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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

#461

Post by rimliu »

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…

Do they care if a year down the road your maintenance costs increase fivefold? Have they seen the analysis which shows that initial development cost just makes a small fraction of the total cost and that fraction get smaller the longer software is in use?

Do they care if a year down the road your TTM times increase tenfold?

  We know that the bad code slows us down. Why do we write it?
  Why do we write the code that slows us down? How much does it
  slow us down? It slows us down a lot. And every time we touch
  the modules we get slowed down again. Every time we touch bad 
  code it slows us down, what do we write this stuff what slows 
  us down?
  And the answer to that is: well we have to go fast.
  I'll let you to deal with the logical inconsistency there, my 
  message to you today is—you don't go fast by writing crap.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMuno5RZNeE&feature=youtu.be...

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

#462

Post by ainiriand »

015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #67

I'm a grad student at an elite American university. Several weeks ago, some other students and I attended a recruiting presentation put on by a large multinational company I won't name. The woman who gave the presentation services her company's contract with a tech company, that, let's just say, has a big share of the search engine market. She emphasized that she was looking for diversity, because, as she said, "the…

You sir are everything that is right in this world. You won the internet today.

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

#464

Post by oh-kumudo »

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…

To be the devil's advocate from employer perspective, old folks:

1. Work fewer hours, because of age and family

2. Pay is higher, because of experience

What this implies is their wage per hour metric is higher than younglings. So didn't veteran coder get stuff done more swiftly? IMO, yes, some of them are extremely valuable and irreplaceable. But they are RARE, and doesn't need Facebook Ads to find another job, they cultivate connections or head hunters find them.

So the rest of the old folks are the one that suffer most from ageism. Their career growth stuck when they are around mid 30s, as the scope of their work doesn't expand, their experience also stagnate, they end up doing the same stuff for many many years. At some point, the age is going to catch upon them, when their years of experience becomes a liability other than assets.

Sad part of this is it is not necessarily their fault. They get caught up in their own comfort zone, not because they like it, but often time subjects to circumstances. And software is a field moves so fast, talking about relevance of skills in 5 years term doesn't make too much sense.

Solution? Better social security net could help, but won't solve the problem, unless you go to the Japan model, at the expense of suffocating the younger generation, which is not only costly yet not feasible in western societies.

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

#466

Post by evgen »

lionelione43 wrote: post #393
harryh wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You bring up a good point. If you choose specifically to advertise to a specific demographic, can you be fined for NOT advertising to another? Is a company that puts a job offer ad in a men's or women's magazine breaking the law?

Does the men's or women's magazine explicitly work to prevent people of the other gender from being able to read its articles? You can legally pick an environment/medium in which to run your ad that may have a specific demographic, but when you get to explicitly set viewership then you have to be much more careful.

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

#467

Post by dorgo »

lemmings19 wrote: post #458
bdcravens wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they mean slow development. Rather, overall rate - all other things equal, someone who insists on no more than a 40 hour week will accomplish less than someone willing to work 60-80 based on whatever metric you use (KLOC, story points, etc)

I've only ever heard one person ever mention KLOC's, and they were in their 60's nearly a decade ago. They were explaining how people were using it as a measurement of work done in the 80's, and what a terrible idea it was to measure throughput that way. You're the second person. When was the last time you encountered anyone using KLOC's (per 1k lines of code) as a measurement of work done? Are they working on mainfr…

I like to use LOCs to see at a glance the size of a project. A more complex business logic usually takes more LOCs to write it down. And I bet there is a strong correlation between LOCs and hours worked on a project which would make LOCs a good approximation of work done. Actually I should research it. Should be not too hard to find all the tickets for projects and compare the time logged to LOCs.

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

#468

Post by lemmings19 »

hackits wrote: post #405
lotyrin wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I obviously didn't bring to the demonstration that I had volunteered the time, it suited my point to make it seem like it was something easy I could do as an aside... Problem is, they don't care about $ either, they care about what makes them look good, what makes their boss look good, what the sales guys are bugging them about, and it's features and visual polish and never quality or performance. I had to break it d…

I saw your post but didn't reply. The work you did probably is great and do I think its above your average developer. Somewhere in the the top 10%. Though how you conducted yourself in the face of management was down right petty/folly. Yes you did the best job in the world. You improved the performance of the serves by % and it did make management of those server's easier. Though you need to think about what you've d…

I have a counter-perspective to provide:

Many of the points you've raised are moot outside of large corporate environments and projects.

It is likely that the commenter has root access to all of the things you mention and touches them on a daily basis. It is likely that they are not inundated with all of the heavy process you're bringing up. It is likely that all of the security concerns you raise are not even part of their current business. Working outside of set business hours is likely not a concern; overtime is likely uncompensated anyway and there probably aren't considerable office security protocols (they probably have keys and an access code for the whole office).

The points you've raised do not apply to most small development teams.

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

#469

Post by 3chelon »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #453
busyant wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does not, no. The average age is 29, and they've brought in some people in their 60s. https://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q42

Paul Graham is no spring chicken, so it would somewhat hypocritical to be ageist when you're old.

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

#470

Post by rootlocus »

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 am 10 times better than I was when I started. I know, because I still work with some of my code from back then, and I desperately want to rewrite it all.

Don't be biased. Your improvement might be heavily influenced by the fact that you work on the same codebase, in the same company, with the same people. If you were to start a new job somewhere else, your productivity would likely drop significantly during the first years.

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