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Judges Reinstate Charges In Google Age Discrimination Suit
theodp writes "A California appeals court has reinstated former Stanford prof Brian Reid's age-discrimination suit against Google, ruling that a lower Court erred in siding with Google and rejecting Mr. Reid's claims. From the Court Decision (PDF): 'We conclude that Reid produced sufficient evidence that Google's reasons for terminating him were untrue or pretextual, and that Google acted with discriminatory motive such that a factfinder would conclude Google engaged in age discrimination.' As side notes, helping Reid make his case is CS Prof Norman Matloff, while Google's actions are being defended by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati of pretexting-was-not-generally-unlawful fame."
"'We conclude that Reid produced sufficient evidence that Google's reasons for terminating him were untrue or pretextual, and that Google acted with discriminatory motive such that a factfinder would conclude Google engaged in age discrimination.'"
:p
So much for "Do no evil" (of course, Google has acted contrary to that self-righteous and self-congratulatory credo for years now. Looks like in the future slashdotters will be able to refer to Google as 'convicted discriminator' in each and every Google story.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Disclaimer: I am a believer in nearly an absolute right of freedom of association, so I support the right to fire employees for stupid reasons including racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, failure to keep kosher/halal, etc.
At 54 he may be a real asset to the company in other areas of the company that aren't bleeding edge. He may be the sort of guy you want working on some very difficult, but not sexy, problems like getting better performance out of their products. Just because his ideas aren't new, doesn't mean that he is useless. To the contrary, his experience may be worth several times the vision of a young employee.
The IT industry deserves its problems. It deserves to have to deal with labor shortages if it is young to be a cult of youth. No other industry treats its senior engineers with as much contempt as much of IT. No mechanical engineering outfit in their right mind would trade a person with 30 years of solid experience for a whipper snapper or two with vision, but no experience. It would be product suicide.
So, do we now add this to the growing list of how Google is becoming evil? I don't see how you can avoid it.
Why can't a non-government institution be allowed to choose their employees however they see fit?
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Why do you call Google the good guys? Judge them by their actions, not by their words. Judge everybody by their actions, not by their words. While it has been 30+ years since I met Brian, he is really really really bright. One of the biggest problems in the computer / software space is that most of the practicioners tend to dismiss the highly experienced people as old fogeys. As a consequence, they keep repeating the mistakes of earlier generations of developers in different guises. I have experience if a few disciplines beyond SW. SW is more subject to snake-oil miricale claims than any other engineering / (hard) scientific field I know and it shows in the results. The amazing thing is how thoroughly they believe it. The information presented in the article suggests that Google is probably guilty of age discrimination, which is a federal offense. I have no sympathy for them. Other SW businesses should review their internal biases as well.
I'm fifteen and I suffer from a lot of age discrimination when looking for work. Most employers don't dare tell why they won't hire me. Others just say flat out that they are discriminating against me. My grandmother has the same problem. She was fired from her teaching job after she hit 84 for her age.
Stop discriminating!
We really need government affirmative action to stop the age discrimination.
*clap* Thank you. Being "young" has nothing to do with "being good at computers". Thats a cultural stereotype that is absolutely bunk, probably stemming from comments from people like Bill Gates, stating that "there is no good hacker over the age of 13." Being a hacker involves open mindedness-thats what hes talking about, because a child has an open mind. Open mindedness, however, doesn't always yield positive results unless you are a) lucky or b) experienced, especially in computer science/information technology. This dude deserves every penny he gets from them. Cultural eugenics d.n.e progress. btw, im 23
Go figure - someone who runs around saying "I'm cool I'm good I'm hip" is really just a bottomline driven corporate husk.
There is nothing "geeky" about your preference, it is just plain foolish. Implementing it will lead to companies holding on to underperforming employees (think Wally) for fear of government audits and other legal problems. It already happens (Wally did threaten the PHB with a lawsuit once), but, at least, the burden of proof is on the complainer... It would be both unfair and unproductive to make companies justify their firing decisions.
Imagine yourself having to file a form with the government, when you wish to switch a babysitter or the cleaning person. And why stop there? Should not your decision to switch from one supermarket to another by subject to audit? What if your reasons for switching are discriminatory — maybe, you are doing it, because you didn't like the cashier — because she is too old?
Contrary to many people's perception, there is no difference in principle between employers and the rest of us — we all participate in the market, buying something and selling something. Attempts to make the sellers of labor into a special group have no basis in fairness or legal principles — they are all purely vote-winning measures. In a typical democracy there are far more employees (sellers of labor) than others, so laws favor them to a large degree, fairness or not.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's a typo in your message, I think you meant
"As a fascist, I like to in favor of strong employment laws that give the government full audit power over every corporation's decision to fire any one whatsoever."
There ya go and for once, 'fascist' will be used accurately)
\u262D = \u5350
I can understand why a person would not be in favor of at-will employment laws, but keep in mind they also protect the employee to the extent that he can resign at any time without penalty by his employer. This should render any non-compete "agreements" useless, as they are not contracts and the employment is still at-will. Of course, this doesn't mean your hostile ex-employer won't try to haul you into court to prove it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It seems that besides being a good engineer you have to be "culturally fit".
