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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.
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.
The good news is that that will get better for you in the next few years.
The bad news is that it will eventually get worse again.
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."
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
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...
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.
"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 ?
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
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.
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."