Median Age At Google Is 29, Says Age Discrimination Lawsuit 349
dcblogs writes: The typical employee at Google is relatively young, according to a lawsuit brought by an older programmer who is alleging age discrimination. Between 2007 and 2013, Google's workforce grew from 9,500 to more than 28,000 employees, "yet as of 2013, its employees' median age was 29 years old," the lawsuit claims. That's in contrast to the median age of nearly 43 for all U.S. workers who are computer programmers, according to the lawsuit.
Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no law against outsourcing interviews to incompetent people. Exactly zero of the crappy behaviors of his interviewer sound remotely age targeted. In fact, older people are generally more patient with technologically inept folk than younger, and it seems unlikely they disqualified him for excessive patience.
As for the stats on their median age, that's the median age of the employees not the people that were hired. I hear Google tends to overwork it's employees. The older you are, the less patience you have for that crap.
If you handed out high quality stuffed unicorns to a perfectly evenly age-distributed portion of the population, you'd find after a couple years the people still in possession of said objects were disproportionately 4-9 year old girls. This is not evidence that you discriminated in any way.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
We've got this guy coming for an interview, he's got the experience and training we asked for, in fact he's the ideal candidate, except for one thing - he's too old. He'll want a salary to match his value and he won't be a yes man. So let's interview him but make him look really inept by getting the worst person we have to do technical interviews. Then we say he want very good in the interview and it looks like we're giving all age ranges a chance.
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Actually tech workers should get paid as much as lawyers. stop giving away the jobs to shit indian and we can get some money for all. As for older workers which I am I have banged out more code than these twits have changed socks. takes no time to learn an new bit and use it well..
if two people are equal on the resume but one has more experience who is older, and you pick the younger for "social fit" , thats open and shut lawsuit.
Kids today, want parties every Friday, free lunch and big salaries that say
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Informative)
Have you seen what the average lawyer makes? We do. The average lawyer doesn't even get a job out of law school these days.
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Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually tech workers should get paid as much as lawyers.
Tech workers, especially engineers, should get paid more than lawyers since our skills actually create value.
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But legal skills create money. Most people would choose money over value (would you like $100 in fiat currency or 40 loaves of bread?).
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Legal skills just move money around.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Legal skills take money from place A and move it to place B. Lawyers don't create value. Engineers do.
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"Director" is not earned from technical competence, but from political maneuvering and brown nosing. Ie, it's a reward for loyalty. Good companies will spot this and be much more picky about how gets to be director, but bad companies will be chock full of director level people who are incompetent at being a director (even if they were competent at their lower rank jobs).
But then remember that director has to be a brown noser and political player as part of the actual job itself. They must deal with highe
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a Director who works directly for a CEO, I don't brown nose for shit. I might be respectful, understand business requirements, and dress somewhat better than your standard developer or admin, but I'm no politician. Just the thought of me as an actual politician makes me giggle.
Getting to be a manager was a little bit of looking out for an opportunity, putting myself forward, and working up the ranks. Yeah, I don't get to sit and code all day long, but just the coordination that I have to do and the experience I have with dealing with bullshit is worth every penny they pay me. The place I worked at before didn't even have a process for taking orders from Sales and provisioning customers. No one had actually thought of how you'd actually give someone an account. Or how to tell finance that they should, you know, start charging the customers money. Guess who does that?
Oh and that new technology you just had a nerdgasm over? Someone has to figure out how to pay for that shit. Have you ever had to get money out of a CFO? It's like they hire people who believe that every dollar bill is their precious firstborn child. You have to make proposals and budgets and graphs, and THEN they ask you if you can wait two weeks for it. And THEN they delay payment on the bill until you're on your third notice and about to be cancelled. Guess who is fucked if they make a mistake and get us shut off due to that little game of "Hide the phone line payment".
You'd think that's easy shit. It isn't. I spend more time trying to figure out how to interface my unit with other units than I do supervising my staff. Fuck, they pretty much do their own thing based on some requirements I give them. Of course, that's because I spent a fuckload of time and effort trying to hire a qualified staff who don't need me to shove my hand up their ass and puppet them through doing that job.
Yes, there are some brown nosers, especially in big companies, but in small companies, a director earns their money because you're expected to manage and do the work, and figure out how things work that you took for granted as a grunt.
Google? If they're making 29 year olds into Directors, well, they're either management geniuses or they're fucked in the long run. Technical management doesn't mean that you are alpha nerd. You're supposed to be an experienced senior manager who knows how to get shit out of executives WITHOUT the reach around. If you're a kiss-ass, you're doing it wrong and the executives will eat you for lunch.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
But the young ones think they already know everything, even how to spell.
Re: Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Funny)
Then you should fire yourself immediately you bitter demanding old coot
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I'm not a young one.