I kinda agree: a pessimistic or unsociable person could endanger the spirit and the enthusiasm of others. I would not like to work with a highly intelligent but depressive person, if his depression would affect my everyday mood. Not to mention if the guy is the PM.
On the other hand, I would be fucking upset for being fired because of not fitting into the company's social standards.
Flamebait? Cm'on! Strong laws that give the government full audit power over corporations hiring practices? That's almost the definition of fascism and especially Mussolini's corporativismo. Open a fucking history book before you moderate.
\u262D = \u5350
It's as good a reason as any. I know whenever I interview someone, I try to get a feel for what they'd be like to work with. I'll pick a less qualified candidate with a better manner over a more qualified jackass. It's not just their output you have to consider...It's everyone's output.
Corporate culture is more of an ephemeral. They clearly want people to fit in and participate, and that's understandable. I think, however, that they need to be more up-front about it.
I work with a lot of people who are older than me, and it's definitely a drain. Not because they're any less competent, but more because there is enough of a generational disconnect that we can't really associate from a common viewpoint.
I don't think per se that Google is ageist, but I do think that they're cliquish and snobby, and like all such groups, rather than just saying, "Nothing personal, but you're not one of us" they invent a reason, in this case, the guy's age.
I agree with some of the above posters. The guy was an idiot to leave his university job. You chase the dollar signs, you lose.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I don't work for google, so please don't try and say that I do.
... you can't recite from memory what others could. You may not like that they want you to do so, but that's their choice and criteria.
Your argument is that of a strawman. You claim they are discriminating based on age because
I know quite a few folks who have interviewed at google, and a couple who were offered jobs. The interview is the same for everyone. It's very similar at Amazon.com as well, BTW, if you're interviewing for a senior position. One of my friends made sure to cram for about 2 weeks prior to his Amazon interview for this reason. He actually said it was the hardest interview process he ever went through.
And I'm not talking about 20-somethings straight out of school - I'm past the half-way point myself and so are most of the people I associate with (Well, except for some of the "kids" I work with these days, LOL).
- Roach
Let me fix that for you:
"I don't have a problem with discrimination as long as I am not the one being discriminated against."
There that's more like it.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
That's not age discrimination. If they are looking for specific qualities for their workforce that you don't meet, that's not their fault. Whether it's intelligent of them to rule out a large number of capable and qualified individuals, well that's another matter. Practicality and legality are two separate ballparks.
The point he is making, which I concur with since I too am a rather succesful in the realm of IT member of the older-fart generation, is that the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether).
So yes, if that are Google's "choice and criteria" then the lawsuit is quite justified indeed.
See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything.
Again, you may not like how they are doing things, and that is a very valid opinion
I don't know if you interview anyone for your company or have done so lately, but I do and have to tell you
There are a LOT of folks who were employed during the boom who really don't have a solid foundation and have no clue about sorting, hashing, etc. Stuff that I consider pretty basic knowledge if you're interviewing to be an engineer. While we don't look for hard code examples from memory, but we do expect that the concepts are there, readily available in memory, and able to be drawn out on a whiteboard. You'd be amazed at how many people can't do that.
I agree on principle that knowing how something works and where to go to get the specifics is every bit if not more important than being a walking textbook, but that's not what they've decided (right or wrong). It's their company, they can do that.
But saying that it's "age discrimination" is silly IMO.
- Roach
As I figured. Most "age discrimination" (taking age as a negative) is really just a case where the employer has some obscenely huge financial disincentive to keep the employee on, and the employee was aware the whole time the employer would eventually be in this position. But then -- why negotiate a benefit that gives your employer such a perverse incentive structure to begin with?
Another example is the employees who get "fired for being old" but then you find out their pension benefits accrue in such away that on one day, the current actuarial value of the benefits shoots up by hundreds of thousands of dollars because of a step-up. Since almost no one's work is worth that much *per day*, then obviously it's not hatred of the old, but an objective financial penalty. But since some people have a hard time compartmentalizing the "pension benefit" of a job, they don't understand this.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
So yes, if that are Google's "choice and criteria" then the lawsuit is quite justified indeed. Wouldn't that also mean that a requirement of "10+ years experience" is age discrimination because it prevents a 25-year-old from getting the job? In fact, an experience requirement could be arguably worse, since nothing actually prevents a 60-year-old applicant from knowing how to write search algorithms, while it's pretty much impossible for a 25-year-old to have 15 years of professional experience.
