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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

#361

Post by Clubber »

danjoc wrote: post #111

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. Has Zuckerberg retired yet? He's old now. 33 in fact. He should have passed the torch to someone smarter. I guess he got old and dumb and forgot.

If he were older at the time, he might have realized that saying something like that is not only short sighted, but would follow him for the rest of his life.

I haven't heard him repeat it since.

Of course, when I was young, I said plenty of short sighted, silly things as well.

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

#362

Post by learc83 »

avar wrote: post #130
notzuck wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvoted and rightly so. Do you think purchasing a few newspapers from the store in the morning is the same thing as having to register multiple accounts on FB just to avoid their age discrimination which you may not be aware is happening in the first place? This also violates their terms of service. How many accounts do I need: one white, one black, one hispanic, one 20 - 30, one 30 - 40?? where does it end? It's u…

> Downvoted and rightly so. I don't care about the internet points, but I'd like to point out, account created ~30m ago, that you're using HN the wrong way. Downvoting is not a "I disagree" button like on Reddit, it's a "this is not interesting to discuss" button, the fact that you're replying at all shows that it's not the latter. > Do you think purchasing a few newspapers from[...] No it's certainly not the same, b…

>Downvoting is not a "I disagree" button like on Reddit

You have it backwards. Everyone might not follow this rule, but reddiquette says "Please don't downvote an otherwise acceptable post because you don't personally like it."

While pg thinks it's perfectly fine to use the downvote to express disagreement:

"I think it's ok to use the up and down arrows to express agreement. Obviously the uparrows aren't only for applauding politeness, so it seems reasonable that the downarrows aren't only for booing rudeness."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171

> the fact that you're replying at all shows that it's not the latter.

By that logic you should never reply to someone you downvote.

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

#363

Post by icelancer »

user5994461 wrote: post #293
vitno wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was once hired for a C++ position _because_ I hated on C++ during the interview.

C++ is the exception. You can't be senior without despising all the intricacies of the language.

Linus Torvalds is perhaps the perfect depiction of this.

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

#364

Post by astura »

myf01d wrote: post #290

if you're 35 yo in tech industry and not owning a small business, you're almost done unless you have good connections. That's how tech works, nobody just wants to admit that. tech workers are the diggers of their own graves.

Maybe in SV but certainly not everywhere. The vast majority of my colleagues are over 35. I mean like ~90%.

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

#365

Post by harryh »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #344
baddox wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: is it explicitly illegal to discriminate in your outreach for job applications? Surely similar behavior happens all the time without as much outcry, like recruiting at college career fairs.

At college career fairs you're selecting for people who are graduating with a relevant degree, there is no age requirements for attending college so a 55 year old who is just completing their bachelors could well be one of the people you recruit. Just because the environment you advertise in is inherently skewed young doesn't make it discrimination, explicitly preventing people of a certain age from seeing your ad is…

explicitly preventing people of a certain age from seeing your ad is.

But that's not what "you" are doing. All these jobs are public. Every company in America has a jobs page that anyone of any age is free to look at.

What you are doing is not paying money to force your ad in front of people in a certain age.

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

#366

Post by mc32 »

mulmen wrote: post #353
mc32 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both (Craigslist prostitution ads and age specific jobs ads on Facebook) are publishing something which is illegal. The party which should be pursued is the one posting the post which goes contrary to law. I'm ok if FB or CL proactively root out those posts, but I'm not so sure I see it as their responsibility to do. It's good oversight but still I feel the people who should be punished are the agents of the wrongdoi…

Facebook has a setting where you can enter the age of a person for a job posting and they even have a special site for job ads. It's not comparable. Craigslist does not market a platform that explicitly says "target prostitution ads at people who are looking for prostitutes". What Facebook is doing is far more explicit and they are clearly aware of what is happening because they built functionality to do it specifica…

Craigslist has a setting where you can explicitly say you're seeking a man/men, woman/women both, other etc.

Not calling out Craigslist --simply illustrating that regular tools meant to be used responsibly can be abused to accomplish nefarious ends.

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

#367

Post by joshamania »

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…

I think it's more about the commoditization of employees than anything else. Big companies seem to have trended to thinking of and treating their employees as commodities. A piece of furniture that can be swapped in and out at will. I don't know that it's willful discrimination against older workers so much as willful disregard as to whether or not they're getting the best employees.

A company like Facebook probably doesn't really care that they get the absolute best employee for 90% of their open positions. They go with the group that's going to get them the largest number of acceptable hits so they don't need to work as hard to filter out candidates that they're not interested in.

This is all speculation on my part, I have nothing to cite in this regard. I think it's fairly obvious that if Facebook filters out over-40's for these 90% of jobs right up front they will have less work to do gleaning the wheat from the chaff.

For the remaining 10% of high-productivity/high-value workers they probably wouldn't use such pre-screening and do more targeted recruiting. Again, this is all a guess on my part, but it makes sense. Not saying it should be legal, but I can understand why they do it.

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

#368

Post by flukus »

jimbokun wrote: post #312
flukus wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we just have to do their job as well as our job?

Making money for the company is every employee’s job.

So the janitor should analyse and quantify what difference he will make to the companies bottom line before he wipes those skidmarks off?

Not everything is quantifiable like that. If I'm writing code and I take the time to make it 30% faster then it won't make a difference to our bottom line. If that's done everywhere then customers will like us more, be more likely to stay with us and be more likely to recommend us, but that can't be quantified in my day to day work.

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

#369

Post by f4rker »

I have a decade and a half of experience some of which includes fortune 100 and 500 cos. I've helped the UN, colleges, tv personalities, law enforcement, federal and local government. And some of my shitty code made it into a small Linux distro.

If you don't want me because I'm over 30 then let's do each other a favor and never meet =)

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

#370

Post by tluyben2 »

koolba wrote: post #346
andrewflnr wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting about ethics. Even if your boss doesn't care about security, if you want to be a decent person, you need to at least try to prevent your system from becoming a tool to harm others.

Hanlon’s razor comes through in full force. The vast majority of people making agregrious security errors know no better. You could argue that whoever hired them shares or shoulders the blame, but to suggest they’re not decent people is a stretch. Most I’m sure are. They’re also likely infosec idiots. Now if you know something is terribly insecure, understand what’s involved in fixing it, and go out of your way not t…

I already have issues when I see something but I know no-one is going to pay to fix it, so what can I do? I report it, no-one cares; I might be able to fix it but then I do this for free.

If your bugs can hurt people (financially, physically) I think you need to work a bit harder to make sure it doesn't sneak into your work. Whatever you believe helps there (unit tests, formal verification, ...); if you didn't do all you could do because you are not paid for it (your boss tells you to add features, don't waste time on things that didn't break yet for instance), what should you do? Seems like a real issue for professional coders as there are not so many options; not many companies will pay to prevent these kinds of things unless they had a big issue before already (and someone(s) got fired / sued for it already).

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