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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."
The easiest way to "discriminate" against old people is to offer lower pay. It seems like sort of a non-issue.
If you offer starting salaries you're overwhelmingly going to get RCG's or old people who just suck (since they're applying for low paying entry level jobs). If they suck, don't hire them.
So I don't think the goal is to "discriminate", it's to hire people who are good with technology and new to the business. By definition not older people.
What I find ironic is that the people who wrote the basic items that are taken for granted, be it the Linux kernel, apache, the HTTP protocol, the IP protocol, Mosaic and its derivatives... are all people likely over 40+.
Demanding someone be a "digital native" means you will get someone who knows how to flip through cat pictures, re-list their stuff on WoW's Armory, talk about how bad their work environment is on Yik Yak while trying to hand out their kik ID for a score. You won't get someone who actually knows the foundation that those apps are built on.
If employers lose lawsuits over this, they'll probably change it to "up-to-date education" and "3 years of active use of a major social network, iOS or Android operating system, and electronic bill payment". This allows older people to technically qualify by having taken a relevant class at a local college and joining Facebook.
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."
Wouldn't "Entry level position" basically do the same thing?
"Digital native" is old and only luddites use that term. The new term is app appers, because app appers love apping apps!
Apps!
Didn't us old folks usher in the age of the Internet and the digital world?
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.
We call then n00bs. :^)
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.
Anybody using the term "digital natives" is someone I don't want to work for anyway.
The truth of it is that I have a cubicle-ville full of 40+ year olds who are perplexed by concepts like copy/paste and drag/drop even though they use computer for 40+ hours a week.
Trying to get them to actively think about malware and phishing, fucking forget about it.
Give them a copier machine with buttons in slightly different places as the old copier machine, they will never just STFU and use it.
Browser updates slightly change the behaviour of some menu or option, phonecalls like a motherfucker.
EVERY SINGLE goddamn thing is like right back to square one with most of these people. It just gets worse the older they get. Somehow, people around 45 years old (and females especially) REALLY lose their ability to problem solve or learn concepts.
From an infosec perspective, these people are the absolute biggest liabilities for social engineering-related attacks. All the malware email attachment incidents and phishing incidents I've seen have involved an employee over 45.
Hiring some girl right out of HS or College, maybe 19-25 year old range, honestly... I have NONE of these problems.
And this is coming from a 38 year old IT guy. I GET the hand-wringing over age discrimination, but for fucks sake, these people really aren't worth hiring most of the time.
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
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.
She worked on the earliest mainframes for the airline industry (one of the first industries to computerize,) and has always been "high-tech." She had internet at home in the mid '90s, and was on Facebook early on in its "open to all" stage.
She was never a programmer, but it wouldn't have been a stretch for her to be one.
Likewise, my uncle has been a programmer since the '70s, always keeping up to date. He current writes mobile apps for a large national company. (iOS and Android.)
Age discrimination is stupid, even in "hot/fresh/new" areas. Back when I ran a small tech company, I had great employees that included a dropped-out-of-college-to-take-the-job young man, as well as a woman who was a retired IBM mainframe programmer, re-invigorating her skills. They were fully equals.
Would it be a bad idea to follow up a rejection letter with "Is there anything I could do to improve my skills to make myself a better fit for your company?"
"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...
Native? As in the ones who were here first or showed up later? The older folks who actually created the systems and infrastructure everyone uses and now takes for granted, or the youngsters who just use those systems and infrastructure, but have little/no idea how anything actually works? I'm not sure who to thank most, the people who created Ethernet or Angry Birds.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The 100% correct answer regardless of age is "YES".
The form's answer to your answer is "Please choose an option from the list. ( ) Older ( ) Younger or same"
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?
Anti-discrimination laws keep older people from becoming long-term unemployed before they are old enough to qualify for social security. Long-term unemployment is associated with increased costs to the government to control crime.
Just turned 50; been unemployed since mid November. Not even an interview yet; recently did apply for a state program called OJT and did well on their little test, but I seriously doubt it will lead to a job either. We all are going to get screwed in September or October when China drops its financial bombshell which will lead to the replacement of the dollar as the international standard anyway, so it won't matter to me once we all experience misery since misery loves company. :)
I am just about to hit that milestone 40th birthday this year. If things are as bad as they seem, I'm probably in for a rough couple of decades.
One thing that does bother me is that "digital natives" are no more or less capable of doing a good job in a technology job than older people. The skills are the same -- creative problem solving, troubleshooting, logical thinking and awesome communications skills. Older people do have different qualities in my opinion:
- We've been around the block and seen technology fads appear, disappear and come back later on with better underpinnings. We've also seen how stuff like virtualization and application containers aren't actually new concepts...just way better now than they were.
