Slashdot Mirror
Recruiters Use 'Digital Native' As Code For 'No Old Folks'
bizwriter writes: Companies are trying to get around Equal Employment Opportunity Commission restrictions on age-discriminatory language (like "recent college graduate") by saying that they want "digital natives." So far, no one has complained to the EEOC, but that could change. "Since the 1990s dotcom boom, many employers have openly sought to hire young, tech savvy talent, believing that was necessary to succeed in the new digital economy. At the same time, age discrimination complaints have spiraled upward, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, with 15,785 claims filed in 1997 compared to 20,588 filed in 2014.
Out of the 121 charges filed last year by the EEOC for alleged discriminatory advertising, 111 of them claimed the job postings discriminated against older applicants. The EEOC has said that using phrases like 'college student,' 'recent college graduate,' or 'young blood' violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1966. That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
Out of the 121 charges filed last year by the EEOC for alleged discriminatory advertising, 111 of them claimed the job postings discriminated against older applicants. The EEOC has said that using phrases like 'college student,' 'recent college graduate,' or 'young blood' violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1966. That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
Unless of course you live in an area where there are more people that are skilled, talented, and have experience than there are available positions. Your false assumption is based on the idea that there are more jobs than skilled people to fill them. It may be true in some areas, but not all.
Comcast online application has the question "Are you older than 49 or younger".
When I went back to school to finish up, I applied for several low level IT jobs and was asked "aren't you a little old for this job?".
Watch the look on the temp service persons face when they meet you the first time,ageism is fairly rampant I would say.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Fad Savvy more likely. Most of the "Tech Savvy" people I know are Google experts, meaning they know how to Google for an answer, and they think that makes them an expert. Take away their computer, and they can't have a Tech conversation with anyone.
They have no idea what it takes to get them their "Google". They aren't tech savvy, they are digital savvy illiterates.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
This is one of the biggest bullshit laws I've ever seen.
Let's say I don't want to hire you because you're old. EEO laws simply mean that I can't say it in your face that you're old. Instead, i send you the standard HR rejection e-mail and we're all good.
Sight, I hate seeing my tax $$ going to waste drafting these stupid laws.
How much more "native" could I be?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Companies want recent college grads because they know they're willing to work for less, not because they believe them to be more talented. Do you want to pay a landscaper $100 to mow your lawn, or the kid across the street $20? Same concept. If it's important, you'll pay the experienced professional, but a lot of development work is doable by amateurs. It might not look as good, but it's good enough.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
People over 40 can be good with technology too. Most of the younger people never learned how a CPU works, how to work with limited RAM, etc. Stop giving cutting-edge technology to your people in IT because most of the rest of the company (or the world, if you work with the Web) never has cutting-edge hardware either. Your bloated code may run "fine" on your maxed-out 2015 workstation but it's painfully slow to use on the mid-to-low-range, five-years-old hardware that other people use.
Web example: if you have people who can't even correctly choose between PNG and JPEG for the graphic format of an image (logo/chart vs photo), they're not using technology correctly, no matter what their age is. If you work in IT, age shouldn't have anything to do with it. The only difference is that most veterans won't be jumping to the flavour-of-the-week languages and just keep using what works best for the job.
It's hard finding programming jobs with so many younger developers willing to work 70+ hours per week at 2/3 the salary I'm used to making.
That being said, let companies hire who they want. I don't really understand the forced-melting-pot concept of hiring. If a company wants young people, who am I to force them to take me?
Some things need to be said...
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
HR drones everywhere are rolling on the carpet laughing. Ever tried to get HR to pass your resume along if they spot any clue that you are 50+?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I've been called "culturally incompatible", which I know means "too old."
Yes, posting as AC, because my lawyers told me to.
It's been said before, the over-30s with a family don't care about the in-office perks, they just want to go home and spend time with their kids.
These companies are missing the flip side of the coin, that the over-50s are highly motivated (saving for retirement!,) often highly skilled, and generally have done that before, several times. Though they do command the big salaries.
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age."
I don't think I ever realized how ironic that was before now. A threshold requirement for an age discrimination claim is that you not be certain ages...
Riiiiight. Because of us old folks didn't do digital before you were a glean in your daddy's eye. You think you know digital? We gave it life.
Just another day in Paradise
Older folks make better money, tend to laugh when their 35 year old boss tries to intimidate them, and are wise to corporate dirty tricks that zip right over a youngsters head without so much as ruffling that thick hair.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What I find funny about "Digital Native" only applying to young people is that there was at least one generation of computing professionals that had to make it work without any of this handholding technology that we have today. I remember my father having to get out the suitcase of a portable computer that work had assigned him, set it up on the dining room table, and dial-in to the mainframe to fix broken batch jobs on weekends occasionally. Since there was no access to the Internet and no vast array of resources on-hand, he had to actually know how to fix the problem without looking at forums or howtos or any other guides.
"Digital Native" is great if you want someone that can do the job when at least some functionality remains, but if things are really broken and one can't reach the Internet, I don't see the Googlers of the world being able to prop the technology back up when it fails.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
My Grandpa would count. He's been dead since 2002 and he was in his 90ies. Given, he worked with Grumman Aircraft on the Lunar Lander back in the 60ies as an electronics engineer (hearing the proud grandson? ;-) ). Basically high-end avantgrade technology back then, but he was a digital native none-the-less.
So is just about any computer kid of the eighties approaching 50 years of age today. We grew along in lock-step with the hardware, its capabilites and our capabilites to understand it. I'd argue that nobody will be more digitally native than our generation of nerds.
I'd also argue that I am way more a digital native than my daughter, since I not only can operate a computer or smartphone, but actually know how it works.
