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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

#261

Post by andrei_says_ »

bartread wrote: post #211
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…

Five of the six people on my team, including me, are over 30; four of us are over 40. I must admit that although devs with that level of experience are "expensive", they start to look a lot cheaper when you realise the additional value they add due to experience. Software development, as with many things in life, often follows the adage that you get what you pay for. (It should go without saying, but it's a sad inevi…

A part of the higher pay grade is that the majority of the mistakes one must make to gain experience points have been paid for.

Also, maturity often comes with a reduction of the ego-driven drama friction which can make people so much more pleasant to work with.

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

#262

Post by twothamendment »

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 like to think of it as hiring people with actual years of experience. I don't care what their age is or their title. Are they a senior developer only because they have 6 more months than the other guy at the startup or are they senior because they've had 6 jobs over twice as many years? Those years add add experience in doing things the wrong way and in ways that work.

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

#263

Post by Retric »

hcoura wrote: post #183
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 "…

I have recently started working remotely and dealing with my own productivity as opposed to have some expectations of work hours has been an interesting challenge. Since I log my own hours I became full aware of this 6 hours "ceiling" in the long term, for a few days I could work for many more hours, but that would have a big price to pay in future productivity. In the beginning I felt bad, as if I was not able to pr…

Based on what I have seen, even 6 productive hours is a high bar even in people that stay in the office 10+ hours a day. Simple things like getting a drink of water or going to the bathroom often take far longer in a cubicle farm than at home. Add having nothing to do, random IT problems, chit chat, checking the phone or other web browsing etc, and the average IT worker might be doing 3-4.

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

#264

Post by monksy »

raarts wrote: post #189
m12k wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Do you want to help disrupt ? Want to work with , and want to work 16 hours a day without or with little ownership? Join us, we are a young dynamic international team, free organic lunches, free Macbook, we're all bros here. Take our whiteboard interview and see if you're a cultural fit!"

Don't forget about the week-long "coding challenge"

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

#265

Post by monksy »

crdoconnor wrote: post #207
m12k wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

I've seen this in large corporations as well. ("They want to be 'more agile'")

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

#266

Post by kolbe »

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…

My thoughts: when there is a completely new industry being built (like transistors in the 60s or social networking in the 00's), no one has an advantage with respect to experience. Young brains seem to work better at adapting to new environments than old ones (e.g. learning foreign languages), and people like Bob Noyce and Mark Zuckerberg can use this to their advantage. But once industries establish, and actual knowledge is required to gain an edge, so experience is more valuable than adaptability. I don't think we have any industries at the moment where youth is better than knowledge, though. AI/ML is not an industry for kids, but rather the best brains having been trained for decades.

Unfortunately, I think the investing class, who tends to use crude proxies like founder age/college/gpa to evaluate business potential, is still calibrated to youth->success based on recent historical precedent of Facebook/Google. And this bleeds through to the job market, where young teams get funding easier than old ones.

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

#267

Post by logfromblammo »

baxtr wrote: post #197
hcoura wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have recently started working remotely and dealing with my own productivity as opposed to have some expectations of work hours has been an interesting challenge. Since I log my own hours I became full aware of this 6 hours "ceiling" in the long term, for a few days I could work for many more hours, but that would have a big price to pay in future productivity. In the beginning I felt bad, as if I was not able to pr…

Please, please, please let everybody come to this conclusion. How much better would the world be as place. I’ve wasted many hours of my time at work, not working, which is so sad

I personally allocate the work day into one 4-hour block as my "big pipe", one 2-hour block as my "little pipe", and let the other 2 hours be "fluff". For limited intervals, I can combine the two pipes into one "mega pipe", to get a "big pipe" task done faster, but it takes a toll over time. The "big pipe" can also theoretically be split into two more temporary "little pipes", but in general, I usually want to have the "big pipe" around to get something important done, and multitasking on three things creates too much organizational overhead, so that also takes a toll.

"Fluff" time is for sitting in meetings or writing reports, as work functions, or for just looking busy. I intentionally avoid doing real work that requires any focus or creativity in the fluff slot. After six hours of real work, any more time spent doing the same thing starts to become counterproductive. So just leave it for tomorrow.

I have been more productive while explicitly dedicating 2 hours a day to getting nothing useful done, than when trying to stay focused on one thing for 8 hours, and ending up goofing off, getting sidetracked, or procrastinating for some amount of time anyway.

That's the theory, anyway. My current employer doesn't keep my pipelines reliably filled. During the dry spells, I have a hard time expanding the fluff slot to more than two hours, and end up doing stuff like coding stupid CLI games, or vectorizing the company logo, or setting up a new vanilla VM that I might not ever use.

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

#268

Post by DoreenMichele »

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.

In case you hadn't noticed:

When you post firsthand testimony like this, the typical reaction is a pile on of unsolicited advice. When you don't grovel in gratitude and promptly turn your life around in response to the brilliant wisdom of a bunch of internet strangers who know an entire paragraph about your problem, you will be quickly labeled as clearly the cause of your problem, never mind the information in the very article currently under discussion that makes it clear there are large scale forces at work. No, you cannot possibly be a victim of circumstance. You just must not be trying hard enough and making lame excuses to cover that up, like playing the victim card because you obviously have a victim mentality. If you argue it, that will be further evidence of your personal defects.

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

#269

Post by toephu2 »

arethuza wrote: post #194
DavidWoof wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a programmer in my late 50s. While age discrimination is real, and I certainly have my share of "not a culture fit" and "overqualified" rejections over the past 10 years, if you're getting rejected over 90% of the time then I strongly suspect the problem isn't age discrimination. It's much more likely that your skills are out of date or you've gained some bad interviewing habits that you should examine. If people…

You are assuming that interviewers read CVs/resumes before the interview.... A colleague recently had an experience at a second interview where the hiring manager proudly proclaimed that they hadn't read her CV and the interviewer was the one who had done the first interview!

Good interviewers try not to read the CV before the interview to help reduce bias.

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

#270

Post by paulddraper »

astura wrote: post #242
ryanmonroe wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I go out of my way to hire older devs that are eschewed by typical Bay Area startups Going "out of [your] way" to hire older devs sounds like age discrimination. AFAIK, age discrimination in this direction isn't illegal in America, but it seems odd that you would respond to an article decrying age-discrimination by proudly declaring that you discriminate too, in the opposite direction. Maybe you just meant that you…

The GP said "older devs" but what they are talking about isn't age, they are talking about skills and experience level. Everything is discrimination - if you're seeking to hire a software engineer you're probably going to discriminate against people who don't know how to code, people with low IQs, people who can't get along with the team, etc. The question becomes, is the discrimination legal and/or ethical and based…

Once upon a time "discrimination" had positive connotations, e.g. "he has discriminating tastes".

Somehow the word has been twisted to be almost exclusively negative.

But show me an organization that doesn't discriminate, and I'll show you an organization of utter incompetence.

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