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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.
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.
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
The fact he can't hear all the office gossip / bullshit means he's able to concentrate on his work instead of contributing to the problem :)
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
And so it should come as no surprise that they won't hire experts who argue against them.
You would think with the incredible amount of job hopping that goes on nowadays, there simple is no one being hired right out of college, and then putting in 40 year in that company before retiring, that companies would prefer 35-50 year olds who are settled and who will not upend their life's to get a new job in some other city.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
unaided internships are not legal
I have had a similar experience with Amazon. Going through their interview process to demonstrate CS101 type questions (which I haven't encountered in over 15 years) only to be told that they chose someone else. I wouldn't have thought anything of it, but they contacted me 4 times after they chose someone asking me if I wanted to apply for an exciting position. I finally had to tell them that I had no interest in working for them ever and specifically told them to never contact me again. I wonder how long this will last.
...trying to explain why you need 100 lines code, a transpiler and knowledge of css+js+typescript+node+whatever they can pile up to write an angular js hello world "application" where the programmer spent 6 months agonizing about "UX", the post-build footprint is a five GB executable (not counting dragging in a few more GB of frameworks it needs to run), which in turn requires a 4 GHz multicore CPU to run it without dragging the computer to its knees, which would fall immediate prey to the first hacker who decides it's a target, will only run on the very, very latest bleeding-edge OS's, and turns out to be infected with the GPL so Corporation X's nest of lawyers forbids its use before it even gets to market anyway.
FTFY. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.