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Age-Discrimination Suit Against Google Seeks Class Action For Engineers (dailymail.co.uk)
An anonymous reader quotes the Daily Mail: A potential class action lawsuit that claims Google discriminated against people over 40 is one step closer to becoming a reality. A motion for conditional certification of collective action status was filed in a San Jose federal court Wednesday, which could open up a suit to anyone over 40 who feels they had been discriminated against by the tech company and not hired because of his or her age. The suit would include "all individuals who interviewed in-person for any software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position with Google in the United States in the time period from August 13, 2010 through the present; were age 40 or older at the time of interview; and were refused employment by Google...."
We've discussed ageism before on Slashdot. Now dcblogs shares an article from Computerworld, which says the lawsuit alleges a "systematic pattern" of discrimination, citing the median age of Google's workforce as 29 (according to PayScale), while the median age for U.S. computer programmers is 43. "I think this is long overdue and potentially huge..." says Dan Lyons, who has complained about ageism during his time at HubSpot. "When it comes to age bias, the tech industry doesn't even bother to lie.... Everyone in Silicon Valley knows this and everyone just accepts it."
We've discussed ageism before on Slashdot. Now dcblogs shares an article from Computerworld, which says the lawsuit alleges a "systematic pattern" of discrimination, citing the median age of Google's workforce as 29 (according to PayScale), while the median age for U.S. computer programmers is 43. "I think this is long overdue and potentially huge..." says Dan Lyons, who has complained about ageism during his time at HubSpot. "When it comes to age bias, the tech industry doesn't even bother to lie.... Everyone in Silicon Valley knows this and everyone just accepts it."
Discrimination becomes impossible when you let the Rust Code of Conduct control your actions. That's what I do. Before I do anything, I carefully consider how this action conforms to the Rust Code of Conduct. If I have even the slightest feeling that I may be violating the Rust Code of Conduct in some way, no matter how small, I do not engage in the action. Thanks to the care that has been putting into crafting the Rust Code of Conduct, I can live my life knowing that as long as I follow the Rust Code of Conduct exactly that I will never engage in discrimination, racism, ageism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or any other form of intolerant and hateful behavior.
bs like we find people over X don't like to work over 50 hours a week and that is not the what we want in this office.
My company has a new program that targets "millennials". Our HR department has been very vocal about it and how they need to target things millennials want on a work environment, like game rooms and catered meals etc. Its all talked about like this great thing and the future of the company. The hype is huge. Meanwhile I'm seeing fewer and fewer people over 50 at the company.
We're a fortune 500 company. The age bias is blatant and in our faces. We are not based out of Silicon Valley either.
Facebook has a bout the same median age. In addition Zuckerberg openly stated “Young people are just smarter” on hiring practices. While we are at it, why not a lawsuit for gender and race equality...
The interview at Google is pretty heavy on algorithms. I interviewed 100+ people for that job. Largely, the longer you've been out of school, the more you'll have to prepare for that interview. If young and old spend the *same* amount of time prepping, the old will fail more often, because they're less qualified.
They also don't hire for "technical architect" jobs, which is where a lot of good people wind up in more traditional software careers. They hire for "person who writes code" and "person who writes code and manages engineers". They rarely (never) hire non-coding manager. Which means, again... algorithms interview.
bs like we find people over X don't like to work over 50 hours a week and that is not the what we want in this office.
Wait a sec, when people think women don't want to work 50 hour weeks so get fewer promotions and less money it's all fine, because that's their lifestyle choice and they prioritize work hours over pay. But when older people don't or can't work like a 20 year old who hasn't figured out they are being exploited yet, it's unacceptable and a lawsuit is required to fix it.
Of course 50 hour weeks are ridiculous. At the moment they are mostly illegal in the EU (the limit is 48 hours, and even that can't be a constant thing). Just apply it equally to everyone.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Every time I apply for a job these days, I get no response other than the "we received your application" automatic email.
And if I'm called for an interview and rejected, I just get the "you don't have the skills." excuse.
My 70 year old father got the "you don't fit in" excuse after his interview.
Quiet simply, older employees aren't willing to be walked all over by management. What, you want me to work 80 hours a week without overtime? That's why these companies want people under 30 and H1Bs as well. It's about control. Older employees are more likely to tell you to go fuck yourself when you tell them to work more unpaid overtime.
