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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

#271

Post by aswanson »

QuackingJimbo wrote: post #256
ryandrake wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are a few places where this is not true Where?

Probably the Apollo moon lander software team, circa 1968.

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

#272

Post by user5994461 »

whatshisface wrote: post #247
ryandrake wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My universal advice to graduating CS students is, "no matter what your current code quality/dev speed balance is, your boss will think you're polishing too much."

Second advice. If you want to pretend that quality matters, move to aerospace, finance, or any critical systems.

Third advice. It's not enough to fix bug, everyone MUST know that you fixed that weird bug that customers were complaining about for years and noone could understand the cause.

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

#273

Post by dreamfactored »

leggomylibro wrote: post #205
hackits wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've nailed it on the head but haven't realized why you've nailed it on the head. `Why? These things have real consequences.` To a business they see software/engineers as a expense. The whole focus as a business is to provide a service that people are will to pay more than it costs to provide said service. Everything else doesn't matter, what does matter for a business is $$$$$ and making sure business does…

>To a business they see software/engineers as a expense. Anecdotally, this is one of the first things I try to gauge at a prospective employer. "Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" If the company works with technology a lot and doesn't see technology as being particularly important to its bottom line, that's usually a bad sign. Also, discussions with C-levels tend to be pretty one-di…

>"Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?"

It's not a matter of opinion, but what the term means. They are cost centers unless they are closing sales (or being billed for about 3x what they cost, which is still way less than sales people will generate, being closer to 10x+ cost).

Best thing any employee can do is find out how their company actually makes money and understand how they align. Unfortunately, the highest business expense is salaries and one of the most important things for most businesses is remaining runway. So there is huge pressure to keep salaries down, particularly in cost centres, which aren't directly extending runway. If it's a service business it can get worse, as the money is typically made on billable hours - creating a perverse incentive to have cheaper and less efficient people to bill out rather than a 10xer (outside a senior business facing role). As long as they are capable and not so bad that they lose the client, it's often more efficient to have cheaper mediocre people from a business point of view.

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

#274

Post by nickthemagicman »

flukus wrote: post #252
ryandrake wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The vast majority of software shops out there care only that something--anything--ships as fast as remotely possible When nobody cares about you get the point sooner or later where you can't ship, they've probably launched a product but there's still a lot more to ship in future. Eventually they become so mired in technical debt that they care. When they realize they've invested a hundred million dollars in somethi…

Then they just rewrite it again shittily. lol

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

#275

Post by nickthemagicman »

che_shirecat wrote: post #121
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…

highly skilled professions like law, medicine don't have a problem with age discrimination, because of the marginally significant positive correlation between years of experience and results. these fields also weed out the incompetent early. there's plenty of well-paid >50 software engineers out there who have no problem finding work, because they've made a mark in some way throughout their careers in the field or ha…

This so much.

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

#276

Post by didibus »

che_shirecat wrote: post #121
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…

highly skilled professions like law, medicine don't have a problem with age discrimination, because of the marginally significant positive correlation between years of experience and results. these fields also weed out the incompetent early. there's plenty of well-paid >50 software engineers out there who have no problem finding work, because they've made a mark in some way throughout their careers in the field or ha…

Though there's been some research recently showing that younger doctors are better, because they're aware of the latest research. I wonder if that's going to lead to some ageism in medicine because of that.

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

#277

Post by doug1001 »

ryandrake wrote: post #215
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…

> But it's better to ship garbage than nothing Yup, this is the software industry boiled down to the basics.

well i think this is certainly the problem--ie, now "garbage" looks justified

but those aren't really the two alternatives, are they--ie, crap code or nothing?

it might be in the very short terim (ie, by this friday)

but over any other span of time, the choice is more like:

ship crap code in 30 day, followed by 50% of the team's resources spent bug fixing (which can often be cleverly disguised as new features) for the next 90 days

OR

ship high quality code in 45 days

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

#278

Post by killjoywashere »

tomohawk wrote: post #254

A lot of managers are threatened by experienced people because experienced people are a lot less shy about pointing out bullshit. People with 5 or less years of experience are much less likely to have a backbone. They're still getting over the school conditioning to complete whatever BS assignment needed to get the grade. Many managers would prefer to have an apparently smoothly running operation than have honest fee…

> experienced people are a lot less shy about pointing out bullshit.

I've seen this backfire on the experienced person though. Pretty brutal to be a PhD in industry and find yourself out of a job at the age of 56 because you pointed out 'hey, this could kill people, maybe we should do an RCT before we go to market"

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

#279

Post by busterarm »

tracker1 wrote: post #248
busterarm wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about 70% of my knowledge today will be outdated in 5 years I really hope this isn't the case for you, and in general I don't really believe it to be true either. Most of what makes me successful as a developer today I knew 20 years ago, in a prior career. You have to differentiate between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. The former changes very little and the latter changes a lot. You're also best off retai…

Not to be offensive, but the front end is quite often far more work than the SQL that goes on in the back. I've worked strictly on the back, the front, and in between. I've also had to work in a number of platforms and languages. In the end, keeping things as simple as possible is usually best. If that means using language features that someone might not be familiar with, it should still be more understandable in the…

Not offensive at all. I actually would say in the best case scenario, you can't do one without the other.

I will agree that frontend is full of churn. I have to do it, but I wouldn't specialize in front end -- most of your role is relying on explicit knowledge rather than tacit knowledge.

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

#280

Post by ec109685 »

mabbo wrote: post #93

> “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work,” said Rob Goldman, a Facebook vice president. No, that's... that's literally the opposite of 'helping people of all ages find work'.

Perhaps there are advertisements that work better for some age groups than others? So by targeting, they can deliver the right ad to the right user.
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