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."

Comments

pretextual!

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Ageism is stupid, but can make sense

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:Ageism is stupid, but can make sense

[MrSenile]

Being an IT professional, I'll tell you right now this isn't just Google.

This is the corporate mindset.

The upper management look at the bottom dollar on how to make money.

And regardless of how ugly it is, on paper, IT are a cost. Never a profit.

Remember, I'm IT. I know just like any other IT professional, that what we save a company in revenue is enormous. We maintain the systems, prevent outtages, and are a total invisible entity until something goes wrong (tm). But most of the time, we're ignored. Why? Because we do our job, we do our job well, and people who make money can continue to make money.

If we went by the RIAA method of cost, then we could argue that each IT professional is worth a few hundred million dollars. Because it's our expertise that is saving the company that much in lost revenue every year, as a blanket possibility.

Unfortunately, the RIAA method of cost isn't used by the business department. The only go for immediate dividends. They look at the long scope project plan and how much revenue they will be generated. To date, I have hardly ever seen a business plan that takes potential loss into account with any budget they write. Ever.

This is why they can easilly determine that firing the 'old codgy 20+ year expert' who makes his 100K year for a green out of college eager beaver for 40K year saves the company 60K, PLUS BENEFITS, a shot.

Looks really good on paper.

Of course, in that year, they lose more money than the 60K in training, mistakes made by this individual, downtime on servers, misappropiations of resources and applications, etc etc.

But that never shows on paper. Regardless of the loss, they'll just point to the 60K saved. And when the company inevitably has a SAN outtage, drive failure, OS crash, DDoS attack or other miscreant attack/damage, they'll put this person on probation, fire off other high end professionals who weren't at fault, maybe lay off the manager in charge of the department. And then, wow, look how much MORE money we saved? We're doing great!

Long as the chair boards are happy and the investors get their cash, frankly, they don't give a damn about the IT professional, and that's always going to be the case.

Welcome to industry gentlemen.

Re:I dislike this result

[IgnoramusMaximus]

You claim they are discriminating based on age because ... 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.

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.

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.

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.

Typical wetware pump and dump.

[rs79]

"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.