
Facebook Tools Are Used to Screen Out Older Job Seekers, Lawsuit Claims - uptown
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-29/facebook-tools-are-used-to-screen-out-older-job-seekers-lawsuit-claims
======
agrippanux
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 startup.

The typical solid dev can only put in 4, maybe 5-6 hours of actual good coding
a day. If you know how to run a tight org - and not a sweatshop of 20-year
olds pulling 16 hour days where only maybe 2-3 hours are actual programming
time - then older devs are a fantastic bargain. Plus, when it comes time to
architect something complex, I have found older devs typically create more
simple and elegant solutions just because they have been exposed to more.

Of course, I do run into the occasional stuck-in-the-mud older dev who is very
slow to adapt to current trends and wants everyone else to get off their lawn.
That has been a rare exception to my overall experience and I don't think it
should be used to stereotype the older devs as a group.

~~~
ryanmonroe
> 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 almost always find the qualities/compensation-demands
you're looking for in older applicants rather than younger ones, but your
phrasing doesn't seem to indicate that.

~~~
Moto7451
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 inclusive. There are a lot of unconscious
things hiring managers do that remove themselves from the running of highly
qualified candidates.

Want to remove yourself from consideration from young talented female
developers? Create a laundry list of "requirements" even though you consider
them "nice to haves." Also add plenty of trigger words to make your business
seem unattractive.

[https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-
unless...](https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless-
theyre-100-qualified)
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2016/12/14/...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2016/12/14/how-
to-take-gender-bias-out-of-your-job-ads/#21863e951024)

Avoiding hurting yourself in the eyes of candidates you'd like to include is
far from being discriminatory to other groups.

~~~
throwawaymath
_> 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._

Wait...isn't this exactly what the article is talking about?

~~~
bobthepanda
'Targeting your ad spend' is the thing under fire here, and under a very
specific attack.

Before online advertising you kind of had an idea of what the target audience
of TV channels, news, and radio was like, but it was very fuzzy and you
certainly weren't _excluding_ people not in your target demographic that
happened to utilize those media platforms. Women reading male fitness
magazines or men reading female lifestyle magazines weren't the primary target
of ads in those platforms, but they could certainly utilize what was being
advertised if they so desired. The same is not true of online advertising
today.

Facebook is more in the position of a newsstand than anything else, and it
would be blatant discrimination if a newsstand wasn't allowing older people to
buy technology magazines, for example.

------
OhHeyItsE
I always wonder where the myth that older developers are "slower" comes from.

Dunno about you folks, but I get better and faster every year. And, for me,
that productivity metric is probably approaching parabolic.

You learn enough languages, frameworks, tools - all the fundamentals start to
merge together. You can pick the next one up faster than you did the one you
just put down. You understand how to design software; how to organize code.
Exactly when to reuse, refactor, or copy/paste.

You have a better understanding of how the market works and the competitive
strategies around product development will manifest - not only within your own
product and industry, but when analyzing and choosing vendors as well (you
really want to leave it up to a 25 year-old to choose AWS vs GCP?).

Sure, I've got a ton of better things to spend my nights and weekends on than
writing code for free. I can also spot a doomed project from a mile a way and
have no qualms about delivering a very curt "yeah no thanks" to that project
manager who waddles over with some deluded hero fantasy where they carry the
flag on my back for something that's probably never going to see the light of
day anyway.

