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Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

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Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#201

Post by nunya213 »

ConcernedCoder wrote: post #159
nunya213 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't you be in management by now?

Is that really the end game? Am I an outlier since I don't want to manage people, I just want to write code? I'm 50 and have been programming since age 13 and I've turned down offers to move into management, since my 1st love is actually building things. Is it really just expected that at some point we all give up what we love to do just to fit into some corporate culture?

Seems to be career suicide. You are turning down countless promotion opportunities and insane amounts of compensation. All so what, you can continue coding day to day? Seems absurd, code at home as your hobby if it means that much to you. As an individual contributor your value to any company is limited no matter your skill. At a certain point the company is going to ask, is your compensation worth the value you add? Its not a surprise that the answer to that question is often no.

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#202

Post by whataretensors »

p0nce wrote: post #12
afpx wrote: post #2

Excellent news! Up until age 39, I was never not given an offer after interviewing. Now after 40, my offer rate has dropped to 1 in 14. So much for the claims that there is a shortage in tech. So crazy.

Readers: what's your exit strategy? You probably need one.

I plan to create value at a startup where they give me fair ownership of the project I'm working on, and once it's successful I'll live off royalties.

Wait what's that about developer royalties?

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#203

Post by tremendo »

1123581321 wrote: post #163
tremendo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case the applicant's employment history would be a lot more relevant. As in, have they been job-hopping, historically "not-lasting" at a job? or do they commit to their work and see it through. If you're offering a decent job and pay fairly, there's no reason to assume an applicant will simply "not last" only because of them being "over-qualified", whatever that means.

No, sorry. The issue is that a job that pays fairly for the position doesn’t feel fair to someone who is settling until they get the job they really want. That kind of person really is likely to leave quickly. Whether it’s worth hiring someone who wants to leave immediately depends on how quickly the company can get new hires up to speed and how much effort they put into interviewing. Now, a company can define overqu…

I disagree, and feel as I mentioned that they candidate's history is more relevant than their age and a non-defined over-qualification. In any case, when that's a worry, bring it up as a concern during the hiring process, work it out with the candidate. Now I cannot deny it happens, as demonstrated by @WillPostForFood in this sub-thread, but that does not mean everybody, not even most candidates think along the same lines. A lot just want an honest job that pays fairly, and as I stated originally, their history would likely be more telling in that regard.

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#204

Post by bmpafa »

always_good wrote: post #168
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The typical solid dev can only put in 4, maybe 5-6 hours of actual good coding a day. Outside of extremely rare triage situations, this limit is true for all developers, regardless of age or quality of output. Beyond about the 6 hour mark, people can force themselves to sit in a chair and hit keys on a keyboard like the Swedish chef from the muppets, but it's pure management denial to believe those hours count as "…

> this limit is true for all developers Maybe sober, but that's not the limit once you factor in the rampant use of amphetamine.

This is probably a myth, but I've heard Kerouac wrote On the Road practically in a single sitting thanks to the peppy magic of Benzedrine, aka Bennies, a _widely_ available inhalant & pill form of amphetamine.

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#205

Post by BadassFractal »

As someone approaching that 40yo cutoff soon enough, does that same apparent bias in hiring show up for managers and executives as well, or only hands-on individual contributors? Maybe there's a general perception that if you're in your 40s and you've worked hard enough, by then you should be a director or VP of some kind, and if you're not you must have messed up? I understand not everybody is meant for managerial ladder climbing, but is that perhaps the stereotype that everybody expects?

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#206

Post by biztos »

oculusthrift wrote: post #184

devils advocate reasons to avoid older tech job seekers: 1. they are less pliable. they have experience st other companies and typically want to keep doing stuff the way they did at their previous company. it’s a lot more work to make someone unlearn bad habits than teach them good ones 2. If you have 20+ years of experience you should really be at the management or architect level. if you’re still a typical engineer…

adversarial advocate:

1. your idea of good habits resists logical scrutiny, and more experienced workers might bring this to light.

2. many people never advance into positions of broader responsibility, and if you're hiring for a dev job this is not a bad thing. (also, cf. real-world corporate engineering vs. management ladders)

3. if your company is open about its insane hours and compensates accordingly, candidates who aren't cool with it will self-deselect.

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#207

Post by crdoconnor »

m12k wrote: post #96
ashelmire wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age discrimination in tech is dumb. I've got a dev 30 years my senior sitting across from me and I guarantee he will code circles around 90% of the devs on HN, and 100% of the new grads getting jobs at big tech (and will until he dies). He's got a huge amount of knowledge in programming, our domain (NLP), he's fast, thorough, and thoughtful. Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically use…

I think the real value in recent grads (from a startup perspective) is that they're young and naive enough to work long hours based on 'team spirit' and the dream of 'making an impact' rather than silly old ideas like earning a real salary or a getting a big enough amount of equity to matter. And they usually don't have families to keep them from working long hours either. They'll drink whatever kool-aid the startup…

None of that actually provides real value though. There's zero point to overworking programmers - that's how you get crap.

I think it's probably just VC bias driven by the number of unicorns which had young founders (VCs aren't after 'moderately successful startups', where founders tend to be older, they're after wildly successful unicorns).

Those young founders hire "people like themselves" which naturally means people their age or younger.

There's a certain degree of implicit age discrimination baked into the default hiring process of most startups too - all of those questions about reversing binary trees or implementing quicksort biases hiring toward recent grads who have just learned it and away from the experienced devs (because 99% of devs simply never use this kind of theory).

tl;dr VCs cargo cult and end up investing in young founders, young founders cargo cult their interview process and hire people "like themselves".

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#208

Post by cm2012 »

This is really dumb if you understand how Facebook's advertising algorithm works.

It's going to optimize job ads towards people who click job ads.

Young people are more likely to be looking for jobs than older people, and thus click job ads more. [1]

So Facebook's ad algorithm's are going to target younger people because it's more cost effective, because they want to see these type of ads more by far. By the data, older people do not want to see these type of ads and thus are not shown them. If you did show it to them, they would complain about bad ads (anyone who does FB advertising gets a report from FB on how many people Xed out an ad, and too many is really bad for your account)

Nothing to do with worker effectiveness or how HR treats older applicants, which is what 95% of the comments in this thread are taking the opportunity to talk about.

[1] " About 60% of Millennials are currently open to a new job opportunity and are by far the most likely generation to switch jobs. To support that, 21% of Millennials in 2016 reported switching jobs within the past year, compared to roughly 7% of gen Xers and other non-Millennials. " https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryalton/2018/01/22/millennia...

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#209

Post by raarts »

tyrust wrote: post #193
raarts wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> resistance to constructive criticism Very curious where you detect that in GP?

They completely discount the feedback without any concessions.

> speed has decreased a little

Sounds like a concession to me

The rest of the post is a rebuttal, not 'discounting'

Re: Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims

#210

Post by bmpafa »

agrippanux wrote: post #156

Age discrimination being rampant in our industry is a fantastic opportunity for an astute hiring manager. I go out of my way to hire older devs that are eschewed by typical Bay Area startups. I can get a seasoned pro with a solid background in C - and other more trendy languages - for about the same price of a 3-years-working-experience "senior dev" who likely was battlefield commissioned into the role at their last…

I understand your intent and I'm not suggesting you oughta do anything differently, but I am not sure how net good it is that older devs' labor is being sold at a discount.

My understanding is that silicon valley hasn't cured aging yet, so until that happens, this seems like yet another market distortion that favors employers at the expense of labor (or 'YAMDTFEAEL' for short)

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