By the example you chose, you show how absurd discrimination, in the sense it's usually used, actually is in terms of hiring practices. Google doesn't discriminate against athletes at all (AFAIK) -- if you happen to be a skateboarder who's also a good programmer, they'll hire you without caring about what else you do with your time. OTOH, if they do care about your skateboarding, they're idiots. Unfortunately, in some specific categories -- historically the big ones have been race, sex, religion, and yes, age; this last being particularly pronounced in the tech world -- this idiocy has reached institutional levels, which is why we have anti-discrimination laws. If one company refuses to hire older workers, or finds excuses to fire them, regardless of their level of actual ability, it's not actually that big a deal. When the entire industry does so, it's a much bigger problem; and "we the people" have decided that the problem this creates has reached the level where it must be addressed by law.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
fwiw, I don't think I've lost a job offer, in the past, due to not 'cramming'. ok, so google was the first, I guess, for me ;)
I believe in truth-in-advertising and so I NEVER cram before an interview. I show them my thinking skills and the fact that I can solve job-relevant problems well.
if I can't get a job based on who I am, I don't really want it based on some just-memorized buzzwords that impressed the interviewers.
I know what you're saying and most people do seem to agree with the 'cram before interview' method but it just doesn't seem like you are being honest with your self or your employer.
its interesting to note that the filter works both ways. perhaps its better that I not work for google. I don't want to be at some place that wants only young abusable ('you must work ALL waking hours for us') eggheads and shuns those of us with a few grays in our beards.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
...the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether). I don't think that testing a programmer's understanding of basic algorithms is out of place.Memorizing stuff verbatim is what _bad_ schools are about. Good schools teach ideas, not technology. There's nothing wrong with teaching students how to look at an algorithm, break it down, understand it and implement it. That's an incredibly useful skill to learn and practice. There's no better way to teach a student how to do this than to make them do it with a few simple algorithms (oh, I don't know, sorting algorithms perchance?).
There's also nothing wrong with trying to find out which "snotty nosed kids" are better than the others at understanding algorithms (you could call them the 'smart ones'). A reasonable way (not perfect, but reasonable) way of doing this is to present them with a few _basic_ algorithms that most students run across in school (oh, I don't know, sorting algorithms perchance?). See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything. Assume an accomplished architect is faced with a task (let's say preparing for an interview with Google). Being 'accomplished' we can assume that they have a strong ability to "locate information and use it effectively". How does that ability translate to this context? It seems that they would research likely interview questions, gather resource material, and 'use it effectively', aka study in this context. When studying is combined with a modicum of passion and diligence (also important to being accomplished), the end result might be quite similar to 'cramming'.
You don't become an accomplished architect without the ability to learn (or forget, and relearn) something. You also don't become accomplished without recognizing when this is necessary. Whether you're fresh out of school or whether you've been around for years, it doesn't matter - if you're not willing to find out that something is a test and study for it(or cram, if you have to), don't expect Google to hire you. I certainly wouldn't.
What's in a Sig?
I worked for Brian Reid at DEC; he's brilliant and few can rival his record of accomplishments. And based on my own experience interviewing at Google, I'd have to say he's 100% right on in this suit.
I had occasion to interview recently with both VMWare (in 2005) and Google (in 2006). The two experiences were as different as night and day.
At VMWare, every interviewer who met with me arrived on time, demonstrated that he or she had read my resume, and asked pertinent questions about my experience and skills. (The interviewers ranged in apparent age from early 20's to late 30's.) I was asked to demonstrate, at the whiteboard, how I would design a particular IT application: server architecture; logical data model; object hierarchy. I was offered the job.
At Google, the recruiter spent the first few minutes looking for an available conference room. The interviewers were from a separate organization, not the one with the opening I was interviewing for, and both gave every indication of having been handed my resume on their way into the room. (Everyone I met appeared to be in about their mid-20's.) The first interviewer asked me to code a fixed-length circular-array object for which he could not name a real-world application. The second asked me to solve a fantasy logic puzzle ("You've got a circular jail with 100 cells...") that, I learned later, came straight from the Games page of the current issue of Make magazine. Neither was particularly articulate (one, to be fair, was not a native English speaker), although they were both quite friendly.
I was not asked to come back by Google, and was not disappointed by the news. TANSTAAFL, indeed.
BTW, I'm 42. And I'm getting out of IT to become a counseling therapist.
(I'll be at the Blue Chalk anniversary party; bring your copy of the Slash book if you want an autograph.)
Simpletoneity, n. -- The phenomenon of many people all doing the same stupid thing at the same time.
You have to stay abrest of trends to be relevant, that is true for any subfield of engineering, and for any creative field also. But the good news is that this task is actually easier now than it ever has been -- e.g., Wikipedia will give you an un-hyped description of basically any buzzword. You can stay on top of the alphabet soup with just a few minutes of reading.
Their interview questions suck, but it probably stems more from the company's early days than some sinister plot to keep out older engineers. Early on they were all about data structures and algorithms. Now they are huge and I chalk it up to the initial culture that they haven't broadened their interview process. The people in at Google passed the interview process, so the company as a whole is self-selected to continue it.
ps: Using capitals would make your posts easier to read.
Cringely sensationalizes and hates Microsoft, so take his writings with huge helpings of salt.
Allen remained on the Microsoft board for years, and kept being on friendly terms with Gates (they attended many Sonics vs Trailblazers games together). There was no lawsuit. Quite unlike this Google case.
If what you say is true, then Google did do something extremely "evil" in my book.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000