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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

#321

Post by mulmen »

mc32 wrote: post #316
beatpanda wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craigslist routinely takes down discriminatory housing and job ads and have been doing that at least since I started using it around 2005.

On the other hand they tend to allow "illegal" prostitution ads... so it's not like they pursue illegal postings in general -or postings which allow the violation of the law. And I generally agree. The authorities should be going after the perpetrators, not the neutral platform.

Is the platform neutral if this is illegal discrimination and they include the ability to do that illegal discrimination in their value proposition?

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

#322

Post by mulmen »

Sephr wrote: post #227
tmh79 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is selling advertising. In this specific case, the product they are selling is illegal. Facebook should be held liable for selling illegal advertising. Do people find this challenging? Is there something wrong with this?

There are many legal reasons to want to limit ads to the elderly. If you're selling a product that disproportionately is bought by elderly people, such as adult diapers, would you prefer to show everyone the ad, or save money and only target the ad to the elderly? Edit: I'm referring to the Facebook ads platform in general, and not specifically job ads. I agree that job ads shouldn't have the option to target age gro…

I think you can do that. What is not allowed is discriminating against employment seekers over the age of 40. I believe this means it is actually ok to discriminate against employment seekers under the age of 40 and also to discriminate against people over the age of 40 for purposes other than employment, including selling diapers.

In this case "ok" means "not made illegal by this law".

What's important here though is that Facebook isn't selling diaper ads, they're selling job ads and so they are discriminating against a protected class.

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

#323

Post by ilaksh »

sheeshkebab wrote: post #295
tracker1 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uphi…

There is only so far you can go competing with teenagers in node/js space - pick a different tech stack for the future.

I'm 40 and also a JS developer for many years after using C++ and other stacks before that. From what I can tell Node.js and JavaScript stopped being cool for many young people like a few years ago when they got onto Go and other stuff.

Maybe the trend is web assembly with Rust now or something. Or Ethereum contracts and R are cool. I dunno but trends do matter.

Anyway JavaScript is less trendy but still very popular and there are a ton of crap codebases built up over recent years. So any of those that don't get scrapped for a trendier technology will be looking to recruit experienced people to fix up their crap (maybe adding TS declarations for everything or something like that).

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

#324

Post by mulmen »

jklinger410 wrote: post #98
tmh79 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook is selling advertising. In this specific case, the product they are selling is illegal. Facebook should be held liable for selling illegal advertising. Do people find this challenging? Is there something wrong with this?

For the record, we are talking about the right to be served ads. Not saying I disagree with you, many commenters in here are making good points.

We're not talking about the right to be served ads. We are talking about the right to not be discriminated against.

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

#325

Post by jdmichal »

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…

Honestly, this is pretty straight-forward stuff, and I'm surprised you're getting any argument. If a technologist cannot explain how a proposed implementation is going to provide value to the business, that project is probably better off left alone. Prettier code and better tests don't provide value. But fewer customer-facing P1/P2 tickets provides value. That prettier code and better tests leads to fewer tickets is an implementation detail.

Let's put it this way: Netflix has one of the most robust microservice architectures I know of. I promise you will find zero mention of it anywhere on their customer-facing pages. Because that is not the problem that Netflix solves for their customer; they solve a media library and streaming problem.

The business is your customer. You need to understand their problems and how you're going to fix them. Everything else is an implementation detail.

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

#326

Post by avs733 »

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?

https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

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

#327

Post by Terr_ »

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…

> Software should really only be measured by the value it provides.

The problem is when the "negative value" is externalized leading to false evaluations. "Oops, so sorry we leaked all your social security numbers. Our bad."

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

#328

Post by jjeaff »

user5994461 wrote: post #196
Clubber wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He could be 10 times more expensive than you. Did you consider that? So, the only way that is even in the realm of possibility is if the kid was making $30K and the greybeard was making $300K. That's another benefit of greybeards: you get more bang for the buck simply because of the way salaries scale vs. performance that comes with good experience.

Call it 5 times if you wish. That's a fairly normal range. Costs is more than just salary. 5 weeks vs 2 weeks of hollidays, 401k, health insurance, etc...

Still not realistic. Assuming an entry level dev in sv is making 100k, most 50 year old devs are not making $500k.

More like 50% more or at most twice as much.

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

#329

Post by megaman22 »

doug1001 wrote: post #277
ryandrake wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

Sadly, it's hard to convince people that doing things right is better than doing them wrong, but quicker.

That customer needs this code on the 1st, that is a hard and fast deadline! So shit is churned out, and handed over on the 1st. Then, three or four 1sts later, the customer finally gets their shit together and deploys it, and, voila, it is shit. And the cycle continues, as the scramble ensues to patch the shit by the 15th with yet more shit. And you end up like the little Dutch boy at the dike, except instead of fingers you're using hotfixes made of excrement.

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

#330

Post by jjeaff »

mulmen wrote: post #322
Sephr wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many legal reasons to want to limit ads to the elderly. If you're selling a product that disproportionately is bought by elderly people, such as adult diapers, would you prefer to show everyone the ad, or save money and only target the ad to the elderly? Edit: I'm referring to the Facebook ads platform in general, and not specifically job ads. I agree that job ads shouldn't have the option to target age gro…

I think you can do that. What is not allowed is discriminating against employment seekers over the age of 40 . I believe this means it is actually ok to discriminate against employment seekers under the age of 40 and also to discriminate against people over the age of 40 for purposes other than employment, including selling diapers. In this case "ok" means "not made illegal by this law". What's important here though…

So would it also be illegal to advertise your job positions in teen Vogue but NOT in AARP magazine?

It doesn't seem much different in this case. Bit methods target young people.

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