Wow... Where to begin... Well, let's start from the top...
In reality, neither - older people or the best for the job - get the job. Because if it were the most capable for the job, then new college grads would never get hired, would they?
You started off great but then made the assumption that all college grads would never get hired. It all depends on the college they graduated from. MIT, Stanford, Harvard and Yale graduates don't have nearly the difficulty getting employment as other grads. Now the question you need to ask is why? It boils down to colleges failing in their responsibility to the community they serve. Failing to teach the skills necessary for success.
It takes a couple of years experience to become good and productive.
Poppycock! It only takes years because the colleges are failing at producing the quality employee and the company ends up having to re-teach what the grad was supposed to learn in school. Worse, they now may have to unlearn bad habits that the student was taught in that rotten school.
Some big currently successful corp starts basing its hiring on some metric someone pulls out of their ass, and then everyone does it in the hopes of aping the success of that firm.
When you have 5,000 applicants for 5 positions you have to have some way of telling those that must lose why. Especially since you have agencies like the EEO looking over your shoulder.
Google and Microsoft has fucked up hiring for everyone with their idiotic interview questions that they ended up getting rid of anyway.
The bigger the employer, the more scrutiny they come under. Again, you need some metric to weed out the chaff in a way that won't get you sued in any of a thousand different ways. Some metrics work, some don't.
See, the fact is companies have no clue how to get the best. They make metrics up, buy cute tests, hire consultants with their Ouija boards or whatever, and follow what currently successful companies are doing - who are also pulling shit out of their asses.
Again, it is trying to work within the hiring laws that skew the tables with things like affirmative action How many times has /. had stories about the gender gap or other minority in tech? I see at least a story a week including this story. All these lead to a perception that those groups need to be given preference even over better qualified applicants solely to meet the numbers.
The best way to hire? Get a development manager with a long contact list in his smart phone and have him start calling people he knows can deliver and throw money at them.
Never fails.
Yet when government does that you get upset??? Throwing money at a problem isn't only foolish it is a quick way to the poor house. What you are calling for is cronyism or nepotism where the only way to get a job is to be in that one person's contact list. That's no way to hire someone and you really don't know why that person may be in that contact list.
If you or your company can't get "qualified people", it's because YOU suck - pay too low, having HR recruit or just being lemmings and following the herd on how to hire.
Way to put your head in the sand and ignore the fact that the universities and colleges are failing in their task of producing qualified students. Or that the current hiring laws are skewed to favor less qualified people simply because they fit a diversity metric. Way to put the failure of the job seekers to manage their expectations on the employer with them wanting to be paid the same as the CEO on their first day.
Until we fix our education system to produce students that can actually serve the communities they are in, stop pitting one group against another such as we have in this story, we will continue to see the types of stories on /. that we are seeing today with no real solution to the root of the problem in sight.