- Many/most of us have obligations outside of work and greater responsibilities. A 40 year old with two little kids [raises hand] has a little less flexibility than a recent grad who will move anywhere in the country in a week, doesn't mind sharing a 2-bedroom apartment with roommates and will willingly work 14-hour days for no extra pay.
- Many/most of us have also figured out the game of working for a company, and prefer a healthier work/life balance to throwing all your energy into projects that can sometimes get trashed for no reason.
- One advantage we do have is growing up with computers in a much more primitive state, where more about the actual machine was exposed to you. "Digital natives" grow up with packaged platforms and a lot of the underpinnings are permanently abstracted away unless you are sufficiently motivated to dig further.
For these reasons, among others, companies prefer younger workers because they're easier to control. I'm not saying that all of us oldsters are perfect -- I've worked with a lot of burnt out folks who do the bare minimum to keep their job. But, in my opinion it's not fair to paint everyone with the same brush. I won't kill myself for deadlines the way a 22-year-old working for EA might, but I have cranked out consistent good work over my career, and really want to continue doing so until I don't feel I can contribute anymore.
Well, "discrimination" (of any type: sex/age/race/etc) is "A Good Thing - brought to you by reality and its associate nature" - make it "A Bad Thing - a registered trademark of left-wing and friends" and you automatically create the euphemisms needed to keep reality and nature still working, because (ironically) any "anti-discrimination" is actually "discrimination"!
Antisthenes: "Wisdom begins by examining the words/names." - excuse my English, i am (slightly...) better with my Greek!
McDonald's in town has a help wanted sign out front saying "hiring 15 year olds". Discriminatory?
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
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.
In 17 years the number of complaints went up by 30%. However according to the Census Bureau, the number of "Mathematical and Computer Science" workers increased by 150% between 1997 and 2012 (from 1.3 Million to 3.3 Million). The number of job postings likely scaled similarly, so the complaints per posting actually went down.
Source:
http://www.census.gov/prod/3/9...
http://www.census.gov/compendi...
"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.
It is not just ineffective. The "anti-discrimination" laws are also immoral — they seek to punish thought-crimes and force employers into hiring those, whom they do not wish to hire, for whatever reason.
The reason may be wrong, but that's irrelevant — liberty certainly includes freedom to be stupid and a bigot. We surrendered that essential freedom in the hope of some sort of safety... As predicted, we lost both and deserve neither.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If only there were an old, established, proven labor institution that helped ensure older workers don't get churned out for new, exploitable blood.
Yes, unions you fucking morons.
Sorry that you libertarians ubermensch are too scummbing to the inexorable march of time and are finding that yes, it's not just the blacks and the fairer sex and the limp wristed dandies that get marginalized.
You're so eager to trash organized labor that the taste of your master's boot is still fresh in your mouth when he throws you old, aching, slightly less handsome ass out on the curb. Does it matter that the 3 bright eyed eager kids he hired can't even fill your shoes?
No, not really. They don't have a big pension to steal, or take as many sick days, or have seniority/experience/knowhow to make them look dumb. They get a bonus and you get an unemployment check. (For a short time at least) Does it mater that you like where you work? That you take pride in your work, and that you feel terrible because the things you built for the last 20 years of your life will fall in to ruin? Nope! You're expendable fucker! You're just an obstacle in the way of some metrics that will ensure some pencil dick middle manager's bonus.
If only there was an organization that represented not only your interests, but your pride as a knowledgeable and skilled worker. And yes, the seniority you earned by devoting so many years of your life.
It's funny. I worked at a county IT organization and it was filled to the brim with people that would trash talk the union all day long.. Until one day there was talk about canning the in-house IT unit and contracting with a vendor that happened to be owned by a very well connected local politician.
I'm a digital native.
I learned to program on a DEC-20, PDP-8, PDP-11, and later worked on VAX-11 and Alpha, for Digital. How much more Digital (tm) do you want?
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I'm an "old fart" and more of a digital native than any 20 something.. I have been in the internet since 1987 in a legit form.. Was a part of it in other forms for 2 years previous... Running Unix and managing dial up nodes for UUnet access. I have been active in usenet at that time as well as not only living the digital world, but I have done more in networking and computing hardware than any 10 of the new kiddies from college put together. How many of them have actually licked a cray?
