One of the subjects that came up with my mentoree is age discrimination in the computer industry. He's an older student so he's worried about finding a job once he graduates. My first answer was that, yes there is discrimination in my industry. But as I think about it more, I really have to wonder whether it's age discrimination or something else.

What do you think of when you're interviewing a 50-year-old candidate (not that you can ask their age, but the candidate looks old) and he has decades of experience with COBOL and IBM mainframes and things like that? All I can think of (not that I've ever actually interviewed anyone that old) is that we'll have to completely retrain you to Unix, Oracle, Java, and other more contemporary skills.

So the question is: why hire someone that old who's going to have to be paid much more when (in the short term) they're going to be just as effective as a college graduate? Let's face it, in the long term (more than a year down the road), having that kind of experienced person can be really valuable. But in today's job market, a year is a long time to stay in a company.

On the other hand, if you have the appropriate skills already, we'd hire you no matter your age or salary. There just aren't that many people with telephony development experience, much less Java and Oracle experience too. We still have to train you, but now all your technical experience comes into play once you're acclimated. That COBOL programmer has a lot of useful experience (working on large projects, documentation, leadership, etc), but the fact is that all those COBOL skills go to waste.

But, is salary really that important? Yeah, you hear that companies such as Oracle hire lots of foreign workers because they're cheaper. But how much cheaper is it? We can pay a graduate from one of the universities in India $40k versus $60k for someone from UC Berkeley (I'm pulling the numbers out of thin air, beats me what we pay them). But that's only like a third of the cost of an employee. Companies spend $100-150k a year per employee, which includes not only salary but various benefits, health insurance, and a bunch of other miscellaneous costs. And the savings is even less since we're also paying for the legal fees for their H1B visas and to get them US Citizenship.

You hire graduates from India, Hong Kong, and other places because of drive and hunger. These guys have gone through make or break decisions all their lives: competing to get the very few select spots in the top schools starting from when they first entered grade school. We have dedicated people who graduate out of our schools, but there are also a lot of graduates who are just not right for this industry, who don't have that hunger (heck, I'm not one of the driven ones). The percentage of foreign graduates who are right is much higher, so there's less risk of making a bad choice.

Part of that reasoning leads back to the age thing. It's hard to imagine a 50-year-old being hungry and driven. They've been through it all before, have families and real lives. Much less likely to find the work-60-houes-a-week- without-complaining people in that group than in the younger college graduate crowd. There are exceptions to everything, but the reason there is perceived age discrimination is that because there is reason to discriminate. Ability or maybe social compatibility or whatever.

To be fair, most companies don't overtly discriminate. You get a lot of applicants so you can be very fine tuned about the skills and group compatibility of candidates. It's unfortunate if you get pass over for another equally skilled candidate because of perceived differences (I'd rather work with people my age and cultural background, etc), but I don't think that's ethically bad. What would be unethical is to choose someone who is clearly less qualified over perceived differences. If you can't quantify why you chose the lesser candidate (cheaper, has useful non-technical skills, whatever) then that's discrimination in its ugliest form.