And you still don't know the difference between their, there, and they're? Dunning-Kruger wants to have a talk with you - in front of the mirror :-)
It seems to be a habit [slashdot.org] of yours:
Who knows, maybe the person in charging of deciding to hire this person was discriminating against them based on age.
and [slashdot.org]
if their commitment to linux support was good, it would be possible to by most of their laptops with linux.
buy, bye, by, and here's another they're, their, there boo-boo [slashdot.org]
I would say "They're loss" and move on to the next interview.
... and the one that started this: see above for the poster who first pointed it out ...
They won't learn anything knew
knew, new, gnu.
Kind of ironic that you say [slashdot.org]
Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code
when you can't write, period ( these examples are from your posts in this thread in just the last 2 hours). Your technical docume
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"I would hire a young kid over an old person any day."
Repeat this to yourself every day for the next twenty years. You're in for a shock.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not so sure here. Young kids recently seem to act like know-it-alls who hate conforming the group environment; everything you do they see as being done the wrong way as it's not the same as what they did on their last job or what their professor talked about. Older workers, or those of a certain age, had to learn by necessity to learn new tools and discard old ones on a regular basis, and ever new job they took required them to learn to adapt to the new situation.
The older workers can be molded because they have plenty of experience with being molded. The younger workers still have this idealistic vision of how everything should be done. Older workers have patience earned through experience, and it's much more common for me to see the younger workers as the ones who are easily frustrated.
The kids are the ones who only write in their preferred language in my experience, which is probably the only language they know.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:4, Interesting)
As I said, I was just offering a counter-generalization.
At my company we just fire the new grads with attitudes. All the old guys running the show have a real hard time firing (and in some cases not hiring) people if they are supporting families.
We seem to practice reverse age discrimination.
I can see the logic of the rationale you provided. It's just not the reality I see everyday.
I see young people who are very hard working and excited to gain experience from their older colleagues. I see older workers with bad attitudes that freak out when they don't feel they are given the appropriate level of respect. They are the ones acting like know-it-alls, and the code they write sucks. The code the young people write sucks too, but at least they take criticism well.
Maybe you're getting all the kids we fire.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:4, Interesting)
Naw, we use C. Not a lot of kids applying who have the skills necessary to think about low level code that has to be small and efficient. We'd like more junior people I think but they're hard to find and if they're competent there's a lot of competition to snatch them up.
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Sweeping generalizations about age groups are what lead to age discrimination. I know you don't mean to be actively discriminate against the young with your post, but it sets up a frame of mine in which it happens. It's exactly the same thing as is alleged in many discrimination suits by older people, where the mindset is that their generate are has-beens who are stuck in their ways and unable to adapt or fit in.
I've known good and bad programmers of all ages. Age does not correlate with quality, it's just
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the new grads we hire at my company turn out really well. Most of the old people we hire either can't actually write any code, or they can only write code (but only in their preferred language) and can't be bothered to learn or follow prescribed design patterns or coding standards.
Have you considered applying Occam's razor here? Maybe your hiring process sucks. Maybe the compensation and conditions you're offering simply aren't good enough to attract older developers who are any good. Are these theories more or less likely than entire generations of developers who presumably once had that enthusiasm and aptitude you seem to see in new grads mysteriously becoming incompetent and unmotivated a decade or three later?
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They don't pick an inept person to do the interviewing in order to filter out the expensive candidate. Instead Google has a policy that totally inept people must do the interviewing. The interviewer seems to be either chosen at random or in a round robin fashion. The intentionally choose interviewers who are from different departments or fields than the person being interviewed.
It would seem the only time such an ridiculous interview strategy could work is when you're interviewing for entry level jobs.
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Usually positions describe how much experience they require. If a very experienced person shows up to interview for an entry level engineer position expecting a salary to match his experience, then he's SOL. If you've put out a job offer for a senior engineer position, you should be expecting the candidates to want a salary to match their value. Not all companies pay as well as Google, that's why so many people want to work there.
There is really no reason for Google to not hire someone that is well quali
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. Google may or may not discriminate, but their median age is likely has a large component of self selection. I'm only 35, and I'm already at full-Murtaugh. I'm too old for that shit. I see a company with cafeterias open late, games, etc, and I see a company that wants me to spend every waking hour at work. I've been there and done that. I loved it in my early 20s, but now mid-30s me is stuck supporting the code that guy wrote. I hate that guy...
