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Comment by defnfoo | Hacker News Reader

The experience of those filing the law suit differs from yours. You may have known some older devs, but the numbers are very clear: the average age of a google employee is 29. The US national average is 42.

Google itself is not very diverse by most metrics. Maybe they should practice what they preach?

http://time.com/4391031/google-diversity-statistics-2016/

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Disclaimer: I work at Google (opinions are my own)

How would the people filing the lawsuit know whether Google didn't hire them due to their age or for other reasons? I see posts all the time about people complaining they didn't get into company X because of some silly reason but frankly, unless you are the interviewer you likely will never know the reason. Shouldn't we wait to see the outcome of the case?

Indeed Google itself is not as diverse as we would like to be, but that's actually the reason we have these outreach programs: to try to get a more diverse applicant pool, which hopefully will translate to a more diverse workforce.

The average age being 29 doesn't surprise me because there are many more young applicants than there are older ones, since CS is getting more and more popular. Not only that but typically a larger company will have more junior developers than senior ones, and most junior developers are also more junior in age.

I don't know whether Google discriminates by age since I don't have the numbers, but I will say that Google takes diversity and inclusivity extremely seriously. I don't think a day goes by that I don't see a post asking for volunteers for some activity to promote diversity. That being the case, it would surprise me if we discriminate in a systemic way. For some individuals to do so unconsciously wouldn't surprise me just because it's human nature to be biased, although we do our best to unlearn that behavior.

To play devils advocate here, Google has been an absolutely mind blowing company. They didn't do it by being Average, and perfect diversity means exactly that... Average.

Why are people so interested in screwing up something that obviously works, and works so amazingly well in pursuit of absurd ideologies?

I believe it's because research supports the idea that greater diversity leads to a better workforce.

For example, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ekaterinawalter/2014/01/14/reapi...

There have been specific times as well that being in our little bubble has hurt product decisions as well, although I don't think I'm supposed to go into those.

I think you're using a wrong definition of average there. Yes, if you aggregated every quality of the populace, then you would be correct. But talking of age, for instance, wouldn't be the case. I'm quite sure there are plenty of people older than me (45) who could run rings round many of Google's employees, but wouldn't get the chance to do so (or maybe want to be there given the culture).

Google may have been 'mind blowing' but there is a bucket-load of things they simply seem unable to do (such as have a clear overall strategy, leading to the mess that is their approach to messaging), and in addition while they have clearly been hugely profitable, they may not give the best experience for some of their users (I've heard the phrase 'regularly cut off [their] own limbs' used). Whether this would be changed if their workforce was more diverse in terms of age (and therefore more experienced) we will never know, but I have my suspicions.

Google got lucky. There were lots of sites out there when it was turned on that did the exact same thing. They figured out how to monetize searching before the others did, and once market share was had, it was and still is unbreakable.

Everything else other than advertising has failed or is held up by that ad revenue. They may want to play world leaders, but they're an ad company.

Now - back to your point about absurd ideologies, it's against the US law to discriminate based on age. This ad company needs to play by the rules, regardless of how many ads it has sold.

That article is mostly about female to male ratios. Certainly we need more women programmers, but there aren't enough to hire. Every company I've ever worked at wanted more women, but there aren't enough graduates. At google, one way they were able to hire women devs was to pay for women were were stem students to go to the grace murray hopper conference who were cs students and then interview them and hire them on the spot. I know one very successful person at google who was found and hired by this strategy. You have to be faster than the other company to snap up those desirable hires.

I didn't mean to be an apologist for them, but this is one area I have personal knowledge of. It's probably true that they aren't going out of their way to hire old programmers like me. I don't think they pay for old white guy devs who cost more in salary than a new grad (but we have more experience! :-)) to go to a special conference and try to hire them. Instead I had to pass the usual interview bar. It was really hard and I admit to being proud I passed it.

