I don't understand how this could be a lawful arrangement. How do you run a company that structurally precludes hiring people with families?
These jobs don't "preclude hiring people with families". If a person with a family worked there he'd probably do the same thing as the oil rig worker - live on site and skype his family at night.
The only difference I can see between this job and oil rig work is that the software guy probably has a few recruiters/week emailing him opportunities he likes more.
Also, pipeline workers need to work on remote sites. Software developers do not. That will matter at trial.
It's hard to make out a disparate impact claim to begin with. Doing so on the basis that you don't like the living arrangements would seem impossible. What limiting principle would the courts apply that wouldn't result in legal liability for every company that doesn't allow employees to telecommute?
In practice, people do casually ask where candidates live (usually to find out if they require relocation), but companies also don't tend to select only employees willing to live in a dormitory.
Requiring employees to work at a particular job site is uncontroversial; in fact, it's overwhelmingly the norm for all employment. The same thing is absolutely not true of requiring employees to live at a particular location.
You would first have to establish that that duty has a statistically significant harmful effect on persons over 40 that it does not have on other groups. This will not be easy, people under 40 have families, too!
It will be further complicated by the fact that the same effect occurs simply by virtue of a workplace being in a remote, hostile environment, or having work hours incompatible with a typical family life, requiring a limiting principle, which you have not provided.
If you pass that hurdle, Meta would have the opportunity to establish that the policy is based on a reasonable factor other than age. The court would have to find that Meta's policy and/or its purposes are unreasonable. That seems unlikely.
If you are not speaking of discriminating based on where people live, then I have no idea why you are bringing up employers supposedly avoiding asking where people live. It makes no contextual sense, and has no relevance to this discussion. Asking people where they live is not, in itself, discriminatory or unlawful.
It would be great if you would detail exactly why you think Meta's policy may be unlawful, and do so by reference to actual law, not apparently-random HR policies that you don't seem to want to explain the supposed basis of.
I don't understand - what does the "norm" have to do with anything? Are you asserting that some underlying legal principle demands that all employers stay within spitting distance of the average?
If not, I don't see how this policy would even fall within some sort of disparate impact theory. As far as I know, disparate impact lawsuits apply to selection processes. I.e. if the employer hires fewer members of a protected class, a process is bad. But if fewer members of a protected class accept job offers, that doesn't fit into disparate impact.