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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

#691

Post by moosey »

huhtenberg wrote: post #480
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…

> Can someone explain it to me? It's very simple - it is harder for younger managers to work with older subordinates. The age-based hierarchies are deeply ingrained into virtually all cultures - "Elders are wise, respect your elders, etc." This makes arguing with (or reprimanding) someone who's older than you a doubly-uncomfortable task for many people. The reverse is also true - that is being bossed around by people…

> It's very simple - it is harder for younger managers to work with older subordinates.

A good manager would figure out how to make it work. I've worked with younger managers, and I've even had to teach them how to deal with problem workers.

I've also had people all the way up to the director level that I've had to manage, as a developer, because they were so terrible. I even had one ask me once 'Why are you managing me?" and had to reply "Why are you making it necessary?".

I don't think that we've got the whole management thing down - I think that there are probably the same % of bad managers as their are bad devs. I'd also suggest that there are 10x managers, probably ones that read Peopleware and took it to heart.

It is easy to manage most people, all it takes is a bit of diplomacy.

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

#692

Post by marcosdumay »

le-mark wrote: post #617
caseymarquis wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also note that it is very, very difficult for anyone, inexperienced or experienced, to build a monolith that can later be pulled apart. You're two suggestions are a great start. You have to really design with the major blocks of functionality in mind, and carefully manage dependencies between these blocks AND third party dependencies. So many monoliths are balls of mud, that can't be pulled apart with any reasonable…

Honestly, if one can not create a monolith that isn't a giant ball of mud, one has not chance at all of creating a distributed application, microservices or not, even ignoring quality.

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

#693

Post by kindatrue »

Clubber wrote: post #361
danjoc wrote: post #111

"Young people are just smarter," he said, with a straight face, according to VentureBeat. "Why are most chess masters under 30?" he asked. Has Zuckerberg retired yet? He's old now. 33 in fact. He should have passed the torch to someone smarter. I guess he got old and dumb and forgot.

If he were older at the time, he might have realized that saying something like that is not only short sighted, but would follow him for the rest of his life. I haven't heard him repeat it since. Of course, when I was young, I said plenty of short sighted, silly things as well.

>I haven't heard him repeat it since.

If the dude can afford to hire a $120K/year nanny to teach his kids Mandarin, he can afford to hire a guy to remind him to never repeat that.

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

#694

Post by marcosdumay »

notyourday wrote: post #670
TsomArp wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not about cost. It is about cashflow. Revenue is not a king. Profit is not a king. Cashflow is a king.

Nope, hiring fewer more experienced programmers is also better for cashflow.

My bet is that it's about easy and hard to measure costs, and how our modern big government world insulates large companies from competition.

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

#695

Post by kindatrue »

kirykl wrote: post #14

If the job application doesn't restrict on age, and presumably appears on their website, advertising for it is not really exclusionary

Kinda sorta. A consequence of the redlining era in Banking (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining), banks are not supposed to micro-geographically target their advertising. (So... blocking Florida is find 'cuz you don't have offices in Florida. But not buying ads for people in Harlem while you target the rest of Manhattan - not OK.)

So there's precedent for saying that "not including" can be the same as "excluding".

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

#696

Post by kindatrue »

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…

Guy Kawasaki once had a post that states the reason why, but in a different angle - it's a post basically on why Silicon Valley is successful:

>>https://guykawasaki.com/how_to_kick_sil/ High housing prices. If houses are cheap, it means that young people can buy housing sooner and have kids. When they have kids, they can’t take as much risk and don’t have as much energy to start companies. (I have four kids—I barely have the time and energy to blog, much less start a company.) Also, if houses are cheap, it’s easier to “make it big,” and you want it to be hard to make it big.<<

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

#697

Post by marcosdumay »

dreamfactored wrote: post #273
leggomylibro wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>To a business they see software/engineers as a expense. Anecdotally, this is one of the first things I try to gauge at a prospective employer. "Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" If the company works with technology a lot and doesn't see technology as being particularly important to its bottom line, that's usually a bad sign. Also, discussions with C-levels tend to be pretty one-di…

>"Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" It's not a matter of opinion, but what the term means. They are cost centers unless they are closing sales (or being billed for about 3x what they cost, which is still way less than sales people will generate, being closer to 10x+ cost). Best thing any employee can do is find out how their company actually makes money and understand how they alig…

> one of the most important things for most businesses is remaining runway

Remaining runway is a measure that only exist for companies in the red. For most business it doesn't even exist.

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

#698

Post by kindatrue »

dpc59 wrote: post #408
CodeMage wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I call the Mediocre Mercenary Mentality, this idea that "as long as we can make money off of it, it's good enough". This mentality is the reason why sometimes -- but not always! -- my phone won't play music in my car until I restart the _car_. This mentality is why game development companies get away with charging full price for unfinished, bug-ridden games with crippled features and missing content. Thi…

We have an economic system where we reward maximizing short term financial gain. As long as that doesn't change companies will try to sell the crappiest shit they can sell you for the most money.

In b-school Profit=Revenue-Expense was drilled in over and over again.

It's so obvious. But until you realllllly sit down and internalize it... then you can be at peace with the shitty service of Comcast, etc.

In other words: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

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

#700

Post by ThrowAway3456 »

whack wrote: post #684
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…

I've heard similar quotes before, and always assumed the speaker meant that they didn't want everyone to be a old/white/guy, not that they didn't want anyone who was a old/white/guy. Context matters a lot - such quotes are usually said in reference to a company's leadership team, and there's quite a bit of truth to them. When you look at the list of CEOs/Senior-Executives/Board-members at Fortune 500 companies, it's…

Visible Minority men here chiming in; I find this type of perspective (and the lack of empathy that underlines it) kinda saddening. Most of the argument you are saying are the same we used to make to other minority, "No i didn't mean all of them", "Understand the context in which i make a wide generalization etc..."

> assumed the speaker meant... I am guessing you are not an old person being subject to ageism...

> Context matters a lot

Yes it does, the context in which the statement is made, the person who made it and the context in which the statement is receive. Asking us to only consider on side of the communication ,and making excuse because in certain context the statement is not offensive doesn't seem fair to me.

> such quotes are usually said in reference to a company's leadership team, and there's quite a bit of truth to them

There is truth in any stereotype, that's why they exist. The usual issue is that they are alienating and non inclusive to some people.

> it's overwhelmingly middle-aged/old white men

And the prisons in America are filled with poeple who look like me, should i be okay with generalization on me about that. One thing that it seems that most leftist like me forget is that most CEOs are white , but most white are not CEOs...

> I would consider that just as problematic as the age-discrimination that the article was referring to.

Yes and the first step is adopt an inclusive language, and not make excuse we wouldn't accept on any other protected classes. The fight for diversity is won we get everybody on board. When we start to have a hierarchy of protected classes, some classes where it's kind of okay to discriminate against because X,Y,Z reasons then it starts to look like the exact opposite of what we are trying to achieve

And i guess the most interesting thing is the amount the mental gymnastic we have to do to find this statement okay, instead of just taking the most plausible explanation... It simply reflect the latent ageism in our industry, and the fact that it is still okay to be ageist so long as it's directed at white men...

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