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

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

#301

Post by notacoward »

toephu2 wrote: post #271
notacoward wrote: post #52

As a 53-year-old Facebook employee, I find the part about Facebook doing this for their own hiring a bit odd. To the extent that anyone has ever reacted to my age with anything other than mild surprise, people generally seem quite glad to see something besides another fresh 20-something face and to hear the voice of long experience. Then again, I didn't come in via a Facebook ad. Maybe companies use different methods…

Can you speak to ageism at facebook? You must be quite rare there. Anecdotally speaking, whenever I visit the campus it definitely is a majority of 20-somethings walking around (or at least not many devs over the age of 40. I believe there are proportionally a lot more at Google).

> Can you speak to ageism at facebook?

I can share my own experiences, but I can't and probably shouldn't try to address it generally. I'm not just a sample of one, but I'm well aware that I'm an outlier in a couple of ways besides my age. So take all this with a grain of salt.

Yes, you're right, HQ totally feels like a college campus. Some of that's deliberate, from the architecture to the cafes and other amenities. I'm sure it feels comfortably familiar to the high percentage of people you see walking around for whom college is clearly a very fresh memory (or current "normal" during intern season). To me it feels a bit weird, but still quite pleasant.

I've honestly not seen any evidence of overt ageism since I've been here. There are other people my age, though even after a year I can probably still count the ones I've actually met on one hand. AFAICT nobody believes being older makes one less fit to be there or in a specific role. They sure don't believe it makes one more fit either, but that's OK because TBH that's something I'd become a bit too comfortable with and that's my own fault. If there's ageism, it's a very soft kind - more to do with comfort levels than "harder" boundaries or opposition. Some examples...

* Open-plan offices are objectively, provably even harder on older people than younger ones, because of hearing and focus/attention issues utterly unrelated to the actual work.

* Lots of people complain about the artificiality and induced stress of coding interviews. Well, it doesn't get better with age. As awkward as it might be to stumble on these when you're still young, imagine how it must feel when you're being tested on something you've been doing for 20+ years and the person judging you is half your age. The one truly negative age-related experience I've had (not in the interview) has been people who look down their noses at "old fashioned" code because they themselves have never known a world in which their favorite libraries either didn't exist or were buggy as hell.

* Being able to work from home is much more important for older people who are more likely to have families, minor medical issues (including other family members'), etc. Therefore a general antipathy toward letting people work from home is in effect discrimination against older workers.

So it's not like anyone has ever actively tried to stop or discourage me from working here, but there are ways in which we could be more welcoming nonetheless. Does that answer your question?

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

#302

Post by wwweston »

seattle_spring wrote: post #14
afpx wrote: post #2

Excellent news! Up until age 39, I was never not given an offer after interviewing. Now after 40, my offer rate has dropped to 1 in 14. So much for the claims that there is a shortage in tech. So crazy.

I'm not saying you're this person, but a lot of people making this claim are also the people that seem argue with literally everything. They always claim they know better. "Oh your team of 8 has spent the last 12 months building this complex webapp with React? Gosh darn millennial hipsters and their FRAMEWORKS. I could have built it with jQuery in a week, and still had a nickel leftover for the trolley!" Yes I've exa…

Your point stands and is about as real as the idea of millenial hipsters saying "Oh, sure, we have a jQuery app that works right now, but that's so 2010, if you don't have an SPA everyone is laughing at you and if you think you're going to write an SPA with just jQuery do you even code bra, let's spend 6 months converting Angreactive, it's the modern-iest framework out there!"

Which is to say, sure, you can boil people down to caricatures, and there will even be people who match them. There are reflexively recalcitrant developers who don't want to adopt anything new, there are technological magpies whose decisions are driven by fashion and resume bullet points. The former probably do tend older, as they have a sense of less time in general and would prefer to reserve learning for new capabilities rather than different ways of doing the same thing, and perhaps even be judicious about time learning vs doing things they value. The latter probably do skew younger, as it's easier to feel you have years and energy to burn and less reference for how change works in the industry.

So what's very real are the incentives and tradeoffs underlying the decision making. The idea that what the past has provided is often adequate and investment in the new has costs is correct. The idea that there may be improvements in the new is also correct.

If you believe this, maybe having cranky 50 year olds who are going to make your organization justify its decisions is actually an asset along with people who are curious to invest in the new shiny...

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

#303

Post by notacoward »

jmull wrote: post #300
notacoward wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the term disparate treatment is yours Untrue. It's directly from the second paragraph of the news story you clearly didn't read. It's also not vague as you claim. It's a legal term with an established definition, and it's highly relevant. As you so politely introduced yourself to this conversation, COME ON. Again. Read before you start launching arguments that others will find laughable.

>Untrue. It's directly from the second paragraph... Fair enough, you're right and I withdraw that. I realize now you were making irrelevant observation rather than a topical argument. (It doesn't matter to the point being made in the post you quoted or it's ancestor post or to the suit wether or not that poster's experience is the opposite of the disparate treatment alleged in the suit.) > As you so politely introduc…

> My mistake was in construing your post as being more coherent than it actually was.

It was just as coherent and topical as your own. The only thing "bad" about it is that it was in opposition, and that I didn't back down in the face of your increasingly insulting responses. Next time, make your case instead of trying to obfuscate and intimidate.

