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Woman Recruited By Google Four Times and Rejected Now Joins Age Discrimination Suit
dcblogs writes: An Ivy league graduate, with a Ph.D. in geophysics, Cheryl Fillekes, who also specializes in Linux and Unix systems, was contacted by Google recruiters four separate times over a seven year period. In each instance, she did well enough on the phone interviews to get invited to an in-person interview but was rejected every time for a job. She has since joined an age discrimination lawsuit against Google filed about two months ago by another older worker. "The amended lawsuit also alleges that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) received 'multiple complaints of age discrimination by Google, and is currently conducting an extensive investigation.'"
It's very common for people to pass phone screens but fail onsite interviews. The phone screen is just an early warning system for people who have no chance. The fact that this lady got equally far in the process 4 times is probably a good thing - it means the process is consistent.
The problem is that the recruiters actually contacted her 4 times and misled her about her chances. If you have already been rejected once, you are obviously NOT an "ideal candidate". And the reason why the recruiters did this is simple: they are paid on commission. It's a fail system, and in this case it wasted the candidate's time, it wasted the interviewers' time, and now it will waste the courts' time.
I'm sure age discrimination is real, but that's not the issue here.
and see the age discrimination. I've been to their SF and Kirkland, WA campuses about two dozen times, and very few people I saw were over thirty. When I interviewed there, they said I was a good fit due to my age. Yes, that's age discrimination, but I can't argue that they were wrong.
Getting into my late 40's, I find my friends are experiencing this all over. EMC keeps contacting a buddy who is a storage architect, he designed storage hardware at sun, they never make an offer after multiple interviews, he says its because hes almost 60. Facebook keeps calling a few of my buddies, but they too never get hired and are in their 50's. I was turned down by 2 companies when they learned my age and I had a family. But I dont want to work in a sweat shop anymore, so its good to know exactly how bad some places can be. Amazon so far seems to be hiring everyone, because they burn them out quicker than they can hire.
Yeah, people are working until retirement age now, so this is a problem. (You know, that reset button that wipes out your entire life savings called divorce)
Any theories on why this is happening?
My thought is it might be culture thing, unless the new hire is coming on as a team lead or manager they're probably going to be working under someone in their 20s or 30s. I'm wondering if this is simply a case of people feeling weird having a subordinate 10-20 years younger than themselves or bringing a 45 year old onto a team with a bunch of twenty-somethings.
I stole this Sig
Interviews are done by individual rank and file developers who are generally not compensated or recognized for doing this extra work in addition to their primary project. It's very unlikely that there was some top down directive to not hire people based on age. It's possible that younger interviewers have an unconscious preference for people similar to themselves, but dozens of folks who interviewed her would not be acting in consort or with malicious intent.
From my observations (not just personal) I came to the conclusion that, if you are out of job at 45, you're fucked, especially (but not limited to) in tech and science/research.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
"For 40 years, I programmed in C, C++ and Python, primarily in the Unix and Linux environments. In 2014, I bought a dairy farm in upstate NY. I designed and built an on-farm creamery to produce farmstead sheep's milk cheese and yogurt. "
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ch...
To superficial people out there: yes, there's a picture in her profile. Semi-SFW.
lucm, indeed.
Infosys cuts the chase. When I forwarded the resume of a friend of mine to them, they kicked it back saying they *required* the high school graduation year. Not proof of graduation (tho why high school graduation should matter to someone with a degree plus experience anyway...).
You see, college degrees might be obtained at any age. But highschool degrees are mostly earned at 18. So they are asking for the applicants age.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
While older people feel comfortable working with younger people- the reverse is not true.
I've had younger people specifically tell me they hired a team like them that they could hang out with after work.
It feeds on itself once you have a younger team in place. Back in 2009, Scotus gutted age discrimination protection and it's exploded since then.
PRE- ACA, increasing insurance premiums were a cause for not hiring- and for laying off large groups of older employees as they reached 50 to 55.
