221–230 of 808 posts
Personally, I would never think to find a job through FB. IF someone wanted to target me, being outside that age group, it would need to be a different platform.
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People are constantly complaining that Facebook allows you to target ads at certain people. Ads have operated this way since their inception, yet critics are finding new ways to make it seem like Facebook is ruining everything by doing exactly what any sensible person would do if they ran Facebook. I am not a huge fan of Facebook. But I feel like this is the same trope as was hauled out in the "Facebook didn't tell m…
> Ads have operated this way since their inception, The ability for ads to target individuals while being invisible to others is something quite new and pernicious. If you advertise on television, your commercial is seen by everyone watching. If you run an ad in print media, everyone who has a copy can read it. Individually targeted advertising is ripe for abuse. If you're interested in reading more how this is reall…
Ads on TV have fixed cost, depending on the length of the commercial and the time it is aired. But even on TV you would target the show based on the demographics you prefer.
Ads on Facebook are pay per impression, so how can you make companies pay to show those ads to people who they know will probably not respond anyway?
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Facebook is selling advertising. In this specific case, the product they are selling is illegal. Facebook should be held liable for selling illegal advertising. Do people find this challenging? Is there something wrong with this?
What would happen in the physical world with, say, a classified ad in a newspaper? It's on the poster of the ad to follow the law, not the paper, is it not?
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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-di…
Like I said before you're viewing it from the perspective of a developer but not from the perspective of a Business person.
Instead of saying `Users cannot sing up if everything is broken` you need to see it from a Business perspective, and communicate it to them in the language they understand.
For example, `From our quarterly earnings report we need to have 10,0000 new clients signed up by the end of the month to reach the goal. We have on average 2,000 sign-ups per day. On the 2nd, 3rd of last month two of the critical system's fell over, and this result in a estimated 4,000 failed client acquisitions. The estimate from our quarterly earnings each new customer bring's in a revenue of $300 net profit from each client for the quarter. As a result of the system crash our quarterly earnings will be down 1.2 Million.`
Your job is to communicate clearly in the language they understand how it will achieve their goals. You're not the only department/manager who is requiring resources from the Business. As I stated before you're there to serve the business to achieve their goals.
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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 once worked at a company that was having trouble finding women candidates. We were a tiny company that at that point largely recruited out of the people we knew, who were largely people we'd worked with before and people we went to school with. Mostly dudes. There was a discussion at some point about the legality of trying harder to get women engineers than men. My understanding is that you can try to get more peop…
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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…
Facebook is selling advertising. In this specific case, the product they are selling is illegal. Facebook should be held liable for selling illegal advertising. Do people find this challenging? Is there something wrong with this?
Edit: I'm referring to the Facebook ads platform in general, and not specifically job ads. I agree that job ads shouldn't have the option to target age groups.
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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 the…
Also, that the product is 10% better/more stable/whatever frequently does not translate into even a 10% increase in sales. So it's not worth it (from the business' perspective) to invest in that quality. Pick some other arbitrary point (e.g. 20% better/20% boost in sales, etc.), right down to some threshold whereby the company simply doesn't even have a product that can be demonstrated.
I think that is perfectly legal, ethical and acceptable. Those companies pay per impression, so they want to maximize the effect of the ad, and reach as many candidates as possible per each $ they pay FB. This is just an ad. No one can stop you from applying to a job directly with the company, irregardless of your age, or any other demographics. Just another sensational headline.
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But curiously, not illegal to discriminate against people under 40 on the basis of age (at least, under the same Federal statute)[0]. If these job ads were targeted at the 40+ demographic only, they would be totally ok. It's even been to the Supreme Court[1]: > In the 2004 decision General Dynamics Land Systems, Inc. v. Cline, the U.S. Supreme Court settled a conflict among the lower courts over the viability of so-c…
I wonder if this one-way protection exists because otherwise it would be legally tenuous to post job ads seeking a minimum number of years of experience (e.g. 10+ years in professional Python development), which basically by definition discriminate against the very young.