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At Google, You're Old and Gray At 40
theodp writes "Google faces an imminent California Supreme Court decision on whether an age discrimination suit against it can go forward. But that hasn't kept the company from patting itself on the back for how it supports 'Greyglers' — that's any Googler over 40. At a company of about 20,000 full-time employees, there were at last count fewer than 200 formally enrolled Greyglers working to 'make Google culture ... welcome to people of all ages.'"
Is it? Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?
Besides, most people over 40 don't want to spend 60hours+/week at work.
IT is an industry where experience can be helpful, just not in any company that values innovation. Experience tends to prevent the necessary creativity to actually do anything too innovative. And for that matter, so does education past a BA. Thomas Edison was an anomaly in that he recognized that mistakes were going to happen and just because experience suggested that something wasn't a good idea, didn't mean that it wasn't worth trying.
Get too much experience and you put a real damper on what you're going to be able to achieve. Google in particular isn't a good place to work if you've got a lot of experience. Doesn't matter whether they're discriminating or not, it's just not an environment that lends itself well to using any of that experience. And I've noticed a real tendency for people as they get older to get more and more deluded about the value of experience even as they have less and less of the rest of the stuff to contribute.
I'm not sure about other countries, but in the US, age discrimination is mostly just babies in their 40s, getting angry because all of a sudden they're not able to compete with younger workers. Never mind that they aren't willing to go through as much crap as younger workers.
I have this "problem" in online forums where I'll write a huge long post, reread it, decide it's crap, and delete it and not post anything.
Sometimes your opinion just isn't worth sharing. And when you don't take your time and think about what you're writing/typing, you may not realize how idiotic you sound until it's too late.
Note: For me this doesn't really apply to slashdot. On slashdot I just post whatever comes to mind. If it sounds really stupid to me I just click "post anonymously".