Heath and Fillekes v. Google Inc. Lawsuit
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I think this happened to my wife, but her job category was not listed. When my small company was acquired by Google (and I had to interview to keep my job), we were forced to re-locate across the country from the east coast to Mountain View. My wife is a stats professor with tenure at a mid-tier university on the east coast, and she moved with our family. As its hard to get a tenured academic job, we found something at Google that sounded exciting to her.
She applied to Google for a Sr. Data Scientist job, and passed the phone and on-site interviews with flying colors. However, she was rejected by the committee. The problem was that, at Google, the committee both decides if you passed your interview, and then decides on your job level. The job level is arrived at using past work experience.
In my wife's case, the problem was that the committee deadlocked on how to level her. She had 5+ years of academic experience, and 5+ years of research experience (think national lab type stuff; research w/o teaching). However, she'd only briefly worked in industry many years ago between her MS and PhD. So rather than hire her, they told her to "go work someplace else for a year, then apply again". (direct quote, as relayed by her recruiter to me, as I referred her)
If she was a fresh PhD, there would have been no problem. She would have been hired as a level 4, and everything would be fine. But given that they didn't know how to rate her experience, it was just easier for them to pass on her entirely. This tends to bias the hiring process to hiring younger folks, without experience.
And, BTW, that's why I'm no longer at Google, and we're all back on the east coast.
(note, the below are all very very much personal opinions :P Most of what i'm going to talk about is all covered by a large number of books by various people, etc at this point.)
First, sorry to hear about your experience. Hope you don't take the below personally.
Having sat on google hiring committees (2-3 a week sometimes) for the better part of 11 years now, i'm going to say this is probably not accurate. Note that i only do SWE committees, though.
I'm also not sure how you derived this view of what occurred (if you are going by what the recruiter said, know that most recruiters have a jaded view of committees who reject their candidates. Otherwise, i'd love to know what facts you have) . You seem to be assuming a lot of the reasons the committee said what it did.
The answer you received is, in my view, usually the answer given when "we don't think they did well enough to hire them, but think that they may get there with practice". For example, in SWE world, this is usually what happens when committees feel like these people are on the wrong side of being able to design and implement stuff, but saw things in the interviews that made folks believe they may be able to get above that bar. (or put bluntly, not obviously worth the risk right now, may be worth the risk in the future). That isn't to say Google doesn't hire people who need mentoring in coding/etc, it's more "committee didn't feel it was a sure enough thing to take the risk".
Note that there are second chance, etc committees if the recruiter felt the committee was wrong. Committees aren't always right, and they definitely aren't meant to be always right.
The leveling decision is also completely independent of the hiring decision in just about all cases. There's some interesting history here, but the statement "both decides if you passed your interview, and then decides on your job level", is wrong now, and was wrong for pretty much everywhere but MTV for a long time.
In any case, if what you say occurred, generally in SWE world the only reason they wouldn't make an offer at the lower level is if "they've not grown in 10000 years to a sane level of engineer, so we don't ever expect them to", or the person has said they wouldn't take it and so it would be pointless. In fact, most of the discussion that used to happen was "we think they are qualified for this lower level, is it worth discussion or have they said they wouldn't accept it" (because they have competing offers.
The first seems ... not the case here, unless your wife did very badly (IE would have had to be two levels down). Sorry. So i find your experience very very strange, though i don't do data scientist committees.
You started with: "Google often does not know how to hire senior people who are not luminaries, this screws people in their 40s."
This is not right.
IMHO, Google often tries not to hire people who have failed to grow to the level and skill set they want out of people with a large amount of experience or who want a senior position.
But that's literally not about age (despite people wanting to claim it is), it's about growth vs experience. They do even try to account for what the experience was, etc. But usually it's the other way around - person wants senior position at Google, isn't qualified for it, complains google hates people who are older. Google would, in most cases, happily offer them a position they are qualified for, they just don't want that one (or google doesn't have such a need ATM). Personally, I wish that being XXX level engineer at some company mattered. But i've also met plenty of people who got promoted a lot just for surviving long enough, and couldn't code/design their way out of a paper bag despite being "senior principal engineer" or whatever. So i understand why they use interviews to try to gauge level instead.
