241–250 of 487 posts
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Or we could outright ban advertising everywhere, for any reason, full stop.
Well. That's not as easy as you think. Most companies believe that without ads they'd lose to competition.
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Conflating the issue with what? Let's take the flip side. Pretend I am one of the many companies which have adopted discriminatory hiring practices in favor of certain minorities. I want to hire more of said minorities. I target facebook ads towards them. Is that any better or worse? As far as I'm concerned, they are the same; but many people I know would say that's fine.
"I've been given advantage for decades/centuries. We're giving an advantage to the disadvantaged so they have a chance to catch up for years/months. I'm being discriminated against!". Got it.
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You can't get more women into the profession if they choose not to apply. And they can't apply if they never see your ad because of practices like the ones described in the article under discussion.
I've never got a job in response to an ad either. Have you? Do you personally know anyone who has? Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in re…
Wow, I didn't expect to see CapitalOne or Edward Jones on that list. I kind of figured it would be a bunch of smaller companies that were either ignorant of the law or, more likely, used to playing fast and loose without consequences.
Thoes companies in particular expend capital on platforms to purposefully try to get at least more diversity in job applications so if anything it seems counter productive. (Disclaimer: I work for such a platform)
Not just Facebook, but any targeted advertising platform that can target based on demographic could do this. Its not the first example of unethical behaviour using this technology. Alcohol gets targeted to Alcholics, Gambling gets targets to problem gamblers. Targeted advertising for certain purposes should be illegal, including employment ads, alcohol ads, gambing ads and any kind of political ad. There's just too m…
Banning targeted advertising means the vast majority of people see irrelevant employment ads. Every lumberjack and security guard on Facebook will see useless software engineering ads, or nursing, or whatever is the hard to recruit field du jour. This means less people see ads for jobs for them, and that hurts untalented, unskilled regular people the most, because their job ads aren’t going to outcompete highly paid…
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Is it biased in a bad way? It’s really hard to measure someone’s ability to do a job, especially for a more senior role. Therefore, I feel comfortable hiring people recommended to me by others that I trust.
'jobs for the boys' is a well known phrase for a reason. It's rarely used in a positive way
Nothing good can come from sticking my neck out on this, but: If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. Not because they're less capable, but bec…
> If I were paying for advertising for a software engineering position I'd get much better ROI by excluding women and older demographics simply because they're much less likely to be suitable for the job, statistically speaking, when we're talking about the wider population in general and not just software engineers. I'll go the other way. I can tell you, specifically, that if I want embedded software engineers, gene…
> Some of us are doing real work.
The author undeniably had an inflammatory position. But is it really necessary to respond with yet another inflammatory position?
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Banning targeted advertising means the vast majority of people see irrelevant employment ads. Every lumberjack and security guard on Facebook will see useless software engineering ads, or nursing, or whatever is the hard to recruit field du jour. This means less people see ads for jobs for them, and that hurts untalented, unskilled regular people the most, because their job ads aren’t going to outcompete highly paid…
I think I'm willing to endure the horrors of insufficiently targeted advertising.
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I've never got a job in response to an ad either. Have you? Do you personally know anyone who has? Another issue, with workplace politics and edicts being what they are, wouldn't white men be a better category of applicants to exclude via such targeting? I'm pretty sure this is happening as we speak. I don't view this as a problem, though, for the reason alluded to above: approximately nobody in tech lands jobs in re…
That isn’t completely true. You can land a job via an ad, it is very very hard, but it is probably a bit higher than 1%. Especially entry level positions where a professional network isn’t expected anyways.
That having been said, I fully agree that such targeting in job ads in particular should be illegal. I agree with this out of my own rational self interest, as a straight white male in my 40s. Other aforementioned types of gender, racial, and age discrimination should be made illegal as well.
For instance if I advertise a position in, as some random example, Popular Mechanics, I'm going to get an extremely biased sample. And I'm putting my position there specifically because I want to appeal to that demographic. This is also why, for instance, in times past if you stayed at home and watched broadcast television there would be a disproportionate number of ads for things such as tampons, diapers (adult and child alike), and job injury lawyers. It was targeting the demographic watching television at that time.
Perhaps one fair solution here would be an opt-in demographic profile override. What a mouth full. What I mean is that if you want, you can require Facebook to set your demographics to whatever you like. In other words, imagine you're a woman and you want to be shown ads targeting men, well you can opt-in to require your account profile to be a hit for man or woman.
The curious thing is that I imagine almost nobody would actually choose to opt-in there. It'd probably be more used as a protest tool to destroy the value of advertising (by large numbers of people opting into everything), than a tool to get more ads you're interested in. Can't say I'm particularly upset by that outcome though.