Google pays $11M to job-seekers who alleged age discrimination
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
My family came up with a new name for my category of programmers: the gerihacktric demographic.. :-)
I have interviewed with Alphabet twice, no offers. One time apparently it was a close call..
It would be fun to be the all-time record holder for oldest new hire!
Hm that makes sense given the relative infancy of the software industry.
Not to mention that enrollment in CS programs has been increasing so the talent pool is skewed towards younger people
Most old people don't learn as many new things as younger ones, which makes it harder for older people who do to get the chance to prove themselves.
But yeah, just today there was a comment here on Hacker News saying (I'm paraphrasing): I learnt C then C++ then Java, then enough was enough. Which is just sad, that's like going from oatmeal to porrige.
Learning C, then C++, then Rust, then Java, then Ruby (rails), then Objective-C, then Swift, then JavaScript, then Angular, then React, then Flutter, then ....
Depending on the timeframe in which all that learning happens, there's simply no way you can reach expert level with such a diversified knowledge base.
What are you talking about? I’ve checked in production code in 4 languages in a day.
Once you learn your first few languages you should be able to learn the new syntax of a language in a day or two and a good portion of their idioms in the next month (as you know more languages you’ll notice what’s unique about each language and glean idioms from online tutorials and your local codebases).
Being a polyglot is a huge part of many in our industry, especially full stack development. For one project alone I had to work with a backend that was part Java and part Go that hosted customers’ Node backend. I oversaw client SDKs in Objective-C, Java, and C++ and helped prototype the server-side SDK for Go. That’s not fatigue, it’s enjoyable and a skill I can offer my team. Sure I get rusty with a language, but it doesn’t take long to blow off the dust with a skill.
... are you sure about that? I'd avoid sweeping generalizations, it does not help your argument.
At the same time I'm much more concious about spending my thinking energy, and because of my experience I'm making much more money than when I was younger _despite_ my slower thinking.
Discrimination involves hate, and I definately not hate old people, just accept the facts of life (and I'm also hoping for a cure for aging).
Not always, no. That would give an unworkably narrow definition.
"Most old people don't learn as many new things as younger ones..." - this is demonstrably ageist. People performing a mid-life career change can be as focussed and driven to succeed in IT as anyone; the determination to acquire and master new skills is, in my view, a personality thing, not an age-related thing.
FWIW - My only concern with older folks is that they’re either jaded, stuck in their ways technologically, or obstinate towards being managed by people younger than them. Strong opinions held strongly is a net negative. This isn’t everyone or even a majority, but it’s quite a few.
Again, (mostly) stereotyping:
"jaded" - I'd argue this hits a lot of front end developers after about 5 years. How many new frameworks have there been in the last 5 years? There comes a point when any sane person will look at the newest "killer" framework and decide to wait a couple of years before investing time in learning it, just in case next year's "killer" framework turns out to be more fun to learn.
"stuck in their ways" - this is more a personality thing, I think. Most people will find their comfort zone pretty quickly, and then get grumpy when asked/required to venture outside of it. Risk aversion and/or laziness doesn't, in my view, increase significantly with age.
"obstinate towards being managed" - this one is a problem that everyone has to face as they grow older. The sad fact (from what I've seen in my age group) is that some people just cannot come to terms with the ageing process, that there's going to be younger people who are better placed to do a team-leader/manager job than they are (because: longer experience in the industry). But that is something that can be worked on - the important thing is to demonstrate a willingness to at least give it a go, offer support to the younger manager (be a wise owl, not an old owl), and be an excellent team player. At least that's my attitude.
In other words: not only is there no hard data behind this view; there isn't any (from a gut perspective) that much of a correlation -- but it's a strong opinion, strongly held nonetheless.
Strong opinions like your opinion on older folks?
Most old people don't need to learn as many new things. It's called "experience."
And apparently at Google - the negatives carry the day.
That's what I was getting at - apparently it's negativity-driven, all the way down.
The signal was what I was told when I got a subsequent unsolicited contact from a Google recruiter. She communicated this information to me verbally. (I believed her, and in retrospect still do. She was great during the whole process; never gave me the slightest indication that she was in any way deceptive or dishonest.)
For example, "it was a close call" could mean:
- you were late to the interview, and we didn't like that
- we closed the job and stopped recruiting everyone
- you had mustard on your shirt, and we didn't like that
- an interviewer was late to an interview, insisted you proceeds anyway, and you could not possibly have received a vote of confidence for the questions asked in the time allotted
And so on and so on. The only things you can really trust are got hired, didn't get hired, and never heard back. That's it.