Both or none? (Score:5, Informative)
Like you I no longer live to work, I work to live. My 20s and early 30s were my 80-100 hour work weeks. That aside, I was contacted by a Google recruiter and heard the same. "You would be great for this team because of your experience". I received similar treatment interviewing at Google, and figured it could have been a series of mistakes. I was given options for a "test" and provided my options. When it came time for the interview my options were not available (those guys were all sick, on vacation, or died on Bart...). My resume is very clear on my work experiences and knowledge, yet I was not asked a single question about anything on my resume. Instead I was grilled about the ICMP for about 20 minutes, on everything from header content to available flags and forging a packet. Which is really a bizarre line of questions since I don't have "developed network products/protocols" anywhere near my resume and the position was not as a developer. The "test" only lasted a few minutes at which point the interviewer started asking me questions on a different language library.
Lastly he told me that if I was hired Google expected people to work all kinds of crazy hours. To which I answered that while I am at work I work very hard, but I don't work more than I am salaried for without good justification and compensation. "You probably won't fit in".
While I could have been setup to fail due to my age, the interviewer was at least up front about Google's expectation. I'm very employable, so won't be risking that by joining any class action lawsuits
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Interesting)
I see a company with cafeterias open late, games, etc, and I see a company that wants me to spend every waking hour at work.
Actually, Google doesn't. The cafes are open late because people work all sorts of odd schedules. Some don't come in until noon and leave late, some show up early and take off at 3. In the Mountain View office there's a lot of both of those patterns, mainly because traffic sucks so bad that people try to schedule around it.
As for the games and stuff, that's just recognition that taking a break is good for think time. Massage services, espresso bars, etc., are all parts of that.
I've been a Google software engineer for four years and there has never been the slightest pressure on me to work long hours. Not only has no one ever asked me to, no one has hinted, implied or anything else, and on a few occasions when I chose to work late my old manager noticed and told me to go home. I'm not saying every manager is that way, in fact I don't think my current manager would ever say anything to me about my work schedule, whether I worked around the clock or hardly at all. Eventually my lack of productivity would provoke a response, though it would probably take a quarter or so.
Now, there are people who work a lot of hours at Google. Mostly young people who don't have anything better to do and are really excited about what they're building. And mostly no one tells them not to. But there are plenty of others who work normal hours, and no one says anything to them, either.
BTW, I'm 45.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not marketing, it's the truth. I worked there for nearly 8 years. By the way, I'm 31.
Google is (a) a very desirable employer and (b) hires people from all over the world. The combination of these things mean that many, many developers, especially younger ones that move from poorer countries, get relocated across borders. They arrive in a new country where they don't speak the language, quite often with a girlfriend or wife in tow, and frankly many of them don't quite dive into making friends and socialising as much as perhaps would be a good idea. Combination of new city, no social life + interesting work == lots of people working odd hours. Eventually they do settle down and the hours get more normal.
But programming has always been this way, hasn't it? I never heard a lawyer say, "I've been doing lawyering since I was 8 years old" but it happens in software all the time. It's a sort of work that many people just enjoy doing, and do it as a hobby as well as a job.
Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:5, Informative)
They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently?
It's more they desire the culture of hanging out indefinitely. They want people to never leave work. Companies don't give a damn if that burns out employees.
Re: Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:2)
That would still qualify as indirect discrimination: a measure which is applied equally to everyone but affects people of different ages differently. Unless Google can prove in court that overworking is a proportional and justifiable necessity, they are liable for age discrimination.
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Regardless of intent or not, certain practices may indeed lead to age-tilted hiring as an actual end result. That doesn't necessarily make it "right", though.
One can argue a company is obligated to balance its employees' race, gender, and age to reflect the external population of available talent. This may involve counter-acting other hiring practices that indirectly lead to imbalances. Using your example, either stop paying in pink unicorn pillows, or adjust your hiring to match calculated age goals to co
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Ya, their interview structure is utterly incompetent. They randomly pick people who may not have the necessary skills and experience for the job that they will evaluate a candidate for.
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Re:Google: Select jurors who understand stats. (Score:4, Funny)
Prior to perusing the comments on this article, I'd've thought that a post of that length, with 3 measly apostrophes, wouldn't've got any complaints for its excess of them when one wasn't used properly. Would you look at that, I've managed to squeeze six into this post. If you aren't (seven) freaking out right now, I'd (eight) say the frequency isn't (nine) you're (lol) problem.
It's never their problem (Score:2)
Always someone else's.
Hint: not all your new hires will be cute Asian gamer chicks in wheelchairs.
Re:It's never their problem (Score:5, Funny)
be cute Asian gamer chicks in wheelchairs.
You wouldn't know where to find that as porn ?
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Google?
The great problem of integrity (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that I can't support this lawsuit even though it would benefit "MY GROUP"
The whole Idea of group quotas is garbage. supporting them reduces you from a human being to counter for an outrage hustler. Even if your group wins you lose. You lose the concept of "INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS" you lose the right to choose the people you associate with and do business with.
