, build up a territory or clientele, then get dumped by a youngster working a phone and reading from a script at a fraction of what the sales pro could have expected to make had he remained on board.
If you were born on the 29th of February.
1 is the new 4
@ AM he am-
firstly, technically, i am (and a lot are) an agnostic, not an atheist, inasmuch as there is a .00000 (bunch more zeroes) 0001% chance there is some sort of god-thing… don’t think i am going to find out by a bunch of patriarchs making up sky daddy stories to feel safe…
HOWEVER, as a practical matter, i am a ‘practicing atheist’, in that i don’t believe in one more sky daddy than you (apparently)…
.
and, nope, don’t believe that xtians have a monopoly on being stupidheads about religion, pretty much ALL religionists are stupidheads about their stupid religions, and i don’t really care about ANY of your sky daddy stories…
HOWEVER, i am one of the few left on the planet who actually believes in freedom, so i am all for you stupidheads exercising your freedom to worship your non-existent sky daddy…
(i don’t think the state should give churches a tax break, as far as i am concerned, they should be taxed JUST LIKE any other business…)
BUT DON’T YOU DARE try to make laws or enforce social norms based on YOUR stupid shit that MOST OF THE REST OF US DO NOT BELIEVE… how arrogant and selfish; i allow your freedom, you respect mine…
If you're going to reject something, at least know what you're rejecting. Y'all have no idea how stupid and ignorant you sound.You don't believe in freedom. You believe you have the right to push me into a corner, make my beliefs private and hobby because I see a much larger world than you do. Sorry, no.
Social norms exist whether or not you believe in them. The consequences, the prices to pay are all there, whether people like me are pointing out that it's bad idea or not. When I returned to Catholicism it was from the direct observation of the truth of all of it. I even have direct evidence that marriage is forever. Every single one of those social norms are a promise of life well lived, right now in this life, let alone the next. And they multiply and spread out over society today and tomorrow. All blessings from social norms.
And you know what? In the end, it's 10 lousy commandments. 10. You know little that is in comparison to the gift of being alive? Nothing. You can't even manage 1 of them. You won't even try.
Right because all the smart people are atheists. You have to be pretty smart not to notice the worst past and present regimes are all atheist regimes. You have to be really smart to account for everything we experience through magical thinking. You have to be super-duper smart to believe something comes from nothing. Yep, atheism is for upper-class smart people.
The Charlottesville terror murder is showing the world what white people are really likeReplies: @Luke Lea
It is good to be able to document anti-white racism whenever it appears in the Washington Post and other mainstream media. And while Steve Sailer’s blog is hardly mainstream, Tiny Duck still serves a useful purpose.
Secondly, it's insane. There is an age beyond which people cannot go back to school and expect to have full fledged careers.
All sorts of people right now are going into retirement age with student loan debt. They are mostly older, single women whose lives didn't work out as they planned. They're going to work and get that career - at age 52?
If saddling a 20 year old with $35K worth of debt is stupid, doing so to a 55 year old is beyond that. We will all end up paying for the loans of 55 year old.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Massimo Heitor
Sure they do. They say they do. They wouldn’t lie, would they?
That was my divorced Mom, who went back at 50 some odd. Who, because we didn't have money to pay for her loans, ended up being paid for by everyone else, with interest.
She's not the only one. I've met several other women just like her. As long as you qualify for student loan money, you're a warm body to the university system.
This strikes me as be careful about what you wish for.Replies: @Ivy
Work searching for older men is a central theme of my blog. Have been dealing with this a lot again lately as we recently moved to the midwest where I sought work in the local defense-tech sector. Got numerous interviews using my trademark “Employment Game” tactics but killed by revealing my age on their application forms. Nobody wants to pay to get a security clearance for someone approaching retirement. Tough shit. Will look in the commercial sector. Also developing entrepreneurial opportunities. May start a coding academy for girls. It would be very strict.
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/uncharted-waters/what-i-learned-from-google-you-get-fifteen-years/Replies: @anonymous-antimarxist
You forgot the /snark tag…..