Past that, if you've spent 35 years in industry, and can't code/do algorithms/design/or any measurable metric better than a person fresh out of college, and aren't more self directed, etc, than the fresh out, it may not make sense to hire you.
But again, that's still not about age. Because the person fresh out of college could be 70. I'd still say "hire that person", because they still have potential. The person who has 35 years of experience and still not grown is a known quantity, and that known quantity is not above the bar.
If you don't want to hire a tenured stats professor with 10+ years research experience to work in data science, I think that's your problem. Maybe OP's wife had some horrifying deal-breaker personality trait, but really it just sounds like Google's committee was too snobby about Industry Versus Academia to hire an experienced statistics expert to do statistics.
1. Google, from what i can tell, is okay with it being it's problem as long as it can meet its hiring goals.
2. You have pretty much no data to base this on. Seriously.
Also, be careful, logic as in item #1 is the same logic that companies use to justify any form of discrimination.
This is unfortunate, because hiring is one of the areas where a responsive, streamlined approach is most critical to acceptable outcomes. Creating a committee of irrelevant appointees to come in at a late stage and give an indirect evaluation based on the notes from two prior interviews only creates an opportunity to block good people w/ bikeshedding.
If someone whose company is getting acquired can't even get fast tracked out of this demeaning and silly process, it's no wonder Google turns off non-luminaries more interested in getting good stuff done than dealing with red tape and bureaucracies.
Unless Google has made their internal hiring notes and private information public, there's no data to be found on that. I don't know why you'd expect an opinion like that to have data to it when the opposite does not have data to it, either.
In modern academia, there are hundreds of aspirants for each tenure-track job. To both get a job and then get tenure means you've been peer-reviewed as excellent dozens of times over since finishing school.
>After all the whole point of tenure is to protect people from getting fired regardless of how bad their peer-judged performance is.
No, the point of tenure is to protect people from getting fired when they have controversial political opinions like, "Stop gutting state university funding".
This was MTV, and it was several years ago, so perhaps things have changed.
I admittedly know very little about the hiring process. The whole hiring, interview process at Google just pissed me off in general so much that I refused to participate when I was there -- never even took the interview training.
When we interviewed for our jobs, we were lied to and told we were not doing technical interviews (which it turns out is Google company policy for handling acquisitions, according to a friend of mine from school who was a CTO at a different acquired company). So there I was, at 40ish, totally cold, being asked tech interview questions drawing on uni stuff I hadn't seen in 20ish years. I flubbed the interview, and came in one level below my peers. (though I was promoted after 2 years to the level I was working at). I almost refused to go for the promo, but just treated the entire thing as a joke and wound up getting it easily.
Internally, I believe we were told that all SWEs were expected to be capable of growing into a level 5 (senior SWE) role, and it was "OK" to not be promoted any higher.
So if somebody was hired in their 20s, it would be reasonable to expect they'd plateau at level 5 by 40, and would have shown most of their growth in their late 20s and early 30s. Would you hire this same person?
There are a variety of opinions on this matter. My personal one is "set the bar at the point they can do good self-directed and mostly self-managed work". If they can get and stay above the bar, awesome, i would never replace them.
Sure. I've done it. I have hired senior swes who are happy being senior swe's, for a variety of reasons. As long as they can actually maintain a minimum level of performance at that level, SGTM.
"Would you hire this same person?"
Yes.
The bar is basically set at the point they aren't serious overhead to others, can figure out what needs to get done, and get it done.
Anything over that is just gravy.
But they won't hire someone with 15-20 years of experience as non-senior, and let them do the same. Because of demonstrated trajectory and the belief that a company only needs leaders and future leaders (see also: why Google has so much trouble polishing maintaining products, polish and maintenance requires non-senior-level elbow grease)
Yes, is because if uncertainty, but it has a disparate impact on older/experienced people.