In fact most old farts I know that are still in the business can still work circles around the new turds on the block. We just work smart using that experience we have instead of being over caffeinated lost puppies sniffing and peeing on every server rack they can find.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory. I'm at the very leading edge of Gen X and have been using computers pretty much all my life (not as my main thing post school though), and manage to be reasonably current for something that's mostly peripheral to my work. If I had to, I could go to the beach and make a computer from scratch and then program it, though it might take a while.
Now I wish those kids would get offa my lawn! (throws handful of 4004s at them)
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.
Oh, they'd take him. And they'd take me (heckled local university computing center in the 70s for access to their computers, so I've "grown up" with punch cards, paper tapes, and even some computers with core memory deserving the name even though I'm slightly short of 50).
Worth our weight in gold. But nowadays about everybody growing up considers himself a "digital native", and in ancient times it was maybe 0.1% if at all. So it's still discriminatory if it requires an Elder God to compete with an average young idiot with a framework dependence.
In 1972. Started with tubes in a tv shop when I was 14, transistors just a bit later, then in the late 70's, went to a 2 year college for electronics. First computer we had in that school, took up an entire room, magnetic tape and a whopping 10 meg hard drive with a platter larger than a laser disk. After college, took a year long job in Houston for Texas Instruments. Loved the job, hated the city (early 80's). Came back (midwest) took a "temporary" job in an office machine business, been in it ever since. Was just starting to transition from discrete transistors to LSI chips so I bought myself a computer kit, built it myself, learning along the way. Played around with basic. The key is to NEVER stop learning. Some in my business dropped out, when things went digital about 12 years ago, add connectivity, internet, cloud computing and they just couldn't hack it. I'm in my mid 50's now, and I even have some of the vendors calling me for advise, because I never stop learning and always want to know "what if". When hiring, "book smarts" to me, only means you were good enough to sit through class and pass the tests, but, I always look at practical experience, and weight that, as much or more, than that little piece of paper with your name & a gold seal stamped on it.
Please do not use the Dilbert weasel words such as "young, tech savvy talent" when the real reason is cheap, naive, and willing to work long hours without overtime pay.
Their bullshit may be more modern. Perhaps us ol' fogies should attend "Bullshit like a young buck" courses.
When you are interviewing with a PHB, talking the talk matters. Let's face it, the work world is largely a bullshitting game, for good or bad. It would be nice if it were about logic and planning, but humans got into the mix and mucked up that ideal.
I remember during one interview the PHB asked me if I liked to download stuff to my PC to experiment with new gizmos. I replied that I did, but that I prefer to have one "production" PC to get regular work done and a separate "experimental" PC that can be rebaselined if the experiments mess it up and/or to not cross-mix experiments. (Active-X was the "big thing" at the time, which should be enough to explain my caution.)
Anybody with experience will agree this is the rational way to do it. However, this was a start-up and they had no money for double PC's. (Maybe I should have offered to buy my own spare.) My "kind" wasn't welcome. The details of reality bothered them: they wanted to be sold cheap pie in the sky. That is, naive pioneers who don't know about the arrows yet.
That's not me. I value my experience and all the caveats I've learned over the years. I don't intend to sound grumpy or a like parade-rainer, but rather I'm just giving potential risks and estimated probabilities in a direct factual way. If you want to plow thru the asteroid field without being told the odds, then hang out with Jedi's fresh off the dust-farm and contraband runners. And off my swamp, get!
Table-ized A.I.
Somehow the idea that putting together a motherboard and a few other pieces, and learning a couple languages for electronics control, is a "digital native" seems ridiculous. As a kid I was designing and building digital electronics with discrete components (yes, no ICs; I designed and build gates, flipflops, adders etc. out of parts and used audio tape as a storage medium) and have designed many software systems, debugged and programmed in machine language (yes, 1 and 0s),
up through current languages. You don't get much more "native" than that. I have to wonder at those who think these n00bs who may build in a few specialized languages know something super special. Knowing what underlies all that structure is often useful and gives an appreciation of what the strengths and weaknesses of the whole are.
I tend to see discussions of systems in depth though most strongly among people looking for security weaknesses (and occasionally among colleagues who look for generic defenses against such weaknesses).
The legal issue though is better argued along lines of "you are trying to hire only n00bs. These folks may work cheaply but on the whole don't and can't know enough depth of how things work to figure how to defend their systems from attack. How do you propose to avoid liability for systematically keeping that kind of expertise away from your product or service designs?"
(Then too, apart from liability, how about reputation? Some places don't care, hire outsiders to replace their senior people and just let the departments treated like this go to h*** in a handbasket. It takes enough time for big companies to collapse that the managers who decide this way can escape with their golden parachutes. But the company gets killed.)