But what if you got that graduate degree and are not starting your career until 24-25 at least? What if like Damore you were working on you PhD?
Who really wants to go back a get an MBA in their mid-thirties without the guarantee of a management position. Use to be, 30-40 years ago, companies paid for your MBA so you were burdened with extra student loan during your rapidly shortening prime family formation years.
Now it looks increasingly like the “MBA option” is a dicey one unless you attend one of the top 5 schools or already have an in a willing employer.
Somewhere Richard Lynn is shaking his head at just how dysgenic this all is.
That’s “LIAR (Low Information American Reporter)”s
h/t to commenter Mick Jagger gathers no Mosque
https://www.unz.com/isteve/americans-shocked-to-learn-the-symbolic-poem-technically-isnt-us-law/#comment-1954563
But … but … Google featured prominently in 2013’s The Internship, where Vince Vaughan and Owen Wilson play two old dudes who use their wealth of experience and the humanity learned through long years to add to the Google family.
Tell me that wasn’t just feel-good propaganda.
Steve,
I am certain many of your readers are ex STEM workers who have faced the after 35 career challenge in their lives. They just are inhibited about opening up.
Perhaps an Open Thread giving them a chance to honestly tell what has happened to their lives would be appropriate.
TPTB act as if it is easy to move on from as at times as an addictive career as being a computer programming. That there is minimal turmoil or lost souls. That has not been my experience.
There are two neo-liberal laws:
1: Because Markets. (Free market, open this and that, platitudes)
2: Go die. (You didn't keep up? FU, SOL)
Every laid-off IT guy in Silicon Valley, each 40+ new greeter at Home Depot or Wal-Mart, etc, is a victim of the neo-liberal orthodoxy. Great on the upswing, and when you chose the right parents, just don't forget the Law of Gravity. The Universe doesn't care.
Atheism is 100% part of the SJW mindset. No amount of "I'm better than those Christian losers over there" will divorce the role of atheism of us devolving into the madness we're descending into. It is in losing sight of God, in losing sight of something greater than us that we are becoming much less than who we could be.Replies: @advancedatheist
Atheism as such has nothing to do with the social justice ideology. A logically parsimonious atheist can accept the tragedy of the human condition straight: Gods don’t exist, and neither can “social justice,” because society’s losers, misfits, scolds, outsiders, utopians, etc., have conflicting grievances that they can’t reconcile.
http://www.sullivan-county.com/nf0/fundienazis/gary_north.htm
"For decades Gary North has made a living predicting modern society will end in panic and ruin. In 1980, he forecast rationing of housing and a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. He warned his followers to buy "gold, silver, a safe place outside the major cities." Then AIDS became the threat: "In 1992, we will run out of available hospital beds.... The world will eventually panic," he wrote in 1987.
Now North has found Y2K and a skittish audience receptive to predictions of doom. A recent advertisement for his Remnant Review newsletter proclaims: "A bank run like no other will bankrupt banks all over the world in 1999." "Replies: @advancedatheist
Austrian economists in general have predicted hyperinflation and the collapse of the American economy for generations. But then ideologues who want to impose radical changes on society often come up with scary scenarios to try to intimidate the population into going along with their plans; they know that fear impairs judgment, and that if they succeed in frightening enough people, these people will acquiesce to doing things that they would have resisted if they had thought about them more clearly.
Austrian economists invoke hyperinflation as their scare tactic, while leftists seem to have fixated on catastrophic climate change as their strategy to terrify the population.
Now some transhumanists I could name have come up with “Unfriendly Artificial Intelligence” as the latest version of this scam.
… ADA LOVELACE was only a coding success for as long as she was young and beautiful …
http://imgur.com/a/pffilReplies: @EdwardM
Altria and Reynolds seem surprising. You’d think the market would erode the profit of companies like this down to basically zero. (I realize that this list is revenue, not profit, but margins must be high in the production of cigarettes with revenues like that.)
I guess their brands and distribution footprint are worth a lot. The “Master Settlement” of 2008 is really the gift that keeps on giving to the state.