Back then- an older person's insurance could be 12x the cost of a younger person's insurance (now it's 3x).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Sometimes there are ways you can tell. I was once asked at length about my name, which sounds Islamic. The guy was trying hard to find out if I was a Muslim, without actually asking the question directly. The only reason he would care is if he wanted to discriminate against Muslims. I thought about trying to work that fact that I'm not religious into the answers, as he seemed to be hoping I would, but instead I just ended the interview early and left.
For age discrimination it is often in the form of being asked excessively about how much energy you have, what commitments you have outside of work, that kind of thing. Being asked if you intend to work full time, or where you will be in 10 years when you only have 5 to go before retirement. Pretending to reminisce about ancient technologies in an attempt to guess your age. It's a bit like when women are asked, sometimes indirectly, if they have a family or are thinking of having one or might get married any time soon. I know a couple of women who would remove their wedding rings before interviews because of that.
Of course, it's much easier if you can just send two nearly identical CVs, one with a lower age (or apparent age, i.e. just delete some of your older work history) and one gets an interview while the other does not. It's mostly done to detect racial bias, but it works just as well for age. Even something a simple as having an old fashioned name has a measurable effect.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, you'd think so. Try living near enough to an urban center so that recruiters/HR think that you can commute in, but in reality that's a 2 hour trip for everything except driving and paying a fortune for parking (and even then is probably closer to 90 minutes with traffic). Once they find out you're not willing to make that trip 5 days, or (holy shit) you want to work REMOTE, you stop getting called or getting your applications looked at.
Originally I was taking the approach that I'm a valuable asset and I should be able to ask for a better situation than what I have now (asking for more money, work from home/remote, not working with assholes, etc). What I found was that, in general, employers don't like it when you ask for stuff. What they want is people who will take what they are given and smile. So now I don't mention any of that in the interview process. It's a giant waste of time, to find out that, while they do want to hire you, they want to give you half your current salary and will write you up for not having your ass in the seat at 0830 and only leaving when your boss thinks you should leave (which is always more than 8 hours, but they don't tell you that), but that's the only way to get the offer in the first place, and then you can negotiate for what you want. Or, they'll tell you the offer is final, and everyone's wasted their time.
The way we hire people is fucked up. Over-entitled employers still think the pressures of supply and demand don't apply to them, and they insist that they still have the FSM-given right to treat their workers like shit; that extends to the hiring process. It's not that you're a valuable asset to the company, it's that you cost the company money and therefore are a terrible person. Then companies wonder why they can't keep good talent. It has to be greedy lazy employees! Yeah, that's it! They're all lazy and greedy! Couldn't be the fact that we treat them like shit at all!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
"For 40 years, I programmed in C, C++ and Python, primarily in the Unix and Linux environments"
Really. Is your name Ken? I didn't think so.
You can't pull bullshit around smart people. Though maybe you don't notice it so much at a dairy farm.
C was not seen out side of Bell Labs until 1973 at the earliest, most likely 74 or 75, so *maybe* that is true. But the C Programming Language was published in '78, so I call BULLSHIT.
C++ was just a gleam in Stroustroup's eye until about 1983, so I call more BULLSHIT.
Python first hit the streets in '89 or '90, so more BULLSHIT.
Unix, unless you were at Bell Labs, was not seen anywhere until the earliest, 1974, so maybe not bullshit, but I'd still call more BULLSHIT.
And linux is not even 15 years old, so there's no way that anybody has been programming on Linux for 40 years, so still even more BULLSHIT.
Stupid recruiters can't tell the difference between bullshit and tasty chocolate, but Google does not have stupid recruiters.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
Or, you wanted raises larger than 1.5%. The only way you get a raise of any significance (or a promotion) these days is by switching jobs.
That isn't always true...
I have had employees that were worth keeping and I offered more money to.
My office manager/book keeper, a few years ago, was doing very well and I was paying her $40k per year. When it came time to do the annual review, she asked for a 5% raise, instead I gave her a 20% raise to $50k.
Why? Because she ran the office, knew everything day to day, and the place just wouldn't work without her. She had taken on more duties since I hired her and deserved more pay.
She was shocked when I offered the money, to which I replied, "when a company has a great employee who does more each year and makes themselves valuable to the business, a company would be foolish to not compensate them for that.