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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

#281

Post by tabtab »

kolbe wrote: post #266
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 know…

The USA specializes in new industries for good or bad. Existing industries drift to low-wage countries with lighter labor & pollution regulations. Therefore, it may be harder to find industries that value experience in the USA. Perhaps it's time for a reverse H1B visa migration for older workers: "B1H".

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

#282

Post by mattmcknight »

dvtrn wrote: post #102
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 It's much more likely that your skills are out of date or you've gained some bad interviewing habits that you should examine.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…

"Overqualified" has got to be the softest insult you can throw at a job seeker. It ostensibly says "we aren't secure in ourselves as employers to challenge our workers to produce great work, nor do we value original thought, so we'd rather hire drones that don't rattle the cage".

Another variation is, "you are better than the person we selected to run this team, and they are too insecure to have you working for them."

I feel this is silly fear, but I have heard it.

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

#283

Post by B0btheBuilder »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #147
B0btheBuilder wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do. Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups / small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft make up even 10% of tech workers.

Citation please. Startups are minuscule compared to total tech jobs. My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined, for example.

Google - 85,050 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google)

Facebook - 25,105 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook)

Amazon has 566,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps.

Apple - 123,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.) Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers, so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers.

Microsoft - 124,000 employees (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft)

There are around 7 million tech workers in the USA (https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/201...)

Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers.

860,000 / 7 million = 12.3%

That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of the richest tech companies in the world.

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

#284

Post by opportune »

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.

True but generally not good information to propagate, not for selfish reasons, just because it sets an unreasonably high standard

It’s true you can knock out a 10-20hr session in essentially one sitting, but it’s not a good habit to set for yourself or the industry

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

#285

Post by throwawaymath »

Moto7451 wrote: post #218
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…

It's not age discrimination if you accept and do not otherwise discriminate against young/younger candidates. There's a lot that goes into recruiting. Optimizing your job descriptions, creating multiple job descriptions, and targeting your ad spend are all things that can affect the age, race, gender, education level, etc of the people you reach without being discriminatory. In fact, you should do this to be inclusiv…

> There's a lot that goes into recruiting. Optimizing your job descriptions, creating multiple job descriptions, and targeting your ad spend are all things that can affect the age, race, gender, education level, etc of the people you reach without being discriminatory.

Wait...isn't this exactly what the article is talking about?

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

#286

Post by toomuchtodo »

B0btheBuilder wrote: post #283
toomuchtodo wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation please. Startups are minuscule compared to total tech jobs. My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined, for example.

Google - 85,050 employees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google ) Facebook - 25,105 employees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook ) Amazon has 566,000 employees ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company) ), but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify for food stamps. Apple - 123,000 employees ( h…

None of this validates your thesis that startups and small businesses are the majority tech employers. If anything, it reinforces mine.

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

#287

Post by jerf »

BasHamer wrote: post #255
biztos wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

"Give it examples that we consider moral"

That's a tall order, honestly. There's a lot of things in the current dominant SV philosophy that are fine and dandy and everybody thinks they agree with everybody else about them as long as everyone carefully agrees to not sit down and actually put numbers on the terms in question ("discrimination is bad!" "I agree!"), but when it comes time to write down concrete rules and provide concrete examples ("hiring a woman is 43.2% preferable to hiring a man; hiring an African American is 23.1% preferable to hiring a Chinese person") are going to make people squirm, and everyone involved in such a project is going to do everything in their power to avoid having to deal with the result.

I bet there's a number of people reading this post right now squirming and deeply, deeply tempted to hit that reply button and start haranguing me about those numbers and how dare I even think such things, as you've been trained to find someone to blame for any occurrence of such words and I'm the only apparent candidate. But I have no attachment to the numbers themselves and I pre-emptively acquiesce to any corrections you'd care to make to them, for the sake of argument. I expect a real model would use more complicated functions of more parameters, I just used simple percentages because they fit into text easily. But any algorithm must produce some sort of result that looks like that, and once you get ten people at a table looking at any given concrete instantiation of this "morality", 9.8 of them are not going to agree it's moral.

I cite the handful of articles we've even seen in peer-reviewed science journals, sometimes linked here on HN, which discuss the discriminatory aspects of this or that current ML system, while scrupulously avoiding answering the question of what exactly a "non-discriminatory" system actually is. It's one of those things that once you see it you can't unsee it. (And given that these papers are nominally mathematical papers by nominally "real scientists", if I were a reviewer I'd "no publish" these papers until they fix that oversight, because it isn't actually that useful to point out that an existing mathematical system fails to conform to a currently-not-existing mathematical standard.)

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

#288

Post by fixermark »

paulddraper wrote: post #270
astura wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "somehow" is no mystery; discriminatory practice was (and still is) used to stack the deck against people in the United States based on the color of their skin for hundreds of years.

"President" was chosen as the title of the head of the US Executive Branch because it was a title with nearly no prestige; it was the sort of name you'd give to the Robert's Rules enforcer for community meetings. Words take on a connotation history provides them.

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

#289

Post by flamtap »

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…

Tasks assigned to older devs I've worked with generally sail through QA. So even if they're not as fast to put in a PR (though this has not been my personal experience either), they're a lot more efficient getting their code into production.

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

#290

Post by stcredzero »

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…

Are you hiring?
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