Google dealt setback in age bias case by judge interested in 'Googleyness'

That's not necessarily true. Maybe they burned out and want a less stressful role. Or maybe they've cashed out and are looking for a job they would enjoy and can afford to not worry about the paycheck. Frankly, job titles can also be pretty meaningless.

If I saw a resume on my desk for a junior role with somebody with senior experience I'd probably ask them "why are you looking to move into this role?". I wouldn't rule them off outright, because I understand that people's circumstances often change, and not everybody is driven by a career trajectory that's constantly moving upwards.

https://hbr.org/2010/12/the-myth-of-the-overqualified-worker

As a side note, I joined Google at age 39.

The one thing I'll say is that with your background, it's a shame you filtered yourself out. You might not have gotten through the interview process, but if you retained anything significant from what you cut your teeth on you also might have been more successful than you think.

Even a simpler real world problem whereby it takes days of research is not respectful of your time. I've seen people note they can't take a 6 hour time-out of their busy work/home lives to do coding challenges that are popular among startups.

So the balance is in-person interviews. Ones where you have to give difficult problems, ones you haven't seen before and ones that don't take days to explain. This usually means algorithmic, data structures, or mathematical in nature. They have subtleness, depth and complexity. As for 'reverse a string', you'd be surprised how many people who have "programming jobs" who apparently can't do basic programming.

And do I use these skill sat my job here? Yes. All the time. I'll spare you the spiel about "everything's different at scale". Google is a different kind of company that attempts to solve as many problems as possible with CS.

For reference, I work at Google, given interviews here, and passed the interview bar twice. Once at 29 and once at 39. Some of my coworkers are older than me. Many of them have children. Some are younger than me. I see plenty of people in the office with grey hair (I work in the SF office).

I refuse to defend past practices, but I believe the company currently sincerely overall seeks to be the best employer for any age. Small pockets of suck happen, but the internal transfer rules let you switch without your manager's permission. The interview process is known to not be perfect, but that is inevitable for any process - nothing is ever perfect!

However, the interviews do involve whiteboard problem solving. I understand some can't do it, and this is one of the blind spots. I personally love diagrams, and think visually, so it works for me. I also prefer when my colleagues use diagrams as well.

https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/post...

That's reflected in the very names of some organisations, e.g., "limited liability corporation". Incorporation is itself fundamentally a risk-control technology.

- It's more expensive to buy health insurance for an older pool of employees.

- Young people are probably less likely to be dissatisfied with cheap work accommodations like open-plan offices.

On the other hand, there are increased efficiencies associated with older employees:

- People earlier in their career might have significantly higher job-turnover rates.

- Older employees have more work experience, and can prevent lots of problems before they happen.

- Older employees have had the time to become better at what they do. I don't think the best developers reach their peak skills after only working for 5 years.[1] Learning from your mistakes takes time.

(I'm a developer in my 50s, and I work with lots of older developers who are good at what they do.)

[1] See, for example, Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years": https://norvig.com/21-days.html

For example males tend to have resume's which over qualify oneself vs females. Asians and Westerners also have these kind of differences.

This causes the rate of resume to hire to be different for different demographics.

Generally though interview feedback will state the facts and can be pulled up to back a companies actions. This is what needs to be judged.

It could quite easily not be ageism if the distribution of the skills actually sought and relevant to the job were not equally distributed by age within the applicant pool. Providing direct evidence of this in court may be difficult (or not, depending on how Google documents its interviews.)

(And, really, the scenario where the age distribution matches because of age discrimination is also possible, for the same reason.)

- Preference for new technologies or languages will favor people who were recently trained or recently spent a period training, which will tend to be people younger in their careers. Can test for this bias versus ageism by comparing pairs of candidates with similar learned technologies, and seeing just their outcomes. (May have to control for confounding factors, though.)

- Preference for candidates who are willing to accept more intrusive or abusive working conditions. This will tend to skew towards people with less work experience and fewer other commitments in life, which again would bias towards younger candidates. Again, you could test for this versus ageism, but the pairings of matched candidates becomes harder because it depends on psychological profiles and life circumstances.

- Google has a bona fide business reason to prefer recent graduates (ie, even if this is agist, it might still be legal), because there's a higher variability in their career engineering RoI (lifetime value generated over lifetime cost to employ) versus established engineers, and Google's main mechanism of value creation is people farming -- getting high returns on engineers, which requires the underlying variability of recent graduates to generate high returns. It's similar to CDOs on mortgages: you can generate a higher return by increasing the variability of the underlying asset and decreasing the risk of systemic failure. Google just does that with engineering talent. This is testable versus ageism by pairing people based on recent graduation, or a score of outcome variability, and see if Google is preferring highly variable people.

I would expect that the reality is a combination of these, often enacted by different departments: HR prefers the abusable hires; technical interviewers prefer the new technologies and languages; both prefer the variability, as part of a broader corporate strategy, and because it provides benefits to each department individually.

However, with several legitimate business decisions each giving a slight bias towards younger candidates, you can get a situation with a heavy hiring bias against older candidates without any agist policy in place (or any agist bias on the part of hiring manager or interviewers), simply because lots of other developmental processes correlate highly with the process of aging.