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More Software Engineers Over Age 40 May Join a Lawsuit Against Google (yahoo.com)
More trouble for tech giants and how they are dealing with people. Google suffered a setback in an age discrimination suit this week. A judge ruled that other software engineers over age 40 who interviewed with the company but didn't get hired can step forward and join the lawsuit. From a Business Insider report: The suit was brought by two job applicants, both over the age of 40, who interviewed but weren't offered jobs. Specifically, the judge has approved turning the suit into a "collective action" meaning that people who "interviewed in person with Google for a software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position when they were 40 years old or older, and received notice on or after August 28, 2014, that they were refused employment, will have an opportunity to join in the collective action against Google," the ruling says. While this isn't good news for Google, the ruling was strictly focused on whether the suit could be broadened to include more people. It doesn't mean that Google will ultimately lose the case. Google says it's fighting the suit.
I'm not saying it's boring or unrewarding, I'm sure it's not, but from what I heard, they basically troll you through a dozen interviews or more - ain't nobody got time for that! (If you're in your forties, you likely have a family, etc. that takes up your time - I sure wouldn't appreciate having to go through that many interviews just to not get the job in the end. It would feel like they're just wasting my time after the 4th one - even if I did get the job).
AC comments get piped to
I don't know about your conspiracy theory, but I had a phone interview with Google, and I wasn't too impressed. Personally, my theory is that Google's recruiters are incompetent 20-something girls fresh out of college and sororities, and they're just contacting people to do make-work and justify their salaries. And then the obnoxious and arrogant 20-something male developers who conduct the initial phone interviews are only doing it because it's part of their job, and don't really want to hire anyone.
It's like the old maxim: never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Organizations are always coming up with stupid policies for various reasons, and then the people who work there simply carry them out. That's the impression I got of Google. In my case, my resume quite clearly shows I have a EE degree and hardware background, and all my programming experience is low-level embedded stuff, and the phone interviewer immediately asked me a bunch of CS algorithm questions. I don't have a CS degree, so of course that stuff is not my strong suite nor do I want a job doing algorithmic stuff. But from what I read, that's exactly how Google interviews are. I seriously wonder how they get any engineering work done that doesn't involve heavy CS stuff. Maybe they just outsource it.