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Median Age At Google Is 29, Says Age Discrimination Lawsuit
dcblogs writes: The typical employee at Google is relatively young, according to a lawsuit brought by an older programmer who is alleging age discrimination. Between 2007 and 2013, Google's workforce grew from 9,500 to more than 28,000 employees, "yet as of 2013, its employees' median age was 29 years old," the lawsuit claims. That's in contrast to the median age of nearly 43 for all U.S. workers who are computer programmers, according to the lawsuit.
There is no law against outsourcing interviews to incompetent people. Exactly zero of the crappy behaviors of his interviewer sound remotely age targeted. In fact, older people are generally more patient with technologically inept folk than younger, and it seems unlikely they disqualified him for excessive patience.
As for the stats on their median age, that's the median age of the employees not the people that were hired. I hear Google tends to overwork it's employees. The older you are, the less patience you have for that crap.
If you handed out high quality stuffed unicorns to a perfectly evenly age-distributed portion of the population, you'd find after a couple years the people still in possession of said objects were disproportionately 4-9 year old girls. This is not evidence that you discriminated in any way.
Always someone else's.
Hint: not all your new hires will be cute Asian gamer chicks in wheelchairs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Last I knew it was common for old programmers to not bother learning new tech. Given Google's preference for next generation technologies, what use would they have for obsolete programmers?
If you're too obsolete for Google and refuse to do something about it, go work in the defense, automotive, or some other industry known to have a new technology adoption lag.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Seems like Google is getting hit with the consequences of what they've been preaching and supporting. Don't like the entitled nature of people? Don't like the subjective nature of the law? Well, the chickens are (again) coming home to roost.
Is that I can't support this lawsuit even though it would benefit "MY GROUP"
The whole Idea of group quotas is garbage. supporting them reduces you from a human being to counter for an outrage hustler. Even if your group wins you lose. You lose the concept of "INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS" you lose the right to choose the people you associate with and do business with.
If your such a hot shot coder and you have that much experience in the field why didn't you start your own business ? Google doesn't owe anyone except their shareholders and bondholders anything.
That explains your "creative" typing patterns.
Table-ized A.I.
I've learned over time that skills are only about half the factors of hiring decisions (with exceptions for high-demand specialties). Personality and "feeling" issues play the other half.
A work-place has a culture just like any village or geographical region, and if you don't fit the culture, your are likely to be turned away. Age of growing up is part of that "culture". I'm not saying it's fair, but rather that it's human nature.
Table-ized A.I.
Google should hire Ellen Pao as the CEO...she can fix it!
Captcha: Fatality
You seem to overwork your apostrophe key. it's means it is, the older I get the less patience I have for this crap.
We've got this guy coming for an interview, he's got the experience and training we asked for, in fact he's the ideal candidate, except for one thing - he's too old. He'll want a salary to match his value and he won't be a yes man. So let's interview him but make him look really inept by getting the worst person we have to do technical interviews. Then we say he want very good in the interview and it looks like we're giving all age ranges a chance.
Google is a discrimination factory, but in this case, there's a deeper problem, and its, what I'll call, the "MIT culture".
You have a bunch of people who busted their ass off to go through MIT/CMU/CalTech/Whatever, to learn all those algorithms, the computer science core, etc, and are thrown in the real world where, while VERY useful, are only a small subsets of things that matter.
Then you ask these people, who spent 4 (or 6, or more) years being drilled that the only shit that matters was what they learnt in school, and worked REALLY hard to absorb that, to interview.
What do you think will happen?
You end up with an interview process that, regardless of the actual work, the further away from school you are (ie: the older you are), the less likely you are to pass the interview, give or take people who worked as data or algorithm scientists in the recent past.
Net result: you have a very high percentage of college hire, and your lateral hires will always lean toward the younger side. Any skill that come with experience is almost never tested in interviews to counterbalance it.
What is the median age of people who are applying to Google? I suspect that many older programmers are set in their job and/or do not have the skills in the newer technology and do not apply.
I'm no Googler, nor have I interviewed, but I suspect this is more about Google's hiring methods than their hiring policies or biases. They run contests, which are essentially easter egg hunts that result in a potential interview. Who has the time and inclination to play around with hoops like that? The young, college attending, and childless nerds and hackers. They don't need to have a bias in who they hire, because they create an innate bias in who chooses to apply by putting that 'application' behind a lot of hoops and rigamarole.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
... in the company culture is a wholly reasonable justification for an employer to not hire someone who is otherwise even the most qualified job applicant. While age shouldn't ever be a reason to exclude an otherwise entirely competent person, if the fact is that if the rest of the office isn't going to easily be able to relate to the person simply because this one person is so much older than they are, that can introduce a communication barrier, however unintentional it may be on everyone's part and that will impede the effectiveness of any programming team that person is put on. Generally, this kind of thing would be more likely to be determined during an initial probationary period than during an interview, however.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't want to belabor the point, but Google isn't a very good place to work. They have tons of money to spend on marketing to make their company seem like it is a good place to work. Coke has a large budget to convince you that its beverages are tasty, too. It's no different.
The best place for programmers to work is where you decide what you want to do, you can override stupid decisions made by management, and where you have a large stake in the success or failure of the company. At Google programmer happiness doesn't matter so much as ad revenue. If that one division of the company continues to do well, be prepared to do whatever stupid thing the rest of the company wants you do to.
Don't expect to have a life outside of the company, or have things like a healthy sex life. Remember that you're stuck in Silicon Valley where there are not enough available women unless you're extremely wealthy. Better have a hundred grand in the bank. Basic cost of living runs you $5,000/month, and there is always the chance of getting laid off for a few months. Seems like a bit of a scam for well educated but naive individuals to get sucked into.
Not ever organization is looking to hire Cobalt coders, individuals with MCSE or A++ certification, or those that are not willing to work with cloud based solutions. Do you only work on local resident development platforms (Borland C++), still delive that a Waterflow developement cycle is king, not willing to collaborate on tools other then AIM or still use Eudora for electronic mail then you might also have a problem with employment at Google.
Happy job hunting and good luck with receiving a job interview after filing a lawsuit against the previous company that offered you a interview...
Maybe I should add this to the candidate survey: Have you ever filed a lawsuit against a company that gave you an interview but did not hire you?
From my observations, Google wants people with high intelligence, but low life-experience and ideally a somewhat infantile personality. You know those that are most easily manipulated with toys and shiny things. That these are mostly found in the lower age ranges is no surprise.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I'm a Java developer. I have a decade of experience doing that. .Net developers not even giving me a chance at an interview? It's all computer programming. They're discriminating against me!
Why are all these companies hiring
This lawyer believes all computer programming is the same.
Last bank I worked at, all the cobol programmers were 20 years old than me. They probably get paid handsomely for their niche skill set.
Is it discrimination that they don't have young people in their team?
How about he gets better stats, including only workers with similar jobs to those at Google..
Actually tech workers should get paid as much as lawyers. stop giving away the jobs to shit indian and we can get some money for all. As for older workers which I am I have banged out more code than these twits have changed socks. takes no time to learn an new bit and use it well..
if two people are equal on the resume but one has more experience who is older, and you pick the younger for "social fit" , thats open and shut lawsuit.
Kids today, want parties every Friday, free lunch and big salaries that say "director" and well frankly , you kids have not earned it. ...
Higher an older worker, we know to work, we won't spend it playing games half the day and the other half going for coffee....
I don't know why people want to hire young, inexperienced programmers, except for the low wages. Inexperienced programmers will make lots of time consuming mistakes. Why put up with them? C++ and Java are still around, and popular. C++, and Java, will probably be popular languages for at least another 10 years. Yes, some new stuff has been added, but it is not as much as learning Java from scratch. Is programming dominated by slave drivers whom want long hours, and do accounting tricks to get a low wage per hour?
Have you seen what the average lawyer makes? We do. The average lawyer doesn't even get a job out of law school these days.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Agreed. Google may or may not discriminate, but their median age is likely has a large component of self selection. I'm only 35, and I'm already at full-Murtaugh. I'm too old for that shit. I see a company with cafeterias open late, games, etc, and I see a company that wants me to spend every waking hour at work. I've been there and done that. I loved it in my early 20s, but now mid-30s me is stuck supporting the code that guy wrote. I hate that guy...
and the young and dumb stayed around?
i've been offered positions at google over the years, wasted time with their bullshit interviews and even turned them down a few times - as we get older; we are more inclined to start our own businesses and be entrepreneurs.. it is not a shock that the younger generation of engineers want to work at a company like Google. what they need here is to also bring in relevant data around startups; how many people actually left Google to start their own thing?
There is no evidence of age discrimination. Period. It just so happens that younger people are more likely to be competent in newer languages, fads, etc. Affirmative action is called for by whiners as an excuse to employ more people from their age/race/gender group, even when it [usually] means hiring less qualified people. Its the old "equal outcomes" plight. This is the land of equal opportunities, not equal outcomes. People vary in their competencies. The affirmative action whiners are really advocating for discriminating against the most qualified in order to get a selfish chance for themselves. Stop it.
Google is at the forefront of H1B hiring. Their executives have been part of the Cabal calling for more H1B's. The fact that they have an artificially low Median (and presumably mean) age workforce, coupled with the fact that they are actively seeking H1B's (ostensibly because they cant find American talent) speaks for itself. Google is not only engaging in age discrimination, they are actively working to undercut wages by bringing in foreign workers. Their application process itself is freakishly well engineered to weed out those persons who do not have massive amounts of free time to burn, thus limiting their applicant pool to younger people (And lower cost) people. This is not accidental.
If Google really wanted to find US talent, they could fill their ranks from within the aging US workforce that had to take early retirement because of the age discrimination, and they wouldn't even put a dent in the unemployment rate.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
You go and work for Google to build your resume. You know that if you apply and bust ass for a few years you'll be able to walk into any other company at a higher wage and for better work/home balance. Working for Google or alike jump starts your career and shaves off a few years to get you ahead.
If your 42 and already have 25 years real world experience why would you WANT to work for a place like Google. You have kids that want to see you at night, only single young grads have the time for 3am offshore VoIP calls.
Actually tech workers should get paid as much as lawyers.
Tech workers, especially engineers, should get paid more than lawyers since our skills actually create value.
Regardless of intent or not, certain practices may indeed lead to age-tilted hiring as an actual end result. That doesn't necessarily make it "right", though.
One can argue a company is obligated to balance its employees' race, gender, and age to reflect the external population of available talent. This may involve counter-acting other hiring practices that indirectly lead to imbalances. Using your example, either stop paying in pink unicorn pillows, or adjust your hiring to match calculated age goals to compensate for the pillow bias.