Alphabet revenues are around $90B, so “earnings” refers to profit here.
We'd love to hear your take on Charlottesville. Your rhetoric and reasoning encourages this kind of behavior. Do you approve of it? Neo-Nazis and Klansmen? Is that your legacy? An answer is essential here for a man who takes ideas seriously, as you purport to do. Enlighten us.Replies: @mobi
‘Apres Steve, le deluge’ is the message of Charlottesville.
Personally, I much prefer that you don’t get it.
Secondly, it's insane. There is an age beyond which people cannot go back to school and expect to have full fledged careers.
All sorts of people right now are going into retirement age with student loan debt. They are mostly older, single women whose lives didn't work out as they planned. They're going to work and get that career - at age 52?
If saddling a 20 year old with $35K worth of debt is stupid, doing so to a 55 year old is beyond that. We will all end up paying for the loans of 55 year old.Replies: @Mr. Anon, @Massimo Heitor
There are no transparency requirements on public university admission. If a university denies a student admission, the student can merely guess as to why his request to enroll was denied. Students don’t know how much their race or age or personal ideologies affected their candidacy or what kind of GPA or academic record they needed at all.
If there were transparency requirements, discriminating on race and age would become impractical. It’s only practical to do so when the university admissions office have the cloak of secrecy to hide their dirty deeds.
If a 40 year old wants to buy a math class for full credit, why not? There are realities of aging, he probably can’t start a full fledged career from scratch, but he can advance a career he has. And why should some back office administrative faculty have the right to cast judgement on him?
If giving loans is a bad deal, don’t do it. If the 55 year old can pay the standard price for education, why block him?
However, most 55 year old students are not there at university because they are uber successful. They need loans and is the vast majority of my objection. Willing to let most dumb things happen as long as the person in question pays the price.
Woooo….psst! Don’t let that get out Steve.
Get rid of companies’ obligation to pay for the health insurance of workers, and that will get rid of a lot of the discrimination.
Increasingly everything in the USA is winner-take-all. If you have a stable job and coverage, great. If you get laid off at 45 and you can’t get hired again, you’re kinda screwed.
As always, there are gradations with these things. But the current health insurance set up works against older people getting hired, even if they don’t have any health problems at all.
Delete.
Only if the employer chooses to make them more expensive, so it’s a bogus excuse.
I used to be a tech recruiter in New York. I focused on programmers. Most of my clients were banks and hedge funds. For job openings, every candidate over 40 years old was referred to as an “old man”. These “old men” seldom to never got hired for programming positions.
There was an exception, and I am going to call this exception out by name because this company knew/knows how to make SERIOUS money. And they looked for very good programmers, regardless of age. So it is a fallacy to say that 40+ men/women can’t program as well as the young ‘uns. They would see any programmer I referred, even if the dude was 60 years old and they made many hires of men in their 40s and 50s. The company was/is Renaissance Technologies. Say what you will about James Simons or Robert Mercer, but these two guys and their subordinates did not discriminate on age or sex. They just looked for good programmers.
And there was/is no cult about this company either. Normal work days. The hiring process was one 4-8 hour interview going through challenging problems. Some candidates solved problems in unique ways that never even occurred to the top scientists there. Offers were made on the same day as the interview. None of this 10 rounds of interviews bullshit. And they could sense any negative personality quirks quite effectively in the 6 hour interview. Some candidates were very good programmers but just a little to weird for their comfort.
The idea that programmers’ cognitive skills age out to any significant degree is bullshit. Furthermore, a more seasoned programmer’s experience in getting the job done outweighs any slight decline in cognitive skill. This idea that there aren’t enough smart Americans is just a fallacy propagated by business so that they can keep the H1-B gravy train going.
H1-B is screwing Americans and our government is letting it happen. It is a disgrace.
firstly, technically, i am (and a lot are) an agnostic, not an atheist, inasmuch as there is a .00000 (bunch more zeroes) 0001% chance there is some sort of god-thing... don't think i am going to find out by a bunch of patriarchs making up sky daddy stories to feel safe...
