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Age-Insight for LinkedIn — Get anyone's age on LinkedIn.
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@rrhoover Awesome question! ...The first time I showed this to one of my friends she told me: "you're just making age discrimination easier" ... In some cases that's unfortunately true, but I don't feel I'm opening a "pandora's box" with this extension.
Anyone who wants to actively discriminate can do it even without this extension.
Now, to answer your question. I don't believe we should encourage employers to use age as a factor when making a hiring decision. However, I believe employers who are open and inclusive could benefit from having this information. The age of a person is a powerful insight that can put a lot of things in context, but I know sometimes this line can be crossed even without having the intention to do it.
The best way to use this extension is to be aware of which are your goals before using it. If you're going to use it as a shortcut to consider or not a candidate, you're certainly doing something blameworthy and you should re-evaluate your principles as a professional.
UPDATE: "Age-Insight is no longer Available" https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
@whoisjuan I agree with @rrhoover. Clever.
Many extension makers seem to make their money by selling users' viewing histories to 3rd parties.
Are you making any of your users' data available to 3rd parties? Will you?
How are you generating revenue?
@andrewwarner @rrhoover Andrew. To be honest I have no intention to monetize it and/or make any data collected by the extension available to third parties. Also the costs associated with maintaining and supporting this extension are very low so there's no need to generate revenue to cover that either.
The only reason why I created this, and why I work on similar side projects is just to put myself out there and let people in the tech community learn about me. It's my own way of doing networking and triggering conversations around my brand as a professional. I just want to tell people "Hey, I created this and it might controversial, useful, weird, clever, etc.. but I just want to show you how well I can execute a product discovery, conceptualization, implementation and launch....Maybe in the future if you are thinking about a product professional you would think about me...."
I don't know if this makes sense, but this is pretty much the only reason why I do it.
UPDATE: "Age-Insight is no longer Available" https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
@rrhoover Of course not. This is totally unfair to young people who have rapidly gained experience working for startups. You can easily cram in 5 years of experience in a rapidly accelerated amount of time because you're learning and doing so quickly. And while recruiters, who are already pretty close-minded traditionalists, may give someone who looks young a chance, they'll definitely screw them in the compensation negotiation because they're young. Ageism is a very real problem. #Injustice
UPDATE:
Hi Product Hunters,
I just wanted to say that I share many of the concerns that were raised in this thread, in Twitter, and in some media articles. For this reason, I decided to shut down "Age-Insight" and stop all the distribution and support for the extension.
Thanks for being part of the debate and contributing to it with your thoughtful comments.
Best,
Juan J. Ramirez
There's no way I'd install this extension. All it's going to do is play on my cognitive biases around age. Why do I need to know someone's age? They could be 20 or 50, I'm more concerned about who they are as a human rather than how long they've been walking the earth.
Another product that doesn't solve any real problem. LinkedIn is a recruiting platform; why would you add another unnecessary dimension (age) to the recruiters' decision making? We as a society are already ageist as it is. Lets create products to make the world a better place!
I think that this makes ageism vastly easier. While an unscrupulous employer could figure it out with some effort, that takes explicit action so you really have to want to discriminate to figure it out. The ease at which this makes that info available causes some problem in this context I think (at both ends of the ageism spectrum too old/too young), where since it's so easy, there's 'no harm' in seeing that data, which the becomes inextricably linked to the candidate in the viewers mind.
I also wonder if having this extension installed could be a liability issue. Would it's presence make ageism claims by disgrunted former employees or people that were not hired but over 40 (protected class) seem to have more merit even if they're unfounded?
Very clever and well-executed extension, but I can't think of any purpose other than the enablement of age discrimination.
I made sure to remove my graduation year from LinkedIn early on after college to prevent this. It fooled Age-Insight too... my age is now listed as "N.A"
@sammmer Hey Sam. Yes I think this is an open and on-going debate. If this extension ends up being something that will help people to be aware of the information they share in their social media (particularly in LinkedIn where many people seems to be very open with their personal info) ... then I'll be more than happy with that result.
UPDATE: "Age-Insight is no longer Available" https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
Looks a great tool. I tried on few and liked it. Not sure if it is right or not, but some data is better than no data.
@whoisjuan nice work! What did you find to be the most telling features to estimate age?
@ryanmac definitely education. After that their first job year can also provide good insight to estimate their age.
UPDATE: "Age-Insight is no longer Available" https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
@whoisjuan I'd love to see this for Twitter. Of course the data points are a lot less structured. I tried a couple years back based on language characteristics but its predictive value was limited. Are there any features you track that might also work for Twitter?
@ryanmac Maybe their name might be helpful. Also traversing the links on their profile to try to find their LinkedIn profile and actually extract the information from there, but that can be challenging.
UPDATE: "Age-Insight is no longer Available" https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
@ryanmac It looks like it's just based on undergrad graduation year, so for friends who finished college later it's completely inaccurate. But still interesting.
Hi Product Hunters,
I'm Juan J. Ramirez and I'm the developer of this extension. I created this because I'm always wondering how old is someone while I'm browsing their LinkedIn profile (I'm curious to know the age of people who has a similar background and profile as me).
The calculation to estimate the age is actually very simple. I used some data points (mainly education and professional experience dates) and when available I used other data to fine-tune the calculation. I'm currently using some data sets but also trying to build new ones to make calculations more accurate and try to estimate an age even when there's not enough data.
This is not open-source but I definitely can make it open-source if you want to collaborate and help me to make it better. You can send me a DM in Twitter. ;)
UPDATE: "Age-Insight is no longer Available" https://www.producthunt.com/tech...
People are already ageist as it is. This will be used for negative use cases, imho.
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