Dozens of Companies Are Using Facebook to Exclude Older Workers From Job Ads • Hacker News Board

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

#731

Post by andrewflnr » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 2:21 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #346

andrewflnr wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting about ethics. Even if your boss doesn't care about security, if you want to be a decent person, you need to at least try to prevent your system from becoming a tool to harm others.

Hanlon’s razor comes through in full force. The vast majority of people making agregrious security errors know no better. You could argue that whoever hired them shares or shoulders the blame, but to suggest they’re not decent people is a stretch. Most I’m sure are. They’re also likely infosec idiots. Now if you know something is terribly insecure, understand what’s involved in fixing it, and go out of your way not t…

I'm normally on board with Hanlon, but "infosec idiots" who fail to educate themselves on basic security principles are guilty of negligence at best. There's no reasonable way they don't know that security is a real concern, so they should be looking into it. If they still fail, then we can go back to Hanlon's razor.

But as one HNer to another, I was really talking about your second case. To claim here that security can ever be discounted, as the person I was replying to implied, is pretty much inexcusable. Everyone here knows that security affects more than just your business, so no one here should be solely applying business logic to it.

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

#732

Post by fpisfun » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 2:37 AM UTC

iak8god wrote: post #376

Consultant32452 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be any less discriminatory?

It wouldn't really, but it would be significantly less douche-y, because it would ultimately be based in a less disparaging view of older job seekers.

It is factual that certain technologies are more used by certain demographics. If someone has a very small ad budget I don't understand why they should be forced to display ads to a demographic less likely to know the technology.

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

#733

Post by gehwartzen » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 2:54 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #220

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…

Genuine question: is it explicitly illegal to discriminate in your outreach for job applications? Surely similar behavior happens all the time without as much outcry, like recruiting at college career fairs.

According to the EEOC, yes it is:

>"It is also illegal for an employer to recruit new employees in a way that discriminates against them because of their race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

For example, an employer's reliance on word-of-mouth recruitment by its mostly Hispanic work force may violate the law if the result is that almost all new hires are Hispanic."

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

#734

Post by mtpn » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 3:37 AM UTC

andrei_says_ wrote: post #431

mtpn wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a web developer in my spare time. I write little things that solve problems in my two day jobs, they haven’t tended to be pretty because often I’m learning as I go and when it works then it’s truly time to move on to the next problem, even though I now know enough to solve the old problem again more elegantly. I’m trying to use better practices and modern JS frameworks in new projects just for experience, even th…

Saying all this shows that 1. You care and 2. You know the difference. I’d hire you.

Good to hear- I’m hoping to switch to full time web development some time in the new year. It's actually my favorite thing at these other jobs.

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

#735

Post by tigershark » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 3:41 AM UTC

dorgo wrote: post #722

tigershark wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) I said that there is no fixed correlation. 2) I'm most productive when my LOCs are negative, deleting duplicate code or finding a better approach for a problem.

1) so you say there is a (positive) correlation, but it is not "fixed". Sorry, I don't understand what this means. 2) I know what you mean. I do it often myself and I know it improves code quality. It's not my intention to measure "work done" in LOCs, which, as you say, could be contradictory. I propose to measure the size of a project in LOCs. Suppose, you have two projects. And you have all the time you want to red…

1) Imagine some project written using CTRL+C, CTRL+V everywhere, another much bigger project written with some good architecture and using always the DRY principle, another one still bigger is written in a much more compact language like F# or Haskell. The first project following your criteria is the bigger and most complex, but in reality it is just a bloated mess. 2) It never works like that in reality. No one is paid to spend time only to improve the code, we are paid to provide value to the users. The project with the good architecture is easier to work with and it will be easier to add features and continue to improve the code. The bloated mess will be much more difficult to work with and you won't have the time to improve it apart from getting the low hanging fruits.

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

#736

Post by nurettin » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 4:14 AM UTC

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #523

nurettin wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my experience with an elderly coder in his mid 50s. He was a decent delphi and .net coder, he was a decent human being, but he had health problems. Most of the week he had hospital appointments. He required nose surgery. His blood levels were low. He needed vitamin d and iron supplements and during our four month acquintance, he never got any better. He constantly forgot things and he feared his lack of iron h…

So you met one guy with a lot of chronic health problems and assume that everyone else in his age group is similar? Or if not then I'm not sure what your point is. People who miss a lot of work and make excuses for being belligerent don't make the greatest employees, but there's not as much correlation as you think between that and age. I feel like you really have given a clear answer to combatentropy's question "why…

It is the other way around. I didn't understand why companies would even consider not hiring old/experienced software engineers until I met him.

