Are You at Risk of Being a Victim of Ageism? Are You Sure?
I’ve always marveled at the number of jobs available in the tech industry. Why are there so many when all we hear about on the news is the ever-growing number of unemployed Americans? Can’t these scores of people just learn to code, become certified software testers, or even take their first steps on the road to agile?
Sure they could—but only if they’re not too old.
Silicon Valley probably shouldn’t do too much complaining about the number of jobs that continue to go unfilled, especially during the “age crisis” that InfoWorld says the tech Mecca is currently undergoing. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends older than twenty-eight, the median age of Facebook employees, when he was recently quoted as saying, “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.”
InfoWorld’s Tom Kaneshige points out that while Silicon Valley was once the home of “angry protests from techies decrying the practice of offshore outsourcing and the hiring of H-1B workers,” today the complaints are of ageism against those being labeled as “old” far earlier than they’d ever dreamed.
But surely ageism is limited to those young startups that don’t want to disrupt their laid-back culture or vibe. How big a problem are we dealing with? Michael Harper of the Boston University School of Law can answer that for us: 23,000 charges of age discrimination were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in fiscal 2010, up by about 7,500 from 1997.
Those are just the cases that were actually reported. It’s not hard to imagine that many more cases are kept quiet—especially with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act labeled as weak, ineffective, and able to be ignored with “relative stealth,” as Rex Huppke at The Chicago Tribune claims.
So, if you can’t wait on the government to help and you’re past the apparently “old” age of thirty, what can you do to increase your odds of being hired for a position with a company that might believe “young people are just smarter"?
Industry professional Dave Fecak’s blog post on overcoming ageism has some fantastic suggestions for the "new-elderly" who are looking for work, plus some tips for those looking to keep their positions out of young(er) whippersnappers’ hands.
