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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."
> untrue or pretextual
Wow! I've been on the internet since it was pregraphical. But pretextual! That must have been a really long time ago. No wonder they fired him for being old.
"'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
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.
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.
By the way, what reasons are accepted for firing someone? In the European Union firing an employee is very hard because of the EU's strong social laws. But we know the US is a capitalist country, so how about the US?
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
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.
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
You still can't discriminate if Florida. I know this from personal experience (dealt with a ton of ADA claims in a previous job) so, no, even in Florida age discrimination is illegal.
The difference is, you don't have to give cause. So you could fire someone, give no reason, and the onus would be on them to make a case for discrimination.
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
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.
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.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If they chose them based entirely on their merits like 'best qualified', 'most passionate', 'willing to work for the least money' then that'd be fine. The problem arises when an employer uses an irrational reason to choose between two perfectly capable candidates. Age, especially in a compsci job, is not a factor that stops someone doing the job well. Equally factors like race, gender, and disability don't necessarily stop someone doing a good job. So why rule out people based on any of them?
Discrimination laws actually help companies. If they discriminate and turn away the best person because they fail to meet some ludicrous and irrelevant target like "is the candidate white?" or "is the candidate under 30?" the company is going to suffer as a result. Employers need protecting from themselves.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctrine_of_Fascism#Quotations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Italian_fascist_corporativism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manifesto_of_the_Fascist_Struggle
Fascism has a meaning, it does not just mean "uncool". It's a political doctrine with a precise ideology. And ideology that the original poster embraces in this context.
\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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"As a geek, I like to be in favor of strong employment laws that give the government full audit power over every corporation's decision to fire any one whatsoever. However, I don't like when it gets used against good guys, like Google."
Brian was hired about a year before Google went public and beefed up the org chart (which helps for an IPO) because looks great on paper: invented the firewall, altavista, the PAIX, Scribe (which begat sgml which begat html) and quickly rose up the ranks to be director of engineering or vp of ops or something fairly high up. His only written review was glowing. Very very shorly before Google went public he was fired for "not fitting in with Google's youthful culture" thus saving Google from granting his significant stock options.
That's what it's really about: the money.
Even Gates and monkeyboy havn't done anything this capricious and arbitrary with employees as far as I can tell.
Net result: Google more evil that Microsoft, much as it pains me to say it.
Suck on that, fanboy.
Need Mercedes parts ?
"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.
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
Because formation of a civil society is a trade off. Corporations can't just do whatever they want. In exchange, corporations can exist. We let the owners of an institution almost entirely off the hook from any responsibility for what that institution does, or what debts it incurs. Nobody has any personal liability deriving from most things a corporation does, which is a fabulously useful thing in terms of ever getting even good things done, but don't you think it's reasonable for society to expect some trade-off in return. Is it really such an odious responsibility that we forbid corporations from firing people for stupid reasons, like being black or old?
I'm 50 now, and (for me) the answer is Hell Yes. My rates are back where they were just before the dotcom bust (not the insane $150+ per hour rates, but the reasonable market ones back then). I'm turning away work again in Silicon Valley.
I find that I've gotten far, far better with age. You may have heard of the old mainframe guy with 30+ years of experience who can look at the output and tell you what the problem is. Well, I'm there. With the Linux/Unix kernel and other system work. I find that I'm the person who the younger guys come to with their questions, as I've worked on most of the code at one point or another. And I certainly get the toughest problems to debug.
So yes, if you keep your skills up and are hard working, there are indeed companies which value results over bigotry. A pity that Google isn't that way.
However, if you don't, you end up like the guys on the Dice board. You'll find a lot of people moaning that they can't find work, and that things are dead slow in Silicon Valley, yadda yadda. IMHO, things are hot, and those guys are missing the bus. Yes, they are probably smart. But the market for mainframe systems guys has long dried up. And IBM is doing their best to kill it.
Take the postings on Dice with a LARGE grain of salt; they are highly skewed. The Dice moderators are absolutely insane, deleting many posts without cause, and generally driving away the good commentators. It's rather telling that the only ones who can put up with that nonsense are the guys without jobs.
If anyone knows of a good board which discusses technical and contract issues, please do post. Dice absolutely sucks.
So, in summary, yes, the market is alive and well. But I'd get into development, because I see a lot of cheap button-pushers in IT. And most companies seem to not want to understand IT issues. They think that all they have to do is to push a button (E.g. Microsoft Exchange) and all their issues are solved. And the fact that certain architectures will bite them later on isn't an issue.
But that's most companies, not all. I'm at a hot, bright startup, and we've tried hiring a top notch IT person. It is tough. So there is demand out there, and probably always will be. But you have to keep your skills up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
--
"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.
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."
if its the same guy who worked at DEC in palo alto many years ago, then I worked with the guy for a very short period of time on a (amazingly enough) network management project! I was in DEC back in Maynard (at the Mill, actually) and brian was part of DEC west. he was VERY well respected as an 'IP god' of sorts ;) this was back in the late 80's - around the time that I left the boston area and moved out to the sf bay area.
again, I only worked with brian for a very short time and only on 1 netmgt project, but his reputation was one that I'd be proud to have, myself. if he couldn't 'pass muster' in google's eyes I would guess that it was google that was in the wrong and not brian.
sheesh. this is weird. and a bit upsetting, too.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
...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'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 ?
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.
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.