Guess what kiddies, the longer you keep taking it up the ass, the more you are going to get fucked over. Do you think this companies actually give a shit about you? They don't. Don't be a corporate fan boy, they have no loyalty to you, thus you shouldn't either.
But what do I know, I'm one of those old people that can see through all of the bullshit. We've been through downturns, the .com crash of the early 2000s etc etc.
Figure out what is REALLY important to you, work is a means to an end in life, not the point of life.
If this lawsuit reaches the U.S. Supreme Court, Google wins. There is a justice on the Supreme Court who used to head the U.S. Equal-Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). While in that position, he sat on over 20,000 age-discrimination complaints until the statute of limitations expired. If he had been an attorney in private practice or a non-judge government attorney, he would have been disbarred. Who is he? Hint: Anita Hill was a side issue.
Even if it's true, how do you prove something like this? Younger programmers will, on average, have different qualifications. Younger programmers are less interested, on average, in quality of life issues.
"Heath applied for a job in 2011, when he was 60, and was denied employment even though he said he was perfectly qualified for the software engineering position and was deemed 'a great candidate' by a recruiter."
I'm sure agism exists - heck, it may even have been a factor in this case. But: what a recruiter tells you, or what you think of your own qualifications means exactly zip. Sounds to me more like someone is looking for a get-rich-quick retirement package, not least because this suit is based on a job application from 5 years ago (in 2011).
It seems likely that this is Robert Heath's LinkedIn page. I can't be sure, but I doubt there are too many people with that name, living in Florida, who are older Software Engineers. If his information is up-to-date (or at least was up-to-date in 2011), he is working with Java 5 (Java 6 was released in 2006, and we are now looking at Java 9). He apparently maintained the backend of web sites that import information in XML, and then present this information using standard web technologies. Nothing wrong with any of that, but nothing special about it either.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Except of course this is wholly different. You're talking about a women's career choice(different jobs, not wanting to work long-hours, etc) vs those wanting to work in that job and being discriminated against because the employer wants them to work long hours which are above the norm(highly skilled vs time put in), or outright refusing to hire them because of their age which is what this suit is also talking about.
Om, nomnomnom...
I'd actually prefer it if Millennials worked less. The work they do is just fucking awful. They actually contribute more to a company's bottom line if they're off playing ping-pong, because at least they're not fucking things up more. It's better to just lose their salary than to lose their salary plus the costs of their fuck ups.
Look at GNOME 3, systemd, Windows 8, and Slashdot Beta to get a sense of what I'm talking about. They're all the creations of Millennials, and they're awful. One trait common to nearly all Millennials is that they refuse to build upon existing knowledge.
When we Gen-X'ers started in the industry, we built upon the knowledge and experience of those who came before us. When we had to store data, we did things right and used relational databases. When we needed to choose a programming language, we did things right and used C++. When we needed to use an OS, we chose UNIX. These technologies developed and improved over time to become robust, reliable and trustworthy.
But what do Millennials do? They intentionally remain ignorant of existing technologies, because they're "old" and "not trendy". So when they need to store data, they basically put it all in a hash table, then use shitty programming languages like JavaScript and Ruby to essentially reimplement a very shitty imitation of a RDBMS around this hash table. They refuse to learn a proper language like C++, and instead start throwing together buggy shit like Rust. Instead of learning how UNIX and Linux have traditionally worked, they start rewriting the init system and pretty much everything else to match their shitty Windows-inspired view of how an OS should work.
No other generation has been like this. Like I said earlier, Gen-X learned from the Boomers and the Greatest Generation. The Boomers learned from the Greatest Generation and the Silent Generation. The Greatest Generation learned from the Silent Generation and the Lost Generation. But the Millennials? They're chosen to remain ignorant of what has come before them, and have destined themselves to create shitty reimplementations of what we've already had for decades.
The less that Millennials are allowed to do, the better off we all are. We need to limit the damage that they can do, so at least the following generation has a chance to throw out everything the Millennials screwed up and continue from where we were before the Millennials screwed up so badly.
When I was there they kept talking up how many job openings they had in the US, yet most of them were for new college graduates (NCGs in their lingo). Sure, for a few hot specialties like security or machine learning they probably would've hired a mid career guy. Almost all of their headcount came from acquisitions, and it was winnowed on an annual basis through layoffs ("resource actions").