Maybe that's it? That's probably it...

~~~
white-flame
As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As their
bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of history
repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere. Younger devs
fall in line much easier.

It can sometimes be a double-edged sword. Some older devs get hung up on
bikeshedding and tunnel visioning about old specifics instead of just getting
work done with whatever the new environment is. However, this problem is far
more represented in the big slow-moving corporate world, and go-getter active
old timers looking at startups wouldn't generally fit that stereotype.

But if 2 devs are agreeably working on a complex project, the old timer will
probably be faster to finish than the younger one. For non-complex projects,
it's a crap shoot.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> As your ending suggests, older developers tend to rock the boat more. As
> their bosses tell them to do something, the old timers see failures of
> history repeating themselves and try to steer the direction elsewhere.
> Younger devs fall in line much easier.

I've seen this in spades. One of my greatest frustrations as an older
developer is seeing history about to repeat itself, yet being unable to
convince management of that fact.

Because I need the paycheck I can't walk away from some work. But it makes me
die a little every time I work on such projects.

------
notacoward
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 to search for candidates of different ages or experience levels
because _our own_ job-seeking habits are different. I was already a principal
before the web even existed, let alone Facebook or LinkedIn. Even then I
didn't look at generic ads anywhere to find a new job. I used headhunters, and
then purely personal contacts. I'm sure many of my contemporaries are the
same. If such broadcast ads are basically a waste of money seeking that kind
of employee, and other methods are being tried, is that really "disparate
treatment" in any meaningful sense?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I don't know. I was recommended to a specific domain-specialized role in
Facebook by someone with a long tenure inside the company, and after the
recommendation, I was just auto-routed into the standard, crappy candidate
pipeline like everyone else, told I'd have to do whatever 6-month rotation
bootcamp, asked why I didn't have a bunch of Javascript experience.

It certainly _felt_ like they make an effort to pedantically screen everyone
through such a process exactly to enforce various uniformity and policy
standards.

I am not claiming that I specifically experienced ageism, although it is
possible. But I definitely experienced some type of "junior dev, infinitely
flexible, doesn't know his own market compensation worth, etc." filters, which
in many cases are going to systematically filter out experienced
professionals.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
So everyone in the same role goes through the same interview, and everyone in
the same role goes through the same 6 week bootcamp. The aim, as I understand
it, is to avoid talk like 'that person was hired into team X, they must suck
at Y' or 'org X is easy to get in to, I wouldn't want to work with someone who
was hired into it', and to allow more internal mobility without the need to
reinterview. I can join any team for my role without needing to interview
again, which reduces the friction a lot.

With that said, sorry you had a bad experience :/ The Javascript question does
sound misplaced.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
> ... to avoid talk like 'that person was hired into team X, they must suck at
> Y' or 'org X is easy to get in to, I wouldn't want to work with someone who
> was hired into it',

This is why you do your best to hire mature employees no matter their age and
fire immature employees, no matter their age.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
I assume you mean that employees who think their colleagues must suck at Y
because they are on team X, or who worry themselves about whether some other
team's chosen hiring standards are "too easy," are the immature ones?

(And presumably it's immature to even care about 'sucking at Y' at all, unless
a specific task requires skill at Y and is not being solved, in which case it
sounds like a problem of assigning it to the wrong person, not a problem of
general hiring for Y in all cases.)

------
jiggliemon
The joke is really on the employer using Facebook ads to target a younger
candidate pool.

Youngsters don’t use Facebook. And if a young dev is using Facebook - they’re
certainly using an ad-blocker. If they’re not using an ad blocker on Facebook,
do you even want to hire them?

Seems like if you wanted to attract a pool of young candidates now days, you’d
target the parents of the said youngsters. The ones with no applicable
experience, and who are still living at home “looking for a job.”

The ad should be to the effect of “tired of your good for nothing millennial
taking up your third bedroom? Want them to move out? We’re hiring good for
nothing straight out of college devs so as to lock them into a low tier pay
bracket.”

~~~
ryanwaggoner
As someone who runs ads on Facebook and other platforms and has a lot of devs
who respond, this isn’t true. Not only do devs not all block ads (and it’s
kind of offensive to imply that only the _good ones_ do), they even click on
ads!

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Yeah, just looked it up. There are over 50 million active users on Facebook
between the ages of 25 and 34. In the US alone.

------
BasHamer
Data-driven algorithms are discriminating based upon undesirable/illegal
vectors; they are utterly amoral in optimizing their solutions. Even if the
algorithm does not have access to the "Age" field, then there are plenty of
proxies, like what reunion tour you liked. And the same goes for race, gender,
sexual identification, religion, etc.

To solve this we either need the training data to have no illegal/undesired
discrimination, or we make the system moral. I think the first is impossible,
and the second is what we will do sooner or later.

~~~
biztos
How would you make the system moral?

Let's say "moral" means "won't discriminate based on X" and the same "system"
is used by everyone, which of course it wouldn't be.

So do you make up a bunch of fake "people" who are equal in everything except
X, and test that it doesn't advantage/disadvantage the X's? Would that even be
possible if the "system" is getting its inputs from social media?

Do you do mandate some kind of audit of the system's decisions, and require it
to choose on average the same percentage of Xs as... what? As there are Xs in
the general population? In the candidate pool?

I'd love for this kind of thing to work but even in an idealized hypothetical
version it's hard to see how it could.

I think in tech we've already shown that shame is no barrier to hiring
discrimination, and as HR+AI type filtering systems preselect candidates for
you it'll be harder and harder for you or the government or the disadvantaged
candidates to even know if you're discriminating.

You'll judge the "system" based solely on whether the set of candidates you
got achieved the outcome you needed.

