How long until the tech giants are held accountable for willfully skirting decades of civil rights legislation.

The way to get it done legally would be to group the ads for different age groups and have them either all shown/approved or none at all.

I have heard that companies like recent grads because they are (1) more malleable and (2) can be paid less. But neither of those reasons seem to me strong enough. I'm talking completely about the company's own interests.

Let's address the first reason: malleability. A recent grad presumably will adopt the company's culture faster, complain less, and in general pick up things sooner. Well, the hardest, meanest coworkers I've ever had were late twenties, early thirties. I've worked with people in their sixties, and they're sweet people. Even the grumpy old sysadmin had only a thin layer of spikes. After just a few days I could see through most of it, and he was 10 times more helpful than my other sysadmins. Not only was he softer (at least deep down) but he was smarter, having done it for decades. Even when he met a new problem, his keenly developed taste made him more likely to choose something that would be more maintainable long term.

Now let's address the second reason: salary. I am 10 times better than I was when I started. I know, because I still work with some of my code from back then, and I desperately want to rewrite it all. How much more does a senior developer make than a new hire? 50% more? Seems worth it to me. 100% more? 200% more? Still maybe worth it. And if some old fella can't get work at all, maybe he would settle for something between 50% and 100% more. I mean, why not at least make an offer?

It just don't make no sense. Other fields reward grayhairs. You see some sixty-year-old painter or architect or carpenter, you think he's probably pretty good. You see some straight-out-of-college twenty-something in . . . any other field, you think, "I sure hope he knows what he's doing."

She emphasized that she was looking for diversity, because, as she said, "the type of people on the other side of the table from us are different than they used to be, and they don't want to be dealing with a bunch of 65-year-old white guys. So those aren't the type of people we're looking for." That's pretty much a direct quote.

I was at a small company before I went to grad school. The company began working with a guy in his sixties who'd been laid off for a while and couldn't find work, even though he had a ton of experience. We brought him in on a contract basis, and his role gradually expanded as it became clear that he had both excellent technical knowledge and great people skills. He became a mentor to me and helped me out a ton. He's objectively better at our profession than I am in multiple dimensions, but right now I could find a new job ten times more easily than he could.

I'd like to start a business in 3 or 4 years, and I'm seriously considering going out of my way to target people like him. It'll be my competitive advantage.

No, that's... that's literally the opposite of 'helping people of all ages find work'.

If it is, then this seems like the problem in the article would be legal on the same basis.

Just because you can, does not mean you should. Most countries have fairly strict discriminatory laws. This falls afoul of the lot. You should not be able to use an advertising platform to pre-filter your applicants.

If you think I'm wrong then substitute "skin colour" or "disabled" or "sex" for "age" in this discussion. Substitute a combination of all of those ...

This is wrong. So wrong that the perpetrators should be considered criminal.

I'll add a few things about Sales.

Through an acquisition, I spent a few years at one of the largest enterprise software company. As a PM, I interacted with a lot of grey hair sales professionals--right from Key Account Directors to Sales Ops to Sales Engineers to National Account Managers. These were some of the finest. Thanks to their mentorship, I have not measured, but in 2 years, I became expert at navigating the buyers of software at large companies, doing calls, replying to RFPs, handling exceptions, and to a certain degree schmoozing.

Who else would you learn these from? Sales is not taught anywhere!

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, since even Propublica was able to put all the pieces together without any special government powers.)

Or is this a case where they're hoping Facebook's commitment to privacy for ad purchasers will end up shielding their illegal hiring practices?

People with 5 or less years of experience are much less likely to have a backbone. They're still getting over the school conditioning to complete whatever BS assignment needed to get the grade.

Many managers would prefer to have an apparently smoothly running operation than have honest feedback.

I once worked on a team with several people with 20+ years of experience. We got new management that did not appreciate that the experienced engineers were pointing out that pixie dust doesn't actually exist. They ended up "greening" the team. The new, much less experienced engineers that were brought on cranked out the code and learned lots of skills, but the product ended up dead within a couple of years. Those managers all got promoted though.

Rob if you are reading this you sound like an idiot. What were you thinking before uttering those words. Please do all of us a favor quit that VP role you are definitely not a leader material :).

https://donate.propublica.org

First, there's a culture thing - when a company is composed out of 20 year olds, it's natural for them to prefer working with other young people who they can relate to. That 40 year old job applicant, the one with the kids and the years of experience in companies that no longer exist doesn't look as relatable as someone your own age.

Second, there's ego. In a company in which junior and even mid level managers are 25-35 years old, who wants to hire a 45 year old "veteran" that has 10 years more experience? Managing someone more knowledgeable than you is a challenge. It's much easier to get a fresh graduate and mold him into the employee you want him to be. Ego-wise, it's much nicer being the mentor than the mentee.

