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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 a

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 8y ago
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.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > exactly to enforce various uniformity and policy standards. Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of the "disparate treatment" the lawsuit alleges?
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    I believe the lawsuit is talking about someone using Facebook tools or other means to specifically target subgroups of the population to be able to see a job ad. As in, older candidates would not have even been allowed to know about the job in the first place, regardless of what pipeline a candidate is placed in. So no, I don't think the properties of a pipeline after a candidate has applied would be related to the lawsuit in the OP, though in principle they could still be relevant for ageism issues. I am interested in whether companies design candidate pipelines to be generically ageist or discriminatory in other ways, probably ways for which ageism laws are very hard to enforce. For example, I sincerely view the overwhelming shift to open-plan offices as partly motivated by widespread ageism for the purpose of trying to replace costly older employees with cheaper, more pliable new grads. I worked in a large education tech company some years ago, and they had a large office in Ohio where most of the HR staff for the whole nationwide HR operations was located. They also had limited IT staff, some regional sales staff, etc., but it was known primarily as "the HR office" because that is where those employees were co-located. Everyone in the Ohio office had private offices, and many of the staff had been with the company for a long time. Back in the late 00s, the company completely renovated the whole office building, knocking down walls and reorganizing it so that everyone had to use open-plan shared desk spaces. In one of the end of the year meetings, it was actually revealed that the company spent a ton of money to do this, upwards of $14MM if I remember correctly, and yet they did not have any plan to increase headcount there. Most of the HR staff were outraged, especially because many aspects of their jobs required private phone calls about confidential HR topics, or calls with job applicants, etc. Even though they needed the ability to make private calls almost every day, the tool they used to do it (private offices) was taken away at expense to the company and replaced with a bank of tiny 1-person phone booth rooms, that you had to compete for every day to book time slots for private calls. Someone even asked in the company's town hall Q&A why they would do this, and the CEO's response (most of us watched by web stream) was something like, "We are a technology company at heart, and every one of you is an innovator, and innovators love open spaces." Sure enough, within about 4 years, there had been huge turnover in older HR staff in Ohio, with most positions being replaced by entry level workers, and huge grumblings around the rest of the company that we were not getting the level of support from HR that we needed or had been getting previously. Really, it was just a restructuring ploy, with a slight bit of ageism (not sure if any part was illegal, but clearly in spirit it was the type of ageism we wish was illegal). In my mind, a lot of HR processes that are supposed to be fair "because they apply to everyone" are actually just engineered to be processes that would surreptitiously hurt older employees or candidates, even if not outright illegal to do so.
- lclarkmichalek 8y ago
  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.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    As a matter of great personal pride, I do suck at Javascript :)
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    > ... 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 8y ago
      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.)
master_yoda_1 8y ago
The facebook CEO is very famous for his quote by the way. https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smarter/ https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-sma...
- notacoward 8y ago
  Yeah, Zuck was a jerk in 2007. I suspect even he would admit that. To be fair, though, I was an even bigger jerk at that age and still am.
  - ohyes 8y ago
    He was a jerk in 2007, he still is, but he was one then too. Heck, he was probably a jerk in 2003 too.
    - cannonedhamster 8y ago
      This reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke.
- oblio 8y ago
  He'll get around. He's still young. Let's see what tune he sings when he's 45-50.
  - cableshaft 8y ago
    He might not change his tune too much. Unlike other people that turn 45-50, he'll be going into his mid 40s a billionaire and won't ever need to experience ageism against himself directly.
toephu2 8y ago
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).
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  If you grow a lot with people moving across the country to work where you're at, you'll be disproportionately young as a result.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > 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?

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

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.

notacoward 8y ago
> exactly to enforce various uniformity and policy standards. Wouldn't that be the exact opposite of the "disparate treatment" the lawsuit alleges?
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  I believe the lawsuit is talking about someone using Facebook tools or other means to specifically target subgroups of the population to be able to see a job ad. As in, older candidates would not have even been allowed to know about the job in the first place, regardless of what pipeline a candidate is placed in. So no, I don't think the properties of a pipeline after a candidate has applied would be related to the lawsuit in the OP, though in principle they could still be relevant for ageism issues. I am interested in whether companies design candidate pipelines to be generically ageist or discriminatory in other ways, probably ways for which ageism laws are very hard to enforce. For example, I sincerely view the overwhelming shift to open-plan offices as partly motivated by widespread ageism for the purpose of trying to replace costly older employees with cheaper, more pliable new grads. I worked in a large education tech company some years ago, and they had a large office in Ohio where most of the HR staff for the whole nationwide HR operations was located. They also had limited IT staff, some regional sales staff, etc., but it was known primarily as "the HR office" because that is where those employees were co-located. Everyone in the Ohio office had private offices, and many of the staff had been with the company for a long time. Back in the late 00s, the company completely renovated the whole office building, knocking down walls and reorganizing it so that everyone had to use open-plan shared desk spaces. In one of the end of the year meetings, it was actually revealed that the company spent a ton of money to do this, upwards of $14MM if I remember correctly, and yet they did not have any plan to increase headcount there. Most of the HR staff were outraged, especially because many aspects of their jobs required private phone calls about confidential HR topics, or calls with job applicants, etc. Even though they needed the ability to make private calls almost every day, the tool they used to do it (private offices) was taken away at expense to the company and replaced with a bank of tiny 1-person phone booth rooms, that you had to compete for every day to book time slots for private calls. Someone even asked in the company's town hall Q&A why they would do this, and the CEO's response (most of us watched by web stream) was something like, "We are a technology company at heart, and every one of you is an innovator, and innovators love open spaces." Sure enough, within about 4 years, there had been huge turnover in older HR staff in Ohio, with most positions being replaced by entry level workers, and huge grumblings around the rest of the company that we were not getting the level of support from HR that we needed or had been getting previously. Really, it was just a restructuring ploy, with a slight bit of ageism (not sure if any part was illegal, but clearly in spirit it was the type of ageism we wish was illegal). In my mind, a lot of HR processes that are supposed to be fair "because they apply to everyone" are actually just engineered to be processes that would surreptitiously hurt older employees or candidates, even if not outright illegal to do so.
lclarkmichalek 8y ago
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.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  As a matter of great personal pride, I do suck at Javascript :)
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  > ... 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 8y ago
    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.)

master_yoda_1 8y ago

The facebook CEO is very famous for his quote by the way. https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-smarter/ https://www.cnet.com/news/say-what-young-people-are-just-sma...

notacoward 8y ago
Yeah, Zuck was a jerk in 2007. I suspect even he would admit that. To be fair, though, I was an even bigger jerk at that age and still am.
- ohyes 8y ago
  He was a jerk in 2007, he still is, but he was one then too. Heck, he was probably a jerk in 2003 too.
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    This reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke.
oblio 8y ago
He'll get around. He's still young. Let's see what tune he sings when he's 45-50.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  He might not change his tune too much. Unlike other people that turn 45-50, he'll be going into his mid 40s a billionaire and won't ever need to experience ageism against himself directly.

toephu2 8y ago

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).

SamReidHughes 8y ago
If you grow a lot with people moving across the country to work where you're at, you'll be disproportionately young as a result.
notacoward 8y ago
> 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?