To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter Tue Apr 9 18:07:32 PDT 2013 Pat Thibodeau of Computerworld has posted a blog summarizing my comments the other day on the age issue at Facebook, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/PlanetSandberg.txt You may recall that among other things, I cited Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's flat statement there is not a single unemployed CS person in the nation, and that they are all making very high salaries. Those who are unemployed or underemployed (e.g. the software contractors with fewer gigs than before) and those who have simply been forced out of the field, find her remark outrageous. Most of the CW blog is a summary of what I wrote in the above posting. But it does mention a recent NYT op-ed expressing the view that employers are shooting themselves in the foot by filtering out the older applicants. Thibodeau says, "Facebook probably isn’t hiring young people to save money. Its founder is only 28." There are a couple of comments that need to be made here. First, as I said in my posting, Zuckerberg has stated publicly that older programmers are not as good. I would strongly dispute that. Though again I must point out that no employer should hire a weak or even mediocre programmer, young or old, as they get in the way, I submit that in my own case, I'm a better programmer than ever. My long experience in the field enables me to learn new programming languages faster, track down bugs faster, better avoid introducing bugs in the first place, and better plan out what I want my code to do, compared to in the past. Second, though Zuckerberg may not have money in mind, his HR Department probably DOES try to filter out the older workers on cost grounds. This is pretty standard for HR, and I doubt that Facebook is any exception. I've known a lot of people who applied to Facebook and did or did not get job offers, and I would say the quality of the two groups is similar. Anecdotally, my observation has been that the ones who didn't get an offer (or even a phone interview) have tended to be age 30 or above. A look at the images on Facebook's Web page, confirmed by my various visits to the company, is consistent with that. Zuckerberg may be entitled to his prejudices and Sandberg to her ignorance (though Zuck might be vulnerable to a lawsuit), but for them to put forth this big image of a tech labor shortage is just not proper. As some of you may know, Zuckerberg has started his own immigration lobbying initiative. Norm Archived at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/FacebookAge.txt