I did go for a job recently where we had a great phone interview and the guy essentially said “everything looks great we just need to meet in person” and when we met in person I visibly saw his expression change. Something about my appearance, either age or weight or both. He emailed no thanks after.
Why was he thumbs down? "I don't think he's a good fit for the team." When pressed for what that means he simply repeated it.
Make of that what you will.
I'm in my 50s. I've been through the death marches, the unrealistic goals, the 60-hour weeks, the last minute emergencies, the all-nighters trying to get a release out or trying to recover from the fallout of a poorly tested release.
I won't do it anymore. Nobody I know who is my age will do that anymore. There's almost nothing that will keep me at work past 5:00. The sun will come up tomorrow and nobody will die.
So if you're looking to hire someone who will ask "how high" when you say "jump" then you probably don't want to hire an older person.
Moe from The Simpsons.
Pay is bad though.
That's not true. YC startup Tailor, the first (and only?) Japan startup that YC funded, left me on read on LinkedIn. They ignored my application without a response, too. Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.
To be fair, the whole American tech culture of inclusitivity is not really a thing in Japan or most Asian countries. My freind works as a designer at a bank's tech arm, and told me wild stories of coworkers parading their sex videos around the office. Her boss straight up told her she was hired because she pretty, and that he was proud of forming a team of models (both male and female). I talked to other people who worked in East Asia, and they found these stories to be unsurprising.
Why do you think that? Was the job requisition in English? Did it ask for Japanese proficiency? If the answers are "yes" and "no", respectively, then it's very unlikely they're discriminating against non-Japanese for that job. If they don't want to hire non-Japanese, they'll simply post the job in Japanese only, or put "Japanese language proficiency (N2 or better)" or something like that in the ad. The reality is that not that many companies have an English working environment; this is a country where the national language is Japanese, and not that many people speak English well, after all.
I wonder if that is in any way correlated to this:
> Gov't study finds only 3,065 homeless people in Japan
https://japantoday.com/category/national/gov%27t-study-finds...
Second, your comment could be interpreted as saying that counties with high pay have (or should have) a lot of homeless people, which seems insane. So what did you mean?
> Last Friday, Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare released the results of an annual study of the number of homeless people *in the country’s parks and riverside areas.*
So this isn't the full count of homeless, just the ones living in specific park areas.
However, the cost of living is much lower in Japan than in the large tech-hub cities in the US (and probably even mid-tier cities). Life in the US is really expensive these days.
However, salaries in general are high. Tech salaries are just not significantly higher like in the US.
There were levels and positions that were only available to employees of certain chronological ages (or above). I remember doing some fancy footwork, trying to get particularly bright younger engineers into positions of greater responsibility.
They did force you to retire at 60, though. I suspect that is an artifact of their "full employment" stance. I’ll bet they are revisiting that, now, as the population is actually declining.
More broadly, I think the problem with age discrimination is a problem with engineers that have 30 years of experience doing unimpressive things. For an IC code monkey I would definitely prefer someone younger with a lot of energy and potential to grow.
Not saying that I think age discrimination is okay, but that's too the reality of how people feel.
I just feel that each employee should be managed as an individual; an attitude that doesn’t mesh well, with today’s business culture.
Same as Spain and Jamaica, higher than China and Korea.
When I was just getting started in the field, I already had some work experience from prior exploits and college employment. Leaving the dates off my degree helped me get a reasonable job early on, I think.
Just wear your ballcap backwards and folks will assume you're at least young at heart! (I jest)
Though we could just normalize leaveing graduation dates off of resumes... I dont6think that is especially relevant for most jobs.
Pretty early in one warm-fuzzy FAANG, around the time a friend of mine finished a big-name CS-ish advanced degree, and he was at an event where the FAANG was recruiting. It might've been a campus event.
At the event, he happened to overhear some of the 20-something recruiting representatives of the FAANG, making fun of a candidate they'd interviewed for being "old".
I didn't ask, but, based on the way he said it, he might've been the one they were making fun of. (Then again, he's always defending others, and might've just been very upset on someone else's behalf. Though, if he'd been defending someone else, he probably would've ripped those representatives a new one, at least three different ways.)
I think he was still in his 30s, despite two successful earlier careers (one as an old school tech-ish entrepreneur). He went to the gym and was fit, but he looked like what he was: a kid from humble upbringings, who'd seen some rough situations, including being gay when and where that was not OK, and had pulled himself up by his bootstraps, to success despite all that. And while also doing a lot of activism to help some of the most disadvantaged and persecuted, when it was unfashionable.
He showed some of that weathering, and -- I suspect this might've been a barrier with that group -- didn't look like an affluent Palo Alto recent-grad. So, "old". Or, if those airhead representatives had had HR training, they would've called it "culture fit".
Which is doubly ironic in his case, since, in principle, he was pretty much a poster-child for the warm-fuzzy FAANG's PR: socioeconomically-diverse, cross-disciplinary, whole-self, make-the-world-better, with LGBTQ+ sprinkles on top.
He seemed very disappointed in those representatives of the FAANG, and had some choice words about who that FAANG "was hiring now". And in the couple decades since, he never did go there, even though, on paper, it would've been the obvious choice at multiple points of his career accomplishments.
Say what you want about the US, but the level of protection workers have is so much better than most other countries.
The US has summary firing. In Japan if you're a permanent employee you can reasonably expect to remain so.
From the people pissing in bottles at Amazon your protections don't sound any better.
Hiring discrimination against child bearing aged women is universal - it's just in the US they have to be more careful how they do it.
“you know, every time we interview a woman in her late 20s/early 30s, I just have to wonder if she’ll take maternity leave 6 months in to working with us. As a startup we just can’t afford that”.
Of course the public face of the company was all about fighting inequality, supporting diversity, etc.