Yeah, my dad would count, too. We had tons of punchcards at home when I was a kid, and he at one point mentioned programming by setting a bunch of toggle switches and then pushing the spring loaded toggle at the end to push the byte into memory.
Oh come on, that's an urban myth. People did not "program" in that manner but entered bootstrap loaders. And you programmed those on paper (more commonly, read them off the paper provided by someone else) before you ever started the toggles.
I doubt that there were many sysops who could toggle in a complete loader without referring to paper. And even fewer who actually understood what they were entering.
If you're over 40 then perhaps you should neither expect nor accept to be hired to do what a 20 year old can, and for a much lower pay. Never mind that you can do it better and faster if that's not what the employer needs. In a company there is always a trade-off between expertise needed and resources available to get it. Besides, younger people will take orders like you probably won't, and have physical resources that you probably don't (think crunch time). Know what you are capable of and either find the right job for you (i.e., the thing that only someone with you expertise can do on schedule - on budget - on specs) and/or build your own shop; they might come.
Most of the time when those tech companies are targeting the young people it's naiveté that they are really looking for.
They want someone who will work all their waking hours on salary and not bitch about it because they think they are "a part of something". They think they are working on the next Facebook and they are going to get rich because they are among the early employees.
In actuality they are just looking to pump as much cheap labor as they possibly can until either the kids are all burnt out and they dump them for fresh ones or they can find someone to sell the company to, likely laying everyone off but getting the owner a nice check out of the deal.
Most older people should know better by now anyway and realize they aren't missing much.
He's an old guy. John Carmack is no spring chicken. Steve Capps, Andy Hertzfield, etc.
The only thing I can think of is that you are some kind of mentally challenged retard living in your mom's basement.
Seriously, Fuck You.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
He certainly did it from paper, not doing it real time.
So I guess Paul Allen doesn't count as a digital native. Oh, wait -- he wrote the Intel 8088 emulator on the PDP before the CPU was even manufactured. And how about Woz? Nah, nobody would hire these people anymore, they don't have the "right" expertise.
Good to know some of you single, double and triple digit UIDs are still alive :)
This is the phrase we would probably use, and it's not for any of the reasons generally mentioned here. We are having an increasingly hard time with older workers who don't understand how to use computers and aren't interested in learning to use them. We want people who have a basic understanding of how to even operate a computer so that we don't spend tens of thousands of dollars training them to do something anyone under the age of about 50 at this point can generally do. Many people on Slashdot are technically savvy and work with a lot of technically savvy people, so I am unsure how many of you still experience the guy with a good resume, but who has literally never touched a computer in his life -- even to the point of not understanding what a mouse does. I still see this _monthly_.
In our industry, it's now virtually impossible to succeed without this knowledge, because everything has been computerized. I'm incredibly sympathetic to those people with just massive knowledge banks with years of experience, but if they refuse to touch a computer and can't connect to a machine (which requires computer input now, no more analog controls), they're toast. We hired one of the best in the country (well,he was 10 years ago) at what we do, who had just failed out of a previous employer, though the reasons he gave were bogus, and he's now, a little over 1 year later, gone. Because our customers expect to be able to communicate with him in e-mail, that he be able to answer a cell phone, and he needed to be able to fill out an Excel sheet, etc. He wanted a personal assistant available 24-7 to do these tasks for him, because he was "never going to use learn to use a computer."
Should a good manager or hiring person weed those people out to begin with? Probably. But that job now includes a "minimum" of computer skills in its description, essentially asking for a "digital native." Does that mean we'll mostly hire younger people for the same position, and that some older people have no chance? Probably. But it really is about their skill set, not about their age.
If the government was into "jobs for crime control" they'd be paying companies to open up businesses in these areas (not just tax incentives... cash).
Would the program look anything like SBA loans and grants or the several states' urban renewal programs?
I have worked in IT since 1979.
Where do people get this idea that IT workers work with old technologies? The idea is not true, and makes no sense.
Do older car mechanics only know how to work on older cars? How about older doctors, lawyers, scientists?
Do you think an installation has new technologies for younger workers, and older technologies for older workers?
I work with latest released technologies all the time.
There were many who were kids when Sputnik got launched or shortly after who learned loads of science and tech stuff, seeing it was considered a national priority then. A fair bit of the computer industry was invented by that group. By the 1980s a later group was around, but building on much earlier work. Those of the
Sputnik time simply continued to design strange and wonderful stuff.
Good point though that "digital native" is being used by HR folks, or more exactly the automata the HR folks kinda/sorta know how to turn on and use. No actual brain required...
Image if you tried to do the same with women, or African Americans.
Like computers, medicine, and law, change constantly. Image if accountants, lawyers, and doctors, were considered washed up at 40.
