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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."
I just turned 40 and am a well paid system administrator. Is it really feasible to work in technology past the age of 50? It's harder to keep up with every new tech and some of the buzzwords of today are really annoying. Most social networking sites feel like reality TV.
At Stanford tenured people retire after 70. Two of my neighbors are Stanford professors and over 80, they both retired at 70+, but still go every day to work, publish lots of scientific papers, have research grants and hire other people to work for them, etc. Sure thery dont receive salaries from Stanford anymore but otherwise they are like any tenured Stanford employees retired or not, have nice offices, unrestricted accounts, secretaries, etc.
The guy should have stayed at Stanford. He wanted big money from Google and got what he deserved.
as someone who's a bit on the 'more experienced' level (ok, so I'm older middle age...) and who applied for a job at google, I can DEFINITELY say that from my perspective, there is age discrimination. very clearly. I saw it during several (I did have a few) interviews there.
the questions were 'schoolboy' quizzed. its been decades (literally) since I had to recreate a search or sort algorithm by hand. and you know what? for the field I'm in (network management) I have not HAD to re-do existing algs. not once in my career! we usually BUILD on existing ideas, not waste time re-doing perfectly good wheels.
when I answered 'I'd search for some sample code or an existing idea, then take parts of it and use what makes sense' they didn't like that answer! when they asked me math (arithmetic) style questions, I said I'd find a calculator and punch in the data. in other words, I know HOW to get the answer but I rarely (these days) walk around with literal data floating around upstairs. I keep POINTERS to data, not data. isn't that the better way? it surely has served me well enough in my 20+ years in the field.
the whole strategy of their interviews are all wrong! ALL wrong. they might work great for the snotnose college hire, but its completely wrong for us seasoned pros.
google is simple NOT setup for older guys. I saw it when I was there on campus for the live interviews and I sensed it all thruout during my phone screens.
they don't value thinking skills as well as they seem to value rote data recall, which clearly favors the young and those who very recently finished school and have it the algs still recallable line-by-line in their heads.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Don't worry, pretty soon Google will be getting old in Internet years and we will soon discriminate against it for a younger "more hip" search engine.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
Fwiw, I was a senior engineer at amazon... And while I worked with some great people I also worked with some morons. As the years passed we were forced to ignore the old hiring rules and increasingly pressured to hire lame candidates because they knew a mgr or director. And during that time much of the real talent left the company.. It ceased to become a fun place to work.
For example you said:
They want a new search algorithm. They don't want you buidling on something that already exists. Googlging to find how to write a new algorithm ain't going to cut it. You need to have that in your basic skills.This is not age discrimination. Your skills just do not match what they need.
"they might work great for the snotnose college hire,"
I worked there and no, it really doesn't.
The interviews at Google, with extremely rare exceptions, are simply pissing matches. You're there to be impressed by how clever the interviewer is, not to prove why you're qualified for the job. Which goes a long way to explaining why Google itself has never produced anything really interesting. Check for yourself, all the cool stuff was purchased and brought in. As for the founding idea, it already existed and without the fortuitous tie to purchased ad services, would have sunk under the weight of no revenues.
Google is a run like a club house, not a business, and the frontline maagers I worked with, and I worked with a lot of them in many different groups, quite frankly could not find their ass with both hands.
And this could be attributed to sour grapes but remember, I actually worked there. Once I realized how quickly my skills were deteriorating in that environment I found a real job with some true software pros. The irony of the whole thing being, those who have not gotten the job there and are serious about their profession are better off having been snubbed.
Oh, and for the good engineers in Google, and there are quite a few, they're very sorry about the way you were treated. It's frustrating for them too.
He didn't get tenure at Stanford. Probably because he was too practical and commercial for Stanford CS of that period. (Back then, Stanford CS was part of Arts and Sciences and dominated by logicians and "expert systems" types. CS was moved to the School of Engineering around 1985). So he went to DEC, which used to have a very good research facility in Palo Alto. He ran their network R&D. When Compaq (remember Compaq? IBM PC clones?) bought DEC, they phased out software research, because Compaq didn't do much software. So he went to Bell Labs in Silicon Valley, which also shut down as Bellcore retreated from research.
Google hired him because he'd done AltaVista, the first big search engine. (Which, amusingly, was done as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU.)
It's no longer fun being a theoretical computer scientist in Silicon Valley. All the great corporate labs are gone. Along with the ones mentioned above, HP Labs, PARC, and IBM Almaden have also tanked. Google, Microsoft, and Intel still do a little theoretical work, but not that much.