HOWEVER, as a practical matter, i am a 'practicing atheist', in that i don't believe in one more sky daddy than you (apparently)...
.
and, nope, don't believe that xtians have a monopoly on being stupidheads about religion, pretty much ALL religionists are stupidheads about their stupid religions, and i don't really care about ANY of your sky daddy stories...
HOWEVER, i am one of the few left on the planet who actually believes in freedom, so i am all for you stupidheads exercising your freedom to worship your non-existent sky daddy...
(i don't think the state should give churches a tax break, as far as i am concerned, they should be taxed JUST LIKE any other business...)
BUT DON'T YOU DARE try to make laws or enforce social norms based on YOUR stupid shit that MOST OF THE REST OF US DO NOT BELIEVE... how arrogant and selfish; i allow your freedom, you respect mine...Replies: @AM
Get the theology right. This is a cartoon version of Christianity pushed at you by bunch of Marxist ninnies.
If you’re going to reject something, at least know what you’re rejecting. Y’all have no idea how stupid and ignorant you sound.
You don’t believe in freedom. You believe you have the right to push me into a corner, make my beliefs private and hobby because I see a much larger world than you do. Sorry, no.
Social norms exist whether or not you believe in them. The consequences, the prices to pay are all there, whether people like me are pointing out that it’s bad idea or not. When I returned to Catholicism it was from the direct observation of the truth of all of it. I even have direct evidence that marriage is forever. Every single one of those social norms are a promise of life well lived, right now in this life, let alone the next. And they multiply and spread out over society today and tomorrow. All blessings from social norms.
And you know what? In the end, it’s 10 lousy commandments. 10. You know little that is in comparison to the gift of being alive? Nothing. You can’t even manage 1 of them. You won’t even try.
Group health insurance costs are a certain driver of decision-making in legacy industries and legacy political subdivisions, top-heavy with older workers and retirees supported by declining work forces and tax bases.
Well said!
Atheism has everything to do with social justice ideology. SJWs think they can have utopia and that they capable of creating it. You can only believe that if you believe in no greater being than yourself.
Feminist almost always female atheists. Male atheists almost always are SJWs in some form or another. Scratch a “religious” SJW and you’ll find someone merely going through the motions. They’ll lack belief on the critical tenets of Christianity, including and especially the fallen nature of humanity and thus the need for a savior.
I’ve seen enough of your thoughts that you’ve reasoned yourself into all of the Christian worldview except the foundations that would make you question important parts of yourself.
Which is why there’s a need to trot out “look how stupid that Christian over is” examples. Well, yes some Christians are not so bright. But they all have enough humility and brains to at least question presumptive atheism that’s rotting the West’s collective brain cells. How does the nihilism and lack of imagination of your worldview even help in the least?
Organized atheism has been tried – it leads to genocide, every single time. How you keep “advanced” as an id given the history of communism is a mystery that belongs God. I mean I guess it’s advanced if the goal is to wipe out humanity physically and spiritually.
Other than that, atheism is just a default position of someone who is afraid of the supernatural. It’s backward, primitive, and seemingly safe to hold when everyone has an iPad in their hand. The intellectual giants are all to be found as Christians from 33 AD on. Atheists only drag down our intellectual level, as can be seen especially as in the last few decades. We’re getting dumber as we lose sight of God, as can be seen in the rise of the SJWs.
You know why I know that old people are dying with student loans?
That was my divorced Mom, who went back at 50 some odd. Who, because we didn’t have money to pay for her loans, ended up being paid for by everyone else, with interest.
She’s not the only one. I’ve met several other women just like her. As long as you qualify for student loan money, you’re a warm body to the university system.
This strikes me as be careful about what you wish for.
Damore at least proves that having a nose that looks like a schlong isn't an impediment to employment, but otherwise he looks fairly normal - if criminally white.
Admittedly however, when it comes to age, rather than being a fat hunchback with facial blisters, it's a fair guess that a young candidate is going to be better at the job than an older one. Yes, this is generalizing and I generally oppose it but what's a hiring committee to do? 100 applications come in for a job, why not automatically toss out any non famous name of someone over, say, fifty?