The specifics of what you feel a company is obligated to do is of course a personal political opinion. I'm just trying to point out that "discrimination" can be purely accidental, and being accidental may not be considered a sufficient "excuse" to keep doing it.
If it's accidental, one could make a good case that the org doesn't deserve punitive or "retro" fees, but are at least obligated to remedy it going forward.
Perhaps a law should be passed that companies above a certain size are obligated to actively monitor their hiring profiles so as to avoid bias. Then "we didn't know" wouldn't be a valid claim anymore.
Table-ized A.I.
I would hire a young kid over an old person any day. Young kids can be molded to do what you want. Old people are stubborn and bitter. They will show up on time and leave on time. They want their health coverage. They won't learn anything knew, and they will demand respect that (they think) they've earned through experience, but rarely does this experience translate into anything resembling productivity.
For every old self taught programmer who thinks they are a genius, there is some new grad who is just as smart, willing to put more effort into everything they do, and willing to learn new things.
Most of the new grads we hire at my company turn out really well. Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code, or they can only write code (but only in their preferred language) and can't be bothered to learn or follow prescribed design patterns or coding standards.
I felt like your generalization needed a counter generalization.
White people, i mean.
We should have a million man march!
Cops shoot babies and black people, so, it ain't so bad.
C'mon, what grown man wants to work for a boiler room like google. The reason the median age at google is so low just proves that kids smarten up after a while and get real jobs.
All you old fogies listen up. This is jot discrimination. Young people are more energetic, more eager to learn, and more likely to know the things you'd need tonhelp Google, like modern programming languages. Take your whining elsewhere.
Great example you set there. Small errors, no QA and, full of shortcuts that only someone more experienced can fix.
"The fact that they have an artificially low Median (and presumably mean) age workforce, coupled with the fact that they are actively seeking H1B's (ostensibly because they cant find American talent) speaks for itself." Yes, it speaks volumes - it is evidence that they hire competent people. It is not evidence that they are discriminating based on age. That simply isn't a logical conclusion. There is no evidence of that. In fact bringing outsourcing into the convo helps show that. It is more evidence that they are targeting the most qualified people regardless of having to pay more for the sponsorship. We can all be conspiracy theorists, but there is simply no way to logically deduce that they are discriminating based on age with the evidence at hand. Sure it may be circumstantial evidence that supports your pre-decided opinion, but it is not a logical conclusion.
I'm sure if we looked, pay would be correlated with age as well. Can younger workers sue for age discrimination in wages?
Google is a pimp who makes "you" the product and they sell you to the highest bidder. They are a bunch of self righteous zealots. Looking forward to the day they will fall.
If I went to apply for a job at google, and didn't get the job, it probably wouldn't occur to me to sue them, especially if I felt I was so talented as to deserve a job worthy of my high skill level. I would say "They're loss" and move on to the next interview.
The last old person that my company hired (we actually hired him), threatened the company with an age discrimination lawsuit, and the company paid him a year's salary to avoid the lawsuit. It wasn't age discrimination. He was mentally unstable, he refused to obey instructions from managers, and his code was terrible.
It takes a certain kind of person to want to sue a company (without ever working for them), without considering the possibility that they may not want you for a reason other than your old age, and going through all the effort to sue this company rather than moving on and offering your amazing talents to a company that will actually appreciate you.
If I were Google, I would not be happy about being sued, but I would be relieved that he was not hired. If he were hired, no doubt Google would be sued by this person for age discrimination for not getting promotions or being fired, etc.
Who knows, maybe the person in charging of deciding to hire this person was discriminating against them based on age. But he doesn't know that, and he is probably a terrible hire because of his willingness to litigate.
Back in '92 when I first started in this industry, this how hiring went:
Are you proficient in C? Can you write a linked list? And other questions about algorithms, computer architecture, and language. If you knew the OS that was a plus.
Now that same job would be do you know, C, SQL on Oracle (Sorry you have SQLServer? No you don't have the skills), on Linux Unbuntu, CICS, DB2/2, IBM 360, COBOL and OS/2. If you don't match that, then you don't have the skills. If I applied for that same job today, I would be rejected for it. That's what the job was and we learned it because when you have the ground work of CS, picking up the other shit is easy.
The recruiting and hiring in software development and technology is just gotten so fucked up. It's just computers doing the screening and if you are not 100% a perfect fit then the candidate "doesn't have the skills".
That is why all companies that cannot find qualified people are incompetent in their recruiting. There are no exceptions. And with the high unemployment of electrical engineers (2013 but has not improved), we can see that there is something horribly wrong with technology employers.
Ya, their interview structure is utterly incompetent. They randomly pick people who may not have the necessary skills and experience for the job that they will evaluate a candidate for.
"our skills actually create value."
But legal skills create money. Most people would choose money over value (would you like $100 in fiat currency or 40 loaves of bread?).
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"They won't learn anything knew"
But the young ones think they already know everything, even how to spell.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
They don't pick an inept person to do the interviewing in order to filter out the expensive candidate. Instead Google has a policy that totally inept people must do the interviewing. The interviewer seems to be either chosen at random or in a round robin fashion. The intentionally choose interviewers who are from different departments or fields than the person being interviewed.
It would seem the only time such an ridiculous interview strategy could work is when you're interviewing for entry level jobs. Thus the median age is still in the junior cadet range.
I just have to wonder why we're all amazed as jobs get moved overseas with all the posturing, extortion and lawsuits that go on against companies. I mean if Google did it, then shame on them but if I had Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton doing their shakedown dance along with age, sex and X discrimination suits, it's no wonder that more jobs are being pushed overseas. On one side I praise businesses that are keeping jobs here and also saying "more power to you" in the face of all this litigation and extortion. Businesses, you shouldn't discriminate, ever. As soon as you learn this then you won't be getting taken to the cleaners either by plaintiffs or your own legal defense team or both.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
That explains your "creative" typing patterns.
It's actually the meth.
Yes, and either rich people are either not really rich people, or poor people just really suck at paying themselves more than others or inheriting a lot.
This really sounds to me like the interviewer did a really bad job. Your best bet in this situation is probably to complain to the recruiter about your experience. I'd be willing to bet that Google will have little problem with scheduling another phone interview if the interviewer screwed up this badly.
face facts, people give the good jobs to their friends
most hiring is corrupt and predetermined
"I would hire a young kid over an old person any day."
Repeat this to yourself every day for the next twenty years. You're in for a shock.
"Director" is not earned from technical competence, but from political maneuvering and brown nosing. Ie, it's a reward for loyalty. Good companies will spot this and be much more picky about how gets to be director, but bad companies will be chock full of director level people who are incompetent at being a director (even if they were competent at their lower rank jobs).
But then remember that director has to be a brown noser and political player as part of the actual job itself. They must deal with higher level executives daily. Maybe it's better to have the incompetent kid in that director job than wasting the talents of a competent older worker.
I'm not a young one.
Personally, I don't think he was talking to Google; at least not directly.
He got called by a recruiter, supposedly for Google, who set up a phone interview Looking for C/C++ and Java. Fine. There's an outside chance of Java, either as an Android App developer, or for some server back end crap at a company they purchased. It's unlikely, but it's possible (in 2011, they hired people to work at Google, and then groups decided to offer them, and then you got a choice of usually one of 3 groups... you didn't know what you'd be working on at interview time, and there was no such thing as "hiring for position" unless you were net.famous).
Then he didn't get sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer. You are *always* sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer, unless you are in a city/area where Google has a facility, then you are instead brought in to use the video conferencing at the Google location.
Then he got an interviewer who barely spoke English, and wouldn't take him off speakerphone. That never happens at Google.
The interviewer was 10 minutes late to the call.
Frankly, sir, IMHO, you got played.
You just got man-in-the-middled by an Indian or other foreign person who wanted a job at Google, and got you to ghost his or her phone interview for them, with the help of a "recruiter"/"interviewer" who had you on lousy speakerphone so that they could relay your answers directly via a cell phone to the person Google was actually talking to.
Yes, this happens.
No, savvy technical people generally don't fall for it, because they get an email from Google telling you the schedule, there's a Google Doc URL sent out with an @google.com address, and if you look at the email headers in the email of the schedule, you'll see that they are probably forged, assuming you got one at all.
Congratulations on being played, Mr. Robert Heath.
"Young people are more energetic, more eager to learn, and more likely to know the things you'd need tonhelp..." ... more likely to sucked into to stupid shit - hey bub I need you 18 hours a day for the next six months. "Yes sur, should I bring my own blanket?" I love dumbfucks like you. You'll do it, you'll like it and I don't have to pay you shit. While you're at office I'll be at cottage laughing my ass off. Send your friends too asshole.
I'm not so sure here. Young kids recently seem to act like know-it-alls who hate conforming the group environment; everything you do they see as being done the wrong way as it's not the same as what they did on their last job or what their professor talked about. Older workers, or those of a certain age, had to learn by necessity to learn new tools and discard old ones on a regular basis, and ever new job they took required them to learn to adapt to the new situation.
The older workers can be molded because they have plenty of experience with being molded. The younger workers still have this idealistic vision of how everything should be done. Older workers have patience earned through experience, and it's much more common for me to see the younger workers as the ones who are easily frustrated.
The kids are the ones who only write in their preferred language in my experience, which is probably the only language they know.
Hey wait now, Google still uses old fogey languages like C, C++, Java, and assembler.
You should sue him.
Usually positions describe how much experience they require. If a very experienced person shows up to interview for an entry level engineer position expecting a salary to match his experience, then he's SOL. If you've put out a job offer for a senior engineer position, you should be expecting the candidates to want a salary to match their value. Not all companies pay as well as Google, that's why so many people want to work there.
There is really no reason for Google to not hire someone that is well qualified for the position they are seeking and asking for a salary that matches that position.
Corporations are in the business of making money. They don't care how old you are if you can help them make money.
As I said, I was just offering a counter-generalization.
At my company we just fire the new grads with attitudes. All the old guys running the show have a real hard time firing (and in some cases not hiring) people if they are supporting families.
We seem to practice reverse age discrimination.
I can see the logic of the rationale you provided. It's just not the reality I see everyday.
I see young people who are very hard working and excited to gain experience from their older colleagues. I see older workers with bad attitudes that freak out when they don't feel they are given the appropriate level of respect. They are the ones acting like know-it-alls, and the code they write sucks. The code the young people write sucks too, but at least they take criticism well.