It's not explicit ageism no, but of courses committees arnet explicitly racist and sexist either, yet Google has no problem admiting there is an implicit problem there.
Because they've already washed out in a sense?
I dunno, it seems sensible to me.
I wouldn't mind working for Google, I am over 40 too.
So I guess it really comes down to whether you think there is any chance at all that they would ever hire you. I doubt anyone would hold participating in the suit against you, it isn't like you started it.
There are legitimate lawsuits in which people's lives have been dramatically affected, and then there are the plethora of scum cases in which people are looking for quick cash. People say that Trump will take American down..no, it's people's unethical mindset that they feel they can take advantage of our basic right to sue for compensation when an aggresses circumstance has occurred.
I thought there were laws to prevent Google from retaliating against somebody who sued them, and it would be illegal for them to not hire you on that basis alone...
[1] And as with diversity (or any discrimination) it reduces the chance that you'll employ that really star employee.
I was also rejected at the committee level, the reason was that I didn't have the amount of domain knowledge they wanted; in my case it was estimation theory/signal processing.
From what I understand, reruiters are rated based on the quality of candidates they pass to the hiring committee, so they have an incentive to only let the best pass.
This may vary depending on the office involved.
The way I understand it now is that besides gauging your expertise level and general review they may simply select the top X for the positions they have, given a larger number of candidates that passed the interviews.
I didn't see anything that seemed to discriminate by age. One interviewer was a woman in her 40s ro 50s. That said it is true that Silicon Valley (I also interviewed for Facebook) is all white or Asian men in their late 20s or early 30s, (with some sparse women). I saw literally zero black people in three days in SV and the only obvious Hispanic were the staff at my hotel.
If you got rejected by VP committee, that is unusual and work grumbling about -- and possibly constrained by amount of funding available for new hires.
The "come back in a year" is absolutely honest. Many people are hired a year, or 2, or 3 later. Google is happy to say "not sure / not yet" to people and "yes" later.
In fact I would go so far to suggest that someone in their 40's has learnt enough about the ways of the world to know alot better the differences in the rights and wrongs of the world. In other words, you are set up to fail if you follow the traditional educational route.
However its also worth pointing out, the age old problem of spotting giftedness. Einstein was mediocre at school and during his early year's at Uni, in fact it wasnt until his 30's that he started to come up with decent theories, so alot of companies hinder their growth & innovation potential by recruiting youngsters fresh out of an educational establishment.
Many of the posts in your history show up as dead, you may be getting autokilled and only getting replies when someone vouches.
My closest guess is that this lawfirm is going to provide an X amount of cases that passed screening etc and have relevant experience to the job as described in its advertisement.
Then its really up to the Judge and the jury if such a case has a jury to decide.
They could also work with statistics. Google being google, they most certainly have enormous amounts of data on their recruitment process. I'd even bet Google has algorithms to uncover discrimination in its hiring – biases are bad for business, after all. They may not have had age discrimination on their radar, but whatever they have on race/gender/dog-vs-cat-owners should be easily adaptable.
Their interviews tend to be very tech/algorithm focused. To the point where they disregard almost everything else.
I would have thought, fast and loose early stage startups would be far more likely to discriminate.
Interestingly, there is research that claims that in businesses women are more often judged by last performance, while men are judged more by potential.
Generally, commerce/work is a voluntary exchange between two willing parts, not a right.
Most forms of real discrimination have become extinct; now a significant % of cases (at least in the IT world) it just a bunch of complainers.
I am serious. There are many other ways to see humanity and the relationship between groups of people. Some may be more beneficial.
These words do nothing to encourage reflection or elicit any of the questions you're now asking; they just trivially dismiss the parent.
Edit to add:
I'm not discussing privilege. I'm arguing that your comment says nothing about whether or not a concept is valid because some people aren't aware of it or concerned about it.
Anyway, I recognize this is now well off-topic and likely fruitless. I apologize for the noise.