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Judges Reinstate Charges In Google Age Discrimination Suit
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 05, 2007 09:08 AM
from the oldies-but-goodies dept.
from the oldies-but-goodies dept.
theodp writes "A California appeals court has reinstated former Stanford prof Brian Reid's age-discrimination suit against Google, ruling that a lower Court erred in siding with Google and rejecting Mr. Reid's claims. From the Court Decision (PDF): 'We conclude that Reid produced sufficient evidence that Google's reasons for terminating him were untrue or pretextual, and that Google acted with discriminatory motive such that a factfinder would conclude Google engaged in age discrimination.' As side notes, helping Reid make his case is CS Prof Norman Matloff, while Google's actions are being defended by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati of pretexting-was-not-generally-unlawful fame."
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pretextual! (Score:5, Funny)
Wow! I've been on the internet since it was pregraphical. But pretextual! That must have been a really long time ago. No wonder they fired him for being old.
Re:pretextual! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Google to become 'Convicted discriminator'? (Score:3, Insightful)
So much for "Do no evil" (of course, Google has acted contrary to that self-righteous and self-congratulatory credo for years now. Looks like in the future slashdotters will be able to refer to Google as 'convicted discriminator' in each and every Google story.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Any tech life after 50? (Score:3, Interesting)
Life after 50 (Score:3, Informative)
I find that I've gotten far, far better with age. You may have heard of the old mainframe guy with 30+ years of experience who can look at the output and tell you what the problem is. Well, I'm there. With the Linux/Unix kernel and other system work. I find that I'm the per
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
By the way, a good hint for buzzword generating is to just append -cast to any word that pops into your head, or is relevant at the time. I've been opinioncasting for a while now.
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Ageism is stupid, but can make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
At 54 he may be a real asset to the company in other areas of the company that aren't bleeding edge. He may be the sort of guy you want working on some very difficult, but not sexy, problems like getting better performance out of their products. Just because his ideas aren't new, doesn't mean that he is useless. To the contrary, his experience may be worth several times the vision of a young employee.
The IT industry deserves its problems. It deserves to have to deal with labor shortages if it is young to be a cult of youth. No other industry treats its senior engineers with as much contempt as much of IT. No mechanical engineering outfit in their right mind would trade a person with 30 years of solid experience for a whipper snapper or two with vision, but no experience. It would be product suicide.
So, do we now add this to the growing list of how Google is becoming evil? I don't see how you can avoid it.
Re:Ageism is stupid, but can make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the corporate mindset.
The upper management look at the bottom dollar on how to make money.
And regardless of how ugly it is, on paper, IT are a cost. Never a profit.
Remember, I'm IT. I know just like any other IT professional, that what we save a company in revenue is enormous. We maintain the systems, prevent outtages, and are a total invisible entity until something goes wrong (tm). But most of the time, we're ignored. Why? Because we do our job, we do our job well, and people who make money can continue to make money.
If we went by the RIAA method of cost, then we could argue that each IT professional is worth a few hundred million dollars. Because it's our expertise that is saving the company that much in lost revenue every year, as a blanket possibility.
Unfortunately, the RIAA method of cost isn't used by the business department. The only go for immediate dividends. They look at the long scope project plan and how much revenue they will be generated. To date, I have hardly ever seen a business plan that takes potential loss into account with any budget they write. Ever.
This is why they can easilly determine that firing the 'old codgy 20+ year expert' who makes his 100K year for a green out of college eager beaver for 40K year saves the company 60K, PLUS BENEFITS, a shot.
Looks really good on paper.
Of course, in that year, they lose more money than the 60K in training, mistakes made by this individual, downtime on servers, misappropiations of resources and applications, etc etc.
But that never shows on paper. Regardless of the loss, they'll just point to the 60K saved. And when the company inevitably has a SAN outtage, drive failure, OS crash, DDoS attack or other miscreant attack/damage, they'll put this person on probation, fire off other high end professionals who weren't at fault, maybe lay off the manager in charge of the department. And then, wow, look how much MORE money we saved? We're doing great!
Long as the chair boards are happy and the investors get their cash, frankly, they don't give a damn about the IT professional, and that's always going to be the case.
Welcome to industry gentlemen.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That's a brilliant point you bring out suggesting that "potential loss" be brought into account. If potential loss evaluation is such a rare concept in today's management world, should it then be patentable?