I'm no expert, but the only published research I've read on this is "Thinking, Fast and Slow", and the original researcher has recently cast doubt on his own results on that study. Regardless, the evidence there was that all that mattered was "any objectively measurable metric" -- which would mean that FAANGs are wasting a lot of time and money on useless interviews. (Of course they have money to throw away, but still...)
Do you have a reference for this? I'm interested in reading more.
What kind of evidence that tech interviews work well are you looking for, exactly? Isn't the obvious evidence of your own eyes sufficient?
I've started to loosen up regarding that and finally finding a path I could take. However, instead now I'm intimidated by the job market and age discrimination.
A lot of the work is more boring business oriented work, and not a lot of startups. But it's steady, there's plenty of it and it pays relatively well compared to cost of living.
Start with Dive Into Python... then decide on something you want to make for yourself and work from there. Python is one of the better options to start from. JS is my personal favorite, second is now Rust, but they're harder to jump into as a beginner.
From my experience, at least half of the devs I've worked with have been within 5 years of my age (currently 44) and where I am now, and my last two positions that's been the case as well.
https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/phoenix-senior-software-d...
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/
The first online book linked from the author's homepage is:
MATHEMATICS OF THE DISCRETE FOURIER TRANSFORM (DFT) WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS SECOND EDITION
IMHO the author does a brilliant job of presenting the mathematics with rigor, but with accessible "on-ramps" via examples.
Appreciate it!
They have the largest amount of scandals, the largest amount of settlements for not meeting what they promised and the largest financial drop of any major Danish IT company.
This could be happening for a range of reasons. With hiring practices like that, their management is probably questionable, but hiring young certainly doesn’t seem to have helped them much.
A proper team has a mix of old and young, because they bring different skills to the table. Young people tend to be more energetic and enthusiastic, while older people have already learned that you don't store customer passwords unencrypted and check that backups are being done.
[1]see court document on https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/bizwomen/news/latest-news...
In my view, the fact that the question even lends itself to philosophical debate like this just illustrates how exceptionally bad the question is, even by Google standards.
> leaves all the zero bits alone, changes all the one bits into zero bits, and returns the result.
Unless you have a weird integer implementation there is no way to avoid touching individual bits. So if( x ) x = 0; return x; is the best I can come up with.
"Fair" isn't as hard. It's not fair, if (as I suspect) Google is guilty of age discrimination. There should be greater consequences than just trying to pay people what they might've lost financially from the discrimination.
Or, to put it another way: Google deserves to be punished if this was actually happening.
For what?
Having been NOT hired (but making it to the interview).
Presumably, even if a bit "old" according to Google standards, these people are anyway "top notch" in programming and almost surely soon found an appropriate job at some other company.
So, the compensation is seemingly very hypothetical, covering what? 2-3 months of wages for someone hypothetically getting 140,000-200,000 US$ per year.
Or is it because the applicant could have been hired at 160,000 US$ per year but only makes - poor little thing - 125,000 US$ from the company that hired him/her, and so first year is covered?
Let's bring it to the extreme, 35,000 US$ for the hassle of making four (fruitless) interviews?
Being the target of discrimination (be it age, sex, race, religion, whatever) is a terrible experience, but it is not easy to determine the amount of a monetary compensation.
As the parent noted, the $11 M are a rounding error to google, still the amount each person received should not be excessive because google is so big.
I mean, let's say that in an alternate world the amount would be calculated on the gross profits of google and the total amount had been US$ 110 Millions instead (still peanuts).
Would have it been "fair" that each refused applicant got 350,000 US$? (a couple years wage)
Or 3,500,000 each (more like 20 years) would have been adequate?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...
Had the lawsuit resulted in 1B -- something significant -- I can assure you that something would change in the way they handle older applicants.
The plaintiffs may have settled because they thought it was unlikely they would prevail if this went to trial, so it would be better take a guaranteed payout.
Google may have settled because they figured that the PR hit of a lengthy age discrimination trial would be worth more than $11M, regardless of whether they won.
Why is Google still making denials and statements after settling the action?
Right, this is why it confuses me because it's been declared settled, a formal resolution outside of the court, the matter is resolved independently between the parties. It seems odd to settle this kind of class-action allegation while continue making statements about it after the fact.
Is my understanding of this incorrect?