One interesting program they had (this was years ago, probably discontinued) was a set of educational incentives for older employees to transition to become teachers, presumably in STEM subjects. I don't remember the exact amount they were offering but it was fairly generous, well over $10K. I thought, damn, you guys think so little of older employees with tons of experience that you're willing to pay to help them go away, before even asking their managers how good they are.
I am already stating in any job offer I send out for applicants to explicitly NOT include race, age, sex, religion or ANYTHING that I could possibly discriminate against. At least if they do I can reject them for not following application guidelines without fearing a lawsuit. At least legal told me so, and I tend to believe them.
Quite frankly and directly: I would hire a 55 year old over a 25 year old INSTANTLY, provided I can afford him. What's coming out of college these days is such a bunch of useless self entitled special snowflakes that I could literally fire them out of a cannon from my top floor office. If legal didn't tell me that this is oddly still illegal, for some odd reason that I just can't understand.
Sorry, had to vent some steam. Mod this any way you like, I have Karma to burn, but this had to be said!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
When I was volunteering as an IT guy to stay busy and keep my skills up (made NO difference to employers), I had a retired IT Director as my supervisor. We were talking about my job hunt (I was in my late 40s then). He said (to paraphrase), it isn't right, but when you have two candidates with the same qualifications, an employer is going to go with the younger one.
As for me, after a few years of applications, putting code on GitHub and having it ignored, learning iOS and Android development and having that ignored, and doing everything I can to make myself employable, I have given up.
Oh! Why I lost MY job? Replaced by H1-b - in 2002. Just like all those people at IBM where I started in the early 90s.
The H1-b program was NEVER about getting qualified people into the US because of a "shortage". It was all about getting cheap labor from the beginning.
Now, industry doesn't even bother to hide it anymore. And just off-shoring everything to a cheap labor country (CLC) is all the rage. And it's not just Indian companies. It's American ones too. CSC, IBM, Oracle, HP, EDS ...
Pitting older technologists against younger technologists (and visa versa) is just a way to drive the salary costs down for both groups. It also denies both young and old technologists the opportunity to combine energy with experience. Expose a young technologist to that experience and it may save them weeks of time exploring some avenue and come up with some new approach the experienced person hadn't seen.
If being younger in IT means having the shit flogged out of you as it ruins your social life (ironically reinforcing the stereotype) and being older in IT mean having your experience devalued by people that don't understand that technologists do what they do to continuously get better at it, then this kind of attitude can only be counter productive for the IT industry as a whole as why would any sane person invest their time in qualifying for such a career if its longevity is threatened.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
That's right!
You better hire me, you snot-nosed little bastards!
I've got backup-disks laying around that are older that your little company!
Speak up son, and don't put any of that candy-ass crap in my coffee!
Why don't you have any god-damned real chairs here?
How funny! A youngster deems to know about oldsters. Most people over 40 work more than 40 hours per week. Top that off with child-work, house-word (of all sorts), help-friends-work, volunteer-work, car-work, etc., etc. Our senior sysadm joined the company at age 52 and worked 45 hours a week consistently and the 36-hour yearly outage until he left for a more lucrative position. Older workers, being more experienced, seem to troubleshoot quicker and/or better from what I read and experience. The problem with stereotyping is that one day your stereotype will catch up with you. The glory of young men is their strength; The glory of old men is their gray hair (assuming they have any). Youth and strength is one thing; Maturity, experience and (possible) wisdom is quite another.
Since it's pretty much a fact that you can work longer and harder when you're young. And it's not like experience is all that important in a brand new field. I understand why the working class is against it. We all get old but very few of us can stop working at 40. But I sorta wish we working class folks could be more honest about it and just admit we're protecting our own interests. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that but we act like we're doing something disdainful...
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It is silly to expect to be treated the same as a 25 year old, when you insist on different conditions. Old people have an inflated sense of entitlement. They expect to get paid more for shorter hours based on "experience" that is often irrelevant.
I am over 50. I have never had a problem finding employment, and I am very well paid. I also keep my skills sharp, and put in the necessary hours. I spend a few evenings a week mentoring the younglings. I adapt to the culture, I don't expect my employer to adapt to me.
The LinkedIn page for Cheryl Ann Fillekes, which only includes her education. Here is her professional experience from a different site. She is also suing Google for not hiring her as a programmer.
Her entire educational trajectory is in fields related to geophysics, but apparently she learned programming on the side. Her professional experience does sound interesting. Google contacted her four times for interviews, but decided each time not to hire her.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Young people, let them reinvent the wheel, work too many hours doing this, while getting paid less. Wonderful!
Old people, can't argue with their experience, knows how to negotiate for better pay, get rid of them. Wonderful!
I'm sure every candidate who was interviewed and rejected can make this claim..
Sorry, but there is a huge difference between people today, and people a generation ago. Every generation has had differences, start counting backward in time. Not all of those differences have been good for society as a whole. Again, start counting backward. Now look at the landscape for today, and actually look at what is going on instead of sitting in your hovel watching TV. I have a kid in college who is a constant victim of today's SJW culture.
First, it's about time. All of them will be 50 one day, too! ;)
And: it's not illegal here, but it is heavily regulated. You are making the mistake of the startup mentality - these are large corporations, not a few friends spewing out code. As a small startup you set your own rules. As a gigantic company, you are legally obligated to act ethically and responsibly toward ALL of your employees. To do otherwise is pretty despicable, and no company wants that reputation.
Speaking as a 53-year-old engineer... I haven't encountered age discrimination. Then again, I work in the Salt Lake City / Provo Utah area, not Silicon Valley. Is ageism widespread in Silicon Valley, and is it a bad thing? If so -- if preferring a younger candidate over an older candidate is based on irrational prejudices rather than on a hard-nosed assessment of who brings the most value to the company -- then companies that practice ageism put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against companies that do not practice ageism. If the practice is as widespread and irrational as is being claimed, then this is a wonderful business opportunity for companies that do not practice ageism: such companies would have near-exclusive access to a pool of talent that is being shunned by other companies. This kind of scenario is not hypothetical; much of CitiBank's success in the 70's has been attributed to its efforts to recruit top female MBA graduates at a time when its competitors were only recruiting male MBAs.
I don't get paid to push buttons. I get paid to know which button to push.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It's exactly the same. Women want to do those jobs, but are more likely to refuse putting in masses of overtime regularly, and employers worry that they might want to take maternity leave more so than men so outright refuse to hire them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Most people over 40 work more than 40 hours per week.
Well, I'm 57 which is well over the 40 you claim. I work rather less than 40 hours per week - maybe an average of 30 - and take 7 weeks vacation. In US dollars, I'm paid six digits for doing so (and the first digit is not a 1). My wife is also well over the 40 cutoff, and has a similar job...
I'm in my 40's and I'll be having an on site interview at Google next week. It will be interesting to see how the youngsters treat me.
if you were interviewed on Aug 22, 2010 you're SOL? How did they arrive at that specific date?
I'm a software engineer in my sixties. I got hired last year by Amazon. Two weeks ago I finally updated by LinkedIn profile to include my "new" job at Amazon. Within a week I was contacted by Google to hear if I would be interested in pursuing a career at Google.
Based on my educational background posted on my LinkedIn profile it should be clear that I'm at least 55+. I actually had an internal recruiter at a different company recommending me to remove the year I got my degree from my profile as it leaked my age.
It's not age bias. It's unwillingness-to-work-crazy-hours bias and unwillingness-to-learn-new-tools bias.
There just happens, by pure chance, to be a strong correlation between age and these things.
I ought to know. I'm 54.
Well said.
in jocks or chaps Be any fucking
The real scoop is how they are marginalising educated idealists, and simply ripping many people off and letting others work on the stolen ideas. It is all a silly con and I am 36. I would join a class action but it needs to be extended to include those in their 30s that suffered in the same way.
It's ageism but it's also about pay, the companies don't want to pay older skilled workers when they can claim a shortage and get cheap labor.
Every company should report on workplace diversity include age, race and sex.
bs like we find people over X don't like to work over 50 hours a week and that is not the what we want in this office.
I'm 53 and don't mind working however many hours - whatever it takes for me and/or my team to get the job done - as long as the work is (a) interesting, (b) not padded with stupid things, like pointless scrum meeting, and (c) I don't get hassled over not doing those stupid things. Luckily, I have that environment where I work now. In addition, because of my experience, I get asked to do the difficult things that the youngsters can't (yet) do. [Note: Doing the "impossible" things usually takes a little longer.]
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is he willing to work at new entry salary? Put his job ahead of his family?
socjus ftl
Guess their recruiters didn't get the memo. They keep contacting me despite it being clear from my LinkedIn page that I'm over 40.
The employers never say that want anyone to work more than 40 hours, that's illegal. What I see are employees voluntarily doing this because they are misled or mislead themselves into believing they must work longer. Older workers have more experience to realize when they're being conned.
When the jobs actually require experience then the older workers get the jobs at a much higher rate. When the jobs require tedious repetition and simplistic programmer/engineering, or is a job with thousands applying for the one open spot, then the younger workers get the jobs. Best bet is to specialize in something that most people don't do rather than be a cookie cutter clone who only knows the fashionable fads of the day.
Anyone with a brain should refuse to work longer than is allowed by law. Meanwhile we have engineers taking paternity leave at the moment.
The problem is that the young'uns think they know everything. They refuse to learn anything else. So they reinvent the wheel because they refuse to acknowledge that it was already done. Or if a different young'un invents it, the other young'uns will applaud them and call it a wonderful thing and fail to notice that everyone's been using that technique for fifty years. And then they go about bragging about all the classes they skipped, all the classes that were a waste of time, and that they learned everything they know in a couple months while on the beach in Belize.
If you're hiring someone with>10years experience, their degree date is probably irrelevant - heck, whether they have a degree at all is probably irrelevant, if they have relevant experience.
Or are you looking only at resumes with no work experience.
but the science doesn't back it up. It's not so much experience as an inability to learn new things. It's been pretty much shown that the older you get the harder it is for you to assimilate new information. There are exceptions, but in business you want predictable results. Those exceptions are too few and far between. And while Experienced people might be very good at what they learned 20 years ago and you want some of those you don't need nearly as many. Doesn't help that productivity has basically doubled in the last 20 years...
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although for all but the top maybe 10% of coders that's probably more important than anything. You're rank and file are just implementing biz logic after all. But don't forget that the ability to learn and adapt goes _down_ as you get older. It just does, and there's plenty of research to show this. An experienced programmer can crank out code he's already written faster, but so what. He's gonna want to work fewer hours and have more benefits. On the low end I can not only work those young guys half again as hard and pay them half as much. They cost less to give medical insurance for to boot. On the high end their ability to learn makes up for their lack of experience.
The reason you were taught to respect your elders is they were smart enough to know they weren't needed anymore and you'd need an emotional reason drilled into you when you were mentally vulnerable or you'd kick 'em to the curb.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In 2013, I got called by Google out of the blue to go on-site to their NYC location, just after I’d turned 40. Note that I had gotten my PhD in 2012 and was working as a CS professor when they called me. They insisted that I was so awesome that they skipped me right past the phone technical interview directly to an on-site interview, because they really wanted me right away. Oddly, although I’d made it clear that my strongest skills were in computer architecture and circuit design, they insisted on interviewing me for a software engineering positon (which I had done for many years prior to grad school, so I was not totally unreasonable). I’d also told them that my “superpower” was debugging, but they never tested me on that. The interview went reasonably well anyway, although the whole process was totally dehumanizing, with it being obvious that I was going to be judged by what 5 engineers wrote down about me on a single sheet of paper.
About a month later, I got the rejection call. The two reasons I recall being given were (1) something about not fitting with the culture, and (2) they felt that I had jumped around too much in jobs. The first one other people told me was code for “too old.” The second one made no sense since it was clear from my CV that I’d only ever had two real jobs, one before grad school and one after, plus a couple of short internships during grad school.
My suspicion, however, is that the ageism at Google is indirect and a side-effect of other practices. Despite the fact that outsiders all think that Google practices ageism, it’ll come as a shock to many people AT Google when they are judged to having practiced systematic ageism. They’ll do an internal review trying to figure out who is turing down people for their age, and they’ll come up empty, because none of the interviewers or hiring committees actually try to figure out anyone’s age. There are several factors that contribute to virtual ageism. These include the current state of CS education relative to what was taught 10 years earlier and a somewhat more systematic and less distractable mentality that sets in as people mature. I’m actually MORE effective as an engineer than I was 10 years ago due to accumulated skills, but I'm less easily diverted from the tasks at hand, which some people may interpret as being less creative (until they get me on topics outside of focused engineering problem solving). In other words, as engineer age, they continue to improve in their effectiveness, but aspects of their personalities (such as focus and less externally visible intuitive processes) naturally mature such that they behave less “Googly,” where “Googly" effectively means “having mad skills at CS theory and coding but also having not compensated quite as much for some of the ADHD traits that a lot of engineers possess."
I often ask myself whether or not I would have taken the offer. I like my current job a LOT, but the pay sucks. I gets better after tenure, but at my age with small children and medical expenses outside of what they insurance will pay for, I have to consult on the side to make ends meet. This is the main reason I took the Google interview seriously. Even if there’s a 75% chance I wouldn’t have taken the offer, there was all that build up of them talking me into going on the interview, followed by the whole dehumanizing interview, and the bizarre rejection. That makes me angry.
Today, when my day job as a professor doesn’t make enough money, I make $200+/hour as an expert witness and $150/hour as a software/hardware engineering consultant. I could work part time telecommuting and still make more money than I could ever get at Google, especially when you account for the cost of living in NYC. Google’s loss.
... and I said why bother, at 58 you won't hire me anyway.
Most people over 40 work more than 40 hours per week.
Well, I'm 57 which is well over the 40 you claim. I work rather less than 40 hours per week - maybe an average of 30 - and take 7 weeks vacation. In US dollars, I'm paid six digits for doing so (and the first digit is not a 1). My wife is also well over the 40 cutoff, and has a similar job...
Well, I'm 97 which is well over the 57 you claim. I work rather less than 30 hours per week - maybe an average of 10 - and take 47 weeks vacation. In US dollars, I'm paid eleventy billion digits for doing so (and the first digit is not a 1). My wife is also well under the 25 year old cutoff, and has no job...
-Signed, another meaningless AC that one ups your anecdotal AC Bs.
who never applied knowing that being over 40 meant there was no chance we'd ever get hired?
I do hope that the plaintiffs win, and win big.
Did you know that you can say literally anything, as long as it is extreme, and attributed to millennials, and someone will believe you? Check it out.
Millennials have no work ethic whatsoever. They expect game rooms, catered lunches and other ridiculous benefits.
Millennials are ruining the job market. HR directors only want millennials because they're stupid enough to work 50-80 hours a week for peanuts.
Millennials have no job loyalty. They walk off the minute someone gives them a better offer, so it's pointless investing in them.
Millennials are ruining the workplace for older, more experienced workers, and it's not at all surprising my department has watched all its knowledgable workers move on to greener pastures.
It's neat studying generational trends and all, but "kids these days" is older than dirt. It probably goes back for as long as we've had the words to say them, and even before that, I bet some older primates rolled their eyes at the kids who insisted on walking on two legs all the time as if their arms were broken or something. I think a more apt truism is "be careful what you wish for."
Congratulations Slashdot! We live in a world where everyone recognizes the transformative power of the Internet, where people carry computers in their pockets and software runs the world. Programming is one of the most highly sought-after skillsets, and it's suddenly cool to be a gee. Women want in so badly that some of them have managed to reimagine history so that, actually you see, it was the nerds who were rejecting the poor girls all along!
But here's the thing: now that everyone and their dog wants software, it means that programmers are no longer the people who spent tens of thousands of hours from age 8 hacking shit out for the love of it. Sysadmins are no longer people who cut their teeth on every piece of networking equipment they managed to get access to (legitimately or otherwise). I mean, we still have those people, but society just plain doesn't make very many of them -- not nearly enough to fill all the positions it needs to fill.
Now we have a new generation -- defined not only by a shift in cultural values, but a shift in demand. There is absolutely a millennial who is every bit as good and talented and passionate as you are, and their head is screwed on snugly and sealed with loctite -- but they're competing with dozens of cut-rate, gold-rush chasers who learned to code from some shitty bootcamp that promised to make them a full-fledged software engineer in 30 days or whatever. Even the ones who have a full-fledged CS degree are often people who are pulled (or pushed, depending on their situation) into the program because it's what makes the money. Those programs, in turn, have had to learn to accommodate a whole new world of expectations on every side: from an academic institution that expects unthinkable enrollment rates, from a student body that is gathered from ever-leftward frontiers of the bell curve of prior academic achievement, and from employers who demand a thick and steady stream of fresh meat.
So if you were tooling around on the disparate and loose threads of the network in the 70s, 80s or 90s, congratulations: you hail from a world that is dead. You got to enjoy the narrow window of time that exists between when a massive new economic opportunity is created, and when it becomes common knowledge. For as bad as it has become, however, it will still get worse: the demand for developers still generally exceeds the supply. The market will correct this. In fact, it will likely initially overcorrect for this by supplying more developers than anyone can possibly hire, and the era of true despair will begin.
