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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

#311

Post by hcoura »

bitL wrote: post #246
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…

Don't ever yield to the temptation of working more remotely because you save on commuting time etc. and can be in the flow for longer. Once you do that 4-5 years, you are likely to be long-term burned out. Balance your brain by doing completely different things in your real life, don't work past 8 hours.

Yeah, I always try to keep that in mind.

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

#312

Post by geebee »

ryanmonroe wrote: post #196
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 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…

In this case, it sounds more like moneyball than age discrimination. By "moneyball", I mean that in very intense recruiting environments, you have to get strategic about ways to find talent that may have been overlooked.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moneyball

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

#313

Post by tluyben2 »

tabtab wrote: post #277
bartread wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But many startups are "ship first, debug later". When it's a pump-and-dump fashion contest, younger fingers are probably better: a fast BS-nozzle to get VC attention. If instead you want your infrastructure to last 5 or 10 years and not get hacked, then experience will pay off.

The over 40s I know are also able to produce working crap faster than the young-uns. If you call it a prototype (so the goal is showing functionality that works but later it will be tossed out and redone) then hiring me is probably going to produce a better one (less bugs and will probably last until the startup runs out of money) then it would with a ‘team of young ninjas’. As PR for VCs I can see a bunch of young people might look better (not to many VCs I talk to but I so not live in the US), but if you want ‘faster’, a 35+ who kept up is probably faster and cheaper. In my experience. When the company grows I definitely would not want a CTO under 35/40.

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

#314

Post by taurath »

eksemplar wrote: post #307
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 prefer hiring people in their 30ies. It’s the perfect mix of being old enough to be practical and patient and young enough to still be cheap. The cheap bit comes from being in the Danish public sector where seniority gives automatic pay increases that you can’t legally turn down, so there is that. I do wonder why people wouldn’t hire older programmers or engineers though. A lot of them are still extremely nerdy abo…

Couple points I’ve seen that can knock older (and not wiser) devs -

* fixing the problems they had at their last company, inappropriately so to the point of over-engineering. Sometimes it’s not elegant, but hardened against the wrong things

* insistence on older technologies and patternss that they’re familiar with even if not concise

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

#315

Post by GFischer »

dvtrn wrote: post #293
WillPostForFood wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve personally applied for jobs I’ve been overqualified for with the intent of getting in the door and moving out of that position as fast as possible. That might be good for me, and good for the hiring organization, but I totally understand the hiring manager blowing me off, because I wouldn’t be filling his need, and in a couple months he’s back to sorting through resumes and doing interviews.

and in a couple months he’s back to sorting through resumes and doing interviews So you're saying this person would...be doing their job like normal?

A candidate that lasts under 6 months is a very bad candidate that has cost the company money (for a technical position, that is).

It's in the interest of both the candidate and the company not to make such a match.

If it was only the resume-sorting part, it wouldn't be a problem, but it's also all the work spent training the candidate.

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

#316

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

white-flame wrote: post #274
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…

As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As their bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of history repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere. Younger devs fall in line much easier. It can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Some older devs get hung up on bikeshedding and tunnel visioning about old specifics instead of just getting work done with…

> As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As their bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of history repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere. Younger devs fall in line much easier.

I've seen this in spades. One of my greatest frustrations as an older developer is seeing history about to repeat itself, yet being unable to convince management of that fact.

Because I need the paycheck I can't walk away from some work. But it makes me die a little every time I work on such projects.

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

#317

Post by bobthepanda »

throwawaymath wrote: post #285
Moto7451 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

'Targeting your ad spend' is the thing under fire here, and under a very specific attack.

Before online advertising you kind of had an idea of what the target audience of TV channels, news, and radio was like, but it was very fuzzy and you certainly weren't excluding people not in your target demographic that happened to utilize those media platforms. Women reading male fitness magazines or men reading female lifestyle magazines weren't the primary target of ads in those platforms, but they could certainly utilize what was being advertised if they so desired. The same is not true of online advertising today.

Facebook is more in the position of a newsstand than anything else, and it would be blatant discrimination if a newsstand wasn't allowing older people to buy technology magazines, for example.

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

#318

Post by GFischer »

pc86 wrote: post #240
dvtrn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

When it reality what it actually means is "your experience suggests you are worth more than what we're paying, and we'd rather not spend the time onboarding you just to have you leave in 6 months when you a job more commensurate with your experience and skills." I've been on the employer side of taking a chance on overqualified folks and it's a waste of a lot of time and a lot of money.

Obviously depends on location and stuff, but you can get overqualified people to stay due to life circumstances (for example due to their significant other doing a postgraduate degree which means they can't easily move cities or country).

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

#319

Post by ryanwaggoner »

jiggliemon wrote: post #229

The joke is really on the employer using Facebook ads to target a younger candidate pool. Youngsters don’t use Facebook. And if a young dev is using Facebook - they’re certainly using an ad-blocker. If they’re not using an ad blocker on Facebook, do you even want to hire them? Seems like if you wanted to attract a pool of young candidates now days, you’d target the parents of the said youngsters. The ones with no app…

As someone who runs ads on Facebook and other platforms and has a lot of devs who respond, this isn’t true. Not only do devs not all block ads (and it’s kind of offensive to imply that only the good ones do), they even click on ads!

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

#320

Post by seattle_spring »

s73v3r_ wrote: post #295
seattle_spring wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because someone says, "I'm a victim!" it doesn't actually make them a victim.

No, but the burden of proof is on you to prove that they're not. And you don't have the evidence to back it up.

A great way to become a victim is to believe every person that tells you they are a victim.
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