Maybe you're getting all the kids we fire.
but it is not a logical conclusion.
The conclusion is perfectly logical. Google Hires H1B visa employees in one of the largest quantities of any American company. Given that the stated purpose of H1B visas is to fill jobs that Americans cannot otherwise fill, Google is implying that there are not enough qualified American workers to fill the job openings.
As a general principle the older people get, the more experienced they become (ergo the more qualified they become). If Google were willing to do what is necessary to fill positions, then it stands to reason that they would offer more money to get more experienced programmers (ergo older ones). Instead, their demographic shows that they have fewer older more experienced programmers. This means that Google is having trouble attracting enough qualified applicants. Given Googles reputation as an excellent place to work, it is difficult to imagine that they can't get enough qualified applicants, which would include all demographics, unless they are causing older qualified applicants not to apply, or they are rejecting those applications. Given that Google has stated that they do not have enough qualified applicants and that they need to hire H1B visas, they are either lying about needing the H1B visas, they are preventing otherwise qualified older applicants from even applying for jobs, or they are discriminating by causing the application process to dissuade older applicants.
All three of those possibilities are immoral, and at least one of them is illegal...
Statistics don't lie. By itself the statistics are circumstantial. Taken in concert with other facts, the statistics are damning...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Well, it's been estimated that the number programmers doubles about every 5 years. So if you 40 that means you have been programming for about 20 years, so that means that about 90% of programmers will be younger than you. So if a company's median age is 43 that means they discriminate against young people. Here is a link with some data.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Speaking as a Director who works directly for a CEO, I don't brown nose for shit. I might be respectful, understand business requirements, and dress somewhat better than your standard developer or admin, but I'm no politician. Just the thought of me as an actual politician makes me giggle.
Getting to be a manager was a little bit of looking out for an opportunity, putting myself forward, and working up the ranks. Yeah, I don't get to sit and code all day long, but just the coordination that I have to do and the experience I have with dealing with bullshit is worth every penny they pay me. The place I worked at before didn't even have a process for taking orders from Sales and provisioning customers. No one had actually thought of how you'd actually give someone an account. Or how to tell finance that they should, you know, start charging the customers money. Guess who does that?
Oh and that new technology you just had a nerdgasm over? Someone has to figure out how to pay for that shit. Have you ever had to get money out of a CFO? It's like they hire people who believe that every dollar bill is their precious firstborn child. You have to make proposals and budgets and graphs, and THEN they ask you if you can wait two weeks for it. And THEN they delay payment on the bill until you're on your third notice and about to be cancelled. Guess who is fucked if they make a mistake and get us shut off due to that little game of "Hide the phone line payment".
You'd think that's easy shit. It isn't. I spend more time trying to figure out how to interface my unit with other units than I do supervising my staff. Fuck, they pretty much do their own thing based on some requirements I give them. Of course, that's because I spent a fuckload of time and effort trying to hire a qualified staff who don't need me to shove my hand up their ass and puppet them through doing that job.
Yes, there are some brown nosers, especially in big companies, but in small companies, a director earns their money because you're expected to manage and do the work, and figure out how things work that you took for granted as a grunt.
Google? If they're making 29 year olds into Directors, well, they're either management geniuses or they're fucked in the long run. Technical management doesn't mean that you are alpha nerd. You're supposed to be an experienced senior manager who knows how to get shit out of executives WITHOUT the reach around. If you're a kiss-ass, you're doing it wrong and the executives will eat you for lunch.
Pay is correlated with experience. If you can be 29 and have 18 years in tech, then by all means, you should make the same as some doofus who graduated at 22 and is now 40. If not, then what the fuck would you get paid more money for? Your bed-head hairstyle?
I'm sure if we looked, pay would be correlated with age as well. Can younger workers sue for age discrimination in wages?
Yes. It would have an interesting impact on the unions...
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Naw, we use C. Not a lot of kids applying who have the skills necessary to think about low level code that has to be small and efficient. We'd like more junior people I think but they're hard to find and if they're competent there's a lot of competition to snatch them up.
Then you should fire yourself immediately you bitter demanding old coot
Prior to perusing the comments on this article, I'd've thought that a post of that length, with 3 measly apostrophes, wouldn't've got any complaints for its excess of them when one wasn't used properly. Would you look at that, I've managed to squeeze six into this post. If you aren't (seven) freaking out right now, I'd (eight) say the frequency isn't (nine) you're (lol) problem.
I will take my old man whining elsewhere, if you finish elementary school, and use better grammar. Deal?
If you really think the H-1B push is all about pursuit of "the best and brightest", you're either a paid shill or a true idiot. That's just propaganda we're getting forcefed while our economy gets destroyed by the race to the bottom. The lie has been showing its cracks since about 2001.
Look up indentured servitude sometime if you're one of those people that like to entertain the notion that their beliefs could be wrong. You think Microsoft fired thousands of people and moved to replace them ALL (Yes, ALL. Look it up if you somehow missed it, it was discussed here for weeks) with H-1Bs because H-1Bs are magically better than anyone local to the Western seaboard? Please.
Or you could keep screaming FREE MARKET TOP TIER TALENT soundbytes. Just make sure to cover your ears every time you get called out for being stupid.
If that man is unemployed, he isn't a lawyer.
People should be hired based on who is best for the job. Period.
I what world is it okay to skew hiring based on Race or Gender or Age? Even experience or education don't matter if you can determine their value as an employee another way. They can hire on this basis and call it "charity" as it is basically taking a hit to the bottom line to help out certain classes of people, but it absolutely should not be a requirement.
This is not Soviet Russia and companies are not a mechanism by which the government makes sure everyone has got a job. If you want to be hired you do what humans have done for thousands of years: you learn a trade and demonstrate your skill in said trade or you start from the bottom and work your way up.
This conversation always seems to forget that everyone who is old was young and that everyone who is young will be old. It's in young peoples interests to make sure older people are respected for what they have learned as much as it is in older peoples interests to help make sure younger people can establish careers.
What we should be criticizing is the myopic view of companies that devalue the experiences of older people to exploit the energies of younger people. It robs younger people of the opportunity to access the experiences that made older people's brains more efficient for problem solving - that is what experience is. It not only robs older people of work opportunities, it also robs them of seeing ideas built on and evolved. That denial of perspective is what holds back the evolution of ideas.
If this is true within Google then it renders their motto 'Don't be evil' hypocritical. The denial of wisdom and experience is a recipe for fragility for companies who don't have access to key knowledge at key times required for them to survive. That is why you pay more for experience, the ROI on youth.
In reality ageism is discrimination against anyone subject to the progression of time.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm not a young one.
And you still don't know the difference between their, there, and they're? Dunning-Kruger wants to have a talk with you - in front of the mirror :-)
It seems to be a habit of yours:
Who knows, maybe the person in charging of deciding to hire this person was discriminating against them based on age.
and
if their commitment to linux support was good, it would be possible to by most of their laptops with linux.
buy, bye, by, and here's another they're, their, there boo-boo
I would say "They're loss" and move on to the next interview.
... and the one that started this: see above for the poster who first pointed it out ...
They won't learn anything knew
knew, new, gnu.
Kind of ironic that you say
Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code
when you can't write, period ( these examples are from your posts in this thread in just the last 2 hours). Your technical documentation must be a real hoot! :-)
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"Should be", yes. But that's not the way most people do things. I've been involved in multiple hiring discussions, and "soft" issues almost always are involved, often in the form of "team fit".
Table-ized A.I.
Well, it's been estimated that the number programmers doubles about every 5 years.
That was a misprint; that's not the actual number of them, as individuals, that's by weight.
Don't sue Google, Kleiner Perkins or anyone else for hiring discrimination, layoff discrimination or OTJ discrimination.
Start your own company, hire the kinds of people that Google, KP, and the others rejected, and beat the crap out the fuckers in the marketplace.
Seriously... that's the American way!
Most of the new grads we hire at my company turn out really well. Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code, or they can only write code (but only in their preferred language) and can't be bothered to learn or follow prescribed design patterns or coding standards.
Have you considered applying Occam's razor here? Maybe your hiring process sucks. Maybe the compensation and conditions you're offering simply aren't good enough to attract older developers who are any good. Are these theories more or less likely than entire generations of developers who presumably once had that enthusiasm and aptitude you seem to see in new grads mysteriously becoming incompetent and unmotivated a decade or three later?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Unions would be fine, work experience is a measurable quality with a more or less objective status.
Getting rid of it would just open doors to other frictions.
"You'd think that age discrimination would have hurt Google. They are losing out on all the potentially talented old people and all their experience. According to free market principles this should have put Google at a huge disadvantage in a highly competitive market."
And maybe that's showing in the way they build beta product/services right and left that they don't know what to do with and end up closing some few months later.
A "highly competitive market" is not so highly competitive when you can throw at it a ton of cash to burn.
Self selection my ass.
They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently, and hire their buddies. Unfortunately that also includes staying around, which means working all day long, much like working in a college lab.
Not different from any college academic fraternity. I saw that with SPS as we had a dedicated study room, aka hang out for nerds (tv, frig, couches, tables, bookshelf library, etc...).
Young people are more energetic, more eager to learn, and more likely to know the things you'd need tonhelp Google, like modern programming languages.
Who do you think is creating those modern programming languages, kid? :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
See Reid. V. Google in the 9th circuit. Google did not win this age discrimination suit.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I have a cousin who, through a series of acquisitions, now finds himself an employee of Google. He's 56 years old, and because of his hire date with his original employer, he has more years of employment than Google has existed. Which gave HR some trouble, as they had to revise some of their benefits formulas to accommodate someone that "senior". He's not the oldest Googler he's come across ... but the only guy older than him that he works with is a fellow "acquisition" employee, who came along when their company was bought.
He talks about it with good humor, but that's mostly because he's spent the last 30 years making good money and preparing carefully for retirement, so he'll be OK if he finds himself pushed to the curb ... and because he knows that he has value to HR as "proof" that Google employs people well over 40 (even though he never actually went thru their hiring process). Hell, if he ever gets let go, he says he could win the age-discrimination lawsuit in his sleep, it would be that easy. (And this was from a good Republican who generally doesn't believe in anti-discrimination laws.)
Yeah, screw you, I a Jung won...
They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently?
It's more they desire the culture of hanging out indefinitely. They want people to never leave work. Companies don't give a damn if that burns out employees.
