Why Demanding Years of Experience in Tech is Age Discrimination

Imagine you are a 23 year old software engineer. You go on Y combinator and see a listing for a cool job. It’s at a startup building a payment app. Pretty simple stuff.

You read the job description. You have experience with the tech stack.

And then you get to the end. You feel a pit open up in your stomach — yet again you’ve been sent to the back of the bus like Rosa Parks. The company won’t hire a dirty yigger — that is, someone under 30.

Soyjak norwooders are going to take your job …

Can YOEs be justified?

How should you feel about this? Maybe you live in a just world and YOEs are just really that heckin’ important.

In one study, gender, meeting preparation, and specific stack experience are predictive while YOEs were basically not. Someone with 6 YOEs who is either the wrong gender, doesn’t tech stack, and who is low conscientiousness will be inferior to someone with 1 YOE who is advanced at the right tech stack. We can only guess what role race and IQ play.

This replicates in other job fields. “A study published in Journal of Applied Psychology found that years of experience is one of the worst predictors of performance for new hires, ranking behind 22 other selection criteria.”

IQ wins again. Who’s going to perform better, a 140 IQ hard working 23 year old or a 120 IQ lazy pot smoking soylennial?

This was recently replicated again.

Civil Rights Law is based on far less

Civil Rights Law is based on simply a priori denying race gaps in economic merit. As a consequence, stuff like race blind IQ testing-based hiring is illegal.

It would be much closer to reality to assume a priori that broad years of experience has 0 to do with job performance and to therefore ban it as age discrimination against young people.

It would also be eugenic, because people should be having babies earlier and this would help fund that. Age discrimination contributes to low wages until your 30s which contributes to not having kids until your 30s which contributes to the sub-2 TFR.

But alongside white people and men, young people are the one age group you can openly discriminate against. It gets worse as age goes down too — what else is university but age discrimination? The colorism of ageism is yearism and if it’s hard to get a job under 25 or 30, it’s impossible under 21.

When the reality is that companies should be hiring smart 16 year olds who are good at webdev to make everything.