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

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

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 808 posts

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

#201

Post by nhebb »

user5994461 wrote: post #94
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #67

I'm a grad student at an elite American university. Several weeks ago, some other students and I attended a recruiting presentation put on by a large multinational company I won't name. The woman who gave the presentation services her company's contract with a tech company, that, let's just say, has a big share of the search engine market. She emphasized that she was looking for diversity, because, as she said, "the…

>>> I'd like to start a business in 3 or 4 years, and I'm seriously considering going out of my way to target people like him. It'll be my competitive advantage. He could be 10 times more expensive than you. Did you consider that?

As someone in their 50's, that argument makes no sense to me. If I were unable to find a job, you somehow think I'd hold out for premium wages?

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

#202

Post by lurr »

ryanmarsh wrote: post #157
exelius wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 seem to recall an episode of the A16Z podcast where Adrian Cockcroft of Netflix explained they were top heavy on senior engineers when they began moving to microservices. Didn’t seem to slow them down but I could be misremembering.

They only hire senior engineers.

I don't know what that really means though. People who are smart, hard working, and get the right jobs can get a senior title in 5-6 years at the big companies.

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

#203

Post by busterarm »

raz32dust wrote: post #140
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…

Knowledge in the software industry tends to get outdated much faster than in other industries. While there are timeless software engineering practices that are good and evergreen, about 70% of my knowledge today will be outdated in 5 years. This is not true of other industries. Sure, other professionals need to keep themselves updated as well. But the percentage of knowledge that a bridge architect needs to update is…

> about 70% of my knowledge today will be outdated in 5 years

I really hope this isn't the case for you, and in general I don't really believe it to be true either. Most of what makes me successful as a developer today I knew 20 years ago, in a prior career.

You have to differentiate between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. The former changes very little and the latter changes a lot. You're also best off retaining almost _none_ of the latter. Those "Teach Yourself in " books you used to see were written for serious professionals, not newbies.

I can often get more done with less using tried, tested tools that change little than my peers can do with 'the new hotness'. It seems every language/stack has its own implementation of cron. Stop that. Use cron.

Networking protocol, binutils and SQL don't really change and that's literally 99% of the "make stuff happen" part of my job. A lot of "Full Stack" developers don't know any of this shit. They don't know what tools will tell them if a client's traffic is coming into their network at all or being rejected at their server.

Con artists, honestly.

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

#204

Post by lurr »

sidlls wrote: post #180
racer-v wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

And such a person shouldn't be hired. I wouldn't hire me to work on a JavaScript stack. It's not because I don't or couldn't understand it in short order, and very much better than many (most, possibly all) of the 20-something hipsters they're using to fart out garbage. It's because I have strong biases against it and the kind of development style it attracts, some of which (as illustrated in this very comment) aren'…

> very much better than many (most, possibly all) of the 20-something hipsters they're using to fart out garbage.

how is this type of attitude not sufficient reason to not bother hiring someone? I immediately don't want to work with or for you.

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

#205

Post by leggomylibro »

hackits wrote: post #176
ryanmarsh wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If billions of computers become vulnerable to malicious actors and a few hundred or thousand people suffer dramatic personal damages, well that's a nice and quiet problem which will be quickly forgotten in the 24-hour news cycle. This. I do development coaching and training. I’m totally burned out because my job doesn’t matter. These companies don’t care. They hire me to “increase code quality” but that ends up being…

I think you've nailed it on the head but haven't realized why you've nailed it on the head. `Why? These things have real consequences.` To a business they see software/engineers as a expense. The whole focus as a business is to provide a service that people are will to pay more than it costs to provide said service. Everything else doesn't matter, what does matter for a business is $$$$$ and making sure business does…

>To a business they see software/engineers as a expense.

Anecdotally, this is one of the first things I try to gauge at a prospective employer. "Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" If the company works with technology a lot and doesn't see technology as being particularly important to its bottom line, that's usually a bad sign.

Also, discussions with C-levels tend to be pretty one-dimensional. It doesn't matter how much their infrastructure is falling apart, they'll still stonewall with something along the lines of, "our goal this quarter is new user acquisition - how does this improve those numbers?"

And they won't accept, "users cannot sign up if everything is broken" as an answer.

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

#206

Post by toomanybeersies »

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).

From experience, companies won't hire you if you express a strong distaste for their software stack.

I learned this after I told the interviewer that I thought that PHP was a crap language, when interviewing for a PHP developer position.

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

#207

Post by e40 »

MilnerRoute wrote: post #191

I want to believe these companies don't know it's illegal to discriminate based on age. Because the alternative is that they're intentionally discriminating -- and thinking they won't get caught, because the ads are only appearing on Facebook. But any government agency that's investigating this can obviously just to ask Facebook for the company's ad buys, and there's an irrefutable paper trail. (It can't be that hard…

I want to believe these companies don't know it's illegal to discriminate based on age.

Are you serious? This is HR 101. There is no manager in the US that works for a company with an HR department (1 person is fine, that's all we have, and she's part time) could ever NOT know this.

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

#208

Post by coding123 »

user5994461 wrote: post #94
015UUZn8aEvW wrote: post #67

I'm a grad student at an elite American university. Several weeks ago, some other students and I attended a recruiting presentation put on by a large multinational company I won't name. The woman who gave the presentation services her company's contract with a tech company, that, let's just say, has a big share of the search engine market. She emphasized that she was looking for diversity, because, as she said, "the…

>>> I'd like to start a business in 3 or 4 years, and I'm seriously considering going out of my way to target people like him. It'll be my competitive advantage. He could be 10 times more expensive than you. Did you consider that?

In my experience that kind of pay differential exists in two places: Pakistan - US or Intern - Not intern.

All other roles for different ages I've ever seen has been based on experience and not age, and at the companies I've been that experience is only about 30-50% higher at the worst.

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

#210

Post by toomanybeersies »

sgustard wrote: post #168
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…

They are discriminating against age, not experience. A 25-year-old with 10 years of experience (elite teen hacker!) is far more attractive than a 50-year-old with 10 years of experience (second-career washout).

That's a false equivalency. They're more likely discriminating between a 25 year old with 3 years of experience, and a 50 year old with 20 years of experience.
Post reply on HN