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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."
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.
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.
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."
"Digital native" is old and only luddites use that term. The new term is app appers, because app appers love apping apps!
Apps!
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
Entry level implies no experience. If I applied for a position in brain surgery, I would apply for an entry-level position. I've never done that before, but how hard can it be?
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.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
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
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.
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.
Sorry, son, but society (and the Supreme Court) voted and you're wrong.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"The hardware knowledge argument has become virtually irrelevant in the EC2-world where you can spawn VM pretty much transparently."
But not cost free.
The every cent spent of VM comes right out of the bottom line. Take a look at the all the hard work Facebook does at optimizing.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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.
Who do you think creates and enhances that VM technology? Who configures the servers, comes up with the load balancing strategies, and keeps our security tight? I can assure you it is the middle aged smart guys at my company... The kids we hire right out of college are almost worthless the first 3 years. Good thing we are willing to mentor you young snots!
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.
Pretty much exactly so.
What you didn't mention is that's a perfectly valid business reason. On more than a few levels what management says may be complete BS but at the end of the day if the goals aren't met there isn't a job at that company for anyone. Having a workforce you can wring that maximum effort out of helps immensely. It's also easier to build company loyalty with younger people.
I did some consulting at a start-up a few years back and had an off-the-record talk with their recruiter. She said that they preferred to hire younger folks because 50 somethings typically have a much harder time working under a 25 year-old supervisor.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
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.
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.
Of course, the reason is quite possibly because the 25 year old supervisor is inexperienced and doesn't take kindly to that being pointed out.
Posting anon because I'm about to talk about a former client I did some consulting for. It's a Valley startup. All a bunch of young guys, mostly with one job behind them. One guy did actually have a family, though. Anyway, at one point we were discussing interviewing and hiring. They didn't seem to think there was anything unusual about asking an interview candidate to spend an entire day doing pair programming with them on their own codebase. I pointed out that this would be fine for college students who could bunk off lectures and spend all day watching the interviewer tap out Go, but more experienced/older guys would probably find this a bit problematic, especially if they already have a job. Google can get away with 8 interviews and all day assessments and still hire very senior people because it has the reputation as a great place to work and with great pay, so people put up with the long process. Not every company can do this.
Their response: "well, maybe we don't want to hire senior guys".
I don't think they'd consider themselves explicitly agist. But they very much wanted to hire people just like themselves, and that almost by definition excluded "old" people (anyone 40 or over). This didn't extend to sexism by the way: they were very keen on hiring female interns and recent college grads to write code for them. But they didn't want some guy in his 40's or 50's turning up and pointing out that maybe some of the modern dev fashions they were following had already come and gone in the 1990's, and perhaps using uncool but tried and tested technology would have some real benefits.
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.
Your response is an example of Appeal to Authority
Actually, the one you're trying to reach for is Appeal to Popularity (Argumentum ad Populum) not Appeal to Authority.
However, you started by talking about "immorality", so you've already fallen victim to dogmatism (by Excluding the Middle). While likening the "Pi equals 3" law or creationism to anti-discrimination laws is an Argument by False Analogy, since Pi=3 and creationism are factually wrong, not morally, and are therefore unrelated to the argument you are trying to make.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
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!!!
Right, we forgot, Amazon VMs are magical devices powered by hopes and dreams, rather than CPU cycles like old fashioned "computers" are.
Back here in reality cloud virtual machines are just a shitty containment mechanism that's sort of like an operating system process, only dramatically less efficient. Did you know that Google, not a company exactly famous for lacking clue, doesn't use VMs internally at all? Every internal program runs as a regular operating system process on top of a patched Linux kernel. The system is called Borg and they published a paper on it recently.
Why don't they use VMs, Amazon style? Because VMs suck. Running an entire OS inside another OS just to provide isolation is a great way to waste vast amounts of money and resources. It means sysadmins get to reuse their existing skillset instead of learning some new way of managing software, but that's about it as far as advantages are concerned.
Certainly your Amazon VM will suffer from cache line interference, limited resources, and other things that plague physical devices.
They might as well advertise for "Naive, spinless young suckers who'll do anything for a buck."
That's how they should advertise the job so that more experienced people don't waste their time. It's the same old story once you get there and it takes a lot of social skills and energy to walk away amicably. Most of the time it isn't a happy ending for anyone.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
They didn't seem to think there was anything unusual about asking an interview candidate to spend an entire day doing pair programming with them on their own codebase.
Heh... I had a similar situation a month or so ago. Headhunter cold-called me, told me how hard they're looking for people with serious amounts of Mac experience, so I went to see the customer (startup over in Mountain View), product wasn't terribly interesting, and then the recruiter says they want me to come in for a "coding exercise" that should only take about four to six hours. I told him my rate for very short term projects, and he actually expected me to give them six hours of my time on spec.
I quit taking his calls.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
There's a large employer in my area that basically staffs entirely with college grads. I've seen the compensation packages they're offered and they're not awful, but given the hours they generally work and the demands placed upon them they're not really fair. Part of the company's repeated excuse for not hiring more experienced devs is "it takes us too long to break them of the habits they picked up elsewhere." Which doesn't speak well of their development practices, frankly - if all you get from experienced developers is "bad habits" the problem may not be with the devs...
Also, "hire a 23 year old" also means "hire someone who is less likely to have a family and demands outside work." It's lot easier to convince someone to work a 12-15 hour day if they don't have to pick up the kids from school.
----
"I used to listen to Null Device before they sold out."