11 Comments
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Approved Posture's avatar

Imagine you have to hire a childcare worker. You can’t interview candidates and all you know is the candidate’s sex. You have one male and one female applicant. You will inevitably pick the female.

Repeat the game where all you know is age. You have an entry-level position in an IT firm and one application from a 25 year old and another from a 55 year old. You will inevitably pick the 25 year old.

In the real world there are lots of other factors about the candidates that might make you hire the male for the childcare position and the 55-year-old for the entry-level position in the IT firm. But these candidates will have to help you to overcome your logical suspicions about their ability based on their demographic characteristics.

I made a big career move just after the age of 40 several years ago for a few reasons. One of the major reasons was that very soon I was going to be too old to be considered a credible candidate as an external hire no matter what my experience was.

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TonyZa's avatar

Imagine you have to hire a lawyer. Your options are a 25 year old and a 55 year old. Which one you pick?

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Approved Posture's avatar

Imagine you have to hire a physics professor and all you know is their IQ. Which do you pick?

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Unknown Person's avatar

25 year old

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Daniel's avatar

Is there a common form of discrimination that is never or rarely rational? Probably not. That's why there are laws and rules against it.

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Andreas Stullkowski's avatar

His argument was that if you want to get valuable employees for little money (because you are a stqrtup), you cannot find these people in the older population. Because they and everyone else know what they are worth. People over 30 will ask for a salary they deserve.

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torre's avatar

What does it mean "somebody who has achieved nothing" here? Getting hired by a startup? Being a tech employee doesn't seem something that difficult to achieve.

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Garreth Byrne's avatar

"The idea that somebody who has achieved nothing at the age of 38 is never going to make it is constraining, unempathetic, and gauche. But it’s true."

Stop huffing the glue brother. This is an empirically incorrect statement.

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Sebastian Jensen's avatar

"Never" is perhaps an exaggeration.

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Random Musings and History's avatar

If the person has ADHD and is in their 30s, then maybe they simply need some help? Especially if they score relatively high on an IQ test?

I mean, I’d love to get a history-related job, but those aren’t widespread, unfortunately, which is a huge shame because history is my passion.

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Marton's avatar

Re: your name, Jensen's inequality is a core theorem in the realm of convex optimization. Maybe inadvertently, the name is very fitting: an inequality which is required to reach optimality.

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