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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

#521

Post by TeMPOraL »

btilly wrote: post #190
exelius wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I STRONGLY disagree. My experience is that programmers who become "architects" and are only responsible for design and code review tend to go downhill in their skills. It SEEMS like an efficient way to use experienced people, but it is actually an anti-pattern. Their tendency is to develop ideas that sound good but don't work well in practice, and there is no direct way to correct the mistake. (Any time it doesn't wo…

I agree with you.

The thing is, software architecture kind of the same job as coding. So what the "architects" you describe really do is equivalent to writing code on a piece of paper. That is, doing one of the most mentally demanding jobs imaginable, but without the tooling to protect them from their own confusion. No surprise then, that it later turns out the architecture doesn't make sense. Without a tool like a compiler to call you on your bullshit, it's too easy to start engaging in fuzzy thinking, and the longer you're not exposed to such practical verification, the more your thoughts will become fuzzy.

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

#522

Post by JohnTClark »

I don't see the problem with adds that are targeted to a specific age group or other characteristics of a person, and I am talking about the adds that pop up in my timeline or on the right side panel. But if I actively search for a job and it is hidden from me because I am not in the target audience then yes, that is discrimination.

Ex: I am 25, male, Java developer, I don't want to be bombarded by adds about nursing jobs or adds about nail polish , but if I type in the search bar :"nursing jobs in " then I want all nursing jobs in my area and the same thing about nail polish.

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

#523

Post by PhasmaFelis »

nurettin wrote: post #443
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…

Here's my experience with an elderly coder in his mid 50s. He was a decent delphi and .net coder, he was a decent human being, but he had health problems. Most of the week he had hospital appointments. He required nose surgery. His blood levels were low. He needed vitamin d and iron supplements and during our four month acquintance, he never got any better. He constantly forgot things and he feared his lack of iron h…

So you met one guy with a lot of chronic health problems and assume that everyone else in his age group is similar?

Or if not then I'm not sure what your point is. People who miss a lot of work and make excuses for being belligerent don't make the greatest employees, but there's not as much correlation as you think between that and age.

I feel like you really have given a clear answer to combatentropy's question "why do employers discriminate against older people", but it's maybe not the answer you thought you were giving.

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

#524

Post by TeMPOraL »

sidlls wrote: post #228
oceanghost wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we just be honest? Us older folks won't build things we know doesn't work against synthetic deadlines, then work overtime to fix what we knew wasn't going to work in the first place, while taking the blame politically. Engineering has in my lifetime become "unwinnable." I'm either not "a team player" or "being negative" for planning for reasonable failure scenarios. Then politically I still take the heat when the…

Engineers aren't blameless, here. In fact they're at least as much the problem as "bad employers". Constantly seeking to use the latest shiny tech toy whether it's appropriate or not (e.g. "Big Data" tools to run stuff on a few GB of data) is a thing, especially in the Bay Area. It leads to a bunch of people with a small amount of shallow experience in a large number of soon-to-be-deprecated technologies. Few want to…

> Also, that the product is 10% better/more stable/whatever frequently does not translate into even a 10% increase in sales. So it's not worth it (from the business' perspective) to invest in that quality.

Here is the core of the problem, and it's more of an incompatibility of goals than errors of one of the parties. Businesses want to make money. They usually don't give a flying fuck about what their product is or does beyond the point it gets sold. Does it waste users' time and piss them off? They paid us, which means they value it, so everything is ok.

Engineers, on the other hand, tend to care about what value the product actually provides to their users. So they would rather invest effort in making the product better for the users, instead of making it better for sales team to sell.

I don't really see the way out of this conflict. The engineers are right, but the businesses are right too - it's the business that pays and suffers (some of) the consequences, so it's the business that gets to tell engineers what to do, and not the other way around. If CEO is making a stupid decision, that's on CEO.

The way I see actually useful software gets done, it's outside or on the side of a business, not within it.

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

#525

Post by syshum »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #464
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…

>Work fewer hours, because of age and family

I think that is generally false today.

"Millennials" demand more of a work life balance than GenX or Baby Boomers, they also demand greater Maternity and Paternity leave when they have children

I think most 40-50 GenX's will work MORE hours than a Millennial that has a younger child...

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

#526

Post by EvilGrin »

leggomylibro wrote: post #76
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…

It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. Well, iOS11 needs to ship on its annual schedule, non-negotiable. And the SVP will really complain if I ask for more money this quarter. So, cheap it is. If a bridge falls down, it's really obvious and people die. If bill…

This is just a facet of the good old fashioned project management 'iron' triangle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle

Crudely put, for project X you have three the following constraints. Cheap, On time, and good quality. You get to pick two of these three. It would seem to me most companies are opting for cheap, on time delivery and thus the quality is simply absent.

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

#527

Post by alkonaut »

oh-kumudo wrote: post #464
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…

> 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.

This is a great point. Older devs are generally "better" than young ones on every metric (including per hour costs). BUT you won't find these. The people that will apply for jobs when old, are not representative of older devs, they are representative of older devs without strong networks.

> And software is a field moves so fast, talking about relevance of skills in 5 years term doesn't make too much sense.

I'm not sure this is necessarily true of all of software. We tend to forget (especially on this site that has an extreme "startup" focus) that most of software dev is still people working with older (5, 10 or 15 years old) tech in a megacorp or public authority somewhere. You don't "see" these people because they don't post to stackoverflow, they don't blog about tech and they don't show up on github. What they do doesn't show up in "language trends" that just look at stackoverflow or github. Because it's just a job, it's not breaking new ground. I work in a 30 man team of 40year olds, where no one really fits the "startup" model.

Of course many of these people (I'm one) will have problems finding jobs if they weren't actually "good" devs. If you grow comfortable and don't have a network, you'll have trouble finding a new job after 50 if your tech has gone out of style. But Java, C# etc are going to be in demand for a LONG time yet. Most of software tech isn't about the latest js framework.

Also, as long as you stay in the same industry, the main asset of a developer is the domain knowledge from the problem domain, not software development.

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

#528

Post by majjam »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #479
asmosoinio wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. But in my experience, this is not true AT ALL. More experienced people might work less hours, but will produce the actual end results much quicker - both in hours and in calendar time. Especially when considering that l…

But that part - bugs, structure - quickly becomes invisible to higher management, as they start to rake in millions the software issues become only minor hitches in comparison. When a company does well, software problems are easily forgiven - Twitter had huge scaling problems but still grew to one of the largest platforms; Coinbase is having regular problems now and is a multi-billion platform. Code quality doesn't m…

Please can you explain why using microservoces is over engineering? Is it because it’s a relatively new approach? Im getting involved in a new project that is using microservices and a new framework...

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

#529

Post by [deleted] »

wadkar wrote: post #391
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…

> as she said, "the type of people on the other side of the table from us are different than they used to be, and they don't want to be dealing with a bunch of 65-year-old white guys. So those aren't the type of people we're looking for." That's pretty much a direct quote. Not to defend the quote, but I wonder how else would you characterize “non-diversity” in this context? Specifically, if their current workforce co…

[deleted]

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

#530

Post by Spooky23 »

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 don’t want people with health issues, kids and spouses.

Whatever advantages you have, the common sense thinking is that more commitment and more control has high value.

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