If your such a hot shot coder and you have that much experience in the field why didn't you start your own business ? Google doesn't owe anyone except their shareholders and bondholders anything.
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You can be the world's greatest engineer and yet have zero skills for starting your own business. There's very little overlap between those two skill sets.
If you have your own business then you live every day on the edge, you have to invest your own money and property into your own business. With a job you let other people do the gambling instead. Five years on a job that goes bankrupt still earns you 5 years of paychecks. Five years on your own business that fails may mean you have nothing to show for
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"If your such a hot shot coder and you have that much experience in the field why didn't you start your own business ?"
hot shot coder != hot shot entrepeneur
That's why.
Re:The great problem of integrity (Score:4, Insightful)
If your such a hot shot coder and you have that much experience in the field why didn't you start your own business ?
That costs time, money, and personal health (due to stress issues).
So why should Google or anyone else owe you anything. When I look at a program, I don't see a black program, a white program, a lefty moonbat program, or an old program. I see good code or I see bad code. There's always been buyers for good code.
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Yes but if you never offer the opportunity for people of those different groups to generate that code you'll never see it
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Why? Linux didn't come from some company. It came from one person, originally. That person happened to be a male Finn, but it could have been a black woman who was interested in writing operating systems.
Einstein couldn't get a job as a professor, so he joined the Patent Office. Did that stop him from devising special and general relativity?
Sure, writing code for companies is the well trod path for coding, but you don't need that in the age of Open Source to get your good code out there. If you have wh
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So why should Google or anyone else owe you anything.
They want the rest of us to respect them, they want to interact with us, to put it simply, they want something from us.
That means we can set standards on their behavior. They want? We can want back.
Funny how that works.
I think you overestimate their concern about your approval.
Culture (Score:3)
I've learned over time that skills are only about half the factors of hiring decisions (with exceptions for high-demand specialties). Personality and "feeling" issues play the other half.
A work-place has a culture just like any village or geographical region, and if you don't fit the culture, your are likely to be turned away. Age of growing up is part of that "culture". I'm not saying it's fair, but rather that it's human nature.
That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
Google is a discrimination factory, but in this case, there's a deeper problem, and its, what I'll call, the "MIT culture".
You have a bunch of people who busted their ass off to go through MIT/CMU/CalTech/Whatever, to learn all those algorithms, the computer science core, etc, and are thrown in the real world where, while VERY useful, are only a small subsets of things that matter.
Then you ask these people, who spent 4 (or 6, or more) years being drilled that the only shit that matters was what they learnt in school, and worked REALLY hard to absorb that, to interview.
What do you think will happen?
You end up with an interview process that, regardless of the actual work, the further away from school you are (ie: the older you are), the less likely you are to pass the interview, give or take people who worked as data or algorithm scientists in the recent past.
Net result: you have a very high percentage of college hire, and your lateral hires will always lean toward the younger side. Any skill that come with experience is almost never tested in interviews to counterbalance it.
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Go Beavers!
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I call it "PhD syndrome" and you describe it well. I always joked that if you ask me to write a sort routine in the interview, I'm going to lecture you about why you need to go off the shelf, and doesn't Google have anyone who can make a shareable library? Do we really need to know how to code a lightning sort ad hoc? To sell more ads? heh
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I always joked that if you ask me to write a sort routine in the interview, I'm going to lecture you about why you need to go off the shelf, and doesn't Google have anyone who can make a shareable library?
Then you'd come across as someone with an attitude. Good luck with that.
The reason an interviewer asks you to write a sort routine is to separate you from the candidates who can't (of which there are many, sadly.) The interviewer wants to see how you approach a simple problem and how you solve it.
Re:That shouldn't surprise anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
its stupid to demand or even ask a programmer to recall, from memory, a whole algorithm. what a total waste of time! even before the net, it was a waste of time (there were books back then).
what I would ask is: here's an alg, can you adapt it to do this or that? why is this a good starting point vs some other alg?
TALK about things, but don't ask me to recite code on a board. in my 25+ yrs of doing C (and other software) eng work, I have NEVER had to code 'live' in front of an audience or via a timed interval, other than the 'new breed' of interviews that moron companies like google engage in.
you can tell that they have no clue how to interview; its all kids who recently graduated and so, memorization is ALL those brats know. yes, I'm pissed, because it locks us older folks out and without just cause. memorizing is the last thing I would want an analytic mind spent on!
oh, just because YOU know this thing you think everyone should? I spent a bit of time in hardware design, too - you think its fair game to ask what pin 7 and pin 14 mean, generally, on TTL chips? if you have touched hardware at all, you'd know this, but I doubt even 10% of googlers would know it. I know it. why shouldn't they?
see, same logic fallacy. I would not demand anyone know my domain of expertise and I would not flunk them for it. but they surely do flunk us for not knowing THEIR pet problems or algorithms.
google hired brainy but really clueless people, overall. I've interviewed there quite a few times (on site) and seen it first-hand. pretty sickening when you go down there and its all about them wanting to show off and to find reasons to mark you down rather than try to find reasons to hire you.
google really is for the young. the young deserve google and google deserves the young and foolish. and now that I've seen what the make-up of typical googlers are, I now realize why so much of their software fails and is EOL'd in no time flat. its why I call them the classic 'short attention span' company of this decade.