This is about on par with where my thinking was on this. I'm aware that these settlements are often contingent upon agreements from both parties regarding disclosing details of the settlement, and I suppose I assumed there was something in place here that prevented parties from speaking out about the settlement other than to release a statement saying 'a settlement was reached'.
Evidently not the case here. Thanks.
Aka, the plaintiffs probably can't argue with Google's claim that they don't age discriminate, and Google probably can't say bad things about the people that sued them for it. But Google can continue to claim it treats all applicants fairly.
It's also almost impossible to prove on both sides. Even if Google has insane numbers showing how many young vs old people they hire, it's totally possible that the younger ones are simply more experienced with the technologies/paradigms Google is looking for. A judge might not see it the same way though.
(See, e.g., the Kevin Spacey lawsuit for a recent example in the news)
Again, the question is not who would win. It's whether it is worth winning.
Let me use a strong amount of hyperbole to try to make this part of the point.
Imagine a 3 year old challenges you to a fight. They are completely and totally adamant about it. You certainly could win. Is it worth winning? Or would it be better to try to give them ice cream and get them to stop bugging you. Now imagine this fight will take 5-7 years :)
Despite what random comments on hacker news say, these are basically settled on a regular basis as cost of doing business.
If they were arbitration (heresy, i know) or some other cheaper/less intensive method of dispute resolution, google would likely (and often does) fight it.
But court cases are just really expensive and time consuming. The average civil litigation takes 5-7 years to resolve.
You know that thing we totally denied? Now that we've settled, we can admit it.
Cue four thousand new lawsuits
That's why.
(The top email basically said: why are you emailing me this. This is illegal. Don't create a paper trail!!)
Another fun fact from that lawsuit: Steve Jobs threatened Palm with a patent war if they didn't join the cartel. Oh, it was a fun time to work in the valley...
Eric Schmidt:
"I would prefer that Omid do it verbally since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later? Not sure about this.. thanks Eric"
See Reid v Google where Brian Reid, a key developer of the tech we use, was told his ideas "were too old to matter" and that he was an "old fuddy duddy."
Google fought it and lost.
https://www.law.com/therecorder/almID/1202464321723/?slretur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...
then they settled.
"The case was settled out of court", settlement is not a loss, its being allowed to sweep your dirty deeds under the rug with no consequences.
We may also get more insight if/when Google goes after Federal contracts which have reporting requirements and stronger applicant protections.
This is standard in any settlement, which is typically a release of liability. Part of the boilerplate in these contracts is that both parties are compromising not because of guilt but because of the uncertainty of litigation.
Even were Google in the right, a long protracted legal battle against claimed discrimination will constantly remind people that there’s alleged age discrimination. Nipping the negative PR in the bud is probably clearly worth it.
As an aside, ageism is pretty apparent in most companies where I’ve worked. There’s a huge expectation of “up or out”. I was on a hiring committee where I’m ashamed I didn’t stand up for a candidate who the committee decided had too much “experience” to be slotted at level X and therefore not offered any job. At least that shame gave me the courage to speak up the next time I ended up in that position.
In 2 days, I’ve got a very dismissive letter from Google, which amounted to “we decided that your profile and experience is no match for this position — and by the way, don’t bother applying to other similar positions at other Google offices. Case closed”.
My CV only got better since my last interview at Google, and while I didn’t pass it with flying colors, it wasn’t completely bad, too. I wonder if my current age played the part. Meanwhile, at Google jobs site, there were many positions marked as “fresh alumni of 2019 only” — perhaps that’s their perfect target.
we had a huge response launching here on HN and I believe it’s a hidden problem we need to tackle.
"JK Scheinberg, the engineer who spent 21 years working at Apple and is best known for persuading Steve Jobs to move the Mac from PowerPC to Intel in 2005, was rejected from a job at an Apple store a few years later. "
I wonder if Woz himself would pass the muster :)
Isn't this just discrimination against a different demographic?
So from that respect, they probably opened themselves up for further scrutiny from future applicants whether they engaged in ageism or not.
I suspect they feared during the discovery process things would be found in the internal communications that do show some kind of -ism or other things that would just look bad for them, so throwing $11m at the problem to go away quickly seemed better.
In fact, I'm somewhat dubious that there's any googler who doesn't have a reasonably close colleague hired above the age of 40.
> Of the $11 million payout in the settlement, $2.75 million will go to lawyers representing the class, Bloomberg reports. Fillekes will get an extra $10,000 as the lead plaintiff. The remaining cash works out to around $35,000 per plaintiff.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/google-pays-11-m...
Perhaps the law firm had final say?