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.
If it is no big deal to discriminate because of age, then why worry about discrimination based on ethnicity, or gender, or religion?
It really is the same thing isn't it?
How about: "if your a woman, you should not plan to have a career as an engineer. If you got your degree, and can't get a job, that's just bad career planning. Should have been a nurse."
Why is it okay to discriminate by age, but not gender?
Still use most recent systems, and languages, etc.
Why, on the Dice job listing sidebar at this moment three of the six jobs postings ask for 'Senior' positions.
This is obviously age discrimination against the young!
Really what they want is people who will work for very little money for very long hours who aren't encumbered by things like spouses and children.
Everyone is a digital native, hell, you're born with 20 of em! I can count to 2^20 on mine, 2^21 if I like you.
Seriously, this is bullshit. Oh no, I wasn't born on FaceBook or Twitter and I don't Instagram my meals or Pin my interests! I must be an old fossil with tons of useless work experience in the field!
My first digital computer, circa 1965:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
Those punks aren't digital natives. We are!
Now what if you're over 60, but more "digital native" than 99.99% of youngsters?
no, I don't have a sig
But do I count as a digital native? RAM did not exist in those days. Internal memory consisted of iron rings strung on wires by hand. It was so costly that to have as much as 64K of it, you had to be an insurance company. Unlike you young whippersnappers, we had to code for economy of resources. That's a performance measure that's no longer in required skillsets, though.
I just completed a 6-month contract at Google. I was trying for a full-time gig and my resume matched their job description to a "T". However, they would only offer me a contract. While I was there, they were desperately looking to fill two or three FTE positions, so I asked to be submitted for one of them, but they wouldn't allow me to. While working there, they hired one person whose skills were below mine. The average age of the employees was around 35 (two of the 5 full-timers turned 30 while I was there and the new-hire was 34. The other two were in their late 30's or early 40's). The manager turned 40 the week my contract ended. I'm 53. It didn't dawn on me until just now that they might have discriminated against me because of my age.
The step 4 "Don't live in luxury....buy a low-end boring car" would seem to exclude the possibility of owning a Jag e-type.
The upshot of the advice given is to NOT spend money, and to INVEST the money that you make. That is what prevents the dependence on SS checks later on.
My father had been using the Internet since the early 90s or even earlier. My father wasn't a tech worker, but he did stock trading and advertising, so he needed computers to access data. There were multiple computers in my house at any one time (Commodore 64, Macintosh, MS-DOS PCs). He kept it up buying new gadgets such as a programmable watch (using the PC screen to transfer data), PDAs, and the first Tablet PCs (the Microsoft hybrid laptop/tablet that preceded the Surface).
It didn't save him from getting laid off eventually.
While many tangible reasons can be stated to rationalize why older workers are discriminated against, with counter-points for most or all of them, the fact is that people in a range of 25-40 years old just plain don't like to have to work with older people. I'm 57, and am one of 2 in a group of 35 in that range. It puts the younger ones off a little -- I should be their boss, not some kind of elevated peer. A guy my age cranking out code or doing design/plan/build on a data center just plain looks weird to younger people. Consider a musical analogy: what if musicians in the orchestra were expected to 'progress' in their career, and those that didn't 'take it to the next level' of conducting or administrative leadership were deemed 'failure to progress', and thus aged out?
It's not about technology savvy. Older workers are much more informed -- not from a user perspective, perhaps, but certainly from an architectural one. In my experience, the younger guys know so little about how things actually work end-to-end, from endpoints to networks to servers to Internet etc., that even trying to teach them stuff like that is tough on the job. Enter the cloud vendors and Business Analysts, exit the engineers and admins from the corporate scene.
So I went to work for a tech service vendor. Sign of the times, go with the flow. Sure I'm old, but I tell great jokes.
I'm 47. No secret.
With so much experience to bring to the table, I have so much to give, but it doesn't mean I stop learning. Every day I learn something new. 40 is nothing. My grandmother where hired when she was 75 as an expert and a professional within her field.
I don't hire by age, I hire by experience.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
... create a job where the essential functions of the job really do require at least 30 clock-hours of recent (in the last 5 years) training OR equivalent on-the-job/volunteer/self-study experience in a broad list of non-technical courses typically taught in undergraduate programs AND which candidates who have not been in school the last 5 years likely won't have.
For example, most recent graduates who went to school full-time the last 4-5 years studied at least one semester of
* American history
* Writing or composition ("English 101")
* Differential Calculus
If you have a job that really does make use of these jobs - even if you've deliberately gone out of your way to engineer the job requirements so that someone without this knowledge would have difficulty doing the job - you should be alright.
