Age-Insight for LinkedIn

@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

@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...

@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.