You're Too Old for That: Age Discrimination in Japan Tech

https://www.tokyodev.com/articles/age-discrimination-in-japan-tech

by pwim • 2 years ago

66 99 2 years ago

swader9993• 2 years ago

In practical terms, I've never been asked my age in an interview. At some point I'm going to prune my experience if I have to.

whatyesaid• 2 years ago

Age is pretty easily guessable by degree dates and your appearance, they don't need to ask it explicitly.

Retric• 2 years ago

Is there some reason to add degree dates? I removed them as clutter.

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Maybe at some point it’s better to leave off your degree? Your 20 years of experience are a lot more important (and the 10 before those irrelevant).

tarxvf• 2 years ago

More than that, too. I bet you could guess my age within 2 years with solely a list of technology I've used. I don't think it would even have to be sorted by date.

ensignavenger2• 2 years ago

Fortunately for me, I finished my degree much later in life than most folks. Pretty sure I could pass myself off as being at least 10 years younger than I am in a job hunt.

Though we could just normalize leaveing graduation dates off of resumes... I dont6think that is especially relevant for most jobs.

Atreiden• 2 years ago

You don't need to list the dates you obtained your degree.

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)

swader9993• 2 years ago

Never had those checked either.

phendrenad22• 2 years ago

Interviewing continues while on the job. People have been put on layoff lists, "encouraged" to quit, and passed over for promotion based on age, too. People have take these cases to court but it's not easy to prove.

coldcode• 2 years ago

If this is true, given their birth rate, they will have to change, or run out of people to do things.

jalapenos3• 2 years ago

A reminder Japan's birthrate isn't a special case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...

Same as Spain and Jamaica, higher than China and Korea.

brailsafe• 2 years ago

Closer to Canada than Canada is to the U.S.

zeroCalories5• 2 years ago

You probably want to look at overall population growth, as many countries have young immigrants that contribute to their growth.

wegfawefgawefg• 2 years ago

You know what japan always does though? They always respond to applications. Theres no instant automated rejection email. Theres no getting ghosted by 90% of companies.

Pay is bad though.

barbazoo• 2 years ago

Pay is bad though

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...

staunton• 2 years ago

First, that number is most probably understated.

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?

anonymoushn• 2 years ago

There are probably more than 3000 people just trying to live out of net cafes. Pay is bad for SWEs because Japan mostly doesn't have the sorts of companies that generate millions in profit per SWE, and foreign companies lower their offers to be only a little above the local market rate. Pay is bad for other workers because huge amounts of labor are wasted on tasks like "staying at the office at least as long as my boss" or "replacing our successful product with a new one for the sake of demonstrating that we have done something" which are optimized for purposes opposed to creating value.

willmadden• 2 years ago

That's one of the last things I would wonder.

TapWaterBandit• 2 years ago

The full quote is:

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.

bryanlarsen2• 2 years ago

Pay wasn't horrible 30 years ago when I was there; but after 30 years of ~0 inflation...

alephnan2• 2 years ago

They always respond to applications.

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.

shiroiuma4• 2 years ago

Pretty confident this company discriminates against non-Japanese.

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.

cscurmudgeon3• 2 years ago

Could it be because there are no automated systems?

shiroiuma4• 2 years ago

The pay (for tech jobs) isn't that bad compared to other peer nations. It's bad everywhere, compared to the US, where salaries are much, much higher than pretty much everyplace else, except possibly Switzerland.

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.

sureglymop• 2 years ago

Compared to the US, tech salaries in Switzerland are pretty bad unless you work for a big US tech company that has their hq here.

However, salaries in general are high. Tech salaries are just not significantly higher like in the US.

Aeolun2• 2 years ago

Hmm, I’ve had fresh people hired into management positions because that was age appropriate, never mind that those people were not interested in managing and had only one or two token reports.

blindriver• 2 years ago

Japan requires photos of woman on their resumes, and their age. Japanese employers don't like hiring women who are in their child-bearing ages because they might get pregnant.

Say what you want about the US, but the level of protection workers have is so much better than most other countries.

slily• 2 years ago

They don't "require photos of woman", passport-style portrait photos are standard period. It's really no different from LinkedIn being the standard in Western countries where you're suspicious if you don't have a personal photo on your profile and where you can just as easily be discriminated against based on your looks or whatever other criteria you can think of. The only difference is that they'll use euphemisms or outright bullshit you, if they even bother getting back to you about your application.

jalapenos3• 2 years ago

Bit disingenuous wording - they don't exclude men from photos & age.

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.

gyomu• 2 years ago

Yep. I once had the CEO of an early stage, venture backed SF startup I worked for confide to me:

“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.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

In the company I worked for, it actually went the other way, from 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.

zeroCalories5• 2 years ago

If we're working on a serious project(not tinder for dogs), I want to staff my senior positions with people that have tons of experience, not someone super bright.

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.

ChrisMarshallNY2• 2 years ago

Preaching to the choir, here. If you know much about me, you know that SV’s ageism is one of my biggest peeves. I feel that many of these jurassic-scale disasters, we hear about, are likely the direct result of inexperienced, impulsive, decisions, made with no adults In the room.

I just feel that each employee should be managed as an individual; an attitude that doesn’t mesh well, with today’s business culture.

tetrisgm• 2 years ago

In the next 10 to 15 years, tech is going to have a lot of millennial who reach 50+. We'll have a similar challenge in the US where tech culture leans towards hyping youth, and the new reality.

toomuchtodo• 2 years ago

Luckily, there’s going to be a lot less youth (compressing demographic pyramid), forcing businesses to accommodate older workers if they want labor.

taude• 2 years ago

nah, they'll just continue moving it offshore.

cubefox• 2 years ago

If the AI progress in the next 10 to 15 years will be like the AI progress in the last 10 to 15 years, tech culture will no longer hype youth anyway, or human employees in general.

netchkin• 2 years ago

It won't be the progress in AI, but the ever increasing human tolerance to bugs and shitty software, hardware and products in general. This is what will enable AI to thrive.

manfre• 2 years ago

With companies backpedaling on self checkout, I think the no human employees future is unlikely.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

You’ll never know if you’re being discriminated against due to age. Not here in Australia anyway, no one would ever say out loud. You just don’t get selected.

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.

alephnan2• 2 years ago

This is a case where statistics could prove of systemic discrimination and statistical anomalies

bigstrat2003• 2 years ago

They can prove statistical anomalies, sure. But no amount of statistics can prove discrimination (contrary to popular belief these days).

JKCalhoun3• 2 years ago

We (at Apple) interviewed a guy who was about my age (and I was already in my 50's at that time, ha ha). The interview(s) went great as far as I could suss but when we, the interviewers, met to go around and give the potential hire a thumbs up or thumbs down — one guy on our team was decidedly thumbs down.

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.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

There might be reasons you want to avoid hiring older software devs.

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.

andrewstuart2• 2 years ago

“Call this an unfair generalization if you must but old people are no good at everything.”

Moe from The Simpsons.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

Age discrimination is real, and impossible to prove. Unless there is a push like the diversity one we have now, it will remain that way. And it will affect all of us eventually (race and gender neutral), we all need to earn our FU money before 50 or else.

neilv2• 2 years ago

On age discrimination closer to home for US techbros...

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.

You're Too Old for That: Age Discrimination in Japan Tech

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