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

#304

Post by mmt »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #260
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…

It is really ironic that an industry focused on engineering can act in such an irrational manner. Long hours in the office chair is only a measurement of management’s failure to pay attention to the metrics that matter. Strongly preferring less experienced devs because they can work longer (which they need to, partially to compensate for their lack of experience), is both tragic and comical. It’s likely the pay is lo…

> an industry focused on engineering

I'm not sure that's the whole story, though, especially considering how much of the "industry" is VC-driven and how few VCs are engineers.

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

#305

Post by Jeff-Stryker »

gowld wrote: post #219
bo1024 wrote: post #154

Many of the posts here focus on ageism but this is just one example of discriminatory algorithms/ML in action. Don't be surprised if the same headline reappears soon with gender or race substituted. There is currently an academic movement often called "fairness in machine learning" aiming to correct these kinds of behaviors in automated systems.

As the former-kids say, "Simpsons did it". We already had the news cycle over racial discrimination in ads. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/nyregion/facebook-housing...

>We already had the news cycle over racial discrimination

We will have it again. News is manufactured.

Discrimination in the news is meant to splinter the populace. You Old people need to fear and hate the young (millennials vs. Boomers) You Black people need to fear and hate the whites You White people need to fear and hate the latinos You Gay people need to fear and hate the transsexuals

It is a constant barrage if you are paying attention. Divide and Conguer.

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

#306

Post by jmull »

notacoward wrote: post #303
jmull wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Untrue. It's directly from the second paragraph... Fair enough, you're right and I withdraw that. I realize now you were making irrelevant observation rather than a topical argument. (It doesn't matter to the point being made in the post you quoted or it's ancestor post or to the suit wether or not that poster's experience is the opposite of the disparate treatment alleged in the suit.) > As you so politely introduc…

> My mistake was in construing your post as being more coherent than it actually was. It was just as coherent and topical as your own. The only thing "bad" about it is that it was in opposition, and that I didn't back down in the face of your increasingly insulting responses. Next time, make your case instead of trying to obfuscate and intimidate.

To be disagreed with or challenged should not be taken as insulting or intimidating.

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

#307

Post by eksemplar »

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 about their hobby, they have profound amounts of experience and they’ll typically both be able to follow orders and voice their opinions. Often they’ll have a good grip on work life balancing as well, making them less prone to stress.

I’m not sure ageism is really a big problem though. I haven’t seen any unemployment numbers on old programmers being huge, though I will admit that fear of abuse was one of the reasons I went into management.

That being said, I do think people should plan their staff to be without huge age gaps. It’s one of the few things that has an empirical proven negative effect on teams. But that goes both ways.

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

#308

Post by PeterisP »

Moto7451 wrote: post #218
ryanmonroe wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I go out of my way to hire older devs that are eschewed by typical Bay Area startups Going "out of [your] way" to hire older devs sounds like age discrimination. AFAIK, age discrimination in this direction isn't illegal in America, but it seems odd that you would respond to an article decrying age-discrimination by proudly declaring that you discriminate too, in the opposite direction. Maybe you just meant that you…

It's not age discrimination if you accept and do not otherwise discriminate against young/younger candidates. There's a lot that goes into recruiting. Optimizing your job descriptions, creating multiple job descriptions, and targeting your ad spend are all things that can affect the age, race, gender, education level, etc of the people you reach without being discriminatory. In fact, you should do this to be inclusiv…

AFAIK in USA, age discrimination is forbidden only against people older than 40, it's legal to discriminate against any groups younger than that (including 35-39 year olds) as much as you want.

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

#309

Post by mmt »

mgkimsal wrote: post #122
StreamBright wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the worst people I worked with was a guy who worked 12+ hours and his code was insanely complex for no good reason. He rewrote other people's code over night without any review. Because he was good friend with management he could get away with it. He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team mem…

>He created a 100.000 line ETL tool that I replaced with 1000 lines one, that also run 10-100 times faster. I did it while explained everything to all of the team members so everybody was onboard. Data import processes often seem to get shuffled to people usually least prepared to understand how to handle them. 2 anecdotes: 1. worked someplace years ago who would take in customer data, transform it in to our structur…

> People think anything that can't fit in to excel is somehow 'big data'.

To be fair, I'd say this is only true if "excel" is generalized to "the largest non-distributed-computing tool they're personally aware of".

Granted, that may usually be a spreadsheet, but at least in the tech industry, people do know of DBMSes. They just happen to think an affordable single server is an order of magnitude smaller than is actually achievable, even if it's an order of magnitude larger than a spreadsheet.

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

#310

Post by hcoura »

logfromblammo wrote: post #267
baxtr wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please, please, please let everybody come to this conclusion. How much better would the world be as place. I’ve wasted many hours of my time at work, not working, which is so sad

I personally allocate the work day into one 4-hour block as my "big pipe", one 2-hour block as my "little pipe", and let the other 2 hours be "fluff". For limited intervals, I can combine the two pipes into one "mega pipe", to get a "big pipe" task done faster, but it takes a toll over time. The "big pipe" can also theoretically be split into two more temporary "little pipes", but in general, I usually want to have t…

That's exactly how I do with my work day. 2-hours / lunch / 4-hours / stop working or anything else less demanding
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