There are many more aspects to this and I suspect that they play a more important role than at least some of the the purely rational reasons for ageism in our industry.

It is illegal to not hire someone on the basis of age, but what is so wrong about targeting ads at young people, for a job that older people would be unlikely to apply for anyway? That just seems like common sense. And getting outraged at not being shown ads, as though your constitutional right to have companies spend money to let you know about employment opportunities while you're frittering away time on Facebook were being violated, just screams entitlement to me.

Kind of like when some insurance co advertises some insurance product and that advert has to go through copy editors and legal to make sure it does not break any laws (representing product faithfully, not making false or dubious claims) before it gets okayed to be published.

In this case HR should consult with legal before putting up job announcements. Or, here specifically these cos should consult with legal before making that job req buy.

It's not obvious to me why employers should be able to use the implicit filtering traditional media provides, but not the explicit filtering new advertising platforms provide.

Well, iOS11 needs to ship on its annual schedule, non-negotiable. And the SVP will really complain if I ask for more money this quarter. So, cheap it is.

If a bridge falls down, it's really obvious and people die. If billions of computers become vulnerable to malicious actors and a few hundred or thousand people suffer dramatic personal damages, well that's a nice and quiet problem which will be quickly forgotten in the 24-hour news cycle.

More experience also means ability to see through management's bullshit.

> It just don't make no sense. Other fields reward grayhairs. You see some sixty-year-old painter or architect or carpenter, you think he's probably pretty good

The difference here is employee vs professional

Are you serious? This is HR 101. There is no manager in the US that works for a company with an HR department (1 person is fine, that's all we have, and she's part time) could ever NOT know this.

I've seen this backfire on the experienced person though. Pretty brutal to be a PhD in industry and find yourself out of a job at the age of 56 because you pointed out 'hey, this could kill people, maybe we should do an RCT before we go to market"

Not to defend the quote, but I wonder how else would you characterize “non-diversity” in this context? Specifically, if their current workforce composition is indeed “bunch of 60 something old white males” then how else would you express your desire to be diverse without referring to the current reality?

It's very simple - it is harder for younger managers to work with older subordinates.

The age-based hierarchies are deeply ingrained into virtually all cultures - "Elders are wise, respect your elders, etc." This makes arguing with (or reprimanding) someone who's older than you a doubly-uncomfortable task for many people. The reverse is also true - that is being bossed around by people significantly younger than yourself.

When everyone does a splendid job, the age difference is not a problem. But if someone is not pulling their weight, that when it starts to complicate the situation for everyone involved.

Exploit him or her with false promises. FTFY.

I thought the "hacker culture" would be supportive of the idea that "if you can do the job well, let's work together on solving interesting problems," rather than the cliche "would I want to grab a beer with this person?"

What happens 6 months after 9 out of 10 juniors you hired want to become team leads? Or they dissagree on the technology stack?

The advantages of younger people are numerous however: you can pay them less, make them work longer hours, make silly promises they will believe (think Elon Musk fooling his employees he's going to Mars).

1. It is the responsibility of the advertiser to ensure that the advertisement is legal. Facebook is certainly not the employer, nor is it registered or defined as an employment agency, so by the language of the law [1] it does not meet the definition of an applicable party.

2. If the advertisement itself did not _indicate_ any preference based on age, then it may not have violated the law even if it was disseminated according to age.

The second argument is tenuous because (my understanding is that) users could click the ad to plainly see the targeting criteria, but displaying this is not the doing of the employer, which is the only entity to which the language of the law seems to apply.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm "It shall be unlawful for an employer, labor organization, or employment agency to print or publish, or cause to be printed or published, any notice or advertisement relating to employment by such an employer or membership in or any classification or referral for employment by such a labor organi­zation, or relating to any classification or referral for employment by such an employment agency, indicating any preference, limitation, specification, or discrimination, based on age."

Company culture is not a valid reason for illegal discrimination.

Context matters a lot - such quotes are usually said in reference to a company's leadership team, and there's quite a bit of truth to them. When you look at the list of CEOs/Senior-Executives/Board-members at Fortune 500 companies, it's overwhelmingly middle-aged/old white men. I would consider that just as problematic as the age-discrimination that the article was referring to.

It doesn't matter how skilled a person is, or how much experience they have, in Silicon Valley you have a better chance of getting hired as a 20-something serial dog molester than a 50-year-old experienced tech.

And filtering out older people, while illegal, is so very easy to do to 99% of applicants by simply by looking at the year they got their undergrad degree.