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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.
So, say two guys apply for a job, they're not really motivated and seem quite incompetent ... *but* they're over 40... then they *must* be hired??
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
For no other reason than I flubbed an easy problem during the interview.
Not sure that Brain Fart is grounds for a lawsuit.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Being white and male isn't an issue, it's a pro.
Being old is a huge issue. Google will learn from this though, they won't even bring in programmers for interviews if they're 40 or older, and if they can't be sure, they won't take the chance.
News to me. I'm over 50 and have had a couple interviews with the googs. But I have a job I like and wasn't terribly interested in the job they were trying to fill, so I wasn't disappointed when the interviews didn't advance to the next round. In fact one of their recruiters just left me a message last week trying to get me to bite....
But maybe I could join the suit anyway – just for shits and giggles – on the basis that they didn't hire me because I'm over 40.
But I have a theory that a lot of these fishing expeditions are just to lure talent away and disrupt other companies. Google, if that's what you're doing, just make an offer. I'm not interested in fucking around with bogus interviews. You can see my work in FOSS going back 25 years. It's all in git, cvs, etc.. If your offer is good enough I might even accept it.
There are a lot of good comments about older developers who are more than qualified in numerous ways in the tech world today.
For the younger guys who are developers: Use those long-term thinking skills and remember where you might be in XX years.
Are you a person who loves to learn (and keep up with) new technologies and solve real problems, and has learned a lot over the first few years of your career?
Do you think you'll be any different any years down the road (other than being more experienced and more mature maybe)?
If so, then welcome to the life of may older developers. Granted, some people don't keep up nor want to, but the same can be said for virtually any age group.
My point is simply: Be careful who you prejudge as you will potentially be an older developer one day yourself. Unless you've gone into another role/career or made your retirement $$ before age 40, be kind to the ones who can offer a lot of talent, even at their age.
Thanks for reading.
Keep in mind that there is also a large group of people (likely with no legal standing) who don't apply to companies that are known in the industry of only hiring below a certain age. Thus they don't even bother applying to companies like this. For this reason we need the government to step in and fine the shit out of companies like Google.
As someone over 40, I can say that there is a single benefit of hiring people at least in their late 20s and beyond. Most programmers that I have worked with who sucked, sucked because they had latched onto some technology cluster/methodology and would let go. It was group-think at its worst. One of the benefits of hiring someone with a decade or more experience is that it is easier to detect this. So if you see someone who has 20,000 certifications in a single technology stack over a long period of time and a resume with nothing else, it throws up a massive red flag. Then you can explore this in an interview. Is this their only hammer in the toolkit.
What also amazes me is that many people in their early 20s make it clear that they have largely learned all they plan on learning. Thus they have not only picked a technology, but a version of that technology. So I will walk into a consulting job where I have been brought in because the project has gone to complete hell. I will start looking at things like the overall systems architecture, the internal architecture, and finally the code and the methodologies for creating that code. It is not uncommon that it is a fairly good selection of the worst of breed everything. Someone who didn't know what they were doing made a prototype and then an entire system was built on that. So you get some Ruby, a bad choice of cloud provider, some bastardization of Azure, and they are using some slow as molasses IDE/build system that means 5 minutes between making a change and seeing the change work. Except they have 100,000 lines of this crap code.
But what amazes me is that the above story happens regardless of age. There is some myth that 20 somethings chase the node.js type things of the world and that the 50+ crowd is just decades out of date. The reality is that they are often both wrong but for different reasons. The 50+ crowd screw up because of the "This is how I have always done it." and the 20 year old versions of the same crap programmer is "This is how my professor said was the only way."
The key being that crap programmers are crap for reasons other than their age, and as I said, the advantage of getting someone with a bit of a resume is that their bad attitude is easier to detect.