When looking for a nanny for your kid you would probably do the same with all applications from black males. That isn't to say that a good portion of them wouldn't be excellent nannies but why take the risk when there are nice white ladies applying as well?
If age discrimination were accepted into the Pokemon Pantheon don't you think it too would take over to a crazy degree such that the agent will be more likely to get a job then someone equally or more qualified who was younger? These things are a balancing act. And any company that can afford to honestly consider the applicants based on his or her own qualifications ought morally to do so, but how many companies can afford it?Replies: @Wilkey, @Jay Fink, @grapesoda
You made this statement as though it is self-evident, and then said nothing at all to back up your claim.
There are plenty of reasons why younger workers could be considered worse: more entitled, poor work ethic, lack responsibility to carry out tasks on their own, less experienced etc. But I guess it’s too complicated to consider all those factors so let’s just make unfounded blanket statements.
It is easier to fool young people into believing that if they give their life away to the company, they are doing something important.
Sorry, but I’m going to have to take exception to the premise of the article. I’m 65 now and have been steadily employed as an engineer at Google, Amazon, HP, and a couple of startups for the last 12 years. I can’t really say that I’ve noticed any age discrimination.
However, I do have a couple of friends who have fallen out of the business. The main obstacle is passing the rigorous technical interviews. I will go out on a limb and say that there may just be some truth to the notion that technical ability declines with age. However, I think it varies quite a bit between individuals, so it seems fair to say that there are a number of older people that perform just as well, but that number is likely smaller than that of a younger cohort.
If that is so, then the argument seems to cleave along the same lines as alleged employment discrimination vs women or certain minorities. That is, what is labeled as discrimination is really the market recognizing legitimate statistical differences between groups.
But five employers in twelve years - what's the reason for that? Serious question.Replies: @Hawk Toohey
We can’t afford to give a decent income to people who work say 25 years between 25 and 50 then live until 85 or 90. To little work for the pension annuity.
The solution to all these labor market “failures” is simple: close the border and stop immigration.
Minimum wages, lawsuits, unions … all window dressing if there’s a continual (and semi-infinite) supply of labor.
But make the nation a “closed system” and employers will use the labor that’s available.
You might still have a crappy job at 45–if you’re stupid, and didn’t learn anything in the previous 20 to make yourself useful. But most people can make themselves modestly more productive and are good workers for an employer to have … as long as there isn’t someone dirt cheap they can bring in from Timbuktu.
There was an exception, and I am going to call this exception out by name because this company knew/knows how to make SERIOUS money. And they looked for very good programmers, regardless of age. So it is a fallacy to say that 40+ men/women can't program as well as the young 'uns. They would see any programmer I referred, even if the dude was 60 years old and they made many hires of men in their 40s and 50s. The company was/is Renaissance Technologies. Say what you will about James Simons or Robert Mercer, but these two guys and their subordinates did not discriminate on age or sex. They just looked for good programmers.
And there was/is no cult about this company either. Normal work days. The hiring process was one 4-8 hour interview going through challenging problems. Some candidates solved problems in unique ways that never even occurred to the top scientists there. Offers were made on the same day as the interview. None of this 10 rounds of interviews bullshit. And they could sense any negative personality quirks quite effectively in the 6 hour interview. Some candidates were very good programmers but just a little to weird for their comfort.
The idea that programmers' cognitive skills age out to any significant degree is bullshit. Furthermore, a more seasoned programmer's experience in getting the job done outweighs any slight decline in cognitive skill. This idea that there aren't enough smart Americans is just a fallacy propagated by business so that they can keep the H1-B gravy train going.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jim Don Bob
The company was/is Renaissance Technologies.
Indeed, that is serious money.
You might enjoy the following, if not familiar with it already.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That
That was my divorced Mom, who went back at 50 some odd. Who, because we didn't have money to pay for her loans, ended up being paid for by everyone else, with interest.