Round out the list with "relevant" technical courses. For example, for a programmer position, structure the job so that it really does require that a candidate recently had 30 classroom hours of ALL of the following courses or had the equivalent experience or self-study in these areas:
* algorithm design
* computer hardware
* [list two programming languages that weren't in vogue 10 years ago here]
* [list another skill that is widely taught in school but which only a small fraction of "industry hires" will have more than a passing knowledge of here]
Then for good measure throw in things like "must have given at least 3 technical presentations of at least 15 minutes each in the last 5 years, at least one of which is to a non-lay audience."
Again, this will only work if the job really does require the knowledge and skills that the job description asked for. If a motivated candidate that lacks one or more of the requirements could reasonably be expected to "fill in the gaps" through self-study before he needed to use those skills between the time he started the application/resume process and the time he needed them on the job, then making them a job requirement could be seen as a sham and it could get you into trouble.
Here's a hypothetical "engineered" job designed specifically to require such skills:
Job posting: Web programmer Level I
Salary range: [keep it on the low end but not OMGTHISMUSTBEANHB1POSITION low]
Primary duties: Work under supervision to design, implement, and maintain web sites using [list 2-3 fairly new web-development environments]
Secondary duties: Give short talks about your projects to other teams in the company; attend short talks given by other teams and provide feedback; present papers at technical conferences
Non-technical duties: Represent company in college- and high-school outreach including participating in "adult vs. youth" contests like "Are you smarter than an 11th-Grade American History Student," giving talks to middle school students on topics such as "how to make a ripple-carry adder circuit from the things you find at home," and giving talks to high school Calculus students on topics like "not all computers are digital."
--
Now, Mr. Employer, I have to ask you:
Is it really worth re-jiggering your employees' job duties specifically so your typical industry hire would not be qualified but your typical recent B.S.-holding technical-degree-graduate would? Add to that the fact that more seasoned professionals bring certain hard-to-define qualities to the job that you typically just can't get from less-seasoned professionals and recent grads? Also, don't forget loyalty: People who have kids-in-tow or who have lived in the area for awhile are very unlikely to want to move to a new area once they hire on with you. While you can't ask about kids or length-of-current-residence in a job interview, you can generally assume that your average person over 30 is more stable/reliable and less likely to "jump ship" for more money or a minor on-the-job annoyance than someone under 25.
Oh, and as for salary:
It's not like the 1990s, we, the "older tech workers," get it: We know that despite the benefi
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Older people with memory or social problems still feel entitled to equal opportunity.
Younger people with memory or social problems also feel entitled to equal opportunity.
Employers would don't usually write very good job requirements and just want to fill a position within budget.
The chief skill unfortunately is everyone just wants to be lied to and they'll get along fine.
When deception and entitlement are the actual goals, everyone looses.
That's probably why startups shoot up like rockets based on one or two self-driven innovators and flame out and they get sold or become larger companies and the original talent seeks and exit strategy, or just quits because of all the social problems with big groups.
Ironically the autistic individual might actually be the better focused and successful in a post startup boom, since they tend to drive away or isolate themselves and focus on the problems or projects they have derived as their primary interest.. they are particularly good at remote tech support, without the interference of a constant barrage of "information" from the users.
I'm pretty sure they meant "digital naive".
"Willing to travel." Maybe if this is to do software development in a remote location, this could have somewhat of a discriminatory effect. Willingness to visit customers makes a big difference, though, in how valuable an employee is. Sure it sucks when you have a family. But it's probably worth 30k/year.
If its a bunch of Party Kids like FaceBook in Social Netweork, would a 40+ want to work there? I a lot of cases its not so balck and white.
So I suppose I'm digital native x10 ???
If you began using the net in the mid 80s and are younger than 60 you've spent half your life on the net and have seen it all and sure as fuck know more than some kid coming out of school with extensive Microsoft experience.
Would Stallman be considered a digital native?
Need Mercedes parts ?
I am thinking of removing anti-discrimination laws completely (not just to create exceptions) and allowing regulators (such as anti-trust) to impose anti-discrimination conditions on specific companies instead, because of the problems they cause and the lack of effectiveness.
I took my first programming class in 1976. We used punch cards on an IBM mainframe. Somebody have a link to a job req. for a "digital native?" I could have some fun.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
> In short, I can't see how this is supposed to be an age-filter.
A shibboleth (/bl/[1] or /bl/[2]) is a word or custom whose variations in pronunciation or style can be used to differentiate members of ingroups from those of outgroups. Within the mindset of the ingroup, a connotation or value judgment of correct/incorrect or superior/inferior can be ascribed to the two variants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
Ok, so it's not the letter of the definition, but surely the spirit.