Like you I no longer live to work, I work to live. My 20s and early 30s were my 80-100 hour work weeks. That aside, I was contacted by a Google recruiter and heard the same. "You would be great for this team because of your experience". I received similar treatment interviewing at Google, and figured it could have been a series of mistakes. I was given options for a "test" and provided my options. When it came time for the interview my options were not available (those guys were all sick, on vacation, or died on Bart...). My resume is very clear on my work experiences and knowledge, yet I was not asked a single question about anything on my resume. Instead I was grilled about the ICMP for about 20 minutes, on everything from header content to available flags and forging a packet. Which is really a bizarre line of questions since I don't have "developed network products/protocols" anywhere near my resume and the position was not as a developer. The "test" only lasted a few minutes at which point the interviewer started asking me questions on a different language library.
Lastly he told me that if I was hired Google expected people to work all kinds of crazy hours. To which I answered that while I am at work I work very hard, but I don't work more than I am salaried for without good justification and compensation. "You probably won't fit in".
While I could have been setup to fail due to my age, the interviewer was at least up front about Google's expectation. I'm very employable, so won't be risking that by joining any class action lawsuits
you should be put up against a wall and shot in the head
I am a tech "worker". I prefer the term "software writer", but who cares.
Tech workers are often prone to self-serving statements like the one you just made. If you wish people to value your position more, it won't become valued by dragging other professions (even the much loved "target" of lawyers) through the dirt.
If you think a lawyer's skills do not create value, then just wait until someone comes into your company and rips it off. Then it becomes easy to see the lawyers creating value by at least attempting to preserve the value that was there.
some crappy web programming framework that 10 people will ever use that gets bought for $500M and forgotten about
6 months later
yeah, you keep telling yourself that you're worth it
...has to be pretty low too. They hire any teenager who will show up and punch a clock. But who is complaining? Should we sue McDonald's because they create opportunities for people who need that very first job? (Wait, somebody probably IS suing them for this.)
This isn't about hiring integrity, it's pure and simple, about extorting some money out of deep pockets.
So you don't even have that as an excuse.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Nice job avoiding the substance of the original comment to instead focus on being a grammar Nazi. The passive-aggressive smiley face to wrap it up was a nice touch. The original commenter's point about the higher moldability of younger engineers is excellent. It is critical part of having new employees assimilate smoothly into a company's culture.
actually most of their workforce is not programmers.
technicians, sales, support etc vastly outnumber the coders.
so much in fact that googles hiring for programmers has been notoriously fecked up and academy credentials focused that I would expect their programmers to be in 35+ range more often than not.
Oh no! I forgot to add "a" in front of "critical"! Please, Grammar Nazi, go easy on me!
I see a company with cafeterias open late, games, etc, and I see a company that wants me to spend every waking hour at work.
Actually, Google doesn't. The cafes are open late because people work all sorts of odd schedules. Some don't come in until noon and leave late, some show up early and take off at 3. In the Mountain View office there's a lot of both of those patterns, mainly because traffic sucks so bad that people try to schedule around it.
As for the games and stuff, that's just recognition that taking a break is good for think time. Massage services, espresso bars, etc., are all parts of that.
I've been a Google software engineer for four years and there has never been the slightest pressure on me to work long hours. Not only has no one ever asked me to, no one has hinted, implied or anything else, and on a few occasions when I chose to work late my old manager noticed and told me to go home. I'm not saying every manager is that way, in fact I don't think my current manager would ever say anything to me about my work schedule, whether I worked around the clock or hardly at all. Eventually my lack of productivity would provoke a response, though it would probably take a quarter or so.
Now, there are people who work a lot of hours at Google. Mostly young people who don't have anything better to do and are really excited about what they're building. And mostly no one tells them not to. But there are plenty of others who work normal hours, and no one says anything to them, either.
BTW, I'm 45.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If Google / x megacorp really could not find qualified applicants locally, then why would they not pick up people from countries that are comparable to the US in larger proportions? I should see a lot of Germans and Japanese H1B workers, but they are barely represented...
I laugh at inappropriate times.
Legal skills just move money around.
That. I just found my time is better spent coding than doing this admin craze all day long. No doubt it's exhausting and someone probably has to do it (although I'm sure it is just a pile of inefficient behavior of self rightous humans, i.e. lots of it could be automated away). But frankly it just didn't make me happy, pay is not everything and coding is so much more rewarding. So that's what I do now. Have fun up there!
Google hires lots of recent grads with MS/PhD in Computer Science or related field. The problem is that universities are doing the age discrimination for them so only younger people show up at Google interviews...
Friday night, go out to bars and talk up a bunch of girls. Tell them you work at McDonalds and that your goal for the next ten years is to pay off your car. Your used car that you bought with 100,000 miles on it.
Then, on Saturday night, go out to a different set of bars and talk up an equal number of girls. Tell them you work at Google and your ten year goal is to have your five bedroom house paid in full.
Then let us know what the response rate is.
Well, lasers are a young science.. okay, fine, you made me say it, now we're both in trouble
There's an outside chance of Java, either as an Android App developer, or for some server back end crap at a company they purchased.
Actually there's an extremely good chance of Java. Google mostly runs on Java... infrastructure stuff like GFEs, borg, etc. is all C++, and search is C++, but nearly everything running on borg is Java.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You say your assertion is logical, then end with the admission that it is circumstantial. Normally i would just end it there but I'm bored. There isn't a "blend," FYI. The conclusion you present is not one which we could abstract, because it is not logical in itself, rather logical to you, given YOUR "logic" which is not presented here. I will repeat, nothing in this "study" can logically be attributed to age discrimination.
_created_. Those so called modern languages were mostly created some 20+ years ago. Python, Ruby, Javascript, Java... Even Scala has 12 years on its back. With the exception of maybe Go, Dart, which however lend heavily from C and derivatives, and thus hardly qualify as "new". Oh and guess what, Kido, if I have to write an actual system that does it's job *and* is maintainable, scalable, documented and tested, be sure I'll outsmart you in about five seconds, and I don't need a shiny new MacBook for that.
That's how I separate analog EEs...
Yeah, those digital designers need to know the corner pins carry the power supply on TTL. But real designers know that the power is in the middle, and the opamp outputs are on the corners, where the gods meant it to be.
We used to ask people what a diode was.. then a triode.. then to point to a monode in the office (back when we had incandescent lights)
I've seen it as well. Older people seem to be more resistant to going along with the flow of technology... unless they're autistic (which is a trait we tend to like).
Your anger is funny.
If you're the only person going on about quotas - and you are - then it's your straw man that is garbage.
There's a term for that....Willful Blindness.
Not bored. Trolling. The sole purpose of H1B is to lower prevailing wages. Combine that with Google's preference for 20 somethings and you're out of excuses.
"our skills actually create value." But legal skills create money. Most people would choose money over value (would you like $100 in fiat currency or 40 loaves of bread?).
I might go for the 40 loaves of bread, if I could sell them for more than $100.
On the other hand, I might choose a Fiat 500 over either of them.
If non-technical guys like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn played in "The Internship" at ages 46 and 45 respectively can get jobs at Google, what's wrong with the rest of these no-talent old farts? This smells like envy, if you ask this faithful movie-goer.
Seastead this.
I do hire people in a way that reflects the population's variety and abilities: japs and chinks to do the brain stuff, kikes as accountants, honkys for white-collar crap, spics as janitors, pakis for the help desk and niggers to move boxes and shit around. I'm a Marxist: from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs.
No. Legal skills take money from place A and move it to place B. Lawyers don't create value. Engineers do.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Corporations are in the business of making money. They don't care how old you are if you can help them make money.
Thats why the law is protecting from corporate abuse. If money making was the only driving force we would all be slaves by now.
Frankly, sir, IMHO, you got played.
You just got man-in-the-middled by an Indian or other foreign person who wanted a job at Google, and got you to ghost his or her phone interview for them, with the help of a "recruiter"/"interviewer" who had you on lousy speakerphone so that they could relay your answers directly via a cell phone to the person Google was actually talking to.
Yes, this happens.
I don't thi-- but?! My head is spinning.
They could, but of course Google could say that pay correlates to experience and market prices for that.
My Stack Overflow user
I would be pretty shocked if you are even remotely on the right track.
I think you've identified someone with dyslexia.
And there's the problem.
Who fits best with a team of 25 year olds?
It leads to a recursive situation where candidates with less experience or other negatives are chosen because they are young and not ugly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is the best slashdot post I have ever seen.
They too put me on speakerphone. The sound quality was poor. The man that interviewed me was insecure about his weight. He said he gained a lot of weight with all the free food...the interview went from stellar to south quickly after that. They even went as far to indirectly say that my google hangouts, gmail and chrome web browsing history was being used as a factor for my candidacy. They also said in ther interview that I should use incognito mode if I do not want my information and google hangouts account to be logged (and used in an interview). I felt my privacy was seriously violated.
Lately, I've really started to value my privacy.
Maybe google should take a leaf out of apple's boom and sue samsung
This.
I'm curious, are you on an hourly wage or on a fixed salary?
Is it the same for everyone?
Corporations are in the business of making money. They don't care how old you are if you can help them make money.
Corporations don't care if you can make them money. They don't care about anything at all in fact because they're not sentient. The people acting on behalf of the corporation are supposed to have the corporations interests (i.e.making money) at heart, but are frequently far removed from that and in practice care little. They also have whole piles of prejudices and blindnesses because they're people.
On the whole, the only people for whom making the corporation money comes high on their list of priorities are ones with a sufficiently large personal stake.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
People should be hired based on who is best for the job. Period.
If you have a mechanism for identifying, up front, who is best for a job requiring creativity and technical skill and is not subject to subconscious biases by interviewers then please let the rest of us know. I know a lot of companies that would be able to save huge amounts of money by replacing their hiring mechanisms with such a technique.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now, there are people who work a lot of hours at Google. Mostly young people who don't have anything better to do and are really excited about what they're building.
So, you're confirming that young employees are overworking, which is the first part of the hypothesis, although then you go into a marketing style tangent with, "It's just that they are so excited that they don't want to go home!!!" That sounds pretty unhealthy to me, especially given the present evidence of attrition suggesting that it is not a sustainable way of working.
I am 45.
So, you are an outlier who will have been employed for a different reason than the infantry and for whom expectations are different.
It's not marketing, it's the truth. I worked there for nearly 8 years. By the way, I'm 31.
Google is (a) a very desirable employer and (b) hires people from all over the world. The combination of these things mean that many, many developers, especially younger ones that move from poorer countries, get relocated across borders. They arrive in a new country where they don't speak the language, quite often with a girlfriend or wife in tow, and frankly many of them don't quite dive into making friends and socialising as much as perhaps would be a good idea. Combination of new city, no social life + interesting work == lots of people working odd hours. Eventually they do settle down and the hours get more normal.