She's not the only one. I've met several other women just like her. As long as you qualify for student loan money, you're a warm body to the university system.
This strikes me as be careful about what you wish for.Replies: @Ivy
Teach your children: debt is evil. Do not be enslaved by wasting assets and fleeting consumption fads. Look. At how many idiots pay 24% or more for some food and drink that they rented for a few hours, or for some clothes that went out of fashion before they left the store.
I guess their brands and distribution footprint are worth a lot. The "Master Settlement" of 2008 is really the gift that keeps on giving to the state.Replies: @Ivy
Limit your downside risk, free up resources to exploit new markets, more cash flow, devil take the hindmost. Cigarette companies Delenda est.
I am certain many of your readers are ex STEM workers who have faced the after 35 career challenge in their lives. They just are inhibited about opening up.
Perhaps an Open Thread giving them a chance to honestly tell what has happened to their lives would be appropriate.
TPTB act as if it is easy to move on from as at times as an addictive career as being a computer programming. That there is minimal turmoil or lost souls. That has not been my experience.Replies: @Ivy
The word you are looking for is neo-liberal.
There are two neo-liberal laws:
1: Because Markets. (Free market, open this and that, platitudes)
2: Go die. (You didn’t keep up? FU, SOL)
Every laid-off IT guy in Silicon Valley, each 40+ new greeter at Home Depot or Wal-Mart, etc, is a victim of the neo-liberal orthodoxy. Great on the upswing, and when you chose the right parents, just don’t forget the Law of Gravity. The Universe doesn’t care.
People are renting food and beverages?! Please elaborate.
If you pay for food and beverages with a credit card, and then run a balance, then you are financing consumption. For co establish that exit your system Ina short time, what sense does it make to keep paying for something well after you have shat it out?
For something that exits your system in a short time, why finance that?
I was perpelexed by the disturbing logisitic of returning rented food to its owner. (Perhaps now for use as fertiliser...?)Replies: @Ivy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_ThatReplies: @Reg Cæsar
I had a copy as a teen. I was weird even then.
Typing too fast. Here it is in a different form.
For something that exits your system in a short time, why finance that?
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that going around here on UR. Innit great?
I’d like to see an analysis of this. I’m guessing there’s an intervening variable:
Younger people who haven’t formed families versus older people who have.
It’s the spouses and offspring who rack up the health insurance costs. Way over single young males.
So age discrimination is a proxy for Anti-Family Formation discrimination.
This is a reason that young single males are preferred as immigrants for low-wage high-turnover occupations. Also to replace middle aged white males who have formed, and honored, family connections and commitments.
It isn’t the left that destroyed the “traditional” nuclear family. They merely turned vicious, anti-family economics and policies into edgy culture that glorifies loneliness. They and others then can merchandize products and services that–lucratively–will never make it feel better.
My husband's health plan costs the most for family+children. But surprisingly, employee+spouse only costs slightly less. Why? Does 10 children or even 2 really not do all that much to overall health care costs compared to a presumably older spouse? The prices suggest that. Single of any gender is lowest by an order of magnitude. It suggests that age is a huge factor in health costs, as is disability status of someone.
However, I do have a couple of friends who have fallen out of the business. The main obstacle is passing the rigorous technical interviews. I will go out on a limb and say that there may just be some truth to the notion that technical ability declines with age. However, I think it varies quite a bit between individuals, so it seems fair to say that there are a number of older people that perform just as well, but that number is likely smaller than that of a younger cohort.
If that is so, then the argument seems to cleave along the same lines as alleged employment discrimination vs women or certain minorities. That is, what is labeled as discrimination is really the market recognizing legitimate statistical differences between groups.Replies: @E. Rekshun
I’m 65 now and have been steadily employed as an engineer at Google, Amazon, HP, and a couple of startups for the last 12 years. I can’t really say that I’ve noticed any age discrimination.
But five employers in twelve years – what’s the reason for that? Serious question.