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its stupid to demand or even ask a programmer to recall, from memory
Yes, this is why one of the requirements for good Google interview questions is that they not rely on specific knowledge. They tend to ask you to invent and implement a new algorithm, not remember an old one. Where interviewers do ask questions that require specific knowledge, they're happy to provide whatever you don't remember.
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From my experience, the "... requirements for good [company name here] interview questions ..." are mostly ignored and a recital of sort algorithms and quirky C++ anachronisms rule.
Not at Google. Engineers talk to each other a lot about what they ask in interviews, because one of the rules is that you must "calibrate" your questions, and the very best way to do that is by trying out your questions on your colleagues.
The goal, of course, is to select hires who are at least as good as you and you colleagues.
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I suppose, but I'd rather take my time asking you your knowledge of key libraries and interfaces and more complicated concepts, rather than asking you to code me a sort.
If you really wanted to test someone's rote memorization of the Big O notation values of various algorithms, then just ask them to give you some examples of n or n log n or whatever. You do need to understand the reason that a sort is better than another, and it's nice to have a set of sorts handy for general purpose use, but really, is tha
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Missing data point. (Score:5, Informative)
What is the median age of people who are applying to Google? I suspect that many older programmers are set in their job and/or do not have the skills in the newer technology and do not apply.
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What is the median age of people who are applying to Google? I suspect that many older programmers are set in their job and/or do not have the skills in the newer technology and do not apply.
I suspect this is the case. Each year Google went to my graduate department and tried to recruit everyone who was coming out. Among the foreign students in particular you could walk up to a random student, ask them when they were doing their Google interview, and you'd almost always get an answer (foreign students liked big companies because it made the H1B stuff easier)
Google is also a very young company. They're not going to have people who have been around for 20 years because they haven't been around 20
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I guess you didn't read the part where the median age of programmers across the board is 43.
I did. That does not mean that the same spread of programmers applied for jobs at Google.
I guess Google is an exception to the rule, eh?
It is not a "rule" it is average over an entire industry. I bet there are a number of older companies working with older technology that have a much higher median age. Are you going to accuse them of age discrimination when few young people apply for their jobs?
Discrimination is based on who applies and not an industry average.
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I have a feeling that plenty of people on here will upmod defenders of google, and perhaps age discrimination in general.
I am not defending Google or age discrimination. I am just saying that an industry average is a poor indicator of discrimination in a single company. The telling number is the difference, if any, between the ages of people who applied and that of people who were hired.
BTW, I am over 50 and therefore not a youngun.
Hiring Methods (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm no Googler, nor have I interviewed, but I suspect this is more about Google's hiring methods than their hiring policies or biases. They run contests, which are essentially easter egg hunts that result in a potential interview. Who has the time and inclination to play around with hoops like that? The young, college attending, and childless nerds and hackers. They don't need to have a bias in who they hire, because they create an innate bias in who chooses to apply by putting that 'application' behind a lot of hoops and rigamarole.
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They run contests, which are essentially easter egg hunts that result in a potential interview
No, they don't. Google did try that once, with math problems on billboards. Lazlo Bock says those billboards resulted in zero hires.
(I'm a Google engineer.)
Being a less than ideal social fit... (Score:2)
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If a communication barrier exists because of some demographic difference between one employee and everyone else, why should a company have to tolerate what they may be able to measure as a reduced level of productivity because of it?
I'm not saying it should happen, but it *does* happen... I've been fired from jobs for simply "not fitting in" myself... why should being older or even being of a difference race somehow protect somebody from such an evaluation?
Google (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't want to belabor the point, but Google isn't a very good place to work. They have tons of money to spend on marketing to make their company seem like it is a good place to work. Coke has a large budget to convince you that its beverages are tasty, too. It's no different.
The best place for programmers to work is where you decide what you want to do, you can override stupid decisions made by management, and where you have a large stake in the success or failure of the company. At Google programmer happiness doesn't matter so much as ad revenue. If that one division of the company continues to do well, be prepared to do whatever stupid thing the rest of the company wants you do to.
Don't expect to have a life outside of the company, or have things like a healthy sex life. Remember that you're stuck in Silicon Valley where there are not enough available women unless you're extremely wealthy. Better have a hundred grand in the bank. Basic cost of living runs you $5,000/month, and there is always the chance of getting laid off for a few months. Seems like a bit of a scam for well educated but naive individuals to get sucked into.