So if you're an old timer who doesn't like this situation, well... tough shit. The rest of the world found out about what we were doing, and they want in, and we're never, ever going to push them back out. Their values are not our values. They don't give a shit about building things that are enduring and elegant; in many cases, they
I am personally shocked that a person over 40 would WANT to work at a place like Google, FacePalm, Microsoft, et al, even if it is "for the money" and for the benefits. I am a female, over 40, skilled in programming, information security and assurance. Worker experience is not valued at these companies. They are much like the big accounting firms who suck up youngsters, chew them up and then spit them out at the end of the cycle. If one knows what one is doing and doing it well, there is no reason for someone to work 50+ hours a week, unless of course one is so passionate about their work that work is NOT work. It's play. These companies can all go pound sand as far as I am concerned. And no, H1B's are not going to dig them out of the pit these companies have created for themselves.
Don't call me, I will call you. Maybe.
bs like we find people over X don't like to work over 50 hours a week and that is not the what we want in this office.
Wait a sec, when people think women don't want to work 50 hour weeks so get fewer promotions and less money it's all fine, because that's their lifestyle choice and they prioritize work hours over pay. But when older people don't or can't work like a 20 year old who hasn't figured out they are being exploited yet, it's unacceptable and a lawsuit is required to fix it.
Of course 50 hour weeks are ridiculous. At the moment they are mostly illegal in the EU (the limit is 48 hours, and even that can't be a constant thing). Just apply it equally to everyone.
For a delivery crunch, I did 60 hours a week for a three month period. At the end of the third month -- I had burnout. I quit that company and took a 6 week rest. Still had that obsessive compulsive 60hr work /week feeling for a long time.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
50 hours is a very light week for me.
I think the first time Google turned me down was when I interviewed with them, back in 2001 or 2002.
My foot in the door at Google was via another systems administrator - a gentleman whom I knew from my days at Linuxcare, whose acquaintance I had made when I assumed responsibility for Linuxcare's infrastructure, after the big layoff, in 2000.
I need to say that Linuxcare had the same bigotry against older people that Google had. Oh, they hired a few, here and there, to manage all the kids ... and the executives were all over 40 ... but if you tried to apply to Linuxcare, as a self-educated UNIX enthusiast, you were seen as Old School. You had to be a *Linux(tm)* enthusiast. And a decade or two of experience with open source wasn't adequate. It had to be Open Source(tm) experience, or it was worthless.
I could take comfort in the fact that, after Linuxcare crashed and burne, and they needed one man to run it all, 24x265, I ended up in the driver's seat, after all ... but instead I am reminded of all the interesting people I did NOT meet and whose lives I did NOT influence and who did NOT get a chance to influence my life, either - all of the opportunities for learning, growth, and coevolution, that were lost.
Since then I think I have been contacted by and interviewed by Google at least a dozen times.
I always send Google's recruiters a resume that details over twenty - now, over thirty - years of industrial strength UNIX operational and administrative experience.
So it's not a secret that I am over 40 years old.
Indeed, that is exactly what I am offering. More continuous UNIX experience than 99% of the other candidates.
I do this because I do not think I should have to conceal my experience from my employer - that, and, because, during interviews - when I have truncated my resume - I have found myself citing experience that was not on my resume ... and, needless to say, I did not get the job, as a result.
So don't play this game about only counting candidates who make it on site, at Google, for a physical interview.
Because the odds are good that those are the candidates whom trimmed ten years off their resumes.
Dig deeper - or shut up, and wait for someone else to come along and make your statistical analysis look like the work of fools.
Your call.
~childo
I've read many posts here with tacit approval for on hiring the younger guy, of course all those are coming from younger persons undoubtedly. But apply the same thing to H1B and all of a sudden its just so unfair. The reason the "younger hard working will take less money" people are getting hired is exactly the same reason they hire H1B, just they will work as hard or harder and will take less money with very little ability to push back about it. Karma?
Well, it depends. I'll work 50 hours a week if I am paid accordingly.
$150k should do it.
At least in my area, if it were Silicon Valley, it would likely be more like $500k, but I don't even know what salaries are like out there, so I could be off.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
All these bad *isms ...
Think about team building. Maybe persons of a certain age do not fit into teams with a certain age. Either, because they should be homogenous, or the other way round, because they should be heterogenous and already have some old person in there.
This is one reason that men should also get exactly as much paternity leave as women get maternity leave. It's counter-intuitive, but otherwise employers will always have that motivation to prefer men over women for positions.