Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads • Hacker News Board

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

#601

Post by teddyh » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 1:48 PM UTC

s3r3nity wrote: post #495

maltalex wrote: post #481

The discussion here is interesting, but I haven't seen any psychological and sociological aspects of hiring mentioned yet. Not all hiring decisions are rational. First, there's a culture thing - when a company is composed out of 20 year olds, it's natural for them to prefer working with other young people who they can relate to. That 40 year old job applicant, the one with the kids and the years of experience in comp…

I worry that the "culture" argument has dangerous implications if true, as it can be used to discriminate on so many grounds outside of age: gender ("If I'm with a bunch of my bro's, why mess it up with a girl?"), race, language, disabilities, etc etc. I thought the "hacker culture" would be supportive of the idea that "if you can do the job well, let's work together on solving interesting problems," rather than the…

> I thought the "hacker culture" would be supportive of the idea (…)

Oh, it is. But this isn’t the hacker culture. It’s startup culture. Take care not to confuse the two.

To quote myself from three years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9149922):

Saying “Hacker/Startup culture” is a little like saying “C/C++” – they are not the same and should not be conflated. Actually, it’s more like saying “Lisp/Java” – many people are enamored by the latter and thinks that the former is very similar, but it is in fact only similar in some superficial ways, and completely different in design, values, and style.

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

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Post by vonmoltke » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 1:52 PM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #296

didibus wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though there's been some research recently showing that younger doctors are better, because they're aware of the latest research. I wonder if that's going to lead to some ageism in medicine because of that.

Not a chance. The amount of doctors has a hard limit fixed by regulations, there will always be work for all of them and at good wages.

This is a myth perpetuated by medical schools. There is no regulatory limit to the number of residency slots hospital's can create. There is a limit to the number Medicare will pay for, and teaching hospitals generally refuse to create slots that are not paid for by Medicare.

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

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Post by kenjackson » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 1:55 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #596

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…

Honestly, just evaluating a person's relevant experience vs salary requirements would end up looking like age discrimination. If all I care about is degree + ~7 years experience in relevant technologies + generally solid head on the person's shoulders, and I have one person with those, asking X, and another person with those, as well as another 13 years unrelated experience asking tens of thousands more, why would I…

Ignoring age is the right thing. The title of the job will do the filtering for you. I'm not going to apply to a Jr Dev position. The pay and position handle all this for you. And if someone with extra experience wants the role, what's wrong with that?

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

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Post by sharemywin » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 1:57 PM UTC

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…

Well, if you don't want entangled in a lawsuit you dance around it better than that.

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

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Post by lmm » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:02 PM UTC

probablybroken wrote: post #598

lmm wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible but it's a lot less common IME.

My observation is that earlier on in people's careers they tend to be more certain about the limited experiences they have had due to a lack of contradiction.. Of course, if you keep repeating the same limited experiences this will only be reinforced ;)

My experience is that fresh grads are aware they lack experience and are appropriately modest in their judgements of technologies, whereas people with ten years of experience are dogmatically confident that certain technologies are good or bad.

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

#606

Post by jstewartmobile » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:08 PM UTC

Many years ago, I sold real estate. With some regularity, I'd e-mail a list of homes to an eager young professional couple. The sort who always say the correct things and always vote the correct way.

One of the homes in that list would be so well shot, and so well priced, that they'd take time off of work--they had to see it right now! They chatter excitedly on the drive over. We slow down as we enter the neighborhood. Their excitement is at its apex. Then the excitement drops an octave. I scan the horizon, pondering, "What is this disturbance in the force?" Then I notice, we just drove by a black guy raking his yard. After the next black guy in his yard--silence.

We pull up to the house. As I let them out of the car, I am met with the faces of two people searching for an excuse. One of them breaks, "It's not that we're racists. Some of my best friends are black. It's just that, um, we don't want to be the only white people in the neighborhood."

They get back into the car. I take them back to the office, and I never see them again.

Nice neighborhood, great price, neighbors that take care of their yards--obviously no rational reason to scrub the showing, no one screaming the n-word, no "far-right" politics, just a couple higher-level office slaves quietly reclining into the old tribalisms.

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

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Post by caseymarquis » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:15 PM UTC

BjoernKW wrote: post #550

majjam wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Because like any design pattern microservices should be used to address a specific problem. Martin Fowler describes that particular design pattern here in great detail: https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html Microservices however unfortunately have become a fashionable cure-all that's applied indiscriminately to software projects of all sizes, ages and purposes. Hardly anyone seems to be asking anymore…

I second this. You can internally build your monolith in a way that makes a transition to microservices easy. Avoid global state and build single concern processes which have their dependencies passed to them on creation.

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

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Post by scarface74 » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:19 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #585

gdilla wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't Twitter racked up 2.5B in losses and yet to turn a profit (though reportedly close to doing it for the first time ever). 2.5B in losses for a platform you could build and scale for what, $10M now. Very questionably successful - some people got rich so yes, i suppose?

That has little to do with their architecture, methinks.

People have been asking for years why Twitter is so bloated with employees. A lot of people think that the bloat is partially caused by a poor architecture that they have to maintain.

Contrast that to the small staff that Instagram had before getting acquired. It's still run on a relatively small staff now.

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

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Post by TsomArp » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:21 PM UTC

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…

I am not sure it is cheaper in the end. You might pay a lower hourly rate, but because of bad work, rework, miscommunication, delay on communications you will pay more in the end. That has been my experience with, for example Chinese and Indian development teams abroad. There is a reason why agile prefers collocated teams.

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

#610

Post by sudhirj » Thu, Dec 21, 2017, 2:22 PM UTC

majjam wrote: post #528

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They work well when designed well - and for me that's more often designed organically. If they're designed badly, most bugs eventually reduce to trying to do distributed transactions across microservices.

That's my yardstick - if I see poor man's distributed transaction attempts happening across service boundaries I'll start to assume over-engineering / cargo culting. If I see services acting a nodes in an pipeline or a flowchart, preferably with multiple incoming lines, it smells better to me.