And now I am on a diet and quit smoking :-)

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

#737

Post by ycombobreaker » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 4:28 AM UTC

heedlessly2 wrote: post #648

asmosoinio wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. But in my experience, this is not true AT ALL. More experienced people might work less hours, but will produce the actual end results much quicker - both in hours and in calendar time. Especially when considering that l…

a 24 year old from a top CS college with 3 years of solid javascript experience will be better than a 40 year old with 15+ years of C#.net experience for today's job market

What about a 36 year old from a top CS college with 6 years of Java experience, 6 years of C#, and 3 years of Javascript? And many more failures and paradigm shifts under their belt, by the way. The core field of undergraduate CS hasn't changed much in the past decade, mostly there are new options for specialization and the bleeding edge remains in graduate programs. If you still think the 24 year old is the superior choice, then even generously you're not looking for skill.

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

#738

Post by Clubber » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 4:32 AM UTC

user5994461 wrote: post #345

jjeaff wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still not realistic. Assuming an entry level dev in sv is making 100k, most 50 year old devs are not making $500k. More like 50% more or at most twice as much.

The norm is to double or triple salary between graduation and much experience. Remember that costs is more than just salary. In SF/NYC, juniors can start under 100k, seniors can go over 300k. Either number could go either way, let's not argue about who got what. The point is, there is a LARGE multiplier. I recall one friend in London, in a junior position. Left his company because of bad conditions and bad pay. One o…

So 10x to 5x to 3x, which isn't really a large multiplier. Also, a guy worth $300K is a "large multiplier" more valuable than 3 entry level juniors at $100K.

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

#739

Post by candiodari » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:01 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #583

gdilla wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't Twitter racked up 2.5B in losses and yet to turn a profit (though reportedly close to doing it for the first time ever). 2.5B in losses for a platform you could build and scale for what, $10M now. Very questionably successful - some people got rich so yes, i suppose?

That's why I added (questionable). I've made the mistake at one company of thinking that my job was to architect solid software that was sustainable for the long term. What they really wanted was to have software that was "good enough" and had all of the checkbox features to be attractive to potential acquirers so the investors would stop breathing down their necks.

Twitter "made 2.5B losses". Yeah ... that's bad ... but not from the perspectives of investors.

Jack Dorsey became a billionaire from those losses. The same is true for probably all other early investors. For an investment in Twitter to have done really badly, there was a "bear" period of about 2 years.

And before you say it, remember that even Google stock dropped 60%, Facebook's 70%. Twitter's drop actually looks pretty reasonable in comparison.

So firstly, I don't think twitter is bad, and secondly, I don't think people have given up on twitter, and thirdly, that seems pretty justified.

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

#740

Post by candiodari » Fri, Dec 22, 2017, 5:15 AM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #626

asmosoinio wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a race to the bottom. You could pay more for better work that gets done more slowly (fewer hours as people have families, etc,) or you could pay less for worse work that gets done more quickly. But in my experience, this is not true AT ALL. More experienced people might work less hours, but will produce the actual end results much quicker - both in hours and in calendar time. Especially when considering that l…

>> less experienced devs will (on the average) cause more bugs and worse code structure - in the long run this causes a ton of extra work. In the last five years or so, I've done contract work at several large corporations. In every single one, they didn't care about defects or code structure. They just wanted to ship an application in a very short period of time. When I asked about the same thing you pointed out, th…

That may simply mean that only one of these things really is quality :

1) working great and well for the end user, for the function of the software

2) bugs and code structure

Code quality can be so bad that it matters. But beyond a basic level, it does not matter. Bad code that works beats great code that doesn't fulfill it's function every single time.

I once had this great lesson. I was brought into a team as a TL/Manager. We were making a product that was doing pretty well, in terms of attention it was getting and so on. 1 week in, I learn that about 70% of the code is tests, 30% is actual code that's used at runtime. 2 weeks in I learn that everybody's always working on the tests, never on the program (there's a reasonably good reason for this even). 3 weeks in I explore the program, and at some point I try to run it. Turns out the "main" function is broken. Because of crashes (plural) during variable initialization it never gets to the first line of the main function ... How long had these bugs existed (it wasn't just one), you ask ? Well, over 3 months. Doesn't happen in the (VERY extensive) test run.

Lessons learned in that project:

1) test driven development is a great place to start, and a VERY bad way to run projects once they're even 10% into their delivery schedule

2) even the best tests don't check everything

3) even the best tests don't guarantee that even the most basic simple parts of the program work. In fact, tests actually WORK AGAINST THIS.

4) the value of a system test (where the entire program runs, by actually going into main and doing what it's supposed to on a realistic example) is incredible. The criticism that TDD developers have is valid, that if it fails you won't know (necessarily) where it failed, but isn't that serious. Firstly, you'll usually have some idea of where it failed, and secondly, and this is the big one, you'll know it fails. FAR preferable to the other situation. They're also very hard to write. Tough. You need them, far more than you need unit tests on 5 line functions.

5) you are MUCH better off with a "hero" programmer (bad name, "loose cannon" would be more apt description) AND someone acting 90% anal about tests, and managing the inevitable conflict, than you are without the loose cannon. Managing that conflict will be a challenge though. And yes, that means that, to the utter dismay of the TDD developer, you'll have to tell him to let in code without, or with bad tests, from time to time.