Then a couple of years ago. I lived your story. Too old. Younger person made mistakes. Blamed on me. How dare you, bye bye from management. Know what? That manager in tu
As the young guy (Score:3, Interesting)
Where I work, a lot of the long-
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah! WTF is up with that?
I started in the Caliifornia computer industry when I was 22 in 1979. At my job there I was told:
1) This is the most important project in the history of the company.
2) If this project fails, the company goes under
3) Only you can do it.
So I worked buttloads of (unpaid) extra hours. And I felt good about it.
In my next job I was told:
1) This is the most important project in the history of
Wow Google is like every other 1337 companey (Score:5, Insightful)
Culturally fit (Score:3, Insightful)
I kinda agree: a pessimistic or unsociable person could endanger the spirit and the enthusiasm of others. I would not like to work with a highly intelligent but depressive person, if his depression would affect my everyday mood. Not to mention if the guy is the PM.
On the other hand, I would be fucking upset for being fired because of not fitting into the company's social standards.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hands up all those who interviewed at Google, seemed to be going great then got told "no" because you weren't a fit, culturally?
*holds up hand*
I think its the standard corporate response to someone that they don't like. Its weasel speak for "One of our managers didn't like you but rather than just say that we'll say that you're not a good fit, culturally. When reall
Shrug. (Score:3, Insightful)
Corporate culture is more of an ephemeral. They clearly want people to fit in and participate, and that's understandable. I think, however, that they need to be more up-front about it.
I work with a lot of people who are older
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Google persued him, to fix some personel problems they were having with women employees, which he did. Brian is very very very good with people. He was very quickly made director or vp of engineering or operations or something based on his glowing performance; TFA points out his only written review was "glowing".
He was only at Stanford a couple of years. He was the Director of t
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
In short, smart people do stupid things all the time; if you haven't noticed this, you don't know many smart people.
He got pursued by a young, hip company, to fix a specific problem. That
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The guy invented the web search engine and is one of the top computer scientists of all time. There's zero chance he's not an asset to Google. If you actually knew the man you'd know this. Don't guess.
Don't be so sure he doesn't have people lining up to hire him. Just because h
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I kinda agree: a pessimistic or unsociable person could endanger the spirit and the enthusiasm of others. I would not like to work with a highly intelligent but depressive person, if his depression would affect my everyday mood. Not to mention if the guy is the PM.
On the other hand, I would be fucking upset for being fired because of not fitting into the company's social standards "
I know Brian very very well. He's one of the most
Karma is a bitch (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I dislike this result (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I dislike this result (Score:5, Interesting)
the questions were 'schoolboy' quizzed. its been decades (literally) since I had to recreate a search or sort algorithm by hand. and you know what? for the field I'm in (network management) I have not HAD to re-do existing algs. not once in my career! we usually BUILD on existing ideas, not waste time re-doing perfectly good wheels.
when I answered 'I'd search for some sample code or an existing idea, then take parts of it and use what makes sense' they didn't like that answer! when they asked me math (arithmetic) style questions, I said I'd find a calculator and punch in the data. in other words, I know HOW to get the answer but I rarely (these days) walk around with literal data floating around upstairs. I keep POINTERS to data, not data. isn't that the better way? it surely has served me well enough in my 20+ years in the field.
the whole strategy of their interviews are all wrong! ALL wrong. they might work great for the snotnose college hire, but its completely wrong for us seasoned pros.
google is simple NOT setup for older guys. I saw it when I was there on campus for the live interviews and I sensed it all thruout during my phone screens.
they don't value thinking skills as well as they seem to value rote data recall, which clearly favors the young and those who very recently finished school and have it the algs still recallable line-by-line in their heads.
Parent
Re:I dislike this result (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument is that of a strawman. You claim they are discriminating based on age because
I know quite a few folks who have interviewed at google, and a couple who were offered jobs. The interview is the same for everyone. It's very similar at Amazon.com as well, BTW, if you're interviewing for a senior position. One of my friends made sure to cram for about 2 weeks prior to his Amazon interview for this reason. He actually said it was the hardest interview process he ever went through.
And I'm not talking about 20-somethings straight out of school - I'm past the half-way point myself and so are most of the people I associate with (Well, except for some of the "kids" I work with these days, LOL).
- Roach
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I dislike this result (Score:5, Insightful)
The point he is making, which I concur with since I too am a rather succesful in the realm of IT member of the older-fart generation, is that the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether).
So yes, if that are Google's "choice and criteria" then the lawsuit is quite justified indeed.