Re:Google (Score:4, Informative)
While experiences may differ, for me Google has offered all of these things (except for the large stake in success/failure of the company, but that's just because it's a big company). There are ample opportunities to transfer to other teams if I don't like what I'm working on, and my input is generally welcomed when it comes to what I should work on. I've also pushed back to my superiors when I thought they were wrong, and when I was able to back up my statements with data (which has always been the case when I really believed I'm right and they're wrong), they backed down, with generally amiable interactions maintained throughout.
The only pressure I've experienced from Google with respect to my life outside of Google is to make sure I am able to disconnect from work. Some people have a difficult time disconnecting, but that's usually because they enjoy the work they're doing. For the most part it's a personal choice, and Google gives employees resources to help them to disconnect so that they can maintain a good work/life balance.
With respect to location, yes most of Google's employees work out of the Mountain View office, and the cost of living there is a serious problem. But there are a number of other offices around the world, many of them with more than a thousand engineers.
I don't know where you get your information from, but I don't think your experiences come close to the experiences of most employees at Google today. I generally think that Google is a wonderful place to work, with wonderful people, an inclusive culture, and great benefits. I don't know how well it compares to other companies, but I don't doubt that Google deserves its "best place to work" awards.
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This AC nails it. I'm also a Google SWE. And I have gotten yelled at (figuratively) for not disconnecting :-)
While experiences may differ, for me Google has offered all of these things (except for the large stake in success/failure of the company, but that's just because it's a big company). There are ample opportunities to transfer to other teams if I don't like what I'm working on, and my input is generally welcomed when it comes to what I should work on. I've also pushed back to my superiors when I thought they were wrong, and when I was able to back up my statements with data (which has always been the case when I really believed I'm right and they're wrong), they backed down, with generally amiable interactions maintained throughout.
The only pressure I've experienced from Google with respect to my life outside of Google is to make sure I am able to disconnect from work. Some people have a difficult time disconnecting, but that's usually because they enjoy the work they're doing. For the most part it's a personal choice, and Google gives employees resources to help them to disconnect so that they can maintain a good work/life balance.
With respect to location, yes most of Google's employees work out of the Mountain View office, and the cost of living there is a serious problem. But there are a number of other offices around the world, many of them with more than a thousand engineers.
I don't know where you get your information from, but I don't think your experiences come close to the experiences of most employees at Google today. I generally think that Google is a wonderful place to work, with wonderful people, an inclusive culture, and great benefits. I don't know how well it compares to other companies, but I don't doubt that Google deserves its "best place to work" awards.
I think the issue is entirely different (Score:2, Insightful)
From my observations, Google wants people with high intelligence, but low life-experience and ideally a somewhat infantile personality. You know those that are most easily manipulated with toys and shiny things. That these are mostly found in the lower age ranges is no surprise.
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Do you have a working brain? Have you compared it with others? Did you make sure you are actually able to read and try that on a random sample of text?
It might not be discrimination (Score:2)
I'm a Java developer. I have a decade of experience doing that. .Net developers not even giving me a chance at an interview? It's all computer programming. They're discriminating against me!
Why are all these companies hiring
This lawyer believes all computer programming is the same.
Last bank I worked at, all the cobol programmers were 20 years old than me. They probably get paid handsomely for their niche skill set.
Is it discrimination that they don't have young people in their team?
How about he gets better
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A company that I contracted for had a fleet of young Cobol dev's who replaced the previously retiring workforce because upgrading the system to a new arch was too much money (at the time).
Oh, and COBOL is almost rediculously easy to learn. The big money is in knowing the business processes that those developers probably spent decade(s) mastering.
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I'm a Java developer. I have a decade of experience doing that. Why are all these companies hiring .Net developers not even giving me a chance at an interview?
Probably because they're idiots?
Ooh sorry we wanted a carpenters with five years experience in American white oak. I see you've only got experience in American red oak and *European* oak (and a selection of other hardwoowd and some softwoods) too.
You're probably not a good fir for the company.
Companies that obsess over overly specific skillsets inste
maybe all the smarter; older people quit? (Score:2)
and the young and dumb stayed around?
i've been offered positions at google over the years, wasted time with their bullshit interviews and even turned them down a few times - as we get older; we are more inclined to start our own businesses and be entrepreneurs.. it is not a shock that the younger generation of engineers want to work at a company like Google. what they need here is to also bring in relevant data around startups; how many people actually left Google to start their own thing?
My alternatie theory. (Score:3, Insightful)
If I went to apply for a job at google, and didn't get the job, it probably wouldn't occur to me to sue them, especially if I felt I was so talented as to deserve a job worthy of my high skill level. I would say "They're loss" and move on to the next interview.
