Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by logicfiction » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

markkanof wrote: post #125

agotterer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of reasons I’ve seen for ageism in startups are cost and “not a culture fit”. Cost I understand, but I believe more experienced people end up being cheaper in the long run when you account for speed, correctness, and long term maintainability. The culture piece stems from the “would I get a beer with this person” and will he/she work as “hard” as a younger candidate with less responsibilities. Startups need to s…

It is often very difficult to explain to non-developers how your first point could possibly be true. Even if you have regular discussions regarding the value of experience and the possible damage that could be done by a bad or inexperienced developer. I find that it is easy to agree at a surface level that those concepts make sense, but if someone has not actually had the experience of writing software, they have tro…

I wonder if comparing it to home improvement type work would be a good universal analogy for most people. Would you rather hire the inexperienced person to come do your plumbing or the 30 year professional. The former doesn't give you a proper estimate but will work endlessly at a lower rate on the problem. This person eventually completely messes up and a water pipe in your ceiling leaks for days. Or you could have hired the other person who would almost certainly have completed it within the estimated time frame with professional quality and never caused the pipe leak.

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

#252

Post by sokoloff » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:17 PM UTC

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…

A long time ago, back when I was a recent grad, I often worked long hours simply because coding is so damned fun. I remember thinking, "Damn, I can't believe that they pay me this much for something that I'd do for free anyway! What fools!!"

That hasn't completely escaped, but with a family and 25 years experience, I put that into a different perspective now.

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

#253

Post by svachalek » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:19 PM UTC

nunya213 wrote: post #201

ConcernedCoder wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

It depends. At a lot of companies, manager and senior software engineer are roughly equivalent in compensation. To make "insane" amounts of compensation you've got to make director or better, and that's a completely different job/life than engineering. A lot of people went into engineering because they don't have that in 'em.

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

#254

Post by MaxBarraclough » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:20 PM UTC

rohansingh wrote: post #170

bluGill wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is discrimination against younger workers. Diversity programs are a double edged sword, there are groups that are under represented. However every time you target them you lose the larger group that you didn't target, and that group has great people.

Not making a judgement either way, but just a heads-up— there's actually no federal prohibition against discriminating on the basis of youth. Age discrimination laws only work in one direction.

Interesting. Here in the UK, the law can work both ways, with exceptions where there is good reason.

https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/discriminat... , https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/work-learning/di...

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

#255

Post by BasHamer » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

biztos wrote: post #182

BasHamer wrote: post #144

Data-driven algorithms are discriminating based upon undesirable/illegal vectors; they are utterly amoral in optimizing their solutions. Even if the algorithm does not have access to the "Age" field, then there are plenty of proxies, like what reunion tour you liked. And the same goes for race, gender, sexual identification, religion, etc. To solve this we either need the training data to have no illegal/undesired di…

How would you make the system moral? Let's say "moral" means "won't discriminate based on X" and the same "system" is used by everyone, which of course it wouldn't be. So do you make up a bunch of fake "people" who are equal in everything except X, and test that it doesn't advantage/disadvantage the X's? Would that even be possible if the "system" is getting its inputs from social media? Do you do mandate some kind o…

train it.

Give it examples that we consider moral and examples of what we consider immoral and have it figure it out. The solutions that the algorithms create are less complex than the data that they base the solutions on; so it should be relatively easy for it to model these solutions as data. We would have to train it on what we consider moral and immoral; that would require us to visualize the solutions in a way that a human can make the determination and provide the feedback.

As far as how we get to the solution, that will probably come when there is a liability for discrimination. So lawsuits like the one mentioned. I think that mandating does not work well, it would be more appropriate to make people liable for the decisions made by amoral systems. This liability would create a demand for moral systems.

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

#256

Post by stevenwoo » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #55

wmeredith wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they were targeting older workers as part of a diversity program?

Again, I'm not all that knowledgeable of the law, but I believe the intent of it is to oppose ageism in either direction. Shouldn't it be?

We could argue all day about the intent of the US law, but the wording of the law lists protected classes and older workers is a protected class, and younger workers is not - discriminating against older workers purely on the basis of age is illegal and discriminating against younger workers is legal. The article clearly states the case is tried in San Francisco so US law is the only relevant law.

I agree with your sentiment that no age discrimination is btter unless that is somehow relevant to the job.

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

#257

Post by cm2012 » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:27 PM UTC

kartan wrote: post #239

cm2012 wrote: post #208

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, ol…

> So Facebook's ad algorithm's are going to target younger people because it's more cost effective Because there is a technical explanation doesn't means that it is not discrimination. Actually discrimination had a lot to do about getting an individual differently because he/she is part of a group. We didn't baked a law, the machine did. It is not a good defense in a trial, or at least I hope it is not. A good read o…

Discriminating based on interest in job postings is very different than discriminating based on type of applicant.

If you post a job ad in a job center, it's going to be seen by way more young people and older people won't get as much of a chance to see it. Same if you post job ads in colleges. Both of those common practices are more discriminatory than what FB's algorithm is doing here.

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

#258

Post by DanielBMarkham » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

OhHeyItsE wrote: post #188

I always wonder where the myth that older developers are "slower" comes from. Dunno about you folks, but I get better and faster every year. And, for me, that productivity metric is probably approaching parabolic. You learn enough languages, frameworks, tools - all the fundamentals start to merge together. You can pick the next one up faster than you did the one you just put down. You understand how to design softwar…

53-year-old coder here. (Although that's not my primary job) I still love programming. I love new frameworks and tools, I love solving problems for people. I love having fun with a good team.

I do reason a bit slower, but that's because -- I think -- I'm considering more options than I did when I was younger. I also have a tendency to like "grinding": you know, things like hooking up copy constructors for C++ classes in order to make a more complete type system. So I stay on the lookout for that.

If anything has changed, it's just I try to be much more careful about getting in a rut. And that's crazy, because that's the accusation people make about older coders. I always want to hold the problem in one hand and the tech in the other, looking to see what the minimum amount of work is required. When I was younger, people would describe the problem to me, then I would dive down and focus almost exclusively on whatever the tech was. It was like a big video game or mathematical puzzle that I enjoyed as much or more than making stuff people wanted.

I've seen a lot of people in the industry spend a lot of time, effort, and money doing that. I've seen good friends end up out of work because they fell in love with a certain tech that the rest of the industry decided wasn't cool any more. So now I try to look at solutions as much as tech -- more so, really. Ideally you wouldn't code anything, just make stuff people want without indulging your desire to work with detailed systems of symbols.

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

#259

Post by coliveira » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:28 PM UTC

Discrimination is essentially THE business for FB advertisements in areas such as housing and job openings. It is just a fancy way to circumvent legal requirements that jobs must be posted independent of sex, racial, or religious affiliation. Similarly for housing offerings.

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

#260

Post by andrei_says_ » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

It is really ironic that an industry focused on engineering can act in such an irrational manner. Long hours in the office chair is only a measurement of management’s failure to pay attention to the metrics that matter.

Strongly preferring less experienced devs because they can work longer (which they need to, partially to compensate for their lack of experience), is both tragic and comical. It’s likely the pay is lower for the younger devs but the very practice of working long hours has been proven as detrimental to quality.