Everywhere I've been begs for female applicants. I feel like the low numbers of women trying to get into tech is a fantastic example of how market forces do not solve everything. There is an enormous gap between the supply of female applicants and the demand for them with little change in sight. To any women reading this comment. Places are desperate to hire you so do not be afraid to apply at places where you feel you may be a little under qualified.

Plus, it was discovered that when looking at the list of requirements for a job offering, women wouldn't apply if they didn't meet some requirement, while men would apply as long as they met ~3 of the requirements.

Do you have a source for this?

Not criticizing, just want citations for my interesting fact/study results.

I'm afraid I don't have one: I heard it in a talk about gender in tech jobs, but the talk wasn't posted online. If you do find the study where it comes from, please let me know!

And yet my wife who has masters in computer science, multiple years of experience finds it hard to get a job because she took multi year break from work for raising kids...

OK, so could you help me understand something?

I certainly can see how there could be some injustice in the gap between men and women in the industry. And I could certainly see how the lack of perspective from women causes decisions that are suboptimal in some contexts. There are probably some companies in some subindustries that would benefit from hiring women programmers.

But every company being desperate to hire women? I don't see how most companies benefit from hiring a woman vs. a man.

To clarify, I'm saying that it seems that hiring a woman vs. a man has roughly the same value to most, but not all, companies. Thoughts?

I see it as related to what you are saying. You will be more likely to have software features or whatever you are designing have features that are applicable to women. You'll think of problems that men don't notice - the classic is startups full of 20 something guys solve different problems that women, such as women with families. Women just face different experiences than men. Similarly, someone from China will probably have a different idea about some things than someone from the US. Companies avoid sexist choices - a female friend who was a layer was at a place that had an offsite activity where women couldn't be members at a golf club (really!). The women you have will be more comfortable if they are not a super rare bird. An office with women should have supplies in the bathroom like tampons. A company with men might think of razors or deoderant but not that.

> Places are desperate to hire you so do not be afraid to apply at places where you feel you may be a little under qualified.

My automatic reaction to this was "lol what"...

I don't really think most companies are desperate to hire women. I can see companies paying more attention to women (for better or for worse), but desperate is absolutely not the word I'd use. You're still going through the same interview process as everyone else, and having interacted with various people who were applying to the same companies as myself, everything looked exactly the same and acceptance/rejection rates were very similar. It's not like being a woman waves a magic wand to get rid of the many troublesome parts of an interview process that affect men and women all the same.

I don't know if I'd want to work for a company that was desperate to hire a specific subgroup of people, anyway...

I'd take a referral over being female any day.

My first gut feeling was that the average age of developers has to be lower. My reasoning was that since the number of computer science degrees is increasing and the average age of graduates is low there should be a lower average age of developers.

But this data suggests otherwise https://datausa.io/profile/cip/110701/#workforce_age

And this as well https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp Assuming that the average age is 25 for Bachelor's, 27 for Master's and 32 for a PhD I get an average age of 47.

Am I missing something?

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1walTvrZrdTELPjrI9HmQ...

I have a theory to explain this.

If you count average is 29, then that means there is a whole bunch of 25 - 35 in the range, all over the world. Typically CS students graduate from undergraduate around 22, 23 years old. Google and FB are very popular in the new graduate community and they needed a lot of fresh blood every year to fill in the gaps. Not every position at Google is going to be exciting. The job description is catchy but the your responsibility and assignment may be dull. A lot of older folks may find dissatisfying and because of their seniority they can find similar pay at other companies. There is also a network effect. Sure, younger folks tend to connect with other young folks.

Like other comments said, one can't prove age discrimination easily. Google has a very rigorous hiring process. One ex-Google said one time the hiring committing sat in a room and rejected all applicants. The recruitment team came in and said those profiles were the committee members themselves when they applied to Google.

> the numbers are very clear: the average age of a google employee is 29. The US national average is 42.

This assumes that the hiring market for Google is representative of the entire US workforce, which I think is a big stretch. I think if you looked at any tech company average you'd see it far below the national average.

> the average age of a google employee is 29. The US national average is 42.

Correlation does not imply causation.

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