~~~
BasHamer
train it.

Give it examples that we consider moral and examples of what we consider
immoral and have it figure it out. The solutions that the algorithms create
are less complex than the data that they base the solutions on; so it should
be relatively easy for it to model these solutions as data. We would have to
train it on what we consider moral and immoral; that would require us to
visualize the solutions in a way that a human can make the determination and
provide the feedback.

As far as how we get to the solution, that will probably come when there is a
liability for discrimination. So lawsuits like the one mentioned. I think that
mandating does not work well, it would be more appropriate to make people
liable for the decisions made by amoral systems. This liability would create a
demand for moral systems.

~~~
jerf
"Give it examples that we consider moral"

That's a tall order, honestly. There's a lot of things in the current dominant
SV philosophy that are fine and dandy and everybody thinks they agree with
everybody else about them as long as everyone carefully agrees to not sit down
and actually put numbers on the terms in question ("discrimination is bad!" "I
agree!"), but when it comes time to write down concrete rules and provide
concrete examples ("hiring a woman is 43.2% preferable to hiring a man; hiring
an African American is 23.1% preferable to hiring a Chinese person") are going
to make people _squirm_ , and everyone involved in such a project is going to
do everything in their power to avoid having to deal with the result.

I bet there's a number of people reading this post _right now_ squirming and
deeply, deeply tempted to hit that reply button and start haranguing me about
those numbers and how dare I even think such things, as you've been trained to
find someone to blame for any occurrence of such words and I'm the only
apparent candidate. But I have no attachment to the numbers themselves and I
pre-emptively acquiesce to any corrections you'd care to make to them, for the
sake of argument. I expect a real model would use more complicated functions
of more parameters, I just used simple percentages because they fit into text
easily. But any algorithm _must_ produce some sort of result that looks like
that, and once you get ten people at a table looking at any given concrete
instantiation of this "morality", 9.8 of them are not going to agree it's
moral.

I cite the handful of articles we've even seen in peer-reviewed science
journals, sometimes linked here on HN, which discuss the discriminatory
aspects of this or that current ML system, while _scrupulously_ avoiding
answering the question of what exactly a "non-discriminatory" system actually
is. It's one of those things that once you see it you can't unsee it. (And
given that these papers are nominally mathematical papers by nominally "real
scientists", if I were a reviewer I'd "no publish" these papers until they fix
that oversight, because it isn't actually that useful to point out that an
existing mathematical system fails to conform to a currently- _not_ -existing
mathematical standard.)

------
afpx
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.

~~~
p0nce
Readers: what's your exit strategy? You probably need one.

~~~
ashelmire
Age discrimination in tech is dumb. I've got a dev 30 years my senior sitting
across from me and I guarantee he will code circles around 90% of the devs on
HN, and 100% of the new grads getting jobs at big tech (and will until he
dies). He's got a huge amount of knowledge in programming, our domain (NLP),
he's fast, thorough, and thoughtful.

Honestly I don't get the obsession with recent grads. They are basically
useless for years.

~~~
agotterer
Some of reasons I’ve seen for ageism in startups are cost and “not a culture
fit”. Cost I understand, but I believe more experienced people end up being
cheaper in the long run when you account for speed, correctness, and long term
maintainability. The culture piece stems from the “would I get a beer with
this person” and will he/she work as “hard” as a younger candidate with less
responsibilities.

Startups need to start realizing that it’s okay to have diversity and
different cultural groups. By putting yourself in the stereotypical startup
culture box you greatly limit your ability to hire and create diversity. If
everyone thinks and acts the same you miss out on valuable perspectives and
ideas.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Startups aren’t going to change. The goal should be to marginalize their
influence and effects on tech hiring. They are simply not important enough (by
hiring volume) to carry the weight they currently do.

~~~
B0btheBuilder
>They are simply not important enough (by hiring volume) to carry the weight
they currently do.

Unforunately, they are. A large proportion of the tech industry is startups /
small businesses. I'd be surprised if Google/Facebook/Amazon/Apple/Microsoft
make up even 10% of tech workers.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Citation please. Startups are minuscule compared to total tech jobs.

My current employer employees more tech workers than all YC startups combined,
for example.

