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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

#721

Post by losteverything »

patricklynch wrote: post #718
losteverything wrote: post #713

So i place a classified ad in Chinese Daily News but not one in the Daily News. Am i discriminating against non chinese workers? Im not a FB fan but this isn't discrimination if i, as the buyer of the ad, don't want my ad to go to any group. Do i want to place my ad for a day care help to any FB member that may have a criminal record or keeps track of megans law? We just have too much information now.

No, because the fact that I'm neither Chinese nor likely to read Chinese Daily News doesn't actually prevent me from seeing your ad. If you posted "Help Wanted" flyers in the middle of a college campus for a part-time cashier job, some 52 year old could--in theory--be walking by the quad on his way to a Frisbee golf game. It's when you explicitly add in logic to filter out a protected class that you may be in trouble…

But the ad is targeting. Ads always target.

So if this is indeed true then FB should simply splash enough protected classes to chalk off the requirement. That should not be hard.

We have this really great machine to reach people. FB is just one way to attract talent. Why ruin it

Remember, FB is voluntary

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

#722

Post by dorgo »

tigershark wrote: post #687
dorgo wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) You tell me that if you take some fixed business logic and add some exceptions to it (make it more complex) you wont need more LOC's to address this added complexity? I don't believe you. 2) You can't be productive having 0 LOCs. So 0 LOCs = 0 productivity. n>0 LOCs = (presumable) some productivity. I would say we have a trend.

1) I said that there is no fixed correlation. 2) I'm most productive when my LOCs are negative, deleting duplicate code or finding a better approach for a problem.

1) so you say there is a (positive) correlation, but it is not "fixed". Sorry, I don't understand what this means.

2) I know what you mean. I do it often myself and I know it improves code quality. It's not my intention to measure "work done" in LOCs, which, as you say, could be contradictory. I propose to measure the size of a project in LOCs. Suppose, you have two projects. And you have all the time you want to reduce their LOCs (to improve code). After you are done, both projects will still have some LOCs. My point is that the project, which has more LOCs, after you had your fun with it, is the "bigger"/more complicated project.

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

#723

Post by emodendroket »

dreamfactored wrote: post #714
emodendroket wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the cynic in me finds it predictable that most Agile shops (at least IME) would be doing Scrum and not something like Kanban, even though it largely works against the supposed core values of Agile.

Yep Kanban is the way to go, focus on flow, small batch sizes, reducing waste of wait times and handovers. Look at cumulative flow and rightsize stories instead of fretting over estimation, points, burndown, and all that mini waterfall that scrum seems to entail. Takes most of the drama and hysteria out of delivery.

Ultimately it makes no difference whether you're doing "story points" or estimates in units of time. All that's going to happen is they'll be converted to units of time in a way you don't quite understand. It's just so naive to believe any of the Scrum promises.

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

#724

Post by gspetr »

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…

Most Fortune 500 companies were founded by white men -> Most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are white men.

Is that problematic?

Tax system already penalizes those who are producing wealth in order to subsidize those who are consuming it.

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

#725

Post by sbmassey »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #626
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…

>> less experienced devs will (on the average) cause more bugs and worse code structure - in the long run this causes a ton of extra work. In the last five years or so, I've done contract work at several large corporations. In every single one, they didn't care about defects or code structure. They just wanted to ship an application in a very short period of time. When I asked about the same thing you pointed out, th…

If they actually redesigned and rebuilt it evety 6 months, that would be a reasonable approach. Often they just want to build more stuff on top of what they already have, however.

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

#726

Post by patricklynch »

losteverything wrote: post #721
patricklynch wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the fact that I'm neither Chinese nor likely to read Chinese Daily News doesn't actually prevent me from seeing your ad. If you posted "Help Wanted" flyers in the middle of a college campus for a part-time cashier job, some 52 year old could--in theory--be walking by the quad on his way to a Frisbee golf game. It's when you explicitly add in logic to filter out a protected class that you may be in trouble…

But the ad is targeting. Ads always target. So if this is indeed true then FB should simply splash enough protected classes to chalk off the requirement. That should not be hard. We have this really great machine to reach people. FB is just one way to attract talent. Why ruin it Remember, FB is voluntary

I don't think it works that way. If you add logic that says:

"here's group A, who we really want to target, and here's group B, the protected class we want to exclude. throw 10% of all impressions at group B so we're not violating federal law."

Then I think you may still be breaking the law. Because you're explicitly favoring one group over another. Whether the ratio is 100%/0% or 90%/10% probably doesn't affect the underlying legal problem.

> Why ruin it

At some point many years ago society latched on to the idea that "equal opportunity employment" was a civil right worth protecting with federal law. One of the major draws of facebook, if you happen to be an employer not wholly committed to this idea, seems to be that you kind of have a way to effectively bypass it. There are people who would equate "ruining facebook" in this scenario with "protecting fundamental civil rights," which is more important than creating a favorable environment for recruiters.

That's more or less the argument I think.

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

#727

Post by linkregister »

kindatrue wrote: post #696
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…

Wasn’t most of SV’s most important growth during a time when housing, talent, and funding were plentiful?

Each generation of companies has come from dream teams from the previous. Space race R&D contracts and AT&T engineers begat HP, which begat Apple, Oracle, and Intel, then Sun Microsystems and the dot-coms, then Google and Apple 2.0, now the current crop of companies. SV housing being expensive has only been true for the last 20 years, and has only been utterly unaffordable for the last three.

Guy knows his probate housing, self-help writing, and public speaking, but I don’t take him as an authority for computer company insights.

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

#728

Post by PopsiclePete »

vfc1 wrote: post #438

The best way to avoid this altogether is to start your own Internet business way before hitting 50. Why would you still want to be working for someone else at that age? Being an employee is not the only way to earn a living, internet entrepreneurship is a very realistic alternative, and a much better life in general.

And everyone who starts a business is successful at it?

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

#729

Post by dreamfactored »

emodendroket wrote: post #723
dreamfactored wrote: post #714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep Kanban is the way to go, focus on flow, small batch sizes, reducing waste of wait times and handovers. Look at cumulative flow and rightsize stories instead of fretting over estimation, points, burndown, and all that mini waterfall that scrum seems to entail. Takes most of the drama and hysteria out of delivery.

Ultimately it makes no difference whether you're doing "story points" or estimates in units of time. All that's going to happen is they'll be converted to units of time in a way you don't quite understand. It's just so naive to believe any of the Scrum promises.

It's why we always do rightsizing and never numerical estimates. You can calculate delivery dates by counting stories * average story time - very fast, very simple, and amusingly at least as accurate as detailed time estimates. Has an interesting side effect of tying scope to delivery. So if you want to reduce delivery time, it's clearly understood as under control of stakeholders and done by dropping stories. If you can't rightsize to a reasonably narrow range (we use 1-5 days) and have to estimate (e.g. sifting stories for prioritisation purposes), t-shirt sizing usually works ok and gives the required info without opening it to abuse.

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

#730

Post by cutcss »

mattmanser wrote: post #482
cutcss wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say it like it is that simple to fix; they could ask for photo in the curriculum and just discard the few that looks old, -after targeting job ads on pages that are disproportionaly "liked" by the age range they want- The only true way to solve this is to force by law to hire older people (e.g. 30% of your workforce must be over 40); otherwise all this proxies like trying to regulate third-party ads and else its…

It is an easy fix. Job ads have no age options allowed. Fixed.

Nope; you can target pages that are liked only by young people (e.g. Snapchat) and then just discard the few old people manually.
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