But programming has always been this way, hasn't it? I never heard a lawyer say, "I've been doing lawyering since I was 8 years old" but it happens in software all the time. It's a sort of work that many people just enjoy doing, and do it as a hobby as well as a job.
Google is (a) a very desirable employer and (b) hires people from all over the world.
So are farms, for those willing to cross the border and earn what is not even a living wage for the locals, but which can be sent back home to keep families in excellent living conditions.
They arrive in a new country where they don't speak the language
Google hires people in the US who do not speak English... really?
as much as perhaps would be a good idea
Bingo. It is unhealthy and burns people out.
Eventually they do settle down and the hours get more normal.
So young people stay at Google, and it is straight discrimination in hiring?
But programming has always been this way, hasn't it?
No. You're ignoring the very statistic on which the article is based, biased by your own limited experience. Google is NOT a typical employer. By far the majority of programmers do not develop unhealthy obsessions such that their productivity is governed by putting in excessive hours until they burn out.
I have enjoyed programming since I was about 6, but I have never and will never work in a programming sweatshop, which is any environment where one is competing on the basis of willingness to spend too much time on one's employer. The only time I have worked ridiculous hours is for my own business. Otherwise I'm just trading away my life to fulfil someone else's dream, because I lack the imagination to do anything on my own.
It's sounds bizarre but could have happened. Some people do crazy stuff to get a job there. When I was an interviewer there, part of interview training was learning tricks to detect candidates who were looking up answers on the internet. Sometimes you could ask a question and hear them typing in the background.
The article says the interviewer requested him to read the code out over the phone and that the interviewer was barely fluent in English. Those are two massive red flags that something odd was happening.
Google has a large pool of interviewers and some of them are better than others. There's no doubt about that. But in many years of working there I never encountered anyone with less than excellent English skills, and I cannot imagine anyone asking a candidate to read code out over the phone. That's just an obviously stupid thing to try and do, especially when the candidate offered to share it via Google Docs. SOP there is to send the candidate a Docs link for shared coding together, but even if something went wrong with that process, when the candidate offers to fix it that sounds and the interviewer refuses that sounds very much like he wasn't really talking to a Google employee. Think about it - if the person on the other end of the phone was a MITM then he'd need to have given his own very obviously non @google.com email address to receive the document. Busted.
Tech workers, especially engineers, should get paid more than lawyers since our skills actually create value.
Yeah, like really important stuff like the 20th instagram clone or cloud computing service.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Hm, 200. That's about the year Google's sharp decline began. Not in profits, I'm sure, but in making fun, innovative, and usable products.
He is a lawyer. A lawyer is someone who has, simply, gone through law school. You become an attorney when you practice law as a profession.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
If you don't think the law creates value then try doing business in a place without an effective legal system.
To be fair, engineers created the first Instagram and cloud computing service, too.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Sweeping generalizations about age groups are what lead to age discrimination. I know you don't mean to be actively discriminate against the young with your post, but it sets up a frame of mine in which it happens. It's exactly the same thing as is alleged in many discrimination suits by older people, where the mindset is that their generate are has-beens who are stuck in their ways and unable to adapt or fit in.
I've known good and bad programmers of all ages. Age does not correlate with quality, it's just a bias people use to explain and re-enforce their perceptions when they don't have objective data. Data is not the plural of anecdote.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, now that ROSS has entered the workforce, things are about to get a lot worse for the majority of lawyers employed. It will thin the ranks. In fact, the further it goes up the chain, the more paranoid politicians will become. If there was ever the impetus to legislate AI from employment opportunities, ROSS could give them all the ammo they need.
Life is not for the lazy.
But the smiley makes it ok!
Who said anything about the USA? You realise Google has offices all over the world, right?
And who said anything about burning out? You're the one who decided that must happen. I've not seen any burned out young people at Google. The only burnout I knew there was a guy in his 50s.
And the only "evidence" of discrimination in hiring comes from this article, which is deeply questionable. Amongst other things it assumes every employee at Google does software development, which is very far from true (there is a massive sales division that skews young for the same reason bar staff do - it's not a very appealing long term job).
He'll want a salary to match his value and he won't be a yes man
How is this not rated "funny"? It's obviously sarcastic.
From the article, Google asked this guy to interview for his Java skills which he is certified in.
No one said that Google forces people to work long hours. But you can't sit there and tell me that all the amenities around campus are there for no reason. I've been on Google's campus multiple times for the on site gauntlet of interviews. The campus has free food all day, free transportation to/from/around campus, laundry services, daycare services, bowling alleys, various other entertainment, and more. In fact, a bathroom I used during an interview had a wall of cups and toothbrushes with employee names on them. People apparently stay at work so long that they need a dedicated toothbrush.
You don't know how the reserve banking system works, do you?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Lot's of commenters with posting as "anonymous coward". Hoping for a job at Google someday?
It doesn't matter whether you've *actually* discriminated against *anyone*. Discrimination law has been twisted such that if your demographics are even slightly skewed, you'll be assumed to have discriminated.
Who said anything about the USA? You realise Google has offices all over the world, right?
The context is US employees. The majority of employees are in the US. Name your country with a significant number of Google employees in which Google routinely hires people who do not speak an official language of that country, please.
And who said anything about burning out?
Young people are working long hours, as you said yourself. Those young people are not staying, as the data confirms. You have even just said yourself - abandoning your "because all programmers are willingly OBSESSED" argument - that a lot of Googlers are salespeople, pushed until they can take no more. (Although suggesting that it is expected as if like a bar job is again putting an embarrassingly rosy spin on it - the median age of corporate salespeople is nowhere near 29.)
assumes every employee at Google does software development, which is very far from true
No - it assumes that there is insufficient employees in enough roles which are routinely staffed by such young people marketwide as to pull down the average age without possible accusations of discrimination being made.
Google are low on gender, age, and race diversity compared to nearly every other tech company. Like a few of my friends who walked away from the Google interview process, the moment I started hearing discussions of fitting into the "culture", I saw that it was a business comprised of smart but narrowminded techs who did not really know any better. But it was only later that I found out just how monocultured it is, with fiercely loyal employees contradicting the stories of those who are pushed out. I'm sure you're aware of the statistics your company has released concerning lack of diversity, especially in technical roles as far as race and gender.
You can argue that a company should be allowed to discriminate as it pleases, but it requires some serious intellectual dishonesty to argue that Google is not discriminating on irrelevant factors.
Your claims are a bit off. I've recently been through the "Google gauntlet" multiple times (from phone screen to Mountain View). I'm going to counter your statements of "never" with my personal anecdote.
There's an outside chance of Java
Not true. I used Java in every phone screen and on site interview at Google.
You are *always* sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer
Not true. CollabEdit was used during a phone screen.
Then he got an interviewer who barely spoke English, and wouldn't take him off speakerphone. That never happens at Google.
Not true. I had an interviewer who showed up late, claimed to have no other phone except speakerphone, and left for 10 minutes while I was answering a question to use the restroom.
The interviewer was 10 minutes late to the call.
See previous answer.
My wife interviewed for Google around that time, and pretty much all of that happened. There was a local Google office, and we know who the interviewer was, and it was a Google engineer. And pretty much everything described happened. And it was VERY common at the time (the google docs link was given on the spot, though. No video conferencing).
Interviewer who barely spoke english on speaker phone who barely seemed interested. Check!
It is valuable to be able to move money around...
I would say "They're loss" and move on to the next interview.
That's my philosophy also and have only exercized it once in 32 years.
Long ass thread of entitled bullshit.
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That's a strange analysis... My experience at my job has been just the opposite:
Older employees (many of whom have gone into management) tend to stick with what they know and resist change.
Younger employees are more willing to try new things... Want to run Wireshark on a Linux machine? Oooh, that's too newfangled, gotta slip it under the radar here.
A very telling thing in this particular article: "He also has a master certification in Java, which he achieved with a certification test score "higher than 96% of all previous test takers," according to the lawsuit. " - Basically, if he advertised that to Google, he probably instantly lost the job. Certifications like that require rote memorization and test-taking ability. They don't require creativity and innovation, which are what Google values.
Ouch not sure if you'll be able to shake off that troll moderation. You were a little blunt but I somewhat agree. The older folks we've hired on my team have been pretty difficult to deal with. They are set in their ways and don't care to take any crap from anyone but sometimes your job is to take crap and make the best you can of it. This is especially concerning when you consider that the majority of your open spots in a company are going to be for lower level positions. There are just more of them. A younger guy applying for that role is understandable. An older person.. I know stuff happens in life but that is something of a red flag.
40 loaves of bread is costing more than $100 (fiat US dollars) these days.
unless you look like every single other employee of a company like google. And also never talk without vocal fry. And always where thick rimmed glasses. Use the word "like" where a comma should go. Act like you're really really stupid.
No it's not and no they aren't. Most Google employees and most Google revenues are outside the USA.
Switzerland, as just one example.
Jesus christ, you're bad at this. The data doesn't say that. Google has very low attrition rates and always has. If all the young people were burning out and leaving the average age would be higher than it is, wouldn't it?
You haven't shown that, or even begun to lay the groundwork for that. The demographics of Google engineering are pretty similar to the demographics of people taking CS courses at universities, which should not be surprising to anyone.
All organisations have cultures, it's inherent to any group of people that's allowed to be selective. If you don't believe this then all that suggests to me is you work at a place where you fit in well enough that you don't recognise that there is a culture at all.
Older people seem to be more resistant to going along with the flow of technology...
You might consider that there are at least two plausible explanations for this.
1. Older people can't or can't be bothered to keep up.
2. Older people can keep up just fine, but actively choose not to use certain new technologies or to avoid them for certain types of projects because in their judgement those new technologies aren't the best option for what they need to achieve on those projects.
There are plenty of both types of older developer around in the software development industry. Obviously one type tends to get more useful work done. Unfortunately but inevitably, inexperienced developers frequently mistake one for the other. Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Redistribute that wealth yo.
And rake off a little as it passes by.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I've worked with people like this. I gotta say to any managers reading this, DO NOT give these people a pass because of the perception that everyone makes mistakes. Engineers are precise. Heck, I might have a minor grammar or spelling issue in this very post, but the parent poster is pointing out a very poor grasp of the basics, and chronic writing problems. These people make horrible engineers because they can only very slowly produce code that they themselves are working on in total isolation.