See above. Your very use of the word "cram" blows away any pretenses about the process of that selection. Ask an accomplished architect or industrial engineer or a world-class surgeon with, say, 30 years of practice what was the last time he or she "crammed" anything.
Parent
Re:I dislike this result (Score:5, Insightful)
Again, you may not like how they are doing things, and that is a very valid opinion
I don't know if you interview anyone for your company or have done so lately, but I do and have to tell you
There are a LOT of folks who were employed during the boom who really don't have a solid foundation and have no clue about sorting, hashing, etc. Stuff that I consider pretty basic knowledge if you're interviewing to be an engineer. While we don't look for hard code examples from memory, but we do expect that the concepts are there, readily available in memory, and able to be drawn out on a whiteboard. You'd be amazed at how many people can't do that.
I agree on principle that knowing how something works and where to go to get the specifics is every bit if not more important than being a walking textbook, but that's not what they've decided (right or wrong). It's their company, they can do that.
But saying that it's "age discrimination" is silly IMO.
- Roach
Parent
Re:I dislike this result (Score:5, Insightful)
So yes, if that are Google's "choice and criteria" then the lawsuit is quite justified indeed.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In a way it is, but that is an artifact of the types of positions for which the "10+ year experience" employees are supposed to be hired. What should occur, and what the Labour Laws are aligned with, is that the "entry level" positions of companies are filled (statistically speaking - exceptions are always possible) with young, bushy-tailed whipper-snappers with
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...the ability to recall useless trivia from memory is not a criterion for selecting useful employees, but a method of screening for "snotty nosed kids" as he put it. Most people with any sort of technical achievments in any scientific discipline or even a craft trade will readilly confirm that an ability to locate information and use it effectively is far more important then memorizing it verbatim, which is what schools are all about (and wrongess of which approach versus its ease of managment for the teachers is another discussion alltogether).
I don't think that testing a programmer's understanding of basic algorithms is out of place.
Memorizing stuff verbatim is what _bad_ schools are about. Good schools teach ideas, not technology. There's nothing wrong with teaching students how to look at an algorithm, break it down, understand it and implement it. That's an incredibly useful skill to learn and practice. There's no better way to teach a student how to do this than to make them do it with a few simple algorithms (oh, I don't know, sorting alg
Re:You need to polish your interview skills grandp (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe in truth-in-advertising and so I NEVER cram before an interview. I show them my thinking skills and the fact that I can solve job-relevant problems well.
if I can't get a job based on who I am, I don't really want it based on some just-memorized buzzwords that impressed the interviewers.
I know what you're saying and most people do seem to agree with the 'cram before interv
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes and no. For doing a job of implementing something (doesn't have to be a computer network, but could be building widgets), you way is the best. However for what Google wants, it is entirely wrong. Google wants people who can develop new things. To do that you've got to completely understand your area of "expertise" and keep it all in your head.
For example you said:
Re:I dislike this result (Score:4, Interesting)
This is not age discrimination. Your skills just do not match what they need.
actually, I didn't even disclose which kind of job I was applying for.
I'm an "IT" guy (again, network management) and I'm -very- senior in my field. without drudging up my resume, just take me at my word for just a few minutes. please tell me (if you have been in this field) how being able to re-code a tree-walk or tree-insert from memory, in 10 minutes or less, on a whiteboard is relevant to solving problems in my field (they didn't even allow me a proper emacs or vi session, which is also VERY artificial if they are trying to test my ability to work out problems, live, in front of them).
in my field, you care more about polling devices for health and there are a whole SLEW of questions that I'd ask about 'polling science' (yes, there's a whole lot to polling and being smart about it in large scale networks). you care about database issues since when you poll and collect data, you have to store and search that effectively. I know my sql pretty well and THAT is entirely the level that us netmgt types live at. I've written entire NMS systems and agents, as well, but they didn't ask spudnutz about that. they asked mundane stupid offtopic questions that just wreaked of artificiality. I could tell almost none of them that interviewed me even spent any real time in the field DOING network management.
so, fwiw, I know my field very well and have been at most of the big name players here in the valley. the google interview was the worst experience of my professional career, in all aspects of how it was handled. it was more a show of how 'cool' the company was and but NOTHING about the actual job you'd be doing there. which I found very unsettling. why should I consider leaving a good job (btw, they called me - I didn't call them) when google would not even tell me WHAT, exactly, I'd be working on?
they are guilty of having a 'silicon valley pre-bubble' attitude. I don't think this will scale well, as we say.