The last old person that my company hired (we actually hired him), threatened the company with an age discrimination lawsuit, and the company paid him a year's salary to avoid the lawsuit. It wasn't age discrimination. He was mentally unstable, he refused to obey instructions from managers, and his code was terrible.
It takes a certain kind of person to want to sue a company (without ever working for them), without considering the possibility that they may not want you for a reason other than your old age, and going through all the effort to sue this company rather than moving on and offering your amazing talents to a company that will actually appreciate you.
If I were Google, I would not be happy about being sued, but I would be relieved that he was not hired. If he were hired, no doubt Google would be sued by this person for age discrimination for not getting promotions or being fired, etc.
Who knows, maybe the person in charging of deciding to hire this person was discriminating against them based on age. But he doesn't know that, and he is probably a terrible hire because of his willingness to litigate.
While I'm not agreeing with discrimination... (Score:2)
I just have to wonder why we're all amazed as jobs get moved overseas with all the posturing, extortion and lawsuits that go on against companies. I mean if Google did it, then shame on them but if I had Jesse Jackson [foxbusiness.com] and Al Sharpton [nypost.com] doing their shakedown dance along with age, sex and X discrimination suits, it's no wonder that more jobs are being pushed overseas. On one side I praise businesses that are keeping jobs here and also saying "more power to you" in the face of all this litigation and extortion.
Personally, I don't think he was talking to Google (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally, I don't think he was talking to Google; at least not directly.
He got called by a recruiter, supposedly for Google, who set up a phone interview Looking for C/C++ and Java. Fine. There's an outside chance of Java, either as an Android App developer, or for some server back end crap at a company they purchased. It's unlikely, but it's possible (in 2011, they hired people to work at Google, and then groups decided to offer them, and then you got a choice of usually one of 3 groups... you didn't know what you'd be working on at interview time, and there was no such thing as "hiring for position" unless you were net.famous).
Then he didn't get sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer. You are *always* sent a Google Docs link by the interviewer, unless you are in a city/area where Google has a facility, then you are instead brought in to use the video conferencing at the Google location.
Then he got an interviewer who barely spoke English, and wouldn't take him off speakerphone. That never happens at Google.
The interviewer was 10 minutes late to the call.
Frankly, sir, IMHO, you got played.
You just got man-in-the-middled by an Indian or other foreign person who wanted a job at Google, and got you to ghost his or her phone interview for them, with the help of a "recruiter"/"interviewer" who had you on lousy speakerphone so that they could relay your answers directly via a cell phone to the person Google was actually talking to.
Yes, this happens.
No, savvy technical people generally don't fall for it, because they get an email from Google telling you the schedule, there's a Google Doc URL sent out with an @google.com address, and if you look at the email headers in the email of the schedule, you'll see that they are probably forged, assuming you got one at all.
Congratulations on being played, Mr. Robert Heath.
Number of programmers younger than 40 (Score:2)
Cheap joke time! (Score:2)
Well, it's been estimated that the number programmers doubles about every 5 years.
That was a misprint; that's not the actual number of them, as individuals, that's by weight.
Old vs Young (Score:4, Insightful)
This conversation always seems to forget that everyone who is old was young and that everyone who is young will be old. It's in young peoples interests to make sure older people are respected for what they have learned as much as it is in older peoples interests to help make sure younger people can establish careers.
What we should be criticizing is the myopic view of companies that devalue the experiences of older people to exploit the energies of younger people. It robs younger people of the opportunity to access the experiences that made older people's brains more efficient for problem solving - that is what experience is. It not only robs older people of work opportunities, it also robs them of seeing ideas built on and evolved. That denial of perspective is what holds back the evolution of ideas.
If this is true within Google then it renders their motto 'Don't be evil' hypocritical. The denial of wisdom and experience is a recipe for fragility for companies who don't have access to key knowledge at key times required for them to survive. That is why you pay more for experience, the ROI on youth.
In reality ageism is discrimination against anyone subject to the progression of time.
elder Googler (Score:4, Insightful)
I have a cousin who, through a series of acquisitions, now finds himself an employee of Google. He's 56 years old, and because of his hire date with his original employer, he has more years of employment than Google has existed. Which gave HR some trouble, as they had to revise some of their benefits formulas to accommodate someone that "senior". He's not the oldest Googler he's come across ... but the only guy older than him that he works with is a fellow "acquisition" employee, who came along when their company was bought.