~~~
B0btheBuilder
Google - 85,050 employees
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google))

Facebook - 25,105 employees
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook))

Amazon has 566,000 employees
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_\(company\))),
but it's unclear how many of those are actually tech workers. Amazon has a lot
of retail and warehouse workers, many of who with wages so low they qualify
for food stamps.

Apple - 123,000 employees
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.))
Apple's 2014 SEC filing said that half of their employees are retail workers,
so let's give Apple 62,000 tech workers.

Microsoft - 124,000 employees
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft))

There are around 7 million tech workers in the USA
([https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/201...](https://www.comptia.org/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/2017/04/03/us-tech-sector-employment-approaches-seven-million))

Even if we pretended that all 566,000 Amazon employees were actually tech
workers (they're not) and the above numbers were US-only employees (they're
not), that would total to about 860,000 tech workers.

860,000 / 7 million = 12.3%

That means that at least 87.7% of American tech workers do not work at Google,
Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Microsoft, despite these companies being five of
the richest tech companies in the world.

~~~
toomuchtodo
None of this validates your thesis that startups and small businesses are the
majority tech employers. If anything, it reinforces mine.

------
danschumann
I sometimes wonder how much the fear of something is actually an additional
problem to the thing itself.

NOTE: I am not denying agism exists, I'm wondering about the additional
problem of fear of agism.

The fear that someone might be agist, might make you look at them
judgmentally/suspiciously. If you look at your interviewer
judgmentally/suspiciously they likely won't hire you, and they probably feel
pretty suspicious about you.

If you walk into an interview and say, "I know I'm old, and you probably won't
hire me because you want a young person", well, obviously they won't hire you
because you sound depressed.

Again, this is not to say that some people aren't agist, even if the candidate
shows none of these signs.

I'm just wondering how much of factor the fear of agism is, compared to agism
itself, on a regional level. Are there any people who do clinical studies
here?

~~~
mlthoughts2018
While this might be interesting academically, I think if ageism is a problem
that might generically scare candidates, then that too is _the ageists fault_
for creating that culture of policy, and not a candidate's fault for sincerely
being worried about something that is actually worth worrying about.

We could say something similar about racism. "How much of a factor the fear of
racism is, compared to racism itself..."

It seems silly to really spend any time on this type of second-order extra
effect when there are real, harmful, huge first-order effects (namely, _actual
racism_ and _actual ageism_ ) demonstrably happening.

We should focus on the big, up-front, obvious monster standing right in front
of us, instead of asking, how much of our problem is caused by the monster in
front of us as opposed to a hypothetical monster in the closet, and letting it
distract us (or worse, trying to flip things around and blame candidates for
being too sensitive or try to sympathetically justify what ageist businesses
are doing to their long-time employees or to older job candidates).

~~~
danschumann
The racist wins if he can spoil your other interviews. Let's say you have 4
interviews, the first one has a racist, and it's obvious. Now let's say you
get bitter and resentful, and you blow your other 3 interviews, even though
those 3 people aren't racist. The racist is happy(if he finds out) because not
only did he prevent you from getting his job, he messed with your head and
prevented you from getting the attainable 3 jobs.

So, within the scenario above, racism can take one toll or many tolls. And
this is on the individual level, wherein people operate from day to day. They
need a job. It would seem that being able to reset expectations, forgive,
forbear, and go into the subsequent 3 interviews would be the ideal strategy
to achieve success in job hunting, and prevent the racist from doing the most
damage.

Since you mentioned 2nd order effects: how much do the 2nd order effects
recreate/reinforce the first order effects? This would be another
psychological survey I would be interested in.

If someone is fearful of racists, how many people are likely to become more
racist as a result of this fear ( either themselves or people they come in
contact with )? Isn't racism based on fear in the first place? Fear of other
races? ( and therefore a reaction to fight or flight arbitrarily based on
race? )

Batman: "Gee Robbin, I notice you are afraid when you are around people of
other races" Robbin: "Well it's because I think they're racist against me"
_slap_ Batman: "Robbin you are becoming the thing you fear the most!"

