At Google, You're Old and Gray At 40 543
theodp writes "Google faces an imminent California Supreme Court decision on whether an age discrimination suit against it can go forward. But that hasn't kept the company from patting itself on the back for how it supports 'Greyglers' — that's any Googler over 40. At a company of about 20,000 full-time employees, there were at last count fewer than 200 formally enrolled Greyglers working to 'make Google culture ... welcome to people of all ages.'"
Re:Not just Google (Score:1, Informative)
Or do the old-timers just not get new technology?
The old-timers get the new technology. They invented it.
Re:young company (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not just Google (Score:3, Informative)
There might be a reason for their distractions. See this article [hbr.org] from the Harvard Business Review which talks about the differences between the current and former generations when it comes to work.
Then there is this article [businessweek.com] from Bloomberg Businessweek which talks about the same issue. Both came about because of the Washington Post article [washingtonpost.com] which essentially said that the current generation has a lazy work ethic.
While it can be said the current generation (gees, does that make me sound old) doesn't seem to want to get their hands dirty (so to speak), they are willing to work on a problem until they find a resolution. Whether that is good or bad is up to the manager.
Re:Not just Google (Score:5, Informative)
Texting is useful in lots of circumstances, but perhaps they're not relevant to your lifestyle.
- Communication without disturbing anyone nearby (on public transport, during lessons at school, in the office)
- Communications when the recipient is busy, or might be busy, but can respond later
- A note that doesn't need a reply when the sender doesn't want to be drawn into a conversation (e.g. text parent/partner to say you'll be late)
All of these could be done as well or better by email, but all phones support SMS and only some support email.
Re:Not just Google (Score:2, Informative)
Anyone in IT long enough will realize that you are always learning new technology, but the basic concepts are the same.
I lost count of the training courses I have taken over the years. We now learn in 5 days what probably took a semester in college. I can go through an 800+ pages tech manual and identify and read all the important sections in an hour. I couldn't always do that but after all these years I have developed the ability to learn new technology very fast. I'm not bragging, this seems to be common for 40+ techies.
After learning enough programming languages it all becomes a matter of learning new syntax, how to read a file, process the data, write the file.
Is it interpreted, compiled, procedure oriented, object oriented?
We learn that an OS is just a place to run the programs. When we need to upgrade the OS to a newer version for support or being able to handle new hardware etc. then we plan the OS upgrade and test the applications and check with vendors to make sure they support the new OS.
We learn that vendors are not to be trusted and what used to be considered GA is now BETA and customers are now used as QA/debuggers.
How many people jumped on ZFS right away? It looks great, but it was still new. You know what happens when you setup clustering for high availability and use ZFS? A major problem in one ZFS filesystem that can cause a kernel panic causes failover, the next system imports the the problem ZFS filesystem, it kernel panics,... Now panic is an option, thanks for testing that for us.
We lost our innocence long ago regarding new technology promises and understand that nothing is true until we see it happen. Maybe our cynicism is mistaken as an attitude against new technology?
Re:Not just Google (Score:3, Informative)
Or grammar, apparently... ("Who is" -> "who's", not "whose".)
Re:Not just Google (Score:3, Informative)
capability of the new technology compared to 80s technology is worlds apart.
Other than because you say so, can you come up with any details to your argument or any concrete example? Just one?
The address bus has more bits. The clock cycle time is shorter. Oh wow man I'll never be able to wrap my ancient mind around that. Oh wait, I've been doing just that, every year, for decades.
Like I posted, find me a NEW technology. You can't.
Perhaps you are unaware of Brian Reed's skills (Score:4, Informative)
He invented the scribe text formatting language.
He invented the router, which became the first cisco router.
He co-founded what eventually became Adobe.
While at DEC, he and his group invented the altavista search engine.
There is more, but he clearly has serious computer science talents and vision.
Re:Not just Google (Score:3, Informative)
How is the capability "worlds apart"...? Can you quantify it or express it in some way so that comparisons are possible?
I'm an old and gray 47-year-old who juggles (Unisys in my case) mainframe transactions systems, C and Java stuff, and perl/PHP web stuff for a living, and most of the stuff I see on the web side tends to be OO reimplementations of the same stuff we were using 20 years ago on airline systems.
Many of the same ideas on the web, though somewhat less mature at this point.
Even Unisys MAPPER supported the mouse and graphics at one point with the right remote terminal. Not bad for a mainframe. :-)
similar thing almost happened to me 10 yrs ago (Score:1, Informative)
"On our last big push 10 years ago we had a fairly young developer die when an other wise mild virus wasn't taken as sick time and he worked and worked and finally it crossed the blood brain barrier."
I had recently started at & was on my 1st on-call week for a major .com when I started feeling sick. I'd be DAMNED if I was going to call in sick 3 days into my 1st on-call so just tried to gut it out (pun pending). by Wed I finally called my Dr who basically said: you have APPENDICITIS, you F-tard! drop what you're doing & get to the nearest ER _NOW_!!!. after they took it out the surgeon told me it had "perforated" (analogous to running over nail vs having blow-out) & that I was lucky I didn't have peritonitis/wasn't looking at a much longer recovery or worse. I'm pretty sure they don't name buildings after or make holidays in memory of people who (literally) get themselves killed for their jobs...
FWIW, I'm now 40+ & trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up...
Re:Not just Google (Score:3, Informative)
I dunno...you gotta make sure she WORKS!!
With dual income you can have a nice home and squirrel away a lot of money towards retirement. Besides, it is nice to have someone do the laundry, that saves on the cleaners bill.
But seriously, just make sure and choose well, so you don't get the stereotypical spendthrift type chick.