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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.
be cute Asian gamer chicks in wheelchairs.
You wouldn't know where to find that as porn ?
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.
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.
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...
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.