~~~
mlthoughts2018
This sounds alarmingly similar to something like, _the terrorists win if we
don 't watch the NFL on Sunday while drinking mainstream American beers._

The racist or ageist "win" if they are not held accountable, with visible
punishment, for their racist or ageist actions. They don't "win" through
bespoke second order effects of their first order actions.

In terms of what a candidate should do, it's a heuristic. I choose to apply
the heuristic of, "be really wary and cautious that self-interested commercial
entities have incentives to generally be ageist or racist."

I pay a cost sometimes when that heuristic was suboptimal. But it's worth it
to avoid super widespread predatory practices in a bunch of other cases.
Worrying about the hyper-optimized policy that accounts for secondary
perceptions of my fear of ageism seems like a huge waste, huge premature
optimization effort that could be better spent choosing a simple heuristic and
focusing on the up-front, obvious, primary ageism or racism issues.

To boot, honestly, if an employer gets some kind of "weird vibe" from me
because I ask questions or discuss policies from an anti-ageism point of view,
and this leads them to reject me, then probably my heuristic was right, and
really there are internal dysfunctions in that company that I am better off
avoiding.

Corporations can harm applicants and employees in so many ways that it often
really is better to have a default belief that this is what they are trying to
do, and take a very risk-averse heuristic to just avoid places that give off
even slight signals, like if they treat you like you're weird for taking a
proactive, positive stance on it.

If they reject you, you're probably dodging a nasty bullet anyway.

------
bo1024
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.

~~~
gowld
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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/nyregion/facebook-housing-ads-
discrimination-lawsuit.html)

~~~
Jeff-Stryker
>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.

------
jcadam
I currently work (as of 6 months ago) at a company where the software
engineering staff is made up almost exclusively of two types of people:

1.) young 20-somethings who were hired right out of college. They do all of
the coding and grunt work (for cheap).

2.) A smaller set of 55+ engineers who are coasting into retirement. They do
all of the architecture and design work.

I was recruited rather aggressively and eventually accepted an offer (I'm
definitely being paid on the high side for this area). As a 38 year old, this
place is incredibely lonely (I have no "peers"). I have absolutely no idea why
they hired me. The "elders", who have been at the company for 20+ years, are
hostile, backstabbing and hoard all of the interesting work (and credit) for
themselves. My "lead" (not the manager who made the decision to hire me - I
never see that person now) seems to be actively sidelining me - I've been
assigned nothing but grunt work.

------
JaceLightning
I mean, are we going to start suing companies who go to career fairs at
colleges too?

~~~
csixty4
There are plenty of older college students. There were lots of grey hairs in
my night classes.

~~~
dominotw
Not in the places where top tech companies are willing to go to.

~~~
electricslpnsld
I don't think this is true -- most of the Ivys have entire schools dedicated
to older 'nontraditional' students (see, for example, the Columbia University
School of General Studies), and Google/Facebook/etc recruit quite heavily from
the Ivys.

~~~
dominotw
> Google/Facebook/etc recruit quite heavily from the Ivys.

Yes but do they recruit older non traditional students. Schools catering to
them doesn't automatically imply that they are being hired by google.

~~~
lainga
You just moved the goalposts from "don't recruit where there are older
students" to "yes, they recruit there, but do they recruit the older
students".

~~~
dominotw
ok. I see what you mean.

> don't recruit where there are older students

But they don't recuit from 'schools dedicated to older 'nontraditional'
students '

My original comment is still true > Not in the places where top tech companies
are willing to go to.

"places" here can be 'schools dedicated to older 'nontraditional' students'
within Ivies.

