Deja Vu: Google Settles Age Discrimination Lawsuit for $11M | Hacker News Reader

Deja Vu: Google Settles Age Discrimination Lawsuit for $11M

forbes.com

29 pointsrmason10 comments

> In 2010, Google settled a lawsuit filed by a one-time Silicon Valley superstar, Brian Reid, then 52, who was hired by Google in 2002 to serve as director of operations and director of engineering. Reid was transferred two years later to head up what was supposed to be new program to retain engineers. He was given no budget or staff and the program was quickly disbanded. Reid left Google in 2004 with a two-month severance package.

I wonder if this was the basis for the similar storyline in the Silicon Valley show.

It's clear why tech companies keep practicing age discrimination, the fines aren't meaningful.

I'm perplexed by age discrimination (I don't get it) so I was excited when you wrote "It's clear why tech companies keep practicing age discrimination," -- I thought you'd finally give the reason. You didn't.

What's the reason? What do they get out of it?

From what I have read here, the underlying theory is that someone younger doesn't have kids/spouse/family/etc. So they are more willing to work long hours (I guess without pay since salaried?). Also the theory is that someone older means they would want more money for their experience.

Note that I don't actually know, this seems to be the running theory as I understand it.

Younger workers also seem to want/care more about recognition and praise and are willing to work those extra hours without monetary compensation.

Why do they have to get something out of it? People practice discrimination for all sorts of illogical reasons, rarely profiting from it.

My father was a victim of ageism before there were any laws against it. A new young CEO let everyone go over the age of 55. It was a Fortune 500 company that had been around for over a century and this tanked the entire company, they never recovered.

This company let ten percent of their staff go each year. These people over 55 were company lifers because they knew how to get stuff done. They wiped out a large percentage of their elite employees all at once. Replacing them with new hires right out of college was too much of a toxic shock to the company all at once.

There's also an epidemic of imposter syndrome blooming within these "competitive" tech companies.

https://www.quora.com/Do-engineers-at-companies-like-Google-...

I put "competitive" in quotes, because you can't really have actual, honest competition if you exclude (or include fewer) African Americans, women, and people over a certain age who are "not a culture fit", as it says in the article. In that linked Quora post, it mentions a serious problem with this syndrome at Google in particular, and an internal list dedicated to it. When one is relatively young or inexperienced and one has a kickass job plus imposter syndrome, one might find it unsettling to be the boss of someone older/more experienced or perhaps more accomplished than one... (see Dan Lyons comedic output). ONe way around this is to avoid hiring anyone that distant from your own experience level.

There is no fine here. It's a settlement.

How exactly do you prove that you didn’t get an interview because your LinkedIn photo had some grey hairs or wrinkles?

Are you asking because this happened to you? You can subpoena the CVs of the people invited to the interview and you can cite the hiring/interview practices of the company and its record on age-related hiring and firing. That said, it's usually after the interview and rejection that you bring a successful case. If your point was that so many people over a certain age don't even get asked to the interview in the first place, and that's where the discrimination gets most people, you'd be right! In that many "elderly" (wink/over 30) workers have some valuable experience and maybe some great ideas, not to mention wonderful facility, we may have to consider: does high level work actually need doing?

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