In a way it is, but that is an artifact of the types of positions for which the "10+ year experience" employees are supposed to be hired. What should occur, and what the Labour Laws are aligned with, is that the "entry level" positions of companies are filled (statistically speaking - exceptions are always possible) with young, bushy-tailed whipper-snappers with next to no experience and the "senior" positions with older farts.
But no company should use age as a criteria, only the experience/skill set and match those to appropriate positions accordingly with the rather common sense rules of workforce.
Not if you tailor your interview specifically to the types of knowledge expected of school kids. An older expert in the field will be unlikely to respond to that sort of assault positively because he will quickly realise what is going on and assume, correctly, that he is not wanted for other, social reasons.
The anti-discrimination movement is, in some way, promoting discrimination.
My friend planned to quit.
The IT budget is under the dreaded "expense" word on balance sheets. Expenses are the bad neighborhood of the accounting balance sheet.
That's a brilliant point you bring out suggesting that "potential loss" be brought into account. If potential loss evaluation is such a rare concept in today's management world, should it then be patentable?
Then a couple of years ago. I lived your story. Too old. Younger person made mistakes. Blamed on me. How dare you, bye bye from management. Know what? That manager in turn was deemed too expensive and "bye byed" himself by more management. Are we are getting back to the tried and true Roman galley ship management style?
Thanks,
Jim
They want a new search algorithm. They don't want you buidling on something that already exists. Googlging to find how to write a new algorithm ain't going to cut it. You need to have that in your basic skills.
This is not age discrimination. Your skills just do not match what they need.
actually, I didn't even disclose which kind of job I was applying for.
I'm an "IT" guy (again, network management) and I'm -very- senior in my field. without drudging up my resume, just take me at my word for just a few minutes. please tell me (if you have been in this field) how being able to re-code a tree-walk or tree-insert from memory, in 10 minutes or less, on a whiteboard is relevant to solving problems in my field (they didn't even allow me a proper emacs or vi session, which is also VERY artificial if they are trying to test my ability to work out problems, live, in front of them).
in my field, you care more about polling devices for health and there are a whole SLEW of questions that I'd ask about 'polling science' (yes, there's a whole lot to polling and being smart about it in large scale networks). you care about database issues since when you poll and collect data, you have to store and search that effectively. I know my sql pretty well and THAT is entirely the level that us netmgt types live at. I've written entire NMS systems and agents, as well, but they didn't ask spudnutz about that. they asked mundane stupid offtopic questions that just wreaked of artificiality. I could tell almost none of them that interviewed me even spent any real time in the field DOING network management.
so, fwiw, I know my field very well and have been at most of the big name players here in the valley. the google interview was the worst experience of my professional career, in all aspects of how it was handled. it was more a show of how 'cool' the company was and but NOTHING about the actual job you'd be doing there. which I found very unsettling. why should I consider leaving a good job (btw, they called me - I didn't call them) when google would not even tell me WHAT, exactly, I'd be working on?
they are guilty of having a 'silicon valley pre-bubble' attitude. I don't think this will scale well, as we say.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
But you could do it right? You are smart enough to recreate a simple algorithm from first principles, on the fly? This is not about memory. This is about whether or not you're so dependent on copying code that you've forgotten how to actually think. It sounds to me like you thought the questions were beneath you, and I'm sure that the interviewers picked up on that.
You complain that they don't value thinking skills as much as they value recall, and yet your response to their search question was "I'd look it up" - i.e. retrieve it from a memory store - and not "Let me think about that and do it right now". And doing math is not memory either. Your complaint and your facts simply do not match up.
There are plenty of "seasoned pros" who are actually "seasoned script kiddies", i.e. just very very good at searching, copying and pasting, and there are "seasoned pros", who were extremely smart snot noses when they were young, and are now extremely smart old-farts. And then there are old-farts who expect to be treated differently because they are older and somehow superior human beings. If I was Google, I'd be looking for the smart ones who can work with the little-uns.
Uh huh. He's smart so he can't ever do anything stupid? I've known people so smart that they were often mistaken for being mentally retarded...Intelligence doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being able to make a good decision, and often the smartest people are hopeless when it comes to day to day decision making.
In short, smart people do stupid things all the time; if you haven't noticed this, you don't know many smart people.
