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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

#281

Post by nickthemagicman »

busyant wrote: post #253
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…

Doesn't YC have a max age for founders? I imagine there is similar logic for their cutoff. Not saying it's valid, but last I checked (long ago) they had a max age. Disclosure: I am a bootstrapping old fart.

Do they? I dont think they do.

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

#282

Post by dreamfactored »

emodendroket wrote: post #242
lovich wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you won't do however, is work insane hours to get something done because management changed scope or requirements at the last second but kept the deadline. The flavor of agile development that most shops seem to devolve to is one where management gets the part that they can update requirements based on new information, but deadlines are the same and costs need to constantly be cut. My personal belief is that our…

Call me cynical, but I am always surprised when people sincerely appeal to "agile/scrum values" of team autonomy or whatever to contest management diktats because, like... isn't it totally predictable that that part will be ignored whenever it is inconvenient?

Agile is like dieting, simple but hard and requiring a lot of discipline. Very very few companies are any good at it but done well, it's a complete transformation.

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

#283

Post by user5994461 »

lotyrin wrote: post #257
hackits wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're 100% right but also 100% wrong. Like I said before you're viewing it from the perspective of a developer but not from the perspective of a Business person. Instead of saying `Users cannot sing up if everything is broken` you need to see it from a Business perspective, and communicate it to them in the language they understand. For example, `From our quarterly earnings report we need to have 10,0000 new clients…

Still doesn't work. I've done clandestine work over weekends to speed up an application, then as part of shipping it also add a split test with half the audience having a delay similar to what was in place before I fixed the problem and brought that to the table with the "business" guys, and everyone nodded their head "wow" but every sprint after that was just full of new features.

I hope you got the lesson. Please stop working over the week ends for free.

You are devaluing yourself and you are devaluing all the developers who don't want to ruin their week end at work.

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

#284

Post by nickthemagicman »

sgustard wrote: post #168
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…

They are discriminating against age, not experience. A 25-year-old with 10 years of experience (elite teen hacker!) is far more attractive than a 50-year-old with 10 years of experience (second-career washout).

They had another career before this which means they WANTED to go into tech. I feel like the chances they would be more passionate and dedicated are much higher.

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

#285

Post by nickthemagicman »

yourapostasy wrote: post #174
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…

In the highly distorted US employment market, older employees are more expensive even at the same salary level as younger employees. Big factor I haven’t seen discussed in these comment threads yet is healthcare expenses. In average aggregates, older employees in the US will tend to consume more and more expensive healthcare services, products, and pharmaceuticals. Unless you are an outlier, and somehow signal lots o…

1099..problem solved

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

#286

Post by killjoywashere »

alasdair_ wrote: post #82

Does this mean that using Facebook to target tech company ads at women or an unrepresented minority group, or LGBT people would also be illegal, even if the goal is to reach out to these people to increase the diversity of the workplace?

Not a chance. The implicit paradigm in all these laws is an entitled, young, male, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Think Trump or any member of the Bush clan in their younger years. By the time you're ready to enter the workforce, at whatever level, all other demographics have been beat down to some degree or another.

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

#287

Post by danans »

alasdair_ wrote: post #82

Does this mean that using Facebook to target tech company ads at women or an unrepresented minority group, or LGBT people would also be illegal, even if the goal is to reach out to these people to increase the diversity of the workplace?

No, because those are examples of protected classes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

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

#288

Post by eric_b »

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…

I agree with you, and this is a hard lesson to learn. But I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Software should really only be measured by the value it provides. If a terribly buggy piece of poorly written code still saves hundreds of man hours a week, it's a win. (Unit tests be damned)

If that big ball of mud that's using 20 year old technology still prints a billion dollars a year - that's a win. (Microservices be damned)

If some slapdash jquery-and-duct-tape web app still solves a specific problem I have, that's a win. (React SPAs be damned)

Does crappy software flourish while beautiful software dies? Sometimes. But usually code hygiene, security, bug counts and crashes are not what makes or breaks the success of a piece of software. Developers often think their work is the most important, when in actuality it is usually not. Sometimes you really just are a cog in the machine.

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