Parent
I just noticed, it was brian! (Score:3, Informative)
again, I only worked with brian for a very short time and only on 1 netmgt project
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is nothing "geeky" about your preference, it is just plain foolish. Implementing it will lead to companies holding on to underperforming employees (think Wally) for fear of government audits and other legal problems. It already happens (Wally did threaten the PHB with a lawsuit once), but, at least, the burden of proof is on the complainer
Typical wetware pump and dump. (Score:5, Informative)
Brian was hired about a year before Google went public and beefed up the org chart (which helps for an IPO) because looks great on paper: invented the firewall, altavista, the PAIX, Scribe (which begat sgml which begat html) and quickly rose up the ranks to be director of engineering or vp of ops or something fairly high up. His only written review was glowing. Very very shorly before Google went public he was fired for "not fitting in with Google's youthful culture" thus saving Google from granting his significant stock options.
That's what it's really about: the money.
Even Gates and monkeyboy havn't done anything this capricious and arbitrary with employees as far as I can tell.
Net result: Google more evil that Microsoft, much as it pains me to say it.
Suck on that, fanboy.
Parent
Re:I'm tired of age discrimination. (Score:5, Funny)
The good news is that that will get better for you in the next few years.
The bad news is that it will eventually get worse again.
Parent
Re:I dislike this result (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Italian_fascist_corporativism [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manifesto_of_the_Fascist_Struggle [wikipedia.org]
Fascism has a meaning, it does not just mean "uncool". It's a political doctrine with a precise ideology. And ideology that the original poster embraces in this context.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
By the way, what reasons are accepted for firing someone?
None.
Employers often circumvent discrimination litigation here by forcing us to sign "at-will' employment agreements before getting hired. The company reserves the right to discharge you at any time for any reason whatsoever.
The only protections are those mandated by federal law. You can't be fired for being female, or black, or Jewish, for example (if you can prove in a court of law that this is in fact what happened, heh heh). But on the other
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Discrimination
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The anti-discrimination movement is, in some way, pr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because formation of a civil society is a trade off. Corporations can't just do whatever they want. In exchange, corporations can exist. We let the owners of an institution almost entirely off the hook from any responsibility for what that institution does, or what debts it incurs. Nobody has any personal liability deriving from most things a corporation does, which is a fabulously useful thing in terms of ever getting even good things done, but don't you think it's reasonable for society to expect some
Re:I don't have a problem with discrimination (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me fix that for you:
"I don't have a problem with discrimination as long as I am not the one being discriminated against."
There that's more like it.
Parent
He didn't get tenure (Score:4, Interesting)
He didn't get tenure at Stanford. Probably because he was too practical and commercial for Stanford CS of that period. (Back then, Stanford CS was part of Arts and Sciences and dominated by logicians and "expert systems" types. CS was moved to the School of Engineering around 1985). So he went to DEC, which used to have a very good research facility in Palo Alto. He ran their network R&D. When Compaq (remember Compaq? IBM PC clones?) bought DEC, they phased out software research, because Compaq didn't do much software. So he went to Bell Labs in Silicon Valley, which also shut down as Bellcore retreated from research.
Google hired him because he'd done AltaVista, the first big search engine. (Which, amusingly, was done as a demo for the DEC Alpha CPU.)
It's no longer fun being a theoretical computer scientist in Silicon Valley. All the great corporate labs are gone. Along with the ones mentioned above, HP Labs, PARC, and IBM Almaden have also tanked. Google, Microsoft, and Intel still do a little theoretical work, but not that much.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The day Compaq shut down the NSL he was supposed to meet me in New York to talk to Ira Magaziner about the DNS mess. When he wasn't there we exchanged some email as to why. As he put it "Compaq didn't get enough money to be able to buy DEC by being innovative". While a great quote my favorite BKR quote is "Never mistake truth for consensus"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I had occasion to interview recently with both VMWare (in 2005) and Google (in 2006). The two experiences were as different as night and day.
At VMWare, every interviewer who met with me arrived on time, demonstrated that he or she had read my resume, and asked pertinent questions about my experience and skills.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Old people = no innovation.
Old people = old ways. "
Feynman figured out why the space shuttle blew up shortly before he died as an old man. Nobody else could figure it out. I don't buy old poeple have old ideas, look at all the old science fiction writers or Freeman Dyons wikipedia page.
Another reason you don't see a lot of older people in the IT world is they make enough money to escape it.