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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.
It is tough to teach an old dog new tricks.
but an old dog knows already a lot of tricks, knows how to implement the tricks in such a way they can be extended later, and will not fall in most of the beginner traps when executing the tricks.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I'm 58, last three years have be learning and developing in NodeJS, CouchDB, JQuery, Lodash, Async, etc. Right now am prototyping an architecture using Swagger and a127.
There are exceptions to every categorization. If you dismiss somebody as unable to learn because they are older, then you are prejudging them. That's age discrimination.
If you post it, they will read.
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
Most (nearly all) performance issues I have seen are due to naive assumptions built into the implementation. And poor coding. Things like using Exceptions for logic flow, re-instantiating objects that were instantiated earlier in the call stack, building an in-memory database that is slower than the network lag you were trying to avoid, similar logic scattered throughout the code due to cut-n-paste, etc.
No amount of low-level optimization is going to make up for high-level implementation mistakes.
If you post it, they will read.
I got contacted by them recently. I responded that I'm an embedded engineer and asked if the position dealt with embedded devices or not, since it looked like the position was for web stuff, and never heard back. Honestly, I expect this kind of incompetence (not understanding that embedded stuff is nothing like web stuff) from Indian "shotgun-style" recruiters, but not from internal recruiters for large, successful companies.
this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like.
Incorrect. If it's not too late, spit that cool aid out now. You are talking of the "new reality". This is actually a good illustration. If you were old enough to be discriminated against, you might actually remember a time when people were expected to be productive while at work and then go home at 5 P.M. unless there was a truly exceptional circumstance (not the emergency excuse of the week). For those few jobs where crunch times were intrinsic, the employees were likely to be free to leave early or take a day off between the crunch times.
If management is competent and the compensation is adequate, crunch times will be few and far between.
I'm 45 and have not noticed any change in my ability to learn new stuff. What I have noticed is a decline in my willingness to put up with BS. You want me to work 14 hours per day? Uhm. No. I have a life. Ask that 22-year old fresh out of university without any serious experience, he'll fall for that.
Does that make me less employable? Not really. Of course employers will know I have this attitude, but everyone over 40 does, so the fact that I feel that way doesn't change much for me personally.
Once again, it is not about being able to learn, it is about what you will put up with. Once you are over 40, the kind of treatment you will accept shrinks dramatically, and with it, your employability.