In short, I can't see how this is supposed to be an age-filter. Perhaps a fiter for non-tech-savy, ok. The age-filters I've come across are more like "willing to travel" (go forth and act as a fall-guy for that remote project heading towards a solid brick wall), "resilient" (german: "belastbar") ... meaning "young and stupid enough to work extra hours under shitty gouvernance for no extra pay and a fake career outlook" ... and similar telling lines in the confidentials.
On top of that, how hilarious is an HR person asking for "digital natives"? We all know the bizar truth behind this.
Most of those people couldn't distinguish Google from the Web in general if their life depended on it. It's idiots like these who know less than nothing and actually think they can judge tech and its requirements. Admitted, quite a few if not most of those actually *are* above 40, but they shouldn't get to call out for digital natives. They'd mistake a resus monkey for one.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Agreed--sounds to me as if "digital native" means someone that expects technology to "just work". We grew up surprised when things "just worked"--expecting to have to tinker (and indeed *enjoying* getting to tinker) to make machines do our bidding.
"That federal law protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age." HR drones everywhere are rolling on the carpet laughing. Ever tried to get HR to pass your resume along if they spot any clue that you are 50+?
As we get older, That we should accrue several skills that are hard to commoditize (sp?), such as:
All of that crap translates to the following: By the time we hit 40's we shouldn't not be directly competing for the same type of jobs with right-out-of-school kids. Or in more general terms, we should allow ourselves to fall into a situation of having to compete with people 15-20 years our junior.
If we are, then we didn't pay attention to our career development. I saw this in earnest because I spent (wasted) a good chunk of my mid-career years being happy as a "code warrior", disdainfully avoiding any opportunities to take greater responsibilities or broadening my professional and technical horizons. I wasn't being lazy as I would happily clock 60/70 hours "just coding". I was just being ignorant (and ignorance is bliss, right?)
It wasn't until I had people depending on me that I realize how stupid and dangerous that is. We do not get any younger, and we must have something to show from all those years of experience (show something other than coding abilities.)
I oppose age discrimination on principle (and any kind of discrimination unrelated to reasonable work requirements - working more for less is not a reasonable working requirement.)
But I see too many people resting on their laurels expecting to retire doing the same shit they have been doing for the last 20-30 years. That *dream* started to get shattered when the Japanese started beating the crap of American manufacturing 30-40 years ago.
Some people really hadn't gotten the memo yet.
that natives were there first. But this seems lost on young recruiters.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The reason they want only younger applicants is to save time on people who know what their job is worth.
If they can sucker a younger inexperienced person in, they can tack on a shit ton of shitty and bull job responsibilities for crap pay.
An older person knows what it's worth, will tell them no or demand more pay for the amount of work they want.
Simply put they're just trying to save time, they don't want to interview those folks. :"Looking for young technologically capable but generally dumb otherwise to accept job with ridiciously low pay, crappy hours and way to much work"
They should be forced to change their job postings to say
Not only that... I'm 43 and I consider myself a "Digital Native". At the beginning of my IT career - 1996, I was using workstation virtualization products like Virtual PC and building Intranet applications. Things have changed since then, but I was part of it all and I know it at least as well as any kid whose claim to "Digital Native" is that he used Tumblr and YouTube in high school.
Exactly right. I'm a year younger than you and I've been a "digital native" since I was playing around with my TI-99/4a and converting programs in Byte magazine to TI-basic in 1981. Far too many of these millennial "digital natives" are about as deep as a kiddy pool. They've used one or two technologies that work for them and that's it. Hammer-nail syndrome.
In general, 25 year old "supervisors" don't know squat and can't supervise. Then again, neither can some 50 year old supervisors.
However, if an employee has trouble following orders, his supervisor should have the skills to address that.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'm 61, my first useful PC was an XT clone. I transitioned from office machines to PC service, then networking, helped run a dialup ISP, spent a decade connecting my clients to that Internet thing.
My clients were using email, intranet and extended web sites to share work, and working remotely before there was Google or Facebook.
I've been digital since there was digital. I was even playing MMOG before there was Internet.
I should go to college just to annoy the kids. I already work with teams where the 25- year-olds are in charge, and we do fine. After our team proves them somewhat misled, they listen to us.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The real issue behind the "young movement" and a way to stop it cold is to deal with health insurance. Disallow health insurance to use age as a pricing factor, and watch how quickly the job market changes. I had a buddy that just went to an interview, and was flat out told that they have too many "old" people in the company and require some 20-somethings. Their insurance rates were too high.
In fact, I'd go so far as to state that basic health insurance (wellness visits, accident coverage, and basic illness diagnosis) should be 1 price for everyone, with no disqualifications allowed, with some base high deductible capped coverage for general illnesses. This would be relatively cheap as it stands today. Then additional coverage for whatever as we have today could be purchased on top.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Plus, of course, it's still not that rare for people elsewhere in "IT" to switch over to software development at some point. They may actually be willing to take a salary cut and work for entry-level pay if that's what it takes to make the switch.
There are many reasons why pay alone doesn't "keep the old guys away", and some companies really do only want young workers. They tend to be very exploitative companies, however, banking on someone in their first job not recognizing how badly they're being used. Age discrimination may well be low on the list of sins for some of these companies.
This pretty much says it all right here.
They might as well advertise for "Naive, spinless young suckers who'll do anything for a buck."
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
So you are in your 30s now? Then you are too old. They want graduates who will work 50+ hour weeks for low pay. Around age 28 a little red light starts flashing on their hands and they are replaced before they start wanting s career or work-life balance.
Actually you are kinda showing your age in your post. The kids abandoned facebook, there are too many old people on there. To be honest I've lost track myself... Do they still use Snapchat?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC