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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.'"
I tried to google this but I told me the news was too old.
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.
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)
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.
someone with her education who goes to make cheese... hey, that's really romantic. maybe she burnt out, maybe she has some social issue that prevents competent office interaction
but maybe the real issue here is resume prejudice. where the guy or gal who takes 5 or 10 years off to pursue a passion never can get back in the game. which is especially true of women and the pursuit being having children
the usa should be like the nordic countries, and have mandatory child leave for *fathers and mothers*
that way having kids dings men's careers as much as women. otherwise, as long as child rearing impacts women disproportionately, women will never achieve parity with men in the office. nevermind that men want to spend time with their children and time with dad is just as important as time with mom if we really care about strong families in this country. put your money where your mouth is on your rhetoric about strong families, the presence of a father in a child's life, and family values in general, dear social conservatives, and promote equal family leave for men and women
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Grow up, idiot. Not every male hiring manager is a boob guy. There are quite a few ass guys out there too.
lucm, indeed.
wait.. really? http://www.isitdownrightnow.co...
doesn't look down... but i could google it...
"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.
They hired Kurzweil a few years ago, and he's now 67 (of course there's only one Ray Kurzweil). Anyway, I don't think the lawsuit has legs.
My impression isn't that it's age discrimination per se, it's the culture of twentysomethings. The way they were raised, they are simply uncomfortable with anyone but their own kind. It's not that they hate old people or anything, it's just that they feel weirded out and feel they couldn't possibly work every day with such a person. It's lack of empathy with "the other". It's also a form of oikophobia, in which they welcome people from other cultures but fear and loathe people from their own.
You can trot out the tired cliches about GET OFF MY LAWN LOLZ but at a certain point, there is truth there. I never felt weirded out by working with age 50+ people, even when I was a new recruit. It was just something everyone did. But now, unless you're one of their own kind, they just get freaked out and think they can't deal with having you around day in and day out. When it comes to making a decision, they drop the black ball in the fishbowl and that's it. No regrets, they just prefer the company of their own generation.
And I can sort of see where they're coming from. What happens when they share the latest meme from Tumblr around the office? You're going to show a blank look and keep on working. You're not on Tumblr, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, and this not only weirds them out, but makes you automatically suspicious. What are you trying to hide by not making your life public? You're probably a child molester of the kind that their parents constantly warned them about. "Stranger danger!"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
She should open her eyes and look at the companies that are using sites like Jobrivet to get around age discrimination laws, and band together to sue all those fuckers as well.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Fuck's sake, she majored in geophysics - maybe she should be trying to find work with the USGS?
I suppose from your post that you are one of those one-trick ponies that can do one thing and nothing else. What in hell does a major from 20 or 30 years ago have to do with anything?
You should ask Google why they called her 4 times. Maybe Google is involved in, for example, mapping software?
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Always really interesting to see these two topics come up on Slashdot. Ageism apparently exists, sexism doesn't.
It depends.
I've found that government tech jobs don't discriminate against age.
Many private industry jobs do but not always. It depends upon whether or not the hiring manager is an old fart or not but that is not always the case. Sometimes, they're being directed to sift out a particular age group for the job by their superiors. Mostly for low wage or "obedience" issues. Young people haven't become stubborn yet and are wiling to put up with more bullshit.
They also don't happen to have children that interfere with pesky 12-16 hour work days.
Not for me or a few others I know, but point taken as it mostly applies.
So the consequence of that realization, is that about ten years into a career, you should get a masters to reset the clock. :-)
Hmm, so THAT'S why people get a masters... always seemed rather pointless until now. It's not pointless, just expensive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
She did a postdoc in applied mathematics and has a bachelors degree in engineering. Look at her resume.
Older people tend not to want to work long hours, which is expected in many places in the industry.
An older person won't fit well into a young company, probably won't enjoy hanging out with 20 year olds that much, etc.
Older people do, in general, have less "zest". They've seen enough, they're more measured, they don't go "OMG, my first job, how exciting is that" or "did you see that programming competition?"
Older people have more experience, and it's expected that they'd expect and ask for higher salaries.
While it's all individual, it's much easier to assume up front that a young code monkey will be more excited and willing to work for less, will fit in more easily and code 14 hours a day.
I'm 40 and I'm pretty sure I could get a job within a couple weeks if I lost my current one tomorrow. We'll see what the landscape looks like when I'm 45.
You suppose wrong, and in the UK a university degree is a life investment - in fact, most students nowadays are expected never to be able to pay off their loans their entire working lives.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It's rather amusing that you, as an outsider, attempt to define what we, 20 somethings, feel and how we think. It's even funnier when you realize how wrong you are.
Having a person older than you by a fair margin be your subordinate might be somewhat strange, but not for very long and certainly not enough to cross the person off the hiring list. Working with older people in general, though? I've been doing that all my life... And so has basically anyone who's had to work, and not merely get a fat check from daddy to start their "startup". You seem to be conflating "20 somethings" with a select minority of people who can afford to turn their workplace into a reflection of their own egotistical selves.
It's not just google. Age-ism in Silicon Valley is institutionalized.
-- Will program for bandwidth
and the[n] bought the farm in 2014
Aren't most things impossible after you've "bought the farm"?!
[...]
she got into dairy farming
I should have known you meant it literally...
I've interviewed people who looked good on paper but were completely devoid of people skills in the interview. I've interviewed people who clearly hadn't bathed in quite some time. I've interviewed people who were so verbally aggressive they'd be a constant source of problems. Over the years what's amazed me is the number of people who can't at least fake "normal team player kind of person" in an interview. I suppose that's the point of interviews.
We have a culture of white 50 year old christian guys.
We don't feel comfortable hiring anyone who isn't a white male 40+ years old who wants to go to our church weekly.
it's AGE DISCRIMINATION.
The root cause doesn't matter. If you ONLY hire 20 to 28 year olds- you are practicing age discrimination.
Your candor is admirable, but we didn't fight this crap for 40 years (and countless deaths even) against old white religious males to give it all up to a bunch of young males.
I don't see where they are coming from and I hope this crap gets torn out by the roots- they get massive fines AND they get a rolling fine based on their age demographics going forward.
20 year olds have no more right to discriminate against 50 year olds than men do against women, whites do against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc, or religious people do against non-religious people, or non-religious people do against religious people.
If you meet the requirements of the job, your age doesn't matter. Google wouldn't be calling you if you didn't meet the requirements for the job.
What's so terribly funny is that with 2 to 4 year job duration these days (if that), age doesn't matter like it used to when companies were hiring people for 20 years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I think the point is that what you think and what will happen are possibly two entirely different things.
most students nowadays are expected never to be able to pay off their loans their entire working lives.
Good Lord! Either your education costs far too much, or you pay your graduates far too little.
Look at her work experience in-between her degree and now. It's not like learning to program a computer is some black art that can only be learned in school. It's perfectly reasonable (unlike a neurosurgeon) to learn the trade on the job.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
When google contacted me a couple of times, directly or indirectly one of the job requirements was to lift up 30kg. In another instance, was in god-knows-where in france, and one of the requirements was to have a car. The non-google headhunters actually lied when I asked them the right questions about this being a rookie position. Thanks, but not interested.
What utter bullshit, and typical media crap being regurgitated.
My wife has three degrees - a physiotherapy degree and two medical degrees. She finished her medical degrees 6 years ago - and she has no outstanding debts related to gaining any of those degrees. She has paid off nearly £70K in student and private loans in the past 6 years.
So yes, its entirely possible to pay off your student loans, you just have to be intelligent with money.
Yep, many men are boobs but most men are asses.
Quite by the contrary. I do mind working with 20s. They do have some patience for things we do no longer have, and also investigate things a lot. They also need some guidance. What often ticks me off is being interviewed by 20s. Besides them having no experience in life, they often do not understand when they are saying something they were told to say that they are insulting people actually (e.g. too lower offers, or private life questions, for instance), they do not have the life experience to often understand sarcasm, they also do not get it older people has more independent thinking, and also they denote clearly the place I am applying for hires as a politic cheap labor force.
However, 4 times is indicating very strongly that a policy or managerial decision at a rank above that of the recruiters is occuring. It's very likely that she is correct about it being based on age but the recruiters were not informed of that policy being applied by a higher level of management.
Either way it's a fuckup all round putting someone through the same time and money wasting process four times instead of looking up the records of previous interviews.
Do not be dense please. In places like India, Africa or South Europe (where I live) it is the norm to not have any organisation at work and people to be jack of all trades, but in other cultures and in the "civilised" world, people have very defined responsibilities and they do not let you touch even other areas of competence without you have documented and proven training and experience on that.
Ever heard of Texas Instruments? A lot of computer technology grew out of geophysics. With a doctorate it's almost certain that her project involved writing her own software. Geophysics is really about using computers to do stuff with signals and relate it to what is under the ground.
For certain classes of problems an applied scientist is going to be a far better programmer than a computer scientist purely because of their mathematical background, if that's what the solution needs. I've even met CS grads who have never heard of a Fourier transform, which is fine for some stuff but a handicap for others until they get up to speed with whatever a project requires (which may be never if it requires a couple of years of study in mathematics).
How horrible it must be to go through life like that, only looking at labels instead of people. So, so limiting. Oh well, whatever the narrative tells you to believe, eh?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Someone like her is needed to write commercial geophysical software, but it's all being done in India by recent graduates in incredibly slow and crappy Java. It's not that Java is inherently an insane choice compared with the C and FORTRAN code it's replacing, just the poor results of outsourcing.
In other words, it's age discrimination - dressed up in fancy words to make it look like it's not. A rotting rose by any other name still stinks.
You know, they should implement some kind of a search engine on their HR database so that they can look up past interviewees to prevent multiple recruitment gaffs like this. Now, I know that not everyone can write a custom search engine in house, but I hear that both Microsoft and Yahoo have up-and-coming search engine technology they might be able to license and implement that would let them mine their existing data.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
OK, so the last time I was unemployed I had about 12 in person interviews before I finally got a job from the 13th. I was absolutely qualified for every position I applied for and went on to the second interview round more than a few times. But the logic of this article, there must have been something nefarious going on. It's plainly nonsense.
Also "recruited" cannot be used in this sense. If she was recruited 4 times, that means she got the job 4 times. Otherwise she was just contacted by a recruiter 4 times - which seems to be the case. I had to read the the headline multiple times to work out why it makes no sense and the actual article to figure out what the intended meaning was.
oh yes, and have over £10k in disposable income per year.
I call bullshit.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You'd think that a past candidate that didn't succeed would be flagged by their system and not necessarily called again.
"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
The difference is that ageism does affect many Slashdot readers. Sexist and racism apparently not so much.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
Or maybe even if it was intended as a joke it simply wasn't funny...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm basing this off the fact that I got my current job around three years ago, when I was 37, without much trouble. That and the volume of recruiting emails I get (including two from Google in the past 6 months) despite my age being pretty obvious from my LinkedIn profile.
Call bullshit all you like, it can be done and it doesn't take a lifetime to do so.
Just don't pick a pointless degree and then bitch about how you have been saddled with a life time of debt - sorry that your art degree is fucking worthless, but that's not the universities fault.
People need to be careful about what you share publicly.
Someone at Chicago might disagree, but his opinion is irrelevant.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/m...
I see the question burned in your mind so brightly, you felt the need to post twice...
You seem to think it's OK to dislike me because of your own prejudice, so why then are you angry when other people do the same?
Because people of your worldview need such nonsense to think rationally, I'll qualify my point by noting that I personally support gay weddings, have a number of gay friends and friends of color... I'm not the bigot that your mind has formed, you are for hating what your imagination has crafted of me.
People like you think you can wave away human nature, even as your own devours your soul.
I will not answer you any longer, for you mentally are not in a place that you can be helped or even informed... If you can't learn from an exchange why should I bother?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah, I've known heteros like that too. It's shocking how they just act like it's "okay" to talk about the opposite-sex people they care most about in life. They should really know better and keep that damned hetero stuff in the closet.
Next thing you know, it'll be okay to say "wife" or "husband" in the office. It's a damned slippery slope, I tell you. Next thing you know, people will be acting like it's reasonable to talk about their kids. Next thing you know, they'll think it's okay to, you know, actually bring them to the office for a visit!
I'm sorry, I have to sit down and fan myself for a moment now. I'm just soooo upset.
Thank God we have people like you working to make sure that these things Just Don't Happen On Your Watch. You, sir, are a true hero.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
But, I'd assume that Google wanted her on the mapping side. She had graduate work in geosciences or whatever; and can at least program. I could see how she could compliment someone on the CS side.
> "I quit my job at my "Unicorn" company on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. I wish them well (a year of vested stock) but now I'm happily setting up data logging systems on marijuana grows."
> "If you're 40+ like me, just take a hit now"
Heh heh heh. I see you enjoy your new job. :)
In a post entitled: "Re: child rearing impacts women disproportionately", AC says:
There's an entire industry that recognizes this specific serious social problem. That industry is the condom and other birth control manufacturers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
someone with her education who goes to make cheese...
I wonder if the geek would have the same sarcastic reaction if she had designed and opened a craft brewery instead of an artisan dairy --- she milks sheep not cows.
Sheep have been raised for milk for thousands of years and were milked before cows. The world's commercial dairy sheep industry is concentrated in Europe and the countries on or near the Mediterranean Sea.
The dairy sheep industry is in its infancy in the United States. There are approximately 100 dairy sheep farms in the U.S. They are found mostly in New England and the Upper Midwest. There are several large commercial sheep dairies in New York and California.
While sheep usually produce less milk than goats and much less than cows, sheep milk sells for a significantly higher price per pound, almost four times the price of cow milk.
Most of the sheep milk produced in the world is made into cheese. Some of the most famous cheeses are made from sheep milk: Feta (Greece, Italy, and France), Ricotta and Pecorino Romano (Italy) and Roquefort (France). The U.S. is a large importer of sheep milk cheeses. Sheep milk is also made into yogurt and ice cream.
Modern sheep dairies use sophisticated machinery for milking: milking parlors, pipelines, bulk tanks, etc. Ewes are milked once or twice per day.
Cheese from the ewe, milk from the goat, butter from the cow . . . Spanish proverb.
Sheep 101: Dairy Sheep
RED ALERT! RED ALERT! 20-something, registered account, posting on Slashdot -- bring out the old-fartifier, stat!
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=does+goog...
It looks like Google comments pretty badly against themselves in fact.
Maybe the Journalist should have tried harder.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
society breaks down in 50 years and is utterly gone in 100 years, if no one has children
people who raise children deserve credit: they are investing in the future of civilization
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Grow up, idiot. Not every male hiring manager is a boob guy.
Google does not hire by a single managerial decision. They hire by committee, precisely because it reduces the chance of unconscious bias being a factor.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
This doesn't have to be complicated. All Google has to do is release their hiring statistics to a trusted third party, who interviewed during the last few years and who was hired for each position. Then the third party can investigate and find out the ages of everyone (which won't be hard). Then break it down by age group and see if there is a difference between how well applicants succeed based on age. This won't happen because I'm pretty sure Google knows how it will look
Lack of organization I can understand, as that exists nearly everywhere. But I'm kind of surprised that in general, there isn't an instinct to protect their turf in the workplace in those regions.
Who said anything about "no one having children"? There are some countries with (barely) negative population growth, but that is not even close to "no one having children."
Meh. Civilization, in the sense of "people today, different people tomorrow, in an overall sense, is driven -- hard -- by the instinct to breed. I don't see it as something you should get "credit" for. If that's how you want to roll, fine.
What I'm talking about is the ability to exert control over your own reproductive system. You're a working person, you have a kid, likely you're no longer qualified to be a working person, because you now have a whole new set of responsibilities. If you are wealthy enough to slough those off on someone else (nannies, etc.) that's fine. Or if you're supporting a spouse who will carry that load. Otherwise, you're basically crippling your ability to be productive at work. From long nights up with baby to a whole slew of other responsibilities and necessities, some of which will extend past a decade, you will be less effective at your job, only assuming you were effective at it in the first place.
Birth control gives people a choice: They can pursue normal life without abstinence, yet slew the odds strongly in favor of not getting pregnant. It's no longer a general given that the mating process means high odds of pregnancy. Instead, we can control the when, and thereby large portions of the quality of the outcome.
Personally, I reserve giving "credit" to those people who plan the raising of children such that they are available, secure and ready for the task when they undertake it. Not when they punch a hole in the middle of their job responsibilities by pulling the "preggers" card. Furthermore, I think bringing an unwanted child into the world is downright awful.
While I am all for workplace equality, I see it as going both ways: If you do something that makes you less good at what you do than someone you could be replaced by, your job is at risk, and legitimately so in my view. Pregnancy, drug intoxication on the job (and that includes alcohol), not being where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be, etc.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Well that's not terribly hard, especially if you're not looking to enter the housing market.
Shit, I know people on £30k/year with that level of disposable income. You'd be amazed how cheap life can get, especially when you're sharing a lot of costs.
I worked with Cheryl briefly about 10 years ago relating embedded Linux work and her low level Linux knowledge back then was impressive. I would say it was Google's loss not employing her.
What the hell do you think young people who only hire less qualified young people over more qualified older people are doing?
We had a 63 year old java programmer at our company who crushed the younger programmers in terms of delivery, elegance of solutions, maintainability, creativity, and even hours worked (regularly put in 60 hours a week). He would be turned away from Google over a less qualified candidate.
Wouldn't it be nice if companies hired the most qualified candidate for the job?
Age discrimination in IT has been rampant since the 1990s.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You are off by 1 year. They don't apply if you are 39.
http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/types...
Age discrimination involves treating someone (an applicant or employee) less favorably because of his or her age.
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) only forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states do have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The real question is why ANYONE would think you have to like all the people you work with.
You don't have to of course. You are just an idiot if you don't seek that out when you have the ability - which all developers do because of the ease of finding work currently. I feel sorry for people who have more trouble finding work, who do not have that flexibility...
If you think about it, if you are working with a lot of people you don't like as a developer you are spitting on the less privileged. Or you are a masochist, which is fine - I also don't have to work with you.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
From the outside, it's impossible to tell what happened to her. She might have been the second best candidate for four different jobs; Google is a place where a lot of people want to work so they get a lot of good applicants. Or she may actually be a victim of age discrimination or sex discrimination or a combination of both; they are very much a thing in tech.
"a REALISTIC view of the industry and where YOU fit." Oh, please. And when, despite the highest qualifications, women, people of color, and older people are for "cultural fit" reasons disproportionately excluded, the only way to get that situation investigated is to file suit. If you put a bunch of white frat boys in a room, obviously they're going to assume that someone old enough to be one of their parents has in fact devoted half their life to being a parent, that a black guy showing up is the janitor, and a woman coming in had better be young and pretty and there to be sexually assaulted, not someone who looks like they could easily put them in a chokehold and break both their arms if they tried.
Having been (rather recently) roped into the interview process, I can tell you that:
1) Recruiters often get it wrong: since they have no actual knowledge of the required skillset, they have to go on the CV alone; which in itself is very open to manipulation and interpretation
2) Someone may be amazing on paper and then just simply not produce when given a technical test (see #1)
3) Someone may have all of the technical skills but just not align with the culture of the company; for example, our company is big on TDD and dedicated time to learn and improve our skillset during what would otherwise be work time -- both of these 'non-negotiables' in our culture have opponents.
Without reading too deeply, I want to just raise a paw to remind everyone that no-one owes you anything and you don't DESERVE a job. You are granted a place to earn your salary at the discretion of the employer. If the Me-Me-Millenials could just stop for a moment to consider that, that would be great. Some of the older generation has seen that mindset working for the younger generation and thinks they can get away with it too.
On a parallel: if a company really doesn't want you to work there, why are you hung up on forcing them to? Personally, I'd hate to work in an environment where I'd forced myself in, especially when there are (guaranteed) places where you'll be just the right cog in the machine. I've actually left companies where I didn't feel 100% valued based solely on that premise. If you're good enough, you'll place somewhere.
"In this caste system, what you know is not important.
Who you know is very important. It is better to be on the golf circuit than to be at the desk working hard.
Read more at:
http://economictimes.indiatime...
Casteism
The candidate alleging age discrimination here has no "20 year gap" in her employment history. Just 40 continuous years of programming, first in HS, then in college (for pay), then in graduate school (her thesis work), then in postdocs (her research), then in the commercial world. No mention of kids. Would you be making this same incorrect assumption of "must have had a gap in employment" and "doesnt *really* have 40 years of actual continuous programming experience" she were a man alleging age discrimination? It is true that when people are shown pictures of purple cows, they remember them later as having been brown, just because their minds reject what their eyes actually see. It's not because you're sexist or ageist or misogynist -- just human. But do try to look at the evidence, rather than inappropriately applying stereotypes.
Funny, some pretty outrageously sexist and ageist behavior of young men is often excused on the basis that, well, they're programmers, so they "lack people skills." That makes it OK then, right?
I wonder why "lack of people skills" a reason to excuse the unlawful behavior of young men who make programming environments so toxic to anyone unlike themselves, but appears to be a perfectly valid excuse to unlawfully not even hire an older highly qualified woman?
So I should hire old women without people skills because people in other companies hired young men without people skills who later turned out to be a problem.
Seems legit to me. You're a genius.
No, it's just an indication of the double standard. Young men all over the industry are constantly being excused for everything under the sun, up to and including the criminal offense of attempted rape because "they lack people skills" whereas an "old woman" as you say (BTW boyo, 72 is "old woman", 55 is "mature seasoned professional) is going to be told she "lacks people skills" if she offendeth an egomaniac brogrammer by gasp! finding and fixing a bug in his code.
Face it, young men expect a woman as old as their mother to BE their mother, and if they're not getting their poor little egos stroked constantly and their fragile delicate little emotions molly-coddled constantly by someone who "should" be as nice to them as their mommy, they'll bitch and complain about her "people skills" not to mention the more actionable comments about her being "ugly" and "old" and "fat" and "overeducated" and "whacko" (clearly there are some armchair psychiatrists here) and "not really qualified because she took 20 years off to make bay bees" even if she's childless and hasn't had a vacation in 40 years.
We've already seen ALL of those comments right here, so you can't say it doesn't happen.
There are turfs, but people tend to move between them or have multiple competences. And in the lucky places you have some defined ones. Some markets lack core skills, or others are too small to have very strongly defined turfs.
Heer's a newsflash- Google is just anothedr Big Company Doing Evil.
From the forced serfdom which resulted when they knowingly, illegally and maliciously conspired to refuse to hire other SV companies programmers (so those programmers , if they quit, couldn't get another job OR couldnt' look for another job while working at any of those companies ! ) to the driveby stealing of WIFI passwords via StreetView to the CLEAR cooperation of Google with the NSA Prism program.. on and on and on and on... here's a newflash for anyone whose been under a rock these past years- Google Is Evil.
Of course they're sexist as hell in their hiring practices. That's just a small part of being evil. Of course they pay men and women doing exactly the same job different salaries, that's just another small part of being evil. Read their horrified reaction to the fact of employees sharing salary data- why do you think they're horrified? Because those salaries don't revweal a distinct sex bias?
Google is a dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty company. It just is. It does whatever it needs to to make money, lies about anything it needs to, have zero respect for anything which might interfere in it's making money (but goes the extra yardage and when caught frames their actions as a natural expression of their philosophical view of the owrld (Eric Schmidt- Anyone doing something online that they don't want others to know about maybe ought not to be doing that in the first place...".)
I mean is there anyone out there who is surprised at this?
This is just flat out bullshit.
Which comment are you talking about, specifically? Which comment that's not obviously meant to be a joke expresses these sentiments. I'd particularly like to see where someone expresses the feeling any women who's old enough to be their mother should treat them like a child.
Well enough of them certainly act like children. Just read your own petulant comments.
Brish student loans are paid off at a rate based on your income, they are also automatically written off after a set period (the exact set period has varied, for new english and welsh* student loans now it's 30 years, prior to that it was 25 years and prior to that it was at state retirement age). In recent years both tuition fees and loan interest rates have risen sharply while the set period before the loan is written off has been shortened. Claims from different bodies as to what proportion of students will be able to replay their loans vary.
Personally this seems to some extent like an accounting trick to make the current government budget look better at the expense of running up liabilities for future governments to deal with. Rather than subsidising the university education upfront or subsidising the interest on the loans year by year they are kicking the can down the road so some future government will have to pay the cost of writing off those debts.
* Rules in scotland and northern ireland are different.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I see. You assumed you'd find certain kinds of comments and shot your mouth off before checking to see if they were actually there. That may fly in your women's studies class, but next time why don't you check first and save us all some trouble.
I'll give you a little hint for next time: You're not gonna find too many guys under 45 on slashdot, so even if there were actually something to your fantasies about what young men say and do, if they actually behaved like you imagine, you wouldn't see much of it here. The only person here acting like a child is you.
And you'd have to be using your own private definition of "petulant" to find it in my comments. It's true I've lost patience for the kind of transparent bullshit you're peddling, but that's not the same thing.
You're like one of those cartoon characters that has an angry defensive outburst whenever someone disagrees with him, tsotha.
And then gets particularly petulant and childish, screaming and stomping around, when it's pointed out -- how defensive, petulant and childish you're behaving.
Hilarious. Thanks for the lulz, sucker.
I should have put /sarcasm shouldn't I?
"we just have a youth culture" was being compared with "we just have a white male religious culture".
One is clearly illegal .. as is the other one too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How many hours did it take you scouring the internet to find something you could denigrate her personality with?
And this is all you came up with?
Wow. Just...wow.
That's a valid point, but getting a software position at Google pits her against people who have PhDs in Computer Science. Google isn't a little startup with a low bar for entry. It's one of the most sought after employers right now, akin to Bell Labs or Xerox in their heyday. She probably learned how to program, but how many publications has she made in CS related topics? Having a CS degree at the PhD level is not something you can ignore as much as the bachelor level.
Actually her first publication was in a USENIX publication on the use of RPC in the implementation of remote equation solvers in a client-server model.
Last I checked, all of her other publications were in computational fluid mechanics -- you know, where you write code to model fluid flow, usually using finite difference, finite element or spectral techniques.
How different is a PhD in computational physics from a CS PhD? In many cases, The PhD in Computational Physics has far more actual coding experience than the CS PhD.
The PhD in computational physics is guaranteed to have written a great deal of code and building systems grunty enough to run them on -- in Cheryl Stewart (nee Fillekes) case taking advantage of remote supercomputers using SUN RPC and XDR IEEE data encoding not to mention developing mixed-language code by cross-compiling C and Fortran object modules at a time when 'teh internets' did not even exist save a few interconnected ARPAnet and NSFnet nodes (which she also worked on the gateway protocols for), while the CS PhD might have spent their entire academic career on purely theoretical subjects, like lambda calculus or formal logic, and may never written a line of code.
Highlight name in the story, right click, Search for "%name%", read down results page, find Amazon review, read review. Took probably 3 minutes.
I do this for almost everyone in the news I have never heard of before, even other websites, no matter the context.
And trust me, almost every person who hires people will do a web search for the person's name these days as well.
Don't like that people will judge you for what you post publicly? Then don't post your opinion publicly (using your real name).
With agile you can't just decide to take a sprint to do investigation, there always has to be a deliverable of some sort
According to this list of agile deliverable names, you might be able to get away with an investigation that produces a "roadmap for repayment of technical debt".
OMG I still have the troff source for that paper, and all the code. That was a fun project, setting up the RPC client on a Sun in Ithaca to prompt remote machines to run my ODE solver and automagically asynchronously send the results back to the Sun. I was able to sweep initial condition space a lot faster that way, despite the network latency. It's pretty hilarious that, writing that paper in '87, I had this diagram of 'compute servers' with the remote Convex, Sequent Balance and the Intel Hypercube at Argonne and the Cray-2 in Minneapolis drawn in -- not to mention the VAX 9000 with an array processor across campus, calling the Sun RPC library in C to do the client-server communications.
