Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 362 posts

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

#331

Post by wyclif »

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…

I do wonder why people wouldn’t hire older programmers or engineers though

The same reason the military prefers younger over older. Younger developers are easier to manipulate, overwork, and underpay. They are easier to mould and shape in conformance with corporate "culture fit", and they're less likely to question authority. They also don't have the wisdom yet to know when they are being asked to drink the startup Kool-Aid.

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

#332

Post by vonmoltke »

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…

On my phone on a train (so no numbers), but how about:

Oracle

Cisco

IBM

Dell

HP Enterprise

HP Inc.

Lockheed Martin

Northrop Grumman

Raytheon

General Dynamics

General Electric

Intel

AMD

Qualcomm

Texas Instruments

United Technologies

Analog Devices

Samsung

Phillips

Toshiba

... I'm gonna stop listing all the big tech companies I can think of. I madey point.

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

#333

Post by taurath »

wyclif wrote: post #331
eksemplar wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I do wonder why people wouldn’t hire older programmers or engineers though The same reason the military prefers younger over older. Younger developers are easier to manipulate, overwork, and underpay. They are easier to mould and shape in conformance with corporate "culture fit", and they're less likely to question authority. They also don't have the wisdom yet to know when they are being asked to drink the startup K…

Which in a way kind of brings up a point - sometimes you need idealists to see things through, to have a chance. A crusty pessimistic person isn’t necessarily battle-hardened, they may be battle-broken.

Of course, that doesn’t have much to do with age - one can be closed to new ideas at any age.

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

#334

Post by cfadvan »

agotterer wrote: post #65
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…

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…

Startups are often run like cults, and diversity of thought is anathema to running a cult.

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

#335

Post by throwawayWSk24h »

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 sure? I hired these seasoned pros you talk about. I have a team of 12 developers and 3 of these seasoned pros that are about 60+ yrs old. C/C++ devs. They are the worst performing on the team. The 22/23yrs old are running circles around them. They are slow, taking 2-5x times as long to finish their task. It's no better in quality. They are seriously struggling to pick up new technologies. I'm a minority so I'm pretty open minded and built a diverse team race, gender, age, sexuality, whatever. Oh yeah, they are also very well paid due to the past experience! Sometimes as much as twice as the new grads. The one quality that scares the crap out of me for the future is ... Please do note that I'm not talking about 10hr shifts, work on weekends kinda environment. Just the typical come in at 9ish leave at 6 environment. I'm getting older myself too so I understand.

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

#336

Post by busterarm »

throwawayWSk24h wrote: post #335
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 sure? I hired these seasoned pros you talk about. I have a team of 12 developers and 3 of these seasoned pros that are about 60+ yrs old. C/C++ devs. They are the worst performing on the team. The 22/23yrs old are running circles around them. They are slow, taking 2-5x times as long to finish their task. It's no better in quality. They are seriously struggling to pick up new technologies. I'm a minority so I'…

What are your quality metrics and over what timescale are you measuring?

Are you treating everyone in your organization as equivalent resources or are you allocating people based on strengths/specialties?

Having a heterogeneous team with breadth of experience across the stack helps to isolate you from the real business risks of group-think and "not knowing what you don't know". It's a hedge and a pillar of a resilient, long-term-oriented organization.

If you just want to have a get-shit-done culture, move fast and pivot/abort when things get bad, you probably want all 20 year olds. However, if you look at the organizational structure of banks, who are literally in the business of managing business risk, you will see diversity and redundancy in hiring.

Side note: Every single time I've seen a complaint about X group doesn't work as effectively as Y group, it's almost always a management misallocation of (human) resource. Not calling you out specifically, just wondering how much thought was put into team/work structure.

