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Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

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Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#231

Post by hcurtiss »

ryandrake wrote: post #212
ryanmarsh wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If billions of computers become vulnerable to malicious actors and a few hundred or thousand people suffer dramatic personal damages, well that's a nice and quiet problem which will be quickly forgotten in the 24-hour news cycle. This. I do development coaching and training. I’m totally burned out because my job doesn’t matter. These companies don’t care. They hire me to “increase code quality” but that ends up being…

The topic of your rant is something that it took me forever to accept as a software engineer. Nobody cares about quality. Your method is refactored to be super-fast and have no branches? Nobody cares. Elegant, re-usable architecture? Nobody cares. You've optimized an inner loop in assembly and increased speed by 30%? Nobody cares. Made it to zero compiler warnings? Nobody cares. No known crashers left in the bug trac…

If there were a list of such companies, I would patronize them.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#232

Post by sidlls »

lurr wrote: post #204
sidlls wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And such a person shouldn't be hired. I wouldn't hire me to work on a JavaScript stack. It's not because I don't or couldn't understand it in short order, and very much better than many (most, possibly all) of the 20-something hipsters they're using to fart out garbage. It's because I have strong biases against it and the kind of development style it attracts, some of which (as illustrated in this very comment) aren'…

> very much better than many (most, possibly all) of the 20-something hipsters they're using to fart out garbage. how is this type of attitude not sufficient reason to not bother hiring someone? I immediately don't want to work with or for you.

From my comment: "I wouldn't hire me to work on a JavaScript stack.... They're just biases that haven't a good justification."

I know this. And I wouldn't want to work with JS devs. At all. It's a win-win for all of us that I don't apply to those positions.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#233

Post by inetknght »

racer-v wrote: post #186
trevyn wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of change of technological progress is increasing, and many people just have a tendency to... crystallize. Experienced people of any age who can adapt well to change have no trouble getting a job.

My advice to graybeards: when somebody is excited about a new technology XYZ, don't say "oh, we did that 20 years ago and called it ABC". It annoys people, because generally XYZ has important differences that prevent ABC from being a drop-in replacement. Instead you can say "that reminds me of a similar concept we used to implement using ABC", and quietly appreciate that you got a leg up in understanding because of y…

When XYZ is just ABC with additional layers on top which kills performance and/or security...

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#234

Post by tracker1 »

javajosh wrote: post #154
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the greyhairs. I won't work the insane hours, but I'll still get more done. How? By knowing what to write and how to write it, so I don't have to fumble around trying things for nearly as long. By not writing the bugs that the 20-somethings write, which means I don't have to take the time to try to fix them. By not creating the shoddy designs that other create, which then have to be fixed. By having an ide…

Indeed! Over time I've become more and more aware (and proud) of the things I left out. As a young programmer, I would be far more proud of the things I included. The shipped project is one branch of an extremely large tree of possibilities which a younger, less experienced programmer would have taken a very long time to explore and discard (which I know for certain because I was that programmer).

It's weird how that works... I try to avoid unneeded complexity as much as possible for as long as possible... and when I do need complexity, I try to make it as easy to use as possible, so that it's less in your face on reuse.

I'm consistently amazed at how much of a pain in the ass things tend to get when people try to build solutions in their early 20's, vs 30's and now in my 40's. Not to mention how much my viewpoint has changed in the past 20+ years in software.

I'm pretty happy when I can remove a bunch of dead/unused code trees, commented out swaths of crap, and refactor portions of a codebase into 1/5 the size.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#235

Post by thomasrognon »

btilly wrote: post #190
exelius wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not attacking you here (and in fact I agree with you), but from a manager's perspective, I need one guy like you to design it in an architecture modeling tool and 8 young code monkeys to do all the boring work of building and testing it. You can do the code reviews to make sure they don't do stupid shit. The thought is that a team of greyhairs never ships anything, and a team of youngsters ships garbage. But it's…

I STRONGLY disagree. My experience is that programmers who become "architects" and are only responsible for design and code review tend to go downhill in their skills. It SEEMS like an efficient way to use experienced people, but it is actually an anti-pattern. Their tendency is to develop ideas that sound good but don't work well in practice, and there is no direct way to correct the mistake. (Any time it doesn't wo…

My title is "architect". I use scare quotes because I agree with what you wrote and I dislike being associated with the type of people and the jobs that make it true. I, also, only work at places where the interview is sufficiently technical and there are no separate design-only roles.

