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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.
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."
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.
"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
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.