When It Comes to Age Bias, Tech Companies Don’t Even Bother to Lie
HubSpot’s CEO and co-founder, Brian Halligan, explained to the New York Times that this age imbalance was not something he wanted to remedy, but in fact something he had actively cultivated. HubSpot was “trying to build a culture specifically to attract and retain Gen Y’ers,” because, “in the tech world, gray hair and experience are really overrated,” Halligan said. I gasped when I read that. Could anyone really believe this? Even if you did believe this, what CEO would be foolish enough to say it out loud? It was akin to claiming that you prefer to hire Christians, or heterosexuals, or white people. I assumed an uproar would follow. As it turned out, nobody at HubSpot saw this as a problem. Halligan didn’t apologize for his comments or try to walk them back. The lesson I learned is that when it comes to race and gender bias, the people running Silicon Valley at least pay lip service to wanting to do better — but with age discrimination they don’t even bother to lie.
(tags: hiring startups tech ageism age hubspot gen-y discrimination)
Gaeltacht development company defends sale of State seaweed company to Canadian multinational
FFS. Fine Gael government sells off more of our national assets for cheap:
Mr John O’Sullivan, chief executive of Bioatlantis Ltd in Co Kerry called on the Oireachtas environment committee to investigate the sale, or ask the Oireachtas public accounts committee to do so. Mr O’Sullivan said that his company had made a bid of €5.7 million for Arramara, comprising €1.5 million initially and €4.2 million in the post-investment phase, and had been given just 12 days to prepare the bid. He understood that two foreign companies – the Canadian Acadian Seaplants and French company Setalg – had been given over a year to prepare their bids. He said that Acadian’s bid was €1.8 million, and the French bid was €2 million, for initial purchase, and that the rating was “changed” when the final bids were in. No details had been released and the lack of transparency was “frightening” in relation to the final sale, he said.
(tags: seaweed acadian setalg arramara bioatlantis government ireland selloff gaeltacht unag)
-
Comprehensive surveillance appears as seemingly inexpensive because it is a solution that scales thanks to technology: troubleshooting at the press of a button. Directly linked with the aim of saving more and more, just as with the State in general. But classic investigative work, which is proven to work, is expensive and labor intensive. This leads to a failure by the authorities because of a faith in technology that is driven by economics.
(tags: tech surveillance techdirt terrorism brussels crypto going-dark)
So you’re thinking of coming to Dublin…
A really excellent list of stuff to do/see/eat/drink in Ireland, from Colin @ 3FE. top notch recommendations! (also, god I need to get out more)
Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn’t What It Used to Be
EFF weigh in on the internet of shit:
Customers likely didn’t expect that, 18 months after the last Revolv Hubs were sold, instead of getting more upgrades, the device would be intentionally, permanently, and completely disabled. …. Nest Labs and Google are both subsidiaries of Alphabet, Inc., and bricking the Hub sets a terrible precedent for a company with ambitions to sell self-driving cars, medical devices, and other high-end gadgets that may be essential to a person’s livelihood or physical safety.
(tags: nest legal tech google alphabet internetofshit iot law)
Primary Online Database: POD now (mostly) not compulsory (for now)
Ever since the introduction of the Primary Online Database of schoolchildren by the Department of Education, the Department and its Minister have been eager to point out that any parent who refused to allow a child’s data to be transferred would see that child’s education defunded. Well, for all children other than this week’s crop of new Junior Infants, that threat has now collapsed. This is despite the Minister and her department having claimed that the drastic threat of defunding was because it simply wasn’t possible to give grants without a child’s full data being transferred. […] Oddly, as the prospect of defunding the education of 30% of the nation’s children in the run up to an election loomed large, the Department discovered it could, after all, pay for a child’s education without all its POD data.
(tags: pod law ireland data-protection privacy children school)
Wired on the new O’Reilly SRE book
“Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems”, by Chris Jones, Betsy Beyer, Niall Richard Murphy, Jennifer Petoff. Go Niall!
(tags: google sre niall-murphy ops devops oreilly books toread reviews)