He got pursued by a young, hip company, to fix a specific problem. That would ring alarm bells for me, especially if I'm upper middle aged, and I've (apparently) just left the lab environment. I personally have been hired full time to do project work...The reality of it is, that project is your job, and when it's done, so are you. It's definitely a less secure choice.
Now he's out of a job and stuck in a lawsuit against a wealthy, well-lawyered company, which probably means he doesn't have people lining up to hire him. The lawsuit isn't going all that well either...I mean, this is a victory for him, because now the suit can actually go forward, but that they got it dismissed at all suggests he's got a long fight ahead. They'll keep him tied up in it for years to come.
Just a fricking mess. So yea, I think it was a dumb decision. Mind you, if I'd been cheated out of a share of the google IPO (and fired 9 days before it is cheated, no matter how you cut it), I'd sue too.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'd say it really depends on the individual. For myself, technology is a lifestyle, and as such I'm continually learning new things and (doing my best at) staying up-to-date. I know a lot of old hats at any jobs - and tech is a big one for this - that have the attitude of "this is the way it's always been" or have the assumption that "because of my experience, I know best." The problem is, that these individuals lose the will to learn, which can be death in the IT industry.
Where I work, a lot of the long-term techs, who were trained on Novell Netware, insist that it is better than the Linux systems being implemented. One in particular will take every opportunity to point at a server problem, or whatever, and say "this isn't an issue with Novell" (while completely ignoring that the issue might actually be user/admin-error, or that there were a host of *other* issues with the previous system). Now that Novell has gone to Linux that's quieted down a bit, but it still comes frighteningly close to email flamewars between her and the pro-linux techs. Personally I'm all for replacing the Novell boxen because they're old, cost licensing fees, and don't support newer hardware (in other words when the physical equipment fails, it's toast), but try to step to aside when the vitriol starts spewing back and worth. The fact is though, that people who were "trained with system X" are often unwilling to try "alternative Y."
In some cases this is good, because there are plenty of people that want to try "Y, Z, and A B C 1 2 3" and are constantly hopping on to new bandwagons. The voice of reason, and experience, can prevail indicating the need for solid cost/benefits analysis, infrastructure analysis, and transition plans. The voice of experience can organize, and has many skills to top off the technical ones.
So you have two contrasts here. The older, more experience admin that still has a strong cabinet of experience to offer the company VS the older, outdated admin who is fast in holding on to "what he knows" VS "what does the job best." You can have either one, or both in one package. I'm not sure which of these the gentleman in question was.
**Note: For simplicity I have used a masculine reference in this comment, apologies to all the female sysAdmins and techs out there. If you are under 30, single and cute, please accept this diamond ring and my proposal as apolo... er, I mean, have a nice day.
"Old people = old ideas.
Old people = no innovation.
Old people = old ways. "
Feynman figured out why the space shuttle blew up shortly before he died as an old man. Nobody else could figure it out. I don't buy old poeple have old ideas, look at all the old science fiction writers or Freeman Dyons wikipedia page.
Another reason you don't see a lot of older people in the IT world is they make enough money to escape it.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I have long been leery of some of the things Google has done, all the while saying "Do no evil". I know the concept of discrimination being evil has already been discussed here, but that is just the icing on the cake they have been baking for years.
Google has collected and archived so much personal data -- much of it collected in ways that could honestly be called "sneaky" -- that they practically invited the government to subpoena their records... which it did. They did not record that personal data for the benefit of their users. It is for the benefit of themselves, and their corporate customers who pay for that data. When you factor in their methods and intentions, that definitely falls on the "evil" side of the fence.
Google agreed to help China censor its internet, claiming that "we would lose business otherwise" and "if we did not do it, someone else would." Now, wait... since when is one allowed to just dump one's ethics for those reasons? People of higher integrity (or less greed) would have said "No!" Trading ethics for money is "classic" evil behavior. There are so many stories and movies and even ancient fairy tales about that, you would think people would see it coming...
Their youth does not impress me. They have behaved like a bunch of greedy young punks. Their "new" services are things that people have been talking about for many years but never bothered to actually do... for good reasons! They were bad ideas. Anybody who wants to do word processing on someone else's web server is an idiot. That is just one example, of course, but other than some searching and Google Maps (which was really just an incremental improvement of what Microsoft was already providing), they are not doing anything I want. And I think I will go back to Yahoo for my searches.
Google had a very good idea in their original search algorithms... then they took that idea and grew it into a behemoth of a company that is unethical, of little interest, and hardly worth my time.