One person in particular I worked with exhibited very bad spelling. You might not think this was a problem... until you had to untangle a web of mis-spelled dependencies of 3 different variations. Which variable, relevent, relavent or relavant did you meant to reference here, dude?
he's too old. He'll want a salary to match his value
I think you are confusing "too old" with "too expensive".
You do realize that there is one possibility no one has considered: English may not be the guy's first/native language?
He may be a mouth-breathing idiot, but destroying his argument publicly (instead of his grammar skills or lack thereof) would be far more effective, no?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There is a Federal Law that says that a company may not discriminate on the basis of age. It's interesting to note that Microsoft, Oracle, Apple, etc. have not had these age discrimination suits. Google has been notorious for tests that they routinely give that virtually no one over 30 could pass. I had a friend in Marketing who is exceptional - MBA, Harvard etc. - and she had the misfortune of being 40. No one is suggesting that Google should hire 60 year old programmers - but a mean age of 29 smacks of straight out discrimination and since everyone will someday age, it is time to make room for more senior professionals. I am a great admirer of Google - but they cannot argue that they have the right to be outside of the law here. Just my thoughts.
Or some people just like to brush after lunch.
People apparently stay at work so long that they need a dedicated toothbrush.
That or they just like to brush after every meal, trust their fellow bathroom users not to scrub the toilets with their brush, and can afford to keep duplicates of their hygiene utilities at the place they spend around half their waking hours. ... Neurotic I tell you, they're all neurotic.
Something you may not have considered...
Yes, younger coders/admins/etc are willing to put in insane hours, and can bang out huge swaths of effort.
The problem arises when you realize that most of the kids are not so adept at, well, solving problems that arise. As a corollary, that lack of experience is a basis for lack of creativity. They only know what they were taught with perhaps a few limited ideas, and haven't enough hands-on time in the real world to realize that there are multiple ways to get something done, especially on a macro scale - many of those ways being far more efficient and elegant than what they just barely learned in school.
Oh, and I have found that the kids by and large have little-to-no people skills. At all. In a company larger than 400-500 people, the ability to explain and persuade becomes just as important as the ability to do your job.
The good news is this: over time, those kids get that experience, those skills, and most of them realize that there is more to life than throwing 80+ hours a week at a project.
So let's tie it all together: As the near-median mid-40's guy, I've found that I don't have to toss my life upon the altar of the Kanban board. Instead, I find ways of getting the work done more efficiently, and have the people skills to demand (and get) management to set realistic timelines to meet the company's goals (meanwhile, the kids just bitch, moan, then go blast out 80+ hour work-weeks to meet the deadline, often at cross-purposes which blows the timeline anyway - then someone else has to go back in and refactor their barely-running shit, usually after release).
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Trying to get a Contract/NDA/Large PO signed and paid for in time to finish a project on time makes me want to bash my head against my desk and just go back to being a developer.
Diversity includes older people.
Diversity includes US Citizens.
Google does not know this.
Holy shit - that was so beautiful I almost cried. :)
On a more serious note - parent post (or something like it) needs to be required reading for anyone who wants to be more than just a rotating scrum team leader or etc.
Hell, it should be required reading for anyone with "Sr." in front of their job title.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
To be fair, I think they got paid.
I can't agree enough with this. How can this guy be expected to EVER master any (computer) language if he hasn't even mastered the basics of the English language after how many years? Computers change fast, and if you can't go from knowing nothing to being very very good in a language in a matter of a few months, you simply aren't very good.
So does a Casino and Wallstreet. Still examples of not creating anything just extracting money.
Young or Old, if they are willing and able to relearn their jobs every 2 years, then they are professionals. If not, they move to management or become bitter. Older people value their free time more because we understand, you do not get that time you wasted at work instead of with your child, back. They grow up and you get "Cat in the cradle" songs. Perhaps you will figure that out some day before its to late.
The context is US employees. The majority of employees are in the US. Name your country with a significant number of Google employees in which Google routinely hires people who do not speak an official language of that country, please.
And what exactly is the official language of the US? Before you answer, perhaps you should look it up.
Didn't get the job - the reason is because their evaluation criteria is heavily skewed on academic CS skills: sorting, data structures, stuff like that. It is a good system, but it tends to filter out guys like me who have been in industry for decades and cannot remember the details of merge sort. They readily admit this aspect - at least they did to me.
Also, the writing code into a shared Google Doc was a bit cumbersome to say the least. Even though my stuff turned out to compile and run (and get the right result... I cut and paste into a dev env afterwards to verify... which I thought to be incredible considering I cold typed it into the equivalent of MS Word) I didn't get the gig. C'est la vie.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"They won't learn anything knew" But the young ones think they already know everything, even how to spell.
But you already new that.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
I don't know about you but if you read the article, it almost sounds like this guy feels that because he's older and has so much "experience" that he should have been hired. It sounds like he sued Google because he was upset that the Interview didn't go as smooth as he hoped and he badly wanted to work for them. I've worked everything from Call Centre Internet Support all the way to being an Administrator, to Programmer that I am now. I wouldn't hire this guy judging from his attitude. It sounds like he feels entitled to getting this job. You know how old people complain that the young seem to think they deserve everything?
I've done many Interviews in my lifetime and from the those, I've found you can't blame the Interviewer or even yourself when things go wrong. Sometimes things go well and sometimes they don't. Besides, suing like this is sure fire way of burning your bridges. He's going to be lucky if anyone else is going to want to hire him now.
the search algorithms at google are so much worse than they were even five years ago. These days, the noise-to-signal ratio is *terrible* - I frequently do searches, and put a phrase, or couple of words in quotes, and put a + in front... and I see a para for a "hit", 2 or 3 down, and there's part of the phrase, without the rest, bolded. They're not even getting good hits for advertisers - it's anything that can vaguely be construed as related to your search.
mark
Definitely have to agree. Coding is easy when compared to getting 30 "top tier" (i.e. ego-centric) programmers to work in the same direction. Takes experience. Want someone to take a high risk project and pivot quickly, still needs experience - especially with bigger - critical projects.
If it was not for the market strength in Google's ad business, the company would have folded. The inefficiency in their operation shows time and time again. A manager worth their salt SENDS PEOPLE HOME after 10 hrs, because their work will be crap (Actually starts to suffer after 6 hrs - breaks help and so do retaskings) - but no strategy works after 10. The decision cycle is just suspect. If you have people in the office longer, send them home.
stop giving away the jobs to shit indian and we can get some money for all.
Higher an older worker, we know to work, we won't spend it playing games half the day and the other half going for coffee....
Yes, but that millennial or Indian worker might have better writing skills. (The HR and corporate world is really weird right now. But, nothing is worse than an old grumpy fart claiming superiority when his/her communication skills portray a definite lack of superiority.)
If you're a kiss-ass, you're doing it wrong and the executives will eat you for lunch.
If you're a director and it the work is 'hard' then you're doing it wrong.
I spent a bit of time in hardware design, too - you think its fair game to ask what pin 7 and pin 14 mean, generally, on TTL chips? if you have touched hardware at all, you'd know this, but I doubt even 10% of googlers would know it. I know it. why shouldn't they?
see, same logic fallacy.
I see what you did there!
An Indian friend was telling me that Indians are doing this en-masse to get jobs. They are also substituting for each other in video interviews.
When you ask any question, including "Want to run Wireshark on a Linux machine?", the answer you should get is "why?" You may get young employees wanting to try new things, but you'll also get old employees wanting to know the problem that is being solved rather than blindly taking commands.
The main problem of receiving compensation commensurate to the "value" your profession is that you're at the mercy of the other people who share your profession.
People who become lawyers tend to be good negotiators. People who become accountants tend to be risk-averse. You could argue that the baseline value of these two should be similar, but it isn't because there are far more unemployed and underemployed lawyers in the market than accountants. Yet the average salary of lawyers is far higher than accountants. Why? Because accountants as a whole aren't as opportunistic, don't tolerate as much risk, and nobody is sticking their neck out to raise the bar.
If fast food work could attract the same kind of people that lawyering does, fast food workers would be some of the highest paid workers in the country. But it doesn't, that work attracts disengaged or otherwise engaged people who just need some job for the moment. People like that tend to negotiate towards a minimum of commitment and responsibility so they can focus on other things rather than towards a higher paycheck.
The real path to male liberation
Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code
If you hire a coder that can't code, who is the bigger failure?
It's not just that they can't learn new technologies - it is that they won't. Older folk get comfortable with their favorite tools and don't feel intellectually vulnerable when using their favorite tools.
But it's not just that...
Older folk get tired of jumping on board a new technology only to see it die in six months and leave them with useless knowledge. They just don't want to spend the majority of their free time learning new technologies that either die off or later are so buggy that the industry quits using the new technology.
Why learn VB.Net when VB still works? Why even learn PHP when JavaScript works? Why not just use Perl for everything since it has worked fine since 1993? There is wisdom in staying with what has been proven, and in certain sectors such an attitude is pervasive - sectors where reliability trumps innovation.
Some day, those 29 year olds will be in their forties and be tired of jumping to new set technologies only to see them fail. Those same 29 year olds will likely stick with Java or Python no matter what the project.
I've been 29 years old for 20 years now but I still learn new languages and other technologies. I'm just not an early adopter because ii don't wasn't to spend six months learning something that will be useless in a year...
All you old fogies listen up. This is jot discrimination.
Just in case you're not a troll...
Young people are more energetic,
Maybe. But IMO older people tend to direct their energy with more precision.
more eager to learn,
Disagree. Stereotype. In fact, IMO older people tend to learn more effectively as their have more experiences to evaluate wrt new information.
and more likely to know the things you'd need tonhelp Google, like modern programming languages.
Disagree. In my experience younger folks are busy honing their [C, C++, Java, python|ruby] skills - something I did many years ago. These days I'm learning more niche/exotic/modern languages for fun!
Sometimes it pays to be an old fart. Also, FWIW I've never met a youngster I couldn't code circles around ... not saying there's no young uber-coders out there, but they're a rarer breed than you might think.
The worst part is if they're writing the specs, they're even more into "Do what I meant and not what I wrote" than most. We're not mind readers.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I would be pretty shocked if you are even remotely on the right track.
I did over 50 interviews of technical candidates while at Google, and 6 of them were phone screens.
One of them tried this on me, so it definitely happens. Two of them tried the "look things up on the Internet to answer the question" trick.
Personally, I would have had him drive the hour and a half from Boynton Beach to the Miami MarCom office, and interview from there. I don't recruit directly since my pre-Google/pre-Apple/Pre-IBM days, but if you are acting as a recruiter, one of the best gauges of a candidates personality is the front desk person's opinion of them. I can't see a recruiter passing on that information.