------
eli
I'm not sure I agree that it's Facebook's fault that people use its platform
to target ads illegally, but clearly you shouldn't be targeting job ads to
people by age.

~~~
kinsomo
> I'm not sure I agree that it's Facebook's fault that people use its platform
> to target ads illegally, but clearly you shouldn't be targeting job ads to
> people by age.

It seems reasonable to me that an automated ad platform should take steps to
prevent users from running illegal ads. It seems like it would be fairly easy,
at least for discriminatory ad types: just look at the law and gray out
selectors for protected classes when an ad for employment, housing, etc. For
instance, if you run an employment ad, age, race, and gender demographic
selectors should be disabled.

------
ivanhoe
Older devs don't buy the CEO's BS that easy and don't care about table tennis,
you need to pay them in real money - which obviously makes them a completely
wrong fit for so many players in the industry...

------
master_yoda_1
Facebook themselves are a big age discriminator in recruiting. Most of the
company in the silicon valley do age discrimination.

------
edikit
It doesn't seem like the blame should fall on Facebook here, but rather the
companies using Facebook's tools to age discriminate (assuming there is even
blame to place at all).

Age-based targeting can be applied across their entire platform, not just for
job postings, and it can be applied in either direction (i.e. companies can
also create ads targeting only people over the age of 40).

> In the amended complaint, CWA alleged that Facebook encourages advertisers
> to exclude some job-seekers by providing both age filters and regularly
> updated data on how ads perform among different age groups.

IMO, this complaint achieves the opposite of what they want it to achieve. It
suggests that the age-related metrics that Facebook offers are a) explicitly
defined by the individual advertiser and b) are used to objectively determine
the ad's effectiveness rather than to unjustly discriminate.

------
mesubli
So, where do the veterans go?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17179054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17179054)

~~~
Spooky23
Get a reverse mortgage, work for Home Depot, the government, or lobby for UBI.

------
cm2012
This is really dumb if you understand how Facebook's advertising algorithm
works.

It's going to optimize job ads towards people who click job ads.

Young people are more likely to be looking for jobs than older people, and
thus click job ads more. [1]

So Facebook's ad algorithm's are going to target younger people because it's
more cost effective, because they want to see these type of ads more by far.
By the data, older people do not want to see these type of ads and thus are
not shown them. If you did show it to them, they would complain about bad ads
(anyone who does FB advertising gets a report from FB on how many people Xed
out an ad, and too many is really bad for your account)

Nothing to do with worker effectiveness or how HR treats older applicants,
which is what 95% of the comments in this thread are taking the opportunity to
talk about.

[1] " About 60% of Millennials are currently open to a new job opportunity and
are by far the most likely generation to switch jobs. To support that, 21% of
Millennials in 2016 reported switching jobs within the past year, compared to
roughly 7% of gen Xers and other non-Millennials. "
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryalton/2018/01/22/millennia...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryalton/2018/01/22/millennials-
arent-job-hopping-young-people-are-5-things-to-keep-in-mind/#26d1e0ab10d8)

~~~
kartan
> So Facebook's ad algorithm's are going to target younger people because it's
> more cost effective

Because there is a technical explanation doesn't means that it is not
discrimination. Actually discrimination had a lot to do about getting an
individual differently because he/she is part of a group. We didn't baked a
law, the machine did. It is not a good defense in a trial, or at least I hope
it is not.

A good read on this topic [http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/qa-should-
artificial-...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/05/qa-should-artificial-
intelligence-be-legally-required-explain-itself)

~~~
cm2012
Discriminating based on _interest_ in job postings is very different than
discriminating based on _type of applicant_.

If you post a job ad in a job center, it's going to be seen by way more young
people and older people won't get as much of a chance to see it. Same if you
post job ads in colleges. Both of those common practices are more
discriminatory than what FB's algorithm is doing here.

------
sandworm101
Take this from a former tech lawyer: The startups that only want kids and new
grads are hiding skeletons. They know they are doing something
incorrectly/illegally and don't want anyone in the building who is likely to
recognize such mistakes, let alone object to them. They fear industry
knowledge and experience.

Typical example: I had a couple clients who sent new staff on unpaid
"training" courses, in violation of labour laws. They only hired kids and so
by the time I showed up this had been going on for ten years. The founders
knew, but all under them didn't know a thing about labour laws, including the
extensive HR department. Then one day a former employee sent an email ... and
I handed the client to a litigator to prepare the response to the class action
by former employees.

------
BadassFractal
As someone approaching that 40yo cutoff soon enough, does that same apparent
bias in hiring show up for managers and executives as well, or only hands-on
individual contributors? Maybe there's a general perception that if you're in
your 40s and you've worked hard enough, by then you should be a director or VP
of some kind, and if you're not you must have messed up? I understand not
everybody is meant for managerial ladder climbing, but is that perhaps the
stereotype that everybody expects?