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

#337

Post by busterarm »

tabtab wrote: post #324
tluyben2 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Re: The over 40s I know are also able to produce working [prototypes] faster... Not necessarily if it has to be built in some stack or language flavor of the month (and VC's check). If you change entire tool-sets every 18 months, I bet the younger folks will be able to re-learn faster. I'm 40+ myself, and am saying this from experience. It's unfortunate our industry is so fad-driven, but I didn't create humans, I jus…

> I recommend one focus on a domain (insurance IT, healthcare IT, etc.)

So that others benefit from my experience: the cheat code to this is to work in marketing tech. You will have domain experience in all of these in a relatively short time because you will have had to deal with partners & clients from these domains.

You also learn very quickly how any company makes its money, what they consider positive contributions to the bottom line and how you can be one of those.

Except for at the fringes of new tech, traditional business is far more personally rewarding than working in the seeking-funding startup snakepit.

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

#338

Post by tabtab »

tluyben2 wrote: post #326
tabtab wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: The over 40s I know are also able to produce working [prototypes] faster... Not necessarily if it has to be built in some stack or language flavor of the month (and VC's check). If you change entire tool-sets every 18 months, I bet the younger folks will be able to re-learn faster. I'm 40+ myself, and am saying this from experience. It's unfortunate our industry is so fad-driven, but I didn't create humans, I jus…

It might be different in different regions and different markets. Here VCs definitely don't check (or care). I find that they are generally more interested in buzzword bingo on a more abstract level; AI, ML, Blockchain etc. That said, I'm not building a religion; if the latest tech is a business goal, then it will happen. And i'm also not sure if it's true that 'we' would be slower to learn these things; I keep on to…

Maybe you are CTO and I'm not because my brain is not fast enough to keep up. Yes, a lot of it is rehashes of old things, but I keep inter-confusing the old incarnations with the new ones when coding. You can't cross-confuse 2 things if you never met one of them. Plus, its hard to keep enthusiasm up for the 500th reinvention of the wheel. Maybe I'll reinvent stronger coffee; call it "Covfefe 2.0", or "Blockchain Covfefe"...

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

#339

Post by busterarm »

tluyben2 wrote: post #326
tabtab wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: The over 40s I know are also able to produce working [prototypes] faster... Not necessarily if it has to be built in some stack or language flavor of the month (and VC's check). If you change entire tool-sets every 18 months, I bet the younger folks will be able to re-learn faster. I'm 40+ myself, and am saying this from experience. It's unfortunate our industry is so fad-driven, but I didn't create humans, I jus…

It might be different in different regions and different markets. Here VCs definitely don't check (or care). I find that they are generally more interested in buzzword bingo on a more abstract level; AI, ML, Blockchain etc. That said, I'm not building a religion; if the latest tech is a business goal, then it will happen. And i'm also not sure if it's true that 'we' would be slower to learn these things; I keep on to…

I think this depends on the difference of perspective between startup->fledgling-and-profitable company CTO and Fortune 500 CTO.

I feel like in the case of the later, the priorities are much more in the order of 1) manage business risk wrt technology, and 2) manage organizational processes wrt technology.

Tech is only the thing that gets you to the thing and the usefulness of anything new is either a) readily apparent (like from orbit), or b) can only be brought in from outside talent (failure of priority #2) or learned from falling on your ass (failure of priority #1).

My point being, it is of little benefit in this scenario to spend any time actually learning the latest fad tech.

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

#340

Post by learc83 »

tabtab wrote: post #324
tluyben2 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Re: The over 40s I know are also able to produce working [prototypes] faster... Not necessarily if it has to be built in some stack or language flavor of the month (and VC's check). If you change entire tool-sets every 18 months, I bet the younger folks will be able to re-learn faster. I'm 40+ myself, and am saying this from experience. It's unfortunate our industry is so fad-driven, but I didn't create humans, I jus…

> I bet the younger folks will be able to re-learn faster.

This is another place where experience helps. I can definitely learn a new framework faster now that I've had 10+ years experience than I could when I first started.

You might be able to find more younger people who already know the framework of the month.

Post reply on HN