You will be a dinosaur by the time you're 40. I learned that the hard way. Instead, find a career in medicine or physical science where older people are actually respected for their knowledge and wisdom.
If i was hiring, I would probably discriminate as well. Yes, I know that people fresh out of college or with a few years under their belt might know some new technologies (probably not. Colleges usually lag technology), and might be willing to work long hours, but I know that somebody who is 40+ and has been working most of those years in the technical industry has already made many of the mistakes that a young person has yet to make and has figured out how to do things right and how to write code efficiently and using the proper tool and not the latest wizbang tool that isn't quite right for the job but looks great on a resume and everybody is constantly blathering about on the internet.
So yes, I would tend to discriminate in favor of the experienced individual, even though they are probably more expensive and won't work as many hours, I know I will get an overall better product out of them and in a shorter time frame.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Without hardware knowledge people do stupid shit like sort on disk instead of in memory.
A lot more of that happens in scientific and engineering computing than it should, sometimes wasting many hours of time per project.
3 weeks ago I visited my dad. He is 75. Still working. His boss is an old apprentice of him who lets him run his shop a few days a week while he works in his own electronics shop, builds circuits and sells and toys with 3D printers. This guy started his electronics shop a few years ago, at the tender young age of 60, because he like to play with new electronics gizmos that you build yourself (most of his stock are electronic building kits). I (age 45) felt like a kid in a candy store there.
His shop has a inventory system that runs on SCO Unix and dates from the 80s. Someone screwed up and started printing inventory reports for an entire year. My dad dug out the SCO manuals, went into the terminal and found the command line stuff to stop the printer.
Now they have a problem. Their terminal program runs on DOS and it uses a strange version of telnet that can print locally (on a dot matrix). They can't use it anymore cause they can't find floppy disks that can boot DOS anymore. This is problematic. The inventory program on SCO is still better than anything you can find nowadays and they like to use it. The menu is burned into the green-screen monitor.
I looked into using a Raspberry Pi as a terminal with cKermit to get rid of the old (one still running since the 80s') DOS boxes. Old 60 year old guy installed it himself.
This was 3 weeks ago, in 2015. That is what a digital native looks like.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Really the discrimination stuff is a pretense of fairness rather than an actual effort to be fair. Look at it this way. You have 20 applicants for one position. You sort through the pile and discriminate until you find the person that matches what you seek. You have your own values that you have established which are probably quite misleading. For example most of us consider past accomplishments as a signal of what to expect from a person. That is nonsense. People change and the fellow that was behind may have made special efforts to make sure they are superb at the tasks at hand. Even former convicts, who most people consider bad, may well be top drawer people who were placed in such a difficult circumstance that crime was the best or only choice for them a couple of years ago. All of us like to feel comfortable and assured that we are not hiring some sort of freak but when you think about it those nuts who run back into a building and gun down people that they worked with all passed interviews and probably back ground checks as well. We even had a Florida cop who enjoyed dragging young women into the woods and taking them apart with an ax. He had passed muster at more than one Florida police force.
Has it occurred to any of those witlings that people who are now "old folk" invented the computer, the network, the operating system, the Internet, and - marginally - the Web? (Sorry TBL!) Moreover, they are more likely to understand how those things work than younger people who simply take them for granted.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I thought those meant that they were not going to pay.
Recent Grad - young - low pay.
Passion for subject - willing to work nights and weekends without overtime or other compensation.
H1b- willing to be an indentured servant for 3-5 years.
That's what you took away from my post? Really? Maybe you think that YOU are working for the next big billion dollar business?
I guess con artists who go after specific age groups shouldn't be prosecuted for being con artists. They should be sued for age descrimination because they are not offering to steal from everyone equally.
Bits and bytes, what's that is it something like on and off things in hyperspace. Aha it's like me being on FB and other social networks or not, always connected as borgs living in a virtual and matrix world, guess this is better known as VR but not AR in the terms of the native digital awareness. Of course you are native as long as you know how to use and access your I/O between real world and the matrix world now this is a philosophical new era in our digital appearance, wouldn't you say!
...when I was 10, on paper, before I learned standard algebra, and my first program for a "real" computer was a binary decimal conversion program. So yeah, I'm a digital native.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Born in '57. Changed paper tape for batch printing jobs on at FSU in 75. Was an author on PLATO. Sold the first TRS-80 in Tallahassee. Had a 4 digit, 2 digit compuserve login. Knows the difference between CP/M and MP/M. Put the dash in MS-DOS. Spent $600 for my first month on Genie. Reformated my ST-251-0 from MFM to RLL. Installed an Intel Aboveboard 386 in my Tandy 3000.
