371–380 of 808 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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).
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.
Working in a PHP shop, nobody would care to shit on PHP during an interview. We know the shortcommings, it just doesn’t really matter that much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook has a setting where you can enter the age of a person for a job posting and they even have a special site for job ads. It's not comparable. Craigslist does not market a platform that explicitly says "target prostitution ads at people who are looking for prostitutes". What Facebook is doing is far more explicit and they are clearly aware of what is happening because they built functionality to do it specifica…
Craigslist has a setting where you can explicitly say you're seeking a man/men, woman/women both, other etc. Not calling out Craigslist --simply illustrating that regular tools meant to be used responsibly can be abused to accomplish nefarious ends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. I was hoping that sentence would end with "because I figured people over a certain age probably wouldn't be interested in entry-level positions ," and I was prepared to think that was an interesting point.
Why would that be any less discriminatory?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope you got the lesson. Please stop working over the week ends for free. You are devaluing yourself and you are devaluing all the developers who don't want to ruin their week end at work.
I obviously didn't bring to the demonstration that I had volunteered the time, it suited my point to make it seem like it was something easy I could do as an aside... Problem is, they don't care about $ either, they care about what makes them look good, what makes their boss look good, what the sales guys are bugging them about, and it's features and visual polish and never quality or performance. I had to break it d…
Thus fuelling the idea that this sort of thing will just be done as other work is happening with no time budgeted for it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Craigslist has a setting where you can explicitly say you're seeking a man/men, woman/women both, other etc. Not calling out Craigslist --simply illustrating that regular tools meant to be used responsibly can be abused to accomplish nefarious ends.
Yes but in that example what Craigslist is doing is still legal. It is totally fine to be a person seeking a person including all specific permutations of gender. It's not ok to discriminate based on age for jobs. Facebook has a page for the specific purpose of advertising jobs to people on the basis of their age.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Facebook knows the age of the people it displays ads to. Part of their value proposition is that you can use this data to show certain ads to people of a certain age. In the case of job postings this is explicitly illegal discrimination. The average age of Facebook users is completely unrelated.
>The average age of Facebook users is completely unrelated. No it isn't -- to make an extreme point, if 100% of the audience is > 50 years old, it wouldn't matter which age group you are targeting because your target demographic isn't there . The poster below, who points to younger generations fleeing Facebook are exactly in line with my point -- the 20-somethings are on to Insta-chat-whatevers next. If you really wa…
2) The issue is not targeting, the issue is exclusion. If the ads are targeting based on age then only members of a certain age group see the ads. This also means anyone outside that group does not see the ads which means they were excluded based on their age. Combined with the ad content being a job this is illegal discrimination based on age.
3) The specific nature of the algorithm is irrelevant to the effect.