>Ok, now you're just being contrarian, but I'll play along. Maybe you're right, maybe the 19-year old college dropout

The point wasn't to annoy you. I used the college dropout as an extreme example because when Vint Cerf gives talks under the banner of "internet evangelism", he doesn't actually use any of his technical TCPIP specific knowledge to do the cheerleading. (But I'm also not saying the Cerf is the wrong guy for that role.)

>explain to me how you unanimously align the merit of every candidate in the pool with respective open positions

This is actually impossible to accomplish. The problem is:

(1) desirable characteristics are multidimensional

(2) undesirable characteristics are also multidimensional

(3) "fairness" of evaluation and outcome cannot be unanimously agreed upon from the employer _and_ from the candidate _and_ from the outside non-participants that compile statistics on job acceptance/rejection interactions

(4) any qualifications with a non-age & non-years-experience label such as "Rust expertise", or "culture fit", or "on-call weekend rotations required" will be _perceived_ as "age discrimination" or other discrimination. This is related to (3) that "fairness" cannot be universally be agreed upon.

All items above are also subjective. We are compressing multidimensional factors into a single outcome of "accept/reject". The multidimensions remain subjective and possibly unable to be articulated but the rejection of a candidate is an objective fact and is directly observable. There is no difficulty articulating the binary outcome that the candidate was accepted/rejected.

>So then shouldn't it be illegal to list # years of experience as a requirement?

I think you interpreted an unintended idea from my "Rust" example. I'm saying that even if an employer specifies a desired attribute in the job listing with no malicious intention of age discrimination, the actual candidate pool will be skewed and be _perceived_ as age discrimination and thus -- it can be argued by some that it _is_ "stealth age discrimination".

For example, if a job listing specifies "candidate will have enterprise resource management expertise with at least 2 previous full life-cycle implementations from fit requirements gathering to production go live", the candidate pool will heavily skew towards the 30-somethings and 40-somethings. Complex ERP implementations can take ~5+ years so asking the candidate to have 2 of them under their belt will be near impossible for 20-somethings.

Likewise, a COO job listing requiring "previous profit & loss responsibility of at least $10 million" will heavily skew towards 40-somethings and 50-somethings. Very few 20-somethings will have leadership responsibility over a $10 million division -- unless he was a young founder of his own company like Mark Zuckerberg. (And obviously, 20-year old founders do not answer others' corporate job listings so they won't be in the candidate pool.)

Even if employers leave out words like "years of experience" and instead, substitute "expertise" or "previous responsibilities", the world can always find an argument for "unfairness".

My comment you replied to was just observing an unavoidable perception rather than making any recommendations on how to write job postings.