He talks about it with good humor, but that's mostly because he's spent the last 30 years making good money and preparing carefully for retirement, so he'll be OK if he finds himself pushed to the curb ... and because he knows that he has value to HR as "proof" that Google employs people well over 40 (even though he never actually went thru their hiring process). Hell, if he ever gets let go, he says he could win the age-discrimination lawsuit in his sleep, it would be that easy. (And this was from a good Republican who generally doesn't believe in anti-discrimination laws.)
Didn't they see "The Internship"??? (Score:3)
If non-technical guys like Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn played in "The Internship [imdb.com]" at ages 46 and 45 respectively can get jobs at Google, what's wrong with the rest of these no-talent old farts? This smells like envy, if you ask this faithful movie-goer.
Lot's of ACs commenting here (Score:3)
Lot's of commenters with posting as "anonymous coward". Hoping for a job at Google someday?
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That explains your "creative" typing patterns.
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That explains your "creative" typing patterns.
It's actually the meth.
Re:Not discrimintation (Score:5, Insightful)
All you old fogies listen up. This is jot discrimination. Young people are more energetic, more eager to learn, and more likely to know the things you'd need tonhelp Google, like modern programming languages. Take your whining elsewhere.
Great example you set there. Small errors, no QA and, full of shortcuts that only someone more experienced can fix.
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"Young people are more energetic, more eager to learn, and more likely to know the things you'd need tonhelp..." ... more likely to sucked into to stupid shit - hey bub I need you 18 hours a day for the next six months. "Yes sur, should I bring my own blanket?" I love dumbfucks like you. You'll do it, you'll like it and I don't have to pay you shit. While you're at office I'll be at cottage laughing my ass off. Send your friends too asshole.
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Hey wait now, Google still uses old fogey languages like C, C++, Java, and assembler.
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Yeah - this is certainly my impression from looking at Google. I've seen a lot of quality programmers who started out there and then left as they got older (and were greatly helped in cashing in by having cool sounding Google experience on their resume).
For me, I went to their offices for a bit (they gave us a tour during Google Code Jam), and while the general idea sounds fun I quickly soured on the prospect of actually working there. I don't care about free cereal or the game console in the break room or
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I hate to suggest RTFA, but...
First, the plaintiff was contacted by a Google recruiter, so at least somebody believed that he was a good candidate. His phone interview went poorly--he was contacted by a person who had limited english skills, used a speakerphone with a poor connection (or maybe it was Google Voice) and refused to switch to the handset. He asked him to read code to him over the phone rather than using Google Docs.
I'm not sure it was discrimination, but I'd argue that the interviewer was a t
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Well, older programmers actually know how to do stuff. They've seen the paradigm shifting technologies rise and fall on a regular basis. They know what the mistakes are because they've made all of them.
Re:Old programmers vs. new tech (Score:5, Insightful)
An example (I'm an older programmer)
I just gave a presentation to a team that's in trouble, but they can't see it yet. It was about the fundamentals of how to mature their group's testing practices. Fifteen minutes into it, they got bored with the slides and asked if I could show off our project (which implemented the objectives in the slides).
So I fired up 'vi' because I forgot to have a fully environment installed on my laptop, made a change, committed it, walked it though code review, merged it with the mainline, and watched it build, be automated tested at the unit, integration, component, system, and acceptance levels. The most popular response I got back from my post-presentation questionnaires on "The challenges of implementing these ideas" was that they "didn't have good tools like I had".
Those people (not all, but some) completely missed the point. The goals could be achieved with the tools they had in place; but, before they can use their older set of tools to achieve the same results, they need to 1) Not disregard the important parts (the theory) and 2) Not think that a tool is the answer.
One can use a hammer to hang a picture or build a house. I'd be inclined to worry about a person who complains that their hammer couldn't do either because they have a house building only hammer.
Give me 'make', 'm4', and 'tcl', and I still could build what I showed off today. Not because that's the right set of tools to do the job, but because if you have developed the experience, you realize that the the tools aren't the handicap.
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Younger programmers tend to work loooong hours, because they think they'll be rewarded for it. They're handy to get all the grunt work done once the design is hammered out, though you do have to monitor what's going on so that they're not going full steam ahead in the wrong direction.
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"Experienced senior dev at my company... perhaps 4-5x the "jr dev" salary. So even if 80% of the young devs turn out crappy, you're still ahead productivity wise."
That would be true if programing was purely effort-bound (which partly is) instead of knowledge/intellect-bound.
Say you own an Formula One team. Do you really think your odds to win the Pilots' Championship are the same if you have in your team one Lewis Hamilton or five Felipe Nasr?
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"You'd think that age discrimination would have hurt Google. They are losing out on all the potentially talented old people and all their experience. According to free market principles this should have put Google at a huge disadvantage in a highly competitive market."
And maybe that's showing in the way they build beta product/services right and left that they don't know what to do with and end up closing some few months later.
A "highly competitive market" is not so highly competitive when you can throw at