www.cnn.com/2001/CAREER/trends/01/30/agebias/index.html
Find your age group below, and tell us whether you think younger people are better-treated in tech careers than older people. All the commercials you see on television -- some young guy telling the boss what he should be doing online. At the survey's core were questions about whether the respondents thought their ages had been a factor in whatever incident they'd encountered. Overall, 40 percent of the respondents said they think age discrimination isn't a significant or widespread problem in the tech professions. The 'voices' part we put up on the site -- I didn't really find a lot of hysterical bitterness. You could be 90 but as long as you look young, you're fine. When the question was put to older workers, more than half of them, 45 to 64, said there's no such thing as equal-opportunity discrimination: If it happens, it's going to be younger IT workers discriminating against older ones. All responding techies, younger or older, said they had "no preference" about age in terms of tech professionals working for them. In this survey, however, younger techies (18-24) were six times as likely as those 45-54 to contend that older workers almost always make more money than younger workers. These things and the Internet are running many aspects of our businesses today. So it should be whoever has the savvy, the oomph, whoever has the knowledge to get the job done in a businesslike fashion -- those are the people you'd think are being taken the most seriously. We picked up a lot of frustration from people who are under 25 who say, 'Look, I can do this, I know what I'm doing,' but they're seen as too young. We also heard from women, good-looking women, who said, 'I have to really work to overcome the image of the dumb blonde. Younger than that, you have to work hard to convince people you can do things. Older than that you're going to have to work hard to convince people that as an old dog you can learn new tricks. Just because you've spent a lot of time learning one thing this year doesn't mean you won't have to learn a different thing next year. And it might be because you leave or it might be because the company goes away. You find out when you're going through all this that you have to develop yourself professionally. You worry about developing yourself so you're valuable to the widest range of companies. Find 105 Back to the top 2003 Cable News Network LP, LLLP.
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