(When the first version of XMosaic came out five years later and people were like "look! it browses files over the internets!" I was like, "So? I've been doing that with ftp and telnet and rcp and rsh for like a decade. I've written code to do that. I wrote a paper for a refereed publication with someone at Caltech while I was in France over ARPAnet. I'm supposed to get excited about browsing files?" But I did set up httpd and Xmosaic on my SGI box, and started making and little html files, just to see how it all worked. I had to admit, it was pretty nifty. I realized I could have done the whole RPC ODE project with a CGI script instead of Sun RPC. Today, I'd probably call it from a server-side python platform, and use Numpy for the numerics. Could be a good way to get up to speed with the Enthought suite. I might yet, lol!)
Anyway, the hardest part of the RPC ODE project back in 87 weirdly enough, was that there were different C and Fortran compilers on each of the remote and local Unix boxes, and doing mixed-language compiles (linking the Fortran solver to the C wrapper) was a little different on each, and not very well documented. I used m4 macros to make the source a little cleaner and consistent across platforms, but even 'make' was subtly different on each one. Plus, the CRAY was a 64 bit architecture, so single precision floating-point IEEE numbers on its version of XDR still had to be cast into double precision when shipping it back to the Sun 2. You can imagine how hilarious I found Microsoft's conniptions about how to deal with a 64 bit architecture like, just a few years ago.
Funny you should mention lambda calculus, as the CS department at Cornell was really theoretical, and yah -- the grad students there did mostly theory, code not so much. Oh well, missing out on all the fun, I guess. And, I was in charge of more iron and had courtesy accounts on a lot more big iron around the country, as a UNIX sysadmin than they could ever hope to use. The CS grad students had to like, apply for time on big iron and write grants to pay for it. Maybe that's why most of them did theory.
They didn't even have an undergraduate program at Cornell in CS until I was about to graduate with my BSc in Engineering in 82, and weirdly enough I would have had to transfer out of Engineering and into the Arts college to major in CS. And, as a new major, the engineering faculty doubted its value. No way was I going to CS in the Arts college after busting my ascii for three years in the College of Engineering! With a BA there would be nothing to distinguish me from an English major! Yikes!
Oh, well, thanks for looking up my first refereed publication, ForkBomber! Maybe I'll include the whole thing in my memoirs, with a data key holding the source. Never did release it anywhere. I'm pretty protective of my source code. ;)
We call that "projection".
That too.
I'm surprised to find someone so socially awkward she doesn't realize how other people see her. This article isn't about you, is it?
I have a friend who was recently let go by our employer as part of a "restructuring" (read hire a new team lead internally for less money). He was given a small severance and walked to the door. So after filing for unemployment, he immediately updated his resume online. Within 2 days he got calls from 4 different recruiting companies recruiting him for the job he had just been let go from. It was obvious none of the recruiters took the time to read his resume, they only searched for keywords and his name popped up. He said he was sorely tempted to take the phone interview just to see how long it took these idiots to realize he had held the job previously. He simply told them not interested and they went away. It could be this woman fit the keywords, and since the phone interview is almost a waste of time with most recruiters (in my experience they are "technical" recruiters but are clueless about technology) she very easily was called for an in-person interview. I have to wonder if she actually had the same interviewer in any of her 4 interviews?
"If stupid things work...then they are not stupid."
It's just hilarious many commenters have revealed the very bias and bigotry that caused this case in the first place.
And yet, when the subject herself joins the discussion, nobody even bothers to ask her any questions, but rather just carry on in blind sexist and ageist speculation.
It's clear from the complete ignorance of how much programming and systems work her thesis actually required leading them to assume that it's "not relevant" -- from the comments, I honestly doubt anyone's bothered to actually read her thesis or indeed any of her publications.
This is why I hope this case actually goes to trial. Unless people are actually forced to face the facts in a court of law, no facts will be examined, and people will continue to simply believe their own stereotypes.
It's not very surprising that people in this profession do not appear to be terribly interested in facts or evidence, but rather seem to prefer wallowing in their own self-justifying speculation, bigotry and bias. It's the reason the demographic in the profession is so skewed in the first place. And, hence, the cause of action.
If young white men "feel uncomfortable" with people unlike themselves who find bugs in their code, it doesn't exactly help them to start spouting the very stereotypes that they think justifies their discomfort.
When you're in a hole, guys -- oh, here's your shovel. Keep digging. We'll just wait till your down deep enough to bury you.