Shields should have gone up from the they-contact-you-because-you're-desirable-then-they-phone-screen moment. If they want you, they'll call you in, and if they *really* want you, they'll fly you to Mountain View to get a full team on your interview.
PS: I was 5 minutes late to exactly one of them because the bike I was riding to the building broke down. It would be interesting to hear an explanation of why the recruiter was not on the line with the person at the appointed time, and telling them of the schedule change and asking if it was OK with the candidate. For the on-site I was late for, the last interviewer stayed with the candidate until I got there. At a full 10 minutes of no-show I would have been substituted.
Others have done so. But if you insist ... communications skills are important, nay, essential. This includes creating specs, communicating with customers, etc. Sure, in this context it's obvious what he meant, but (1) in other contexts, we shouldn't have to be mind readers to figure out what he meant instead of what he wrote, and (2) he does not have the ability to judge writing skills in others when he's blind to his own lack of skills, so his self-proclaimed ability to judge the value of future hires has a gaping hole in it.
Unlike his claims, which we cannot verify, we can verify his lack of a knowledge of basic spelling. Now, I did consider that English may not the his native language, but he grokked the "young'uns" reference just fine, which would tend to indicate that his understanding of English is idiomatic.
Satisfied?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I don't really pay attention to moderations. Besides, for anyone who read to the end of my post, they would see that what I wrote was meant to an equally unfair generalization opposite of the parent comment. I lean more toward the view I presented, but I think a more accurate view is that terrible people and terrible coders come in all ages, though I think my bias is still toward younger porgrammers (even though I am no longer young).
The problem arises when you realize that most of the kids are not so adept at, well, solving problems that arise.
I would say most programmers in general lack this ability.
As a corollary, that lack of experience is a basis for lack of creativity.
I think it is *possible* for experience to help creativity, but it seems more often than not it is used to hinder creativity. Why figure out a new way to do something if you already (think you) know the best way.
They only know what they were taught with perhaps a few limited ideas, and haven't enough hands-on time in the real world to realize that there are multiple ways to get something done, especially on a macro scale - many of those ways being far more efficient and elegant than what they just barely learned in school.
Depending on the school, the way they were taught in school may in fact be the current best way to solve a problem. I find stubborn older programmers are just as likely to latch on to their one way of doing things, and at least the new stubborn programmers will have latched onto a slightly more modern single solution.
Oh, and I have found that the kids by and large have little-to-no people skills. At all. In a company larger than 400-500 people, the ability to explain and persuade becomes just as important as the ability to do your job.
The only thing worse than the people skills of younger programmers is the people skills of older programmers.
So let's tie it all together: As the near-median mid-40's guy, I've found that I don't have to toss my life upon the altar of the Kanban board. Instead, I find ways of getting the work done more efficiently, and have the people skills to demand (and get) management to set realistic timelines to meet the company's goals (meanwhile, the kids just bitch, moan, then go blast out 80+ hour work-weeks to meet the deadline, often at cross-purposes which blows the timeline anyway - then someone else has to go back in and refactor their barely-running shit, usually after release).
I don't see old programmers being more efficient. I see good programmers being more efficient. And as I said before, I find the younger programmers to be much more humble even when the do in fact know all these things they just learned in school (often things older programmers who went to school a long time ago, or never went to school have never heard of). I find that younger programmers, especially the ones that are still dating still have an incentive to be able to relate to other people.
And yes, the young programmers don't have all the experience they need, but they are like sponges. They absorb information you give them. If you point them in the right direction, their limitless energy and enthusiasm is often more than I myself can muster.
We have lots of old bad programmers that we can;t even give busy work to because they feel it is beneath them. Or they just bitch and moan and take a really long time to do a half ass job. Then you put some new grad on the job, and they follow directions and finish the task in a fraction of the time
...and that my friend, is what an old fucker brings to the table. ;)
A *good* experienced programmer is invaluable. The problem is that most programmers are terrible. Young programmers are malleable. Old programmers are either really good, or more often they suck and can't change because are stubborn as well.
It's probably a good (for them/us) thing that older people value their free time more. That doesn't make them better workers. I was talking about what is better for a company, not what is better for an employee. I personally don't consider my time spent at work wasted. I take pride in my work, and I like to see the fruits of my labor being utilized. I don't stay at work a minute later than I have to, because I've got a kid at home. I am not "young". I am saying I would be more likely to hire a younger person over an older person, because in my experience they are more productive on average.
We recently had to shift 6 people out of our program to other projects due to an accounting error. We got rid of 3 young people and 3 old people. Losing the young people was a big setback. The old people we lost were doing more harm than good, and I'm sure we will be more productive without them. The only reason the other department took them was because the also got the young people. This is just one example that is particularly fresh in my mind. It is not always true that young people are better than older people, but at least at my company it is true more often than not.
And I am not even saying this as a young person. The older people at our company agree that the older people suck. They just disagree on which old people suck.
If you hire a coder that can't code, who is the bigger failure.
Obviously it's us. I thought it was pretty clear to anyone reading this that we as a company are the ones losing out. The old guys that can't code win. They have a steady job they don't deserve.
It sounds like you're a little older than me but we both see this much the same way.
I have as much interest in useful or interesting new technologies today as I had when I was 21. I'm also significantly quicker at getting up to speed with them and more aware of things like pros and cons and the importance of choosing the right tool for the job than I used to be at that age.
However, if you asked me right now, I'm quite sure that I couldn't crank out a new TodoMVC example in this week's front-end JS framework as fast as a 21-year-old who just learned it can. Since not a lot of people solve real problems or make real money writing toy to-do apps, I don't find this situation too threatening. ;-)
The thing is, I've long since stopped being impressed by this week's front-end JS framework, this week's UI trends and visual design language, and this week's new programming language that looks and feels like C or JS with a thin coat of paint over it. I could get up to speed with them to the point where I too could write to-do apps in half an hour, but to me that's like deciding to learn some new GUI toolkit just to write Tetris or learning some new database API just to write a PIM or whatever we're calling them these days. As you say, these kinds of tools are so ephemeral now that they tend to be very trendy and generate a lot of hype, but they are often popular more because of some big sponsoring organisation than any particular innovation or technical merit.
To me, about the only thing more dull is evangelists for a specific browser (why?!) telling us all about these great new features it has for writing large-scale applications... when the biggest web apps out there still tend to be orders of magnitude smaller than stuff many of us "old programmers" were working on in the last millennium, at which time some of those features actually were quite innovative.
Next week, all these elite young programmers, who are leaving people like you and me and our meaningless track records of building actual working and revenue-generating projects in their wake, will probably notice that MV* is not the only possible UI architecture, that building an application that has to run for years around a framework that has a shelf life measured in months might not be such a great idea, and that JS is actually a very bad and very slow language that just becomes not quite so bad with the ES6 changes and only moderately slow with modern JIT compiling engines.
Just don't tell them that the entire web apps industry probably represents closer to 5% of the programming world than 95% and some of these state-of-the-art ideas are actually 50 years old. Such talk is the stuff of nightmares, and they aren't old enough to hear that kind of horror story yet. ;-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I'm curious, are you on an hourly wage or on a fixed salary? Is it the same for everyone?
Salary plus annual bonus and incentive stock. Yes it's the same for pretty much everyone. Why?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That sounds pretty unhealthy to me, especially given the present evidence of attrition suggesting that it is not a sustainable way of working.
Attrition at Google is very, very low, and what there is is mostly people leaving to found their own companies. As for how it sounds to you... you really don't know what you're talking about. Go spend some time with some of said young employees and you'll see why they feel it's fantastic.
So, you are an outlier who will have been employed for a different reason than the infantry and for whom expectations are different.
Nope, just another SWE.
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But you can't sit there and tell me that all the amenities around campus are there for no reason.
Absolutely not. They're there for various very important reasons.
However, none of those reasons are the one you postulate. If you look at each of them individually, drop your bias, and think about what benefit there could be to the company in providing that service to employees... it's generally very obvious.
In fact, a bathroom I used during an interview had a wall of cups and toothbrushes with employee names on them. People apparently stay at work so long that they need a dedicated toothbrush.
Where do you keep your toothbrush at work? Or don't you brush after lunch? Ick.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
This matches my experience each of the three times I've done phone interviews with Google. The first two were with the same cocky / condescending twat. All three quickly derailed into obsession over technical minutia unrelated to the job. Now that I've removed the first 15 years of experience and the year of my degree I should try again and see how differently it goes.
Today one of my junior developers basically threw a fit over what he was calling a violation of the C standards in all of our production code. He was quite rude about it to me, suggesting that I as the project lead had displayed some magnitude of incompetence in being ignorant of just how badly things had been screwed up. His gripe was basically that the multiple inclusion guards in most of the header files (you know, #ifndef SOME_HEADER_H #define SOME_HEADER_H #endif) were of the form "__ProjectName__ModuleName__HeaderName__." Of course the C standard definition says that any name beginning with a double underscore is supposed to be reserved for the compiler. You know, in case some compiler decides to #define something that would conflict with a symbol or variable name you were already using in code. Now the funniest part of this was that these "malformed" header guards were so numerous because the IDE we use just so happened to be automatically generating them exactly according to that pattern, by default.
Now in this case I was fairly incensed because this developer was confronting me about the "major problem" he discovered right after I got out of a three hour intellectual property meeting (complete with lawyers!) and I then realized that in that three hours he had written about 20 lines of code. I nearly blew my stack again when the next day another junior developer submitted a pull request that basically consisted of a renaming of all the header guard definitions throughout the project... I don't even know whether to call it lack of experience, lack of perspective, or some sort of manifestation of "I just graduated with a CS degree and I took an Advanced Operating Systems course so I know everything!"
One of my previous co-workers brushed his teeth after lunch every day. It's kinda weird, but people do it apparently.
Impose tax on corporate revenues, not profits; You're paying income tax on your salaries, not savings;
https://www.change.org/p/barac...
Casteism
And maybe that's showing in the way they build beta product/services right and left that they don't know what to do with and end up closing some few months later.
Do you expect every one of their ideas to be successful? Their success rate is actually much higher than average. Even their failures would be considered successes by others with lower standards.
A "highly competitive market" is not so highly competitive when you can throw at it a ton of cash to burn.
There is a reason they have a ton of cash.
I'd say "poor people suck at making money" is a tautology.
Get a life.
I wasn;t aware I needed an excuse for typos in a slashdot comment.
