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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

#561

Post by wccrawford »

troels wrote: post #557

To be fair, maybe they aren't deliberately discriminating. Advertisement isn't free, so with a limited budget you will want to optimise your ads for conversion. That's marketing 101. Maybe they think (or even have evidence to support) that a specific demography has a higher conversion rate. For example, the reasoning might be that there are more programmers amongst younger people. It would then be inefficient to adve…

I think they'd have to be pretty stupid not to realize the effect of their choice here. I'm all for Occam's Razor, but this is stretching that line pretty thin.

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

#562

Post by itsybitsyspider »

princetman wrote: post #556
itsybitsyspider wrote: post #553

I think one of the reasons is because fluid intelligence declines as people get older - it's maybe an unpopular and uncomfortable, but still, a scientific fact proven by many psychological studies. If I was an employer, I'd definitely prefer someone who's at the peak of their intellectual capabilities.

Care to provide any links or elaborate further on such studies? I'm very curious about this.

Sure, this page links to some studies on the topic of fluid vs. crystallized intelligence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/fluid-and-...

A lot of information can be found in psychological literature touching on Cognitive Psychology.

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

#563

Post by reubeniv »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #191

I want to believe these companies don't know it's illegal to discriminate based on age. Because the alternative is that they're intentionally discriminating -- and thinking they won't get caught, because the ads are only appearing on Facebook. But any government agency that's investigating this can obviously just to ask Facebook for the company's ad buys, and there's an irrefutable paper trail. (It can't be that hard…

Depends, it's not technically illegal if it's done to promote numbers of people in another protected group

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

#564

Post by Beermotor »

itsybitsyspider wrote: post #553

I think one of the reasons is because fluid intelligence declines as people get older - it's maybe an unpopular and uncomfortable, but still, a scientific fact proven by many psychological studies. If I was an employer, I'd definitely prefer someone who's at the peak of their intellectual capabilities.

Care to cite a source for that, and more specifically what age this begins?

Also what level of impairment are we talking about here? You make it sound like everyone over a certain age is a doddering old coot. :)

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

#565

Post by otakucode »

lebski88 wrote: post #533
dorgo wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think LOC probably works OK as a very crude metric until you start to measure it. Once you start to measure it all hell breaks loose. If you measure me on lines of code, well I can get you lots of lines to code. No problem at all...

I seem to recall a quote from some computer scientist, possibly Knuth but I'm not sure, that went something like 'You optimize what you measure.' So if you measures LOC, you get LOC... and far more of them than is by any reason 'necessary.' Really a horrendous metric.

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

#566

Post by itsybitsyspider »

zerr wrote: post #558
itsybitsyspider wrote: post #553

I think one of the reasons is because fluid intelligence declines as people get older - it's maybe an unpopular and uncomfortable, but still, a scientific fact proven by many psychological studies. If I was an employer, I'd definitely prefer someone who's at the peak of their intellectual capabilities.

I believe "fluid intelligence" (whatever you mean) is similarly important in other fields such as architecture, civil and other engineering, carpentry, art as well as academia, military and governance, etc... no?

By "fluid inteligence" I meant (after wikipedia)

> Fluid intelligence or fluid reasoning is the capacity to reason and solve novel problems, independent of any knowledge from the past.

I'm not saying that isn't not important in the disciplines you just mentioned. I _think_ however, that it's more important when you work on something that is meant to be "disruptive". I don't think that for example carpentry necessarily belongs to the same job category.

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

#567

Post by itsybitsyspider »

Beermotor wrote: post #564
itsybitsyspider wrote: post #553

I think one of the reasons is because fluid intelligence declines as people get older - it's maybe an unpopular and uncomfortable, but still, a scientific fact proven by many psychological studies. If I was an employer, I'd definitely prefer someone who's at the peak of their intellectual capabilities.

Care to cite a source for that, and more specifically what age this begins? Also what level of impairment are we talking about here? You make it sound like everyone over a certain age is a doddering old coot. :)

A quick Google search:

http://news.mit.edu/2015/brain-peaks-at-different-ages-0306

I also didn't mean to sound like that :) I'm on the "decline" side and even though I'm not necessarily happy with that, I also understand that you can't cheat biology.

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

#568

Post by Beermotor »

itsybitsyspider wrote: post #562
princetman wrote: post #556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to provide any links or elaborate further on such studies? I'm very curious about this.

Sure, this page links to some studies on the topic of fluid vs. crystallized intelligence: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/fluid-and-... A lot of information can be found in psychological literature touching on Cognitive Psychology.

Ok so that answers the age question: a study found fluid intelligence starts to decline the 60s and 70s.

I think OP's article is talking about people between the ages of 35 and 60 not being able to see ads.

What is more likely is that more experienced workers have higher salary requirements and are less likely to work 90 hours a week.

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

#569

Post by otakucode »

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…

>as long as it does not kill the customer

Whoa now. The Toyota 'unintended acceleration' case showed us that it's fine to kill the customer. The court declared themselves incapable of penalizing even the most stupendously egregious example of criminal negligence we're likely to see (Of 90+ 'required' and 'suggested' practices in automotive industry firmware coding practices, they did 4 in the code in question. The developers didn't have a bug tracker or static analysis tools. Typical of all organizations, the software engineers had no real power to demand more time or testing, etc). They lost a civil wrongful death case and paid out $4 million, then settled with the plaintiffs out of court before the jury could award punitive damages. So killing is OK.

The issue is that, I think, software people need to stand up for themselves. They need to tell executives no, and refuse to pump out slapdash work. They need to take responsibility for the successes and failures of the company. The practical truth is that in most organizations, the software is the most valuable part of the entire business and the thing with the power to enable the company to excel or fall flat. We've been waiting for executives to recognize this since the 1980s and they still just see the software people as people who do typing.

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

#570

Post by notyourday »

notyourday wrote: post #357
rglullis wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree that measuring productivity by the amount of working hours is ridiculous. However, it is important to realize that you are not competing with the 20-somethings or the ones that are fresh out of college. You are competing with the ones that have already a good amount of experience (let's say 7-10 years) but are still in the beginning of their careers. If they are minimally talented, they will probably…

> I totally agree that measuring productivity by the amount of working hours is ridiculous. The alternative is P&L and boy grey beards don't want P&L based measurements

There are only two things that are measurable:

1. Time

2. P&L

P&L measurement would destroy majority of the old timers unless the old timers work the same little money fresh out of college people do.

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