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Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

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Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#181

Post by lovich »

avar wrote: post #41
tmh79 wrote: post #15

I'm astonished that facebook is successfully able to pull the "we're a platform, its not our fault people are using it illegally" excuse here. There is a huge difference between allowing people to freely post content on places like FB, twitter, or Reddit, and selling access the attention of people that fit specific characteristics. How long until the tech giants are held accountable for willfully skirting decades of…

If you mainly advertised for employees in certain newspapers you'd get people of a given political leaning. If you advertised on the radio at 6 in the morning you probably wouldn't get anyone under 35. It's not obvious to me why employers should be able to use the implicit filtering traditional media provides, but not the explicit filtering new advertising platforms provide.

If a newspaper or radio put active barriers in place to prevent people from seeing things and they were grouped by protected classes, then yea they would be in the same boat.

When Facebook decided that they we're going to pick and choose what content people could access, for their own benefit, then they picked up more liability than someone literally broadcasting to everyone in range

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#182

Post by indus »

Most of the conversation in this thread is around engineering, IT, and whether grey hairs code better than non-grey hairs, and whether there is an ROI vis-a-vis money and time.

I'll add a few things about Sales.

Through an acquisition, I spent a few years at one of the largest enterprise software company. As a PM, I interacted with a lot of grey hair sales professionals--right from Key Account Directors to Sales Ops to Sales Engineers to National Account Managers. These were some of the finest. Thanks to their mentorship, I have not measured, but in 2 years, I became expert at navigating the buyers of software at large companies, doing calls, replying to RFPs, handling exceptions, and to a certain degree schmoozing.

Who else would you learn these from? Sales is not taught anywhere!

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#184

Post by golemiprague »

I think all those laws are stupid, people will hire whoever they want, you can't force people to hire someone they don't really want. They should let companies discriminate as much as they want, if someone is valuable they will find a job, if not they won't. At the end of the day there are x amount of positions to fill up and y amount of people to fill those positions. Why do we care who is actually going to get the job, at the end of the day all people are equal and someone is going to miss, who said the old guy suppose to get it rather than the young?

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#185

Post by jessaustin »

MaysonL wrote: post #142
mc32 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, i dunno. I think it's still on the advertiser to follow the law. Kind of like when some insurance co advertises some insurance product and that advert has to go through copy editors and legal to make sure it does not break any laws (representing product faithfully, not making false or dubious claims) before it gets okayed to be published. In this case HR should consult with legal before putting up job announcem…

Newspapers have been prohibited from running discriminatory ads, Facebook should also be.

Yeah this is worse than anything a newspaper has imagined doing in the last several decades.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#186

Post by racer-v »

trevyn wrote: post #119
combatentropy wrote: post #66

It doesn't make sense to me to discriminate against people with more experience. Can someone explain it to me? I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests. Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the co…

The rate of change of technological progress is increasing, and many people just have a tendency to... crystallize. Experienced people of any age who can adapt well to change have no trouble getting a job.

My advice to graybeards: when somebody is excited about a new technology XYZ, don't say "oh, we did that 20 years ago and called it ABC". It annoys people, because generally XYZ has important differences that prevent ABC from being a drop-in replacement.

Instead you can say "that reminds me of a similar concept we used to implement using ABC", and quietly appreciate that you got a leg up in understanding because of your experience. If young people are smart and curious, they'll want to know more about ABC, and ask.

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#187

Post by oceanghost »

exelius wrote: post #129
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the greyhairs. I won't work the insane hours, but I'll still get more done. How? By knowing what to write and how to write it, so I don't have to fumble around trying things for nearly as long. By not writing the bugs that the 20-somethings write, which means I don't have to take the time to try to fix them. By not creating the shoddy designs that other create, which then have to be fixed. By having an ide…

I'm not attacking you here (and in fact I agree with you), but from a manager's perspective, I need one guy like you to design it in an architecture modeling tool and 8 young code monkeys to do all the boring work of building and testing it. You can do the code reviews to make sure they don't do stupid shit. The thought is that a team of greyhairs never ships anything, and a team of youngsters ships garbage. But it's…

Can we just be honest?

Us older folks won't build things we know doesn't work against synthetic deadlines, then work overtime to fix what we knew wasn't going to work in the first place, while taking the blame politically.

Engineering has in my lifetime become "unwinnable." I'm either not "a team player" or "being negative" for planning for reasonable failure scenarios. Then politically I still take the heat when they happen.

This is not a quixotic aspect of engineering, it is a design feature at bad employers. "Heads I win, tails you lose"

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#189

Post by com2kid »

racer-v wrote: post #152
lorenzq wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that older Unix or C++ programmer doesn't have a strong bias against Javascript, functional programming, new es6/es7 concepts, and web appliactions in general, then sure. I see many of these types of people even on HN with biases though. Age shouldn't be used as a catch all filter, but I can see how it might be faster to screen those who have been too content to stick to their tools without catching up to industry…

I presume you wouldn't hire someone who expresses a strong distaste for your software stack, regardless of age (unless their job is specifically to replace it).

> I presume you wouldn't hire someone who expresses a strong distaste for your software stack, regardless of age (unless their job is specifically to replace it).

I'm not sure if I'd want to hire someone who is unable to point out valid criticisms of the technology stack I'm using.

People need to be aware of the limitations of their tools. I spent years in pure C, both complaining about it and singing its praises. Right now I'm in JS land, and I can do the same thing.

I started off in C#. No real complaints there, except for the lack of stack alloc, and that got added in the most recent version. :-D

Re: Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads

#190

Post by btilly »

exelius wrote: post #129
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of the greyhairs. I won't work the insane hours, but I'll still get more done. How? By knowing what to write and how to write it, so I don't have to fumble around trying things for nearly as long. By not writing the bugs that the 20-somethings write, which means I don't have to take the time to try to fix them. By not creating the shoddy designs that other create, which then have to be fixed. By having an ide…

I'm not attacking you here (and in fact I agree with you), but from a manager's perspective, I need one guy like you to design it in an architecture modeling tool and 8 young code monkeys to do all the boring work of building and testing it. You can do the code reviews to make sure they don't do stupid shit. The thought is that a team of greyhairs never ships anything, and a team of youngsters ships garbage. But it's…

I STRONGLY disagree.

My experience is that programmers who become "architects" and are only responsible for design and code review tend to go downhill in their skills. It SEEMS like an efficient way to use experienced people, but it is actually an anti-pattern. Their tendency is to develop ideas that sound good but don't work well in practice, and there is no direct way to correct the mistake. (Any time it doesn't work, the tendency is to blame the implementer. And there is usually enough to blame that their own contribution to the problem gets missed. You're less likely to miss the problem when YOU are trying to make the implementation work.)

In fact the problem is sufficiently bad that in interviews it is important to have people actually write code to show that they still can. When you get an "architect" who takes offense at the exercise, that's a non-hire. They might have been good 10 years ago, but they aren't worth hiring now.

This was something I'd sort of noticed, but didn't become conscious of until I worked at Google. There they were very conscious of the phenomena. Every programmer from the most junior to the most senior (for the record that would be Jeff Dean) writes code. If you're not willing to write code, you're not a hire.

That said, the exercise goes both ways. If I interview with an employer and I discover that they design things up front as UML diagrams, odds are that this won't be a workplace that I want much to do with. If I'm working in a job and they force me into an abstract architecture role like you describe, I'm going to quit and find a better job.

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