You obviously don't know what "typo" means. Using the wrong word is not a typo, but an error indicating lack of knowledge. But, since you used "typo" incorrectly, too, at least you're consistent.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Learn how to spell.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Well, given that they are only mistakes I make while typing, they are by definition typographical errors. More importantly pointing out typos as a means of argument is childish, and indicative of general shittiness as a person.
Learn an argument style that has more depth than simply looking for typos in people's comments. You're "if the glove does not fit, you must aquit" level of logical ability only impresses other people like you. Leave the real logic to people with more in their cognitive toolkit than spellchecking. You have already been replaced by computers already anyway.
You've proven that you can't write properly - so, what gives you the qualifications to judge potential hires? You don't have the chops to vet the quality of the documentation they generate, people will always wonder if they should follow what you wrote or what you meant, and your many misuses of words will be judged by others, both inside and outside the business, as an indicator of both lower intelligence and lower quality control.
That you can't see this shows that YOUR cognitive toolkit is too limited, and as such, it's defective. Which of course means that your "logic" isn't based on reality.
Again, see Dunning-Kruger, and maybe take a peak at the Peter Principle while you're at it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
A good friend of mine in his 40's went through the Google interview mill. Days of interviews until finally offered a role for half his current salary. He told them where to go and got a job with a no-name company that was paying 3x as much as the Google offer.
if two people are equal on the resume but one has more experience who is older, and you pick the younger for "social fit" , thats open and shut lawsuit.
It's more complicated than that, but "social fit" is a valid requirement. ie Communication is an important trait, so getting on with the candidate, no matter their age, is equally as important as skills or experience. If you've got a brain and the right attitude I can teach you the rest. If you're a crotchety old (or young) bastard who knows everything then I'm not interested.
Not sure if you seen the rich list in the last 20 years. Plenty of tech workers, not many lawyers. The Engineers who complain about their place in life are usually the worker bees who understand the tech but fail to get why the tech is there in the first place. Those the jump that gap generally do make more money than lawyers.
You are licensed by The State to practice law (this was not always the case) which conveniently limits competition and prevents outsourcing. Of course these same lawyers passed these laws for our (their) own good and have every incentive to make law as simple (complex) as possible.
If you don't think keeping your gay ass out of jail is not something of value...
Jesus fucking Christ, I hate this place sometimes.
There are TONS of really good programmers/architects who have 20 years+ experience. Depending on the strength of your organization, you may be experiencing extreme bias (towards low quality) in your sampling methodology. Most of the mid-30's to mid-50's technical experts I know haven't had to "job hunt" in a decade. We move between organizations that pay exceptionally well for engineering resources, and have found our sweet spot on the continuums between hands-on, management of people and projects, and other BD responsibilities. Nobody I know, by this point in our careers, isn't involved in some way on all 3 fronts (one who lets his technical skills atrophy does so at one's own peril, even when not directly hands on all day). Transitions are facilitated by professional networking, not job searching, and are almost always invitation driven as soon as a need arises by either party. We've all had to adapt through numerous transitions of tech stacks, methodologies, contracting strategies, budgeting cycles, and executive turnover. Adaptability in any sense isn't an issue.
That said, when I meet a 24 year old developer who has the intellect, professionalism and business savvy that I'd want to help nurture and promote, I'm going to take him or her under tutelage and make introductions to other people in my network. I want to work with smart people, and it doesn't matter if they are 24 or 64.
Proofreading is tedious. I can do it well when I have to, and prefer not to when it is unimportant (e.g. in a slashdot comment), because I value my time and effort and would prefer to spend it on more worthwhile things. The only downside to not proofreading is when people like you try to use mistakes that I would have caught proofreading as an ad hominem attack. This is a downside that I think is more than compensated by the benefit of my time. Most sane people understand that a slashdot comment is not the same as an important document that should be carefully proofread.
I am a software engineer. I create things. I'm sure you latch on your "amazing" ability to proofread because you are otherwise talentless. My syntax errors while coding are caught by the compiler. This is more efficient than proofreading. Other people at my company can spend their time doing documentation. I can do it, and do it well, when it is necessary. Otherwise I would prefer spending my time being productive.
You are like a receptionist who thinks that the doctor would rather be a receptionist like yourself if only he could improve his handwriting.
It would just be sad, if not for the fact that you use it as a juvenile debate strategy. This makes it pathetic.
I am not embarrassed by errors I make while typing in an informal forum like slashdot. I would be embarrassed if I had such low intellectual ability as to need to resort to ad hominem attacks like you apparently need to do.
My syntax errors while coding are caught by the compiler. This is more efficient than proofreading. Other people at my company can spend their time doing documentation. I can do it, and do it well, when it is necessary. Otherwise I would prefer spending my time being productive.
Another fool who doesn't consider documentation as being productive. Also, being able to proofread has helped me spot and fix lots of bugs in other people's code, whether c, c++, php, whatever. Doing a compile just to find a typo is lame. I stopped doing that decades ago.
So keep minimizing the damage your bad reading skills bring to the table ... because stupid is as stupid does.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Another fool who doesn't consider documentation as being productive.
Given my salary and that pretty much anyone can do it, it's a waste of my time, and my company's budget.
Also, being able to proofread has helped me spot and fix lots of bugs in other people's code, whether c, c++, php, whatever.
How long does it take you to proofread 10 million lines of code? I don't know if you've heard the news, but computers can do a lot of the tedious work for you. There are compilers, static analysis tools, memory analysis tools, debuggers, etc. They catch way more errors than a human ever could by proofreading.
Doing a compile just to find a typo is lame.
It finds *all* the typos, and having an ide which is constantly compiling the code as you edit it, finds the typos in real time and offers suggestions to fix them.
I stopped doing that decades ago.
Are you fucking serious? This is the point at which anyone who knows anything about computers should be face-palming themselves. One of the primary functions of a compiler is to check for valid syntax. It does it better and quicker than you do. 1. You are lying if you are saying you don;t use a compiler to detect syntax errors. 2. You are a fucking idiot for thinking this makes you seem smart.
So keep minimizing the damage your bad reading skills bring to the table ... because stupid is as stupid does.
My position indicates what I bring to the table. I get to choose the most interesting projects, and I am who is called when something needs to get done right.
Keep trying to make your useless skill set seem valuable. Anyone who has ever written any significant amount of code can see through your bullshit.
Actually, sometimes it's better to take the time to do the docs yourself, rather than try to explain what's going on to someone who didn't write it. Not only doesn't it take much more time, but the quality is better, and then someone who has to maintain the docs at least has a solid base to go forward on.
Sure, you can do things like comments /* THERE BE DRAGONS HERE */ and /* IT LOOKS WRONG BUT IT ISN'T */, but those are the very areas I wouldn't trust someone else to prepare the docs on from scratch. It's also good to put example usage in the docs, something that a person who didn't write it may very well get wrong.
Also, nobody tests 10 million lines of fresh code in one shot - unless you're really into spaghetti code.
I've been doing it long enough that I don't get very much in the way of syntax errors - possibly because my reading skills are obviously better than yours. Attention to detail, expressive code, and the ability to explain it for future use (even yourself 6 months down the road) via docs is what makes a good programmer - and on that you fail - and the biggest fail is that you don't seem to understand that programming and development is more than just banging it out and throwing it over the wall.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Actually, sometimes it's better to take the time to do the docs yourself, rather than try to explain what's going on to someone who didn't write it. Not only doesn't it take much more time, but the quality is better, and then someone who has to maintain the docs at least has a solid base to go forward on.
We have an excellent team of people writing documents. They don't seem to have any problems.
Sure, you can do things like comments /* THERE BE DRAGONS HERE */ and /* IT LOOKS WRONG BUT IT ISN'T */, but those are the very areas I wouldn't trust someone else to prepare the docs on from scratch. It's also good to put example usage in the docs, something that a person who didn't write it may very well get wrong.
Also, nobody tests 10 million lines of fresh code in one shot - unless you're really into spaghetti code.
We have a 10 million line codebase that is constantly being updated.
I've been doing it long enough that I don't get very much in the way of syntax errors - possibly because my reading skills are obviously better than yours.
1. detecting syntax errors before the compiler does, is basically a useless skill. Congratulations. 2. Your reading skills are not better than mine. As I said, I don't proofread what I write. (i.e. I'm not using my reading skills in slashdot). What's the point of having reading skills without the ability to comprehend? But having useless skills is sort of your thing I guess.
Attention to detail, expressive code, and the ability to explain it for future use (even yourself 6 months down the road) via docs is what makes a good programmer and on that you fail
Now explain how not proofreading slashdot comments before submitting them has any bearing on the code I write. Do you really believe it's impossible to give different amounts of effort to those 2 things?
and the biggest fail is that you don't seem to understand that programming and development is more than just banging it out and throwing it over the wall.
You seem to be under the false impression that it is necessary for each person to perform all the duties of software development from start to finish rather than employing division of labor.
I never said good documentation isn't necessary. It is necessary. I said it is able to be done by nearly anyone (like you). So it is more efficient to have it done by people with no other useful skills (like you).
I am very good at explaining how software works to people, as evidenced by the excellent documentation that exists for my code (mostly written by other people).
I don't proofread my own comments, but I comprehend the things I do read. You should give it a try sometime.
You DID say that software documentation was less important than writing code. For non-trivial projects, it's an absolute necessity. Sometimes, it's better to write the documentation first, then the implementation. But you don't care - "It's not my job. My time is too valuable."
Good documentation, done either before or concurrently, shortens the time needed to code it right, and often leads to getting it right the first time. It should also make it clear what the edge cases are and how they are handled, because a cryptic error code isn't enough.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
You DID say that software documentation was less important than writing code.
Are you not able to understand the difference between "less important" and "not important"?
Sometimes, it's better to write the documentation first, then the implementation. But you don't care - "It's not my job. My time is too valuable."
Sometimes it's better for a surgeon to clean the bathrooms. I don't make a habbit of making "never/always" style claims.
Good documentation, done either before or concurrently, shortens the time needed to code it right, and often leads to getting it right the first time.
I don't doubt that there are people that can't write good code without writing documentation first. But it only shortens the time needed to produce a finished product for people with that particular deficiency.
Furthermore, this is still irrelevant given that my argument is that pretty anybody can do the documentation (it is a *less* valuable skill).
It should also make it clear what the edge cases are and how they are handled, because a cryptic error code isn't enough.
Software done right doesn't have cryptic error codes. It has consistent intuitive behavior. And like I already said, the documentation gets done, just not by me.