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

propublica.org

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

#301

Post by nhebb »

user5994461 wrote: post #264
nhebb wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone in their 50's, that argument makes no sense to me. If I were unable to find a job, you somehow think I'd hold out for premium wages?

A lot of people in their 50's don't need to work. As long as they bought their home when it was affordable, they are fine. Some have sizable assets that the younger folks can't dream to achieve in their lifetime. They won't accept work for less than premium wages, don't need to. That being said, I admit that there is also another part of the population who is struggling and desperate for work at any price. Last but n…

> A lot of people in their 50's don't need to work.

I must travel in lowly circles.

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

#302

Post by mtpn »

eric_b wrote: post #288
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…

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. (Microservic…

I’m a web developer in my spare time. I write little things that solve problems in my two day jobs, they haven’t tended to be pretty because often I’m learning as I go and when it works then it’s truly time to move on to the next problem, even though I now know enough to solve the old problem again more elegantly. I’m trying to use better practices and modern JS frameworks in new projects just for experience, even though they are actually overkill in many cases. Certainly the people I work for would rather have two useful utilities written in plain es5 and php than one useful utility plus a story about the code quality. I’m gradually finding the middle ground where somebody call look at my code and not instantly want to take a shower.

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

#303

Post by lovich »

emodendroket wrote: post #297
dreamfactored wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it's more like a cult, where it's supposed to solve all your problems and any problem you identify with it just proves you aren't doing it right.

It is, at best, a different set of trade offs. What it has become is like you said, some sort of cult where management gets everything they want and don't have to pay any costs.

I've worked at two places where my tech lead at least recognized that if scope or requirements changed then deadlines changed. Now I am at a place where agile is just a word thrown at any problem and now we have things like being asked to integrate third party tools that we don't receive until a week before the deadline. My team stayed till 2 am and was back in at 9am the next day and _literally no one_ saw a problem because it's "agile" and that's what you do when your agile

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

#304

Post by c3534l »

coding123 wrote: post #217

I guess I have two takes on this: 1) Does this mean my local strip club will now have to hire 90 year olds? 2) Ignoring that joke for now - if pro-publica released this information we now have information that harm has been caused. And actually couldn't this be an indication that possibly billions of dollars of damage has been done... what's next?

Technically the stripper rents the stage, the club doesn't hire a stripper.

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

#305

Post by tlear »

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…

Really? Ship an app to the store that crashes all the time and see your metrics go WAY down. Loosing user data is another great way to lose users permanently. Sure if you are Google of FB it probably does not matter but for smaller companies NOT CRASH, NOT LOOSE USER DATA seems to matter quite a bit in my experience.

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

#306

Post by jjoonathan »

user5994461 wrote: post #283
lotyrin wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, but don't take this as "don't work hard," merely as "don't donate time to your employer." There are far more worthy causes out there.

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

#307

Post by oceanghost »

hackits wrote: post #224
leggomylibro wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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…

The core conflict is this:

The engineer is trying to optimize/normalize his free time by acknowledging quality issues, the management is trying to optimize their income by sweeping them under the rug.

The engineer is ultimately liable for the problem. Quality is insured with his reputation and free time.

The business guys almost always leave at 4:00pm and their bonuses are based on a metric not related to quality.

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

#308

Post by user5994461 »

nhebb wrote: post #301
user5994461 wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people in their 50's don't need to work. As long as they bought their home when it was affordable, they are fine. Some have sizable assets that the younger folks can't dream to achieve in their lifetime. They won't accept work for less than premium wages, don't need to. That being said, I admit that there is also another part of the population who is struggling and desperate for work at any price. Last but n…

> A lot of people in their 50's don't need to work. I must travel in lowly circles.

I suppose the distribution is extreme on both sides. Either you accumulated assets from early on and you're golden, or you're still struggling with rent and no pension in sight.

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

#309

Post by tlear »

exelius wrote: post #129
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…

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…

You hire wrong grey hairs, most new people never shipped anything. Person with 10-20 years experience probably shipped a TON of stuff. This is the key thing to look when hiring, people who shipped things and like to ship things.

On other hand there tons of grey hairs who never shipped anything and are useless as new grads are.

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