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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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....
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
"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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
An example (I'm an older programmer)
I just gave a presentation to a team that's in trouble, but they can't see it yet. It was about the fundamentals of how to mature their group's testing practices. Fifteen minutes into it, they got bored with the slides and asked if I could show off our project (which implemented the objectives in the slides).
So I fired up 'vi' because I forgot to have a fully environment installed on my laptop, made a change, committed it, walked it though code review, merged it with the mainline, and watched it build, be automated tested at the unit, integration, component, system, and acceptance levels. The most popular response I got back from my post-presentation questionnaires on "The challenges of implementing these ideas" was that they "didn't have good tools like I had".
Those people (not all, but some) completely missed the point. The goals could be achieved with the tools they had in place; but, before they can use their older set of tools to achieve the same results, they need to 1) Not disregard the important parts (the theory) and 2) Not think that a tool is the answer.
One can use a hammer to hang a picture or build a house. I'd be inclined to worry about a person who complains that their hammer couldn't do either because they have a house building only hammer.
Give me 'make', 'm4', and 'tcl', and I still could build what I showed off today. Not because that's the right set of tools to do the job, but because if you have developed the experience, you realize that the the tools aren't the handicap.
Legal skills just move money around.
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.