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

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.<p>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.

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.<p>Pay is bad though.

In the next 10 to 15 years, tech is going to have a lot of millennial who reach 50+. We&#x27;ll have a similar challenge in the US where tech culture leans towards hyping youth, and the new reality.

In the company I worked for, it actually went the other way, from the US.<p>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.<p>They did force you to retire at 60, though. I suspect that is an artifact of their &quot;full employment&quot; stance. I’ll bet they are revisiting that, now, as the population is actually declining.

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

In practical terms, I&#x27;ve never been asked my age in an interview. At some point I&#x27;m going to prune my experience if I have to.

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.

On age discrimination closer to home for US techbros...<p>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&#x27;ve been a campus event.<p>At the event, he happened to overhear some of the 20-something recruiting representatives of the FAANG, making fun of a candidate they&#x27;d interviewed for being &quot;old&quot;.<p>I didn&#x27;t ask, but, based on the way he said it, he might&#x27;ve been the one they were making fun of. (Then again, he&#x27;s always defending others, and might&#x27;ve just been very upset on someone else&#x27;s behalf. Though, if he&#x27;d been defending someone else, he probably would&#x27;ve ripped those representatives a new one, at least three different ways.)<p>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&#x27;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.<p>He showed some of that weathering, and -- I suspect this might&#x27;ve been a barrier with that group -- didn&#x27;t look like an affluent Palo Alto recent-grad. So, &quot;old&quot;. Or, if those airhead representatives had had HR training, they would&#x27;ve called it &quot;culture fit&quot;.<p>Which is doubly ironic in his case, since, in principle, he was pretty much a poster-child for the warm-fuzzy FAANG&#x27;s PR: socioeconomically-diverse, cross-disciplinary, whole-self, make-the-world-better, with LGBTQ+ sprinkles on top.<p>He seemed very disappointed in those representatives of the FAANG, and had some choice words about who that FAANG &quot;was hiring now&quot;. And in the couple decades since, he never did go there, even though, on paper, it would&#x27;ve been the obvious choice at multiple points of his career accomplishments.

Japan requires photos of woman on their resumes, and their age. Japanese employers don&#x27;t like hiring women who are in their child-bearing ages because they might get pregnant.<p>Say what you want about the US, but the level of protection workers have is so much better than most other countries.