Blog – Page 29 – The Renegade Coder

As a white male living in the United States, I don't really have many things I can complain about. In fact, I have it pretty good. After all, I have total control over my body, I can walk alone at night, and I can trust in law enforcement. Yet even with all that going for me, I still feel discriminated in the workplace. It's certainly not racial or ethnic discrimination but rather age discrimination. Youth Hazing What is often called a right of passage, I interpret as ageism or corporate hazing. Why is it that young people have to be treated so poorly in the workplace? Everything we do is undervalued regardless of the impact to the team. It's as if experience is more important than actual productivity. It's frustrating and disheartening to say the least. Now, I'm aware that this is an unpopular opinion as most literature indicates that the older generations are the ones who are discriminated. And, that's true; people over 50 tend to have a harder time finding jobs. However, I'm trying to address the discrimination that occurs within the workplace rather than during the hiring process. In that scenario, I feel young people actually get the shaft. The Tale of Mutual Respect Ageism is one of those things that's hard to prove. You can't really look inside someone's mind and determine why they're treating you poorly. However, you can sort of extrapolate the reason through their behavior. The One-Off Solution For example, I remember being the only software engineer on one of my teams. Regardless of my experience, that automatically put me at the top of the team in terms of software knowledge. This usually worked out nicely because I would be given full autonomy on projects. That didn't mean things were easy. People without software knowledge have a hard time making software requirements, but I digress. I remember one time I was asked to create a one-off version of our software that would destroy itself after a certain date. Being a decent software engineer at the time—and gamer—I knew that I couldn't just have the code check the system time. I needed some way to preserve that state, so the user couldn't just set their clock back. As a result, I settled on adding a registry key to the system. If the key existed regardless of the time on the machine, we would delete the script. I figured that would be complex enough for these field guys, so I let it go like that. The Great Debate Naturally, we decided to discuss the design in a meeting. We were looking at potential risks, and I made the mistake of mentioning that the executable was always going to be prone to attacks. After all, this is sort of elementary. If the processor can read the executable, so can anyone else. The binaries can be easily extracted and decompiled by the average hacker, and there really isn't much we can do about it. Unfortunately, I was then forced to deflect several members' concerns as they suddenly were let into the world of computer security. It was like they couldn't believe I would write software that was that vulnerable. As a result, I was forced to explain how computers work to a bunch of middle-aged men. As a sand magician, I make sure that electrons flow in just the right way through silicon. It was frustrating because I could tell they didn't trust me, and the only thing they could pin it on was my experience. However, as I stated before, experience is the best facade for ageism. After all, if it was really about experience, one of them would have been writing the software. Another One This sort of debate happened all the time. After I trained the team on how to use GitHub, it became a common ground for arguing trivial computer science topics. There were so many times where a mechanical engineer would be skeptical of my decision and call me out on it in GitHub. For example, I remember we were setting up Jenkins to automatically integrate all our software and build an installer. That's amazing if you ask me. We didn't need to manually do anything but write our own code. Unfortunately, my manager came out of the woodwork and decided to challenge this new automation. They thought that it would somehow hurt our ability to trace software versions when in fact it was the complete opposite. Of course, if they really understood anything, they would have understood that our new build procedure would guarantee that any new installers would have completely documented versioning as well as validated components. All we had to do was use the installer for integration testing. This sort of occurrence happened so often that I had to wonder if some of these senior team members felt threatened by my existence. To protect themselves, they'd use their power to oppress me. Thankfully, I moved on from there. Some Harder Evidence In all the scenarios described above, there really weren't any clear-cut examples of age discrimination. Sure, people looked down on me at times, but that could have been attributed to a variety of reasons. Perhaps I was just a bad team member, or maybe I was a little arrogant. Honestly, I was never really sure. That was until we had a team meeting during a stressful period of development. Long story short, a few of us on the team were asked to put in some extra hours because we "didn't have any kids." That's right. Apparently, having kids affords you extra rights in the workplace. I guess I'll go make one of these real quick, so I can get the benefits. For me, this is a prime example of age discrimination in the workplace. After all, young people tend to be the ones without kids, so it stands to reason that they would be the majority affected by this arbitrary rule. Why would your personal life play any role in your ability to contribute to your team? I suspect it has something to do with young people having to pay their dues. It's effectively hazing if you ask me. Regardless, I've found countless articles detailing this sort of practice in Japan. Unpaid overtime excesses hit youngJapanese woman 'dies from overwork' after logging 159 hours of overtime in a monthThe young Japanese working themselves to death I believe the practice is just as common in America, but American culture tends to label people as lazy if they complain. Eh, what can you do? What Does the EEOC Say? The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the government organization that enforces discrimination laws. So what would they say about my situation? Well, unfortunately, the youth don't seem to be protected by the EEOC. In fact, they explicitly state the following on their website: Employees under age forty are not protected from age discrimination by the laws enforced by EEOC, although some state and local laws protect younger workers. Alright, so maybe there is some sort of protection for young workers. However, I haven't been able to find any. In fact, HRHero (their article has since disappeared...) seems to believe that it's perfectly okay to discriminate against youth as long as you hide it behind some business reason: Even though it’s not unlawful to discriminate against younger workers under federal or most state laws, it’s probably not a good employment practice to do so. If an employer is going to prefer older workers to younger ones, there should be a valid, articulated business reason (e.g., work experience) rather than mere age for doing so. In fact, in the same article, HRHero claims that young workers are overindulgent, impatient, and self-absorbed. It's hard to take an author seriously when they go as far as to stereotype an entire group of people for the purpose of validating their own argument. Generational Age Discrimination With all that said, I think HRHero brings up a great topic: generations. For the record, I come from the tail end of the millennial generation which is the current target of the most jokes. Just take a look at this "motivational speech" (read: propaganda) by Simon Sinek: When you're finished, scroll down to the comments of the video and take a look at what people are saying about millennials. Even some millennials are trying to ostracize themselves from the group. It's ridiculous. I have no doubt in my mind that some level of age discrimination comes from this generational label. After all, these labels are just thinly veiled ageism. However, I'm not going to go into it since I figure the point has already been made. Instead, I'll share this article by Medium titled The 14 Most Destructive Millennial Myths Debunked by Data. Perhaps I should have shared it at work. Addressing Age Discrimination So how do we address age discrimination in the work place? Well first of all, we should probably stop judging each other. After all, workplace discrimination goes beyond age. In fact, I'm sure everyone has been mistreated in the workplace for reasons out of their control. Just take a look at this video: At about 1:20, you'll see someone with a sign that reads: "It's the strain of feeling I am expected to do more, simply because I don't have children." Sound familiar? It's time to foster a community of inclusion and mutual respect. Like always, let me know if this article hit the mark or not. Contrary to the heavy-handedness of my articles, I do love to hear from the other side. Keep in mind that a lot of my content was written during the height of my frustrations, so you can expect me to be more fair in the comments.