Been there done that.
Now I do ITIL
YAWN.... So what else is new. Age discrimination will never be solved. It was an issue when I started after college in 1972. I have always found environments of companies participating in age discrimination schemes to be a drag to work for. They are usually sweat-shops and no place to build a career on. Give these companies and their recruiters the "bird" and move on. Choose your companies carefully. Keep your skills honed and in areas of demand. If you're stuck on Java, try stretching and learning VHDL or something. This often means venturing into new technologies and a lot of self-learning. As you get older quit being an employee and become a contractor or free-lance. The pay is better--you get paid for every hour you work. No one seems to care about the age of contractors. I've worked with contractors who need to walk with a cane. I'm now 70 (although I look younger) and am leading the development of an ARM-based medical device. There are ways around the age discrimination issue if you remain good at what you do.
I have been dethroned as head nerd. I never figured out sendmail.
(I installed a different mail processor just to get decipherable config files)
I recently was flown to Paris, France, for an interview with one of France's largest corporations. Since I am a fairly recent college graduate they had no concept beforehand that I might be over 50 (especially since in France they do not accept older independent college students into university). They told me to my face I was too old. At least in the US they have to make an effort to ignore your qualifications and come up with some sort of bullshit to keep from hiring older workers.
As someone born in the 50's and was a contributor to the revolution I prefer to call my self a "Digital Original" ;)
I also was just laid off last week because of a site shut down and will have a chance first hand to see how bad the discrimination is.
Pax, Richard Elliott
I'm pushing 50 and have been using computers since I was 7 years old (mainframe access originally)
Am I more native than someone in his 20s who's only really started using systems since age 15-18 or so?
This is one of those buzzwords which is hard to nail down and as such discrimination suits would have trouble.
Turned out I had a knack for coding, but didn't find that out until my first encounters with terminals and PCs around '82 or so, at the age of 39. So I started hacking (back when that term wasn't quite so derogatory as it is these days), turned out or participated in some pretty significant code. (Does "Info-ZIP Workgroup" mean anything to anyone anymore?) So I would've been disqualified even before I started, if it were up to those damned recruiters.
Good thing, back then, that a degree in Computer Science didn't mean quite so much. If you had good ideas, if you could code, if you could produce .. hey, give the guy a chance! (I loved that!)
I'd love to be 21 and give it a shot these days (although it wouldn't be nearly as much fun: no such thing as a one-man programming shop these days). But I'd want the same shot if I were 39 .. or 79!
I was born with 10 digits. Doesn't that make me a digital native?
My sixth grade science fair project was a 1 bit adder made out of a battery, wire, two DPDT relays, switches, and lights. Does that make me a "digital native"?
Place me among 1964's digerati? biterati?
How about that everyone in my 10th grade learned FORTRAN on our school's IBM 1130?
Fortunately for me, I needn't care.
Sadly, others do.
There are still plenty of avenues into a career writing code sans a CS degree. Web UI was mine. One Node.js developer can accomplish an awful lot.
4 years younger here. But same sorts of experience, First computer was a TRS-80, Vic-20, then a big bump to 286, and so on. My online handle predates what most would consider the Internet (though I also had access though a university working coop in high school) on BBS's...
I've found while the younger generation might be more familiar with technology than their older counterparts, the apple mantra "it just works" mantra is more often than not is pervasive. They lack a basic understanding about how technology works, where it came from, or how it is connected and all works together...
The older folks that grew up throughout the change have a more fulsome understanding as they have been through it.
All generalizations of course...
I recall my actual interest in computers was born out of the difficulties of computer games at the time, and connecting to things like BBS's. Where you had to write a bit of code even if it was just into a BAT file to play with memory settings so you could play a game or to connect to a BBS. Though I'll admit my first modem was a 2400 baud, but I do recall connecting to some 300 baud modems myself...
Not sure kids now a days would become interested in computer science when everything is seemingly done for them...
Two things:
1) Just because you work 70+ hours, doesn't mean you are actually doing anything good. If you know what you are doing, maybe you can get that work done in 40 hours, better. Hiring someone with less experience to work longer, seems like a poor business plan anyway.
2) Become a consultant. Then be the one that they call in to fix the mess that a bunch of tired 20 somethings bashed together, charge 10x as much. Consulting sucks because of the risk involved, but then again if you are going to work for a start up, that is pretty risky anyway. You may have to work 70 hours anyway, but at least you can decide when, and not have to do it every week.