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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."
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 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.
Go figure - someone who runs around saying "I'm cool I'm good I'm hip" is really just a bottomline driven corporate husk.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.