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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

#641

Post by jklinger410 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #270
jklinger410 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if we have the same vigor over Strip Clubs? They have been operating outside of this law the entire time. Are we supposed to respect this law now, even though everyone in this thread knows its unenforced, unenforceable, and is being broken constantly? I'm supposed to be outraged by the natural evolution of online ads, though. And at Facebook.

Strip clubs are discriminating based on "a bona fide occupational qualification reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the par­ticu­lar business". That is explicitly allowed by ADEA. Most businesses don't have the same excuse.

Doesn't this exception leave room, then, for Facebook to allow employers to decide if their ad targeting breaks the law?

If I'm a strip club owner and I want to promote a job opening on Facebook, I have to waste impressions on 45+ year old males because of this issue?

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

#642

Post by jklinger410 »

thecompilr wrote: post #222
grzm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads have operated this way since their inception, The ability for ads to target individuals while being invisible to others is something quite new and pernicious. If you advertise on television, your commercial is seen by everyone watching. If you run an ad in print media, everyone who has a copy can read it. Individually targeted advertising is ripe for abuse. If you're interested in reading more how this is reall…

Ads in print have a fixed cost, based on the size of the ad. But even printed ads target specific demographics. How many over 40 brides are there compared to 20-30 years old, that would read a wedding magazine is an extreme example of it. Ads on TV have fixed cost, depending on the length of the commercial and the time it is aired. But even on TV you would target the show based on the demographics you prefer. Ads on…

I would assume this would require an entire change in the way Facebook handles ads for jobs.

Either that or they would have to bow out of employment ads entirely.

I'm wondering how closely Monster, Indeed, etc are handling these laws as well. Their system seems way less transparent. We could assume they are obeying these laws but who knows.

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

#643

Post by godelski »

TsomArp wrote: post #609
leggomylibro wrote: post #76

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. 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.

While I agree with you, that it isn't cheaper in the end, people think short term. Lots of companies are trying to pinch pennies at every corner. A great example: Why does extra sauce cost more money? It pisses most people off and a lot of people turn it down. But they still probably see slightly higher margins at the end of the year.

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

#644

Post by wfo »

otakucode wrote: post #569
ryandrake wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

Totally agree. But the only way for software people to take any power or control (really, for any worker to have any say in the business at all) is to unionize, and us tech folks tend to treat that like a curse word.

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

#645

Post by inimino »

I'm no fan of Facebook, but I'm having trouble getting worked up about this.

It is illegal to not hire someone on the basis of age, but what is so wrong about targeting ads at young people, for a job that older people would be unlikely to apply for anyway? That just seems like common sense. And getting outraged at not being shown ads, as though your constitutional right to have companies spend money to let you know about employment opportunities while you're frittering away time on Facebook were being violated, just screams entitlement to me.

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

#646

Post by lotyrin »

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…

It was a simple performance bug (think N+1 query type) that was trivial to implement and trivial to be confident about its behavior vs the pathological implementation, and I used the normal channels for shipping it, it passed QA.

The only "clandestine" part is that I added the split test, and did some work outside of the set of features that was scheduled.

We had no policies around SLA, developing off-site, security or restricting sensitive information (think potential FERPA/HIPPA violation) which are yet other "non-features" that I tried to get them to adopt.

I implemented this entirely above-board, with more precautions and consideration than were taken by other developers on that team for the day-to-day.

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

#647

Post by ryanmarsh »

wfo wrote: post #644
otakucode wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 de…

Totally agree. But the only way for software people to take any power or control (really, for any worker to have any say in the business at all) is to unionize, and us tech folks tend to treat that like a curse word.

Union is a curse word but I have a hunch that there are others that might make more sense. Guild maybe?

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

#648

Post by heedlessly2 »

asmosoinio wrote: post #440
leggomylibro wrote: post #76

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. 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…

> 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…

a 24 year old from a top CS college with 3 years of solid javascript experience will be better than a 40 year old with 15+ years of C#.net experience for today's job market

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

#649

Post by dsfyu404ed »

jcadam wrote: post #589
technion wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These discussions tend to assume in-house development though. I've spent far too much time around organisations where "more time with bums on seats" = "direct correlation to billing more", which = "better work" if you ask the right people. That leads to an unfortunately different scenario.

Defense contracting. It's all about billing hours against a contract. As long as I'm doing that, I'm making the company money.

And that's how you get code from company A that's performing sanity checks on a parts of a file that are outside the scope of the spec the data in that file is supposed to meet failing content that meets spec but has had all superfluous information discarded by a custom compression algorithm that's designed by company B to improve performance on a network with insane latency.

That was a fun bug to track down.

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

#650

Post by user5994461 »

itronitron wrote: post #398
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…

There is an old Google paper where they talk about discovering that users returned more often if the search results list was 10 instead of 20, since the shorter list took marginally less time to load/render for the user. If your co-workers don't believe you then I am sure they would at least love the Google finding that minor performance improvements have a positive impact. They would then support improving performan…

>>> There is an old Google paper

No, there isn't.

Google is showing one series of ads per page. The study showed that having more legitimate results per page decreased their revenues. Of course, it gives less room for ads and less page views.

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