If there were transparency requirements, discriminating on race and age would become impractical. It's only practical to do so when the university admissions office have the cloak of secrecy to hide their dirty deeds.If a 40 year old wants to buy a math class for full credit, why not? There are realities of aging, he probably can't start a full fledged career from scratch, but he can advance a career he has. And why should some back office administrative faculty have the right to cast judgement on him?
If giving loans is a bad deal, don't do it. If the 55 year old can pay the standard price for education, why block him?Replies: @AM
Why should some sniveling snot of bureaucrat fire a perfectly good software engineer from Google for badthink? Life is unfair and then you die.
I’m totally indifferent to 55 year olds paying their own money on an education that most of the time they could get on their own. Since universities need warm bodies, it’s unlikely that such an individual would be turned down.
However, most 55 year old students are not there at university because they are uber successful. They need loans and is the vast majority of my objection. Willing to let most dumb things happen as long as the person in question pays the price.
That situation is way higher than males, but interestingly an expensive demographic is married with non working spouse, no children. That’s usually the older demographic.
My husband’s health plan costs the most for family+children. But surprisingly, employee+spouse only costs slightly less. Why? Does 10 children or even 2 really not do all that much to overall health care costs compared to a presumably older spouse? The prices suggest that. Single of any gender is lowest by an order of magnitude. It suggests that age is a huge factor in health costs, as is disability status of someone.
There was an exception, and I am going to call this exception out by name because this company knew/knows how to make SERIOUS money. And they looked for very good programmers, regardless of age. So it is a fallacy to say that 40+ men/women can't program as well as the young 'uns. They would see any programmer I referred, even if the dude was 60 years old and they made many hires of men in their 40s and 50s. The company was/is Renaissance Technologies. Say what you will about James Simons or Robert Mercer, but these two guys and their subordinates did not discriminate on age or sex. They just looked for good programmers.
And there was/is no cult about this company either. Normal work days. The hiring process was one 4-8 hour interview going through challenging problems. Some candidates solved problems in unique ways that never even occurred to the top scientists there. Offers were made on the same day as the interview. None of this 10 rounds of interviews bullshit. And they could sense any negative personality quirks quite effectively in the 6 hour interview. Some candidates were very good programmers but just a little to weird for their comfort.
The idea that programmers' cognitive skills age out to any significant degree is bullshit. Furthermore, a more seasoned programmer's experience in getting the job done outweighs any slight decline in cognitive skill. This idea that there aren't enough smart Americans is just a fallacy propagated by business so that they can keep the H1-B gravy train going.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Jim Don Bob
Exactly right. I am an old programmer. In my youth, I thought it was fun and exciting to spend nights and weekends learning the latest cool stuff. I have other things to do now, I still have the ability to learn. I have a great deal of something these young whipper-snappers do not have – experience. I not only know what to do; I usually know what not to do, because I have seen and done the wrong thing many times before.
H1-B is screwing Americans and our government is letting it happen. It is a disgrace.
I take your point; you meant “financing, not “renting.” Renting implied a temporary transfer of posession (but not ownership) rather than amortisation of the costs to transfer ownership.
I was perpelexed by the disturbing logisitic of returning rented food to its owner. (Perhaps now for use as fertiliser…?)
“it is eat or be eaten ”
Are you sure you can get along with Steve, or is he dinner, too?
But five employers in twelve years - what's the reason for that? Serious question.Replies: @Hawk Toohey
I was a contractor for almost half of that time. Plus, I lived through an acquisition and a split. Also, seriously — here in Silicon Valley, someone evaluating your resume might think you’re a deadbeat if you’ve been at the same company for more than 3 or 4 years, with such abundant opportunities around.
Are you sure you can get along with Steve, or is he dinner, too?Replies: @donut
Oh , no ! Steve would be too gamey . Better a yearling , of any species .
I was perpelexed by the disturbing logisitic of returning rented food to its owner. (Perhaps now for use as fertiliser...?)Replies: @Ivy
I meant renting, using a common colloquialism. Perhaps in a college bar, for example, you may have heard the following expression: you can’t buy beer, you can only rent it.
Never in my life. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