------
superkuh
It'd be nice if these same protected class laws applied to the rampant and
increasing age discrimination against 18 to 21 year old adults. Discrimination
of them is not just common but baked into the culture and acknowledged as a
good thing (ie, car rentals, firearm purchases, etc).

They get all the downsides and responsibilities of being a full citizen but
are treated as second class citizens.

Sure, discrimination against the old happens. But it's not nearly as common or
widespread as discrimination against the young.

------
this_na_hipster
While I understand Ageism exists, I do see a trend change though. Take for
example all these technical tracks in many companies now. All of these
engineers are very tenured and usually very experienced(40+). In-fact they are
considered irreplaceable by management since they set the vision of the
company. Especially in the valley, the trend I notice is that you don't want
to lose these "senior staff, staff engineers etc."

------
coliveira
Discrimination is essentially THE business for FB advertisements in areas such
as housing and job openings. It is just a fancy way to circumvent legal
requirements that jobs must be posted independent of sex, racial, or religious
affiliation. Similarly for housing offerings.

------
AlexCoventry
What statutes would FB be violating, assuming their tools are being used in
this way?

I wish articles like this would provide a link to the complaint, which is
presumably a matter of public record.

------
jhowell
Maybe this company needs regulation. I think the benefit of the doubt can be
used to hide reason.

------
GhostVII
Would radio ads be discrimination because they generally target and older
audience? Or TV adds on shows that are generally viewed by older audiences or
younger audiences? If it is discrimination to only show Facebook job ads to
certain demographics, it should also be descrimination to show ads on
platforms only viewed by certain demographics.

~~~
oculusthrift
lol this is a pretty lame argument. radio stations would love more young
listeners. it’s a little differnt than intentionally filtering out some of
your audience

------
oculusthrift
devils advocate reasons to avoid older tech job seekers:

1\. they are less pliable. they have experience st other companies and
typically want to keep doing stuff the way they did at their previous company.
it’s a lot more work to make someone unlearn bad habits than teach them good
ones

2\. If you have 20+ years of experience you should really be at the management
or architect level. if you’re still a typical engineer (even senior) it may
indicate a defect.

3\. Our company wants people to work insane hours and maybe your family
prevents that

~~~
s73v3r_
The devil has plenty of advocates already.

"2\. If you have 20+ years of experience you should really be at the
management or architect level. if you’re still a typical engineer (even
senior) it may indicate a defect."

This is absolute crap; not wanting to be in management because you don't have
the skillset for it is not a defect. This idea needs to die a painful death.

------
tannhaeuser
In the sense that if you are "on Fb" you're old by definition I guess.

------
koolba
If I advertise a job in a church newsletter am I screening out Jews, Muslims,
and atheists?

How about a job in a predominantly black newspaper, am I screening out Latino
candidates?

How about a job ad in a predominantly lesbian one, is that screening straight
men?

What about one in a youth newsletter or Facebook demographically targeted ad,
is that screening out old people?

I’d argue intent is what matters. If the goal is to reach a demographic you
think will have fine candidates then proceed. If it’s purely exclusionary to
circumvent labor laws because you’re avoiding someone else then it’s a
problem.

The analysis for this should not be at the inbound funnel, but instead at the
net result based on the received candidate pool. That’s where you can see
whether an actual bias exists.

------
MaxBarraclough
I know almost nothing about the law here, but I imagine intent could be a big
part of it. I'm surprised the Bloomberg article seems to make no mention of
it.

I was also surprised to see this:

> Goldman wrote that, “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment
> purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps
> employers recruit and people of all ages find work.”

Why would it ever be acceptable to deliberately filter on the grounds of age?

~~~
wmeredith
What if they were targeting older workers as part of a diversity program?

~~~
bluGill
That is discrimination against younger workers.

Diversity programs are a double edged sword, there are groups that are under
represented. However every time you target them you lose the larger group that
you didn't target, and that group has great people.

~~~
rohansingh
Not making a judgement either way, but just a heads-up— there's actually no
federal prohibition against discriminating on the basis of youth. Age
discrimination laws only work in one direction.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Interesting. Here in the UK, the law can work both ways, with exceptions where
there is good reason.

[https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-
courts/discriminat...](https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-
courts/discrimination/protected-characteristics/age-discrimination/) ,
[https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/work-
learning/di...](https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/work-
learning/discrimination-rights/the-equality-act/)