It's been surprising to me how much I've had to fight people on this issue in the past.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#236

Post by baddox »

ridgeguy wrote: post #134
dantheman wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the question of targeting different ads at different demographics needs to be answered -- is that ok? Is it ok to recruit at a college job fair?

Yes, I would think. While the college job fair demographic is statistically biased to the young, there are people over 40 who go to college. As long as the recruiting opportunity is made known to the over-40s as well as those younger, it would seem ok to recruit at a college job fair. Not ok would be to decline to interview those over 40, keep them from learning about the opportunity, or otherwise exclude them from t…

There are some older people who go to college, sure, but I would hope that the law concerns itself with the intent and/or the effect of the segmentation. There are probably some younger people who for whatever reason see the Facebook ads for older people too, but the intent of that segmentation is obvious, and I would hope the law would make provisions for that.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#237

Post by bogomipz »

combatentropy wrote: post #66

It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…

Certainly 1 and 2 but I believe younger people are more likely to work longer hours because they are less likely to have families.

Even if you didn't have family obligations I think when people get older they are less impressed with beer in the kitchen and ping pong tables and would rather not be in the office after 7:00PM.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#238

Post by poulsbohemian »

mulmen wrote: post #85
poulsbohemian wrote: post #34

It's anecdata, but if I ask my teen daughter, Facebook is for older people, and the kids are all using things that I've never even heard of. So not sure how you can really prove discrimination. There is some demographic skewing if you advertise on Facebook vs. other channels, but not sure you can really call it an age issue. Not sure what to make of the social marketing guy in the article -- seems like if you are loo…

Facebook knows the age of the people it displays ads to. Part of their value proposition is that you can use this data to show certain ads to people of a certain age. In the case of job postings this is explicitly illegal discrimination. The average age of Facebook users is completely unrelated.

>The average age of Facebook users is completely unrelated.

No it isn't -- to make an extreme point, if 100% of the audience is > 50 years old, it wouldn't matter which age group you are targeting because your target demographic isn't there. The poster below, who points to younger generations fleeing Facebook are exactly in line with my point -- the 20-somethings are on to Insta-chat-whatevers next. If you really wanted to discriminate by age, you'd go there instead. That stated -- of course if the advertisers are setting their ads to only show to certain age groups, then they are discriminating -- but that's true regardless of the medium.

For what it's worth, I'm not on any of these social networks, unless HN counts. And yes, my life is better for it.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#239

Post by AnimalMuppet »

lurr wrote: post #194
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the greyhairs. I won't work the insane hours, but I'll still get more done. How? By knowing what to write and how to write it, so I don't have to fumble around trying things for nearly as long. By not writing the bugs that the 20-somethings write, which means I don't have to take the time to try to fix them. By not creating the shoddy designs that other create, which then have to be fixed. By having an ide…

maybe they discriminate because you call the designs of other people shoddy. I'm only being half snarky. Large chunks of these threads end up as people bashing young people for being idiots for various reasons. I do believe that discrimination is an issue, but you also just don't need that many seniors. If you have a couple to make sure designs are reasonable, catch mistakes, and mentor the junior people then that se…

> maybe they discriminate because you call the designs of other people shoddy.

I'm primarily calling my designs shoddy when I had only a few years of experience.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#240

Post by tracker1 »

lorenzq wrote: post #143
racer-v wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a perception in computer programming that any experience outside of the specific language, library and toolkit being used on the project is irrelevant. Or worse, an impediment; "I don't want somebody with bad habits and instincts acquired from working on now-obsolete systems". Managers really believe a kid with 3 years JavaScript experience and 1 year of Vue is as good (or better) than a senior programmer wit…

If that older Unix or C++ programmer doesn't have a strong bias against Javascript, functional programming, new es6/es7 concepts, and web appliactions in general, then sure. I see many of these types of people even on HN with biases though. Age shouldn't be used as a catch all filter, but I can see how it might be faster to screen those who have been too content to stick to their tools without catching up to industry…

I've been building web applications for over two decades... I love most of the newer tooling over anything I had even a decade ago. Though I do prefer React+* over Angular. I've kept up, some things I love, somethings I frankly use sparingly... that said, I'm definitely biased.

I'm more likely to ride on the bleeding edge (Node 8, Webpack 3, Babel 7) than most. I am afraid though, in under a decade it will be an uphill battle to find work (I'm 43 at the end of the month).

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