Hacker News Reader

Comment by mbrumlow | Hacker News Reader

Why are these numbers so small? Even more so to the fine for data protection violations. The point of these sort of things are to make companies think twice. While 11m is a lot of cash it is nothing compared to Google's total income, and would not even been half a years salary for those they refused to hire. Seems like they got let off easy on this one.

View on HN

This is just speculation, but...

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.

I doubt any company, especially in SV, takes a PR hit from age discrimination, which seems to be widely accepted and barely punished. Google just wants to swat away the plaintiffs like annoying gnats.

Isn't it normal for class-action lawsuits to have a low payout per person?

It's definitely normal for the class members to receive little payout per person, but a lot of that tends to have to do with astronomical legal expenses.

The real winners of the current setup are legal firms. Doesn't matter who is suing who, or who wins or loses. Lawyers are going to get paid.

I had it described to me that class actions are less about making the wronged parties whole, and more about forming large enough sticks to beat misbehaving entities about the head with.

In a class action, lawyers don’t get paid if they lose.

No. Lawyers get about half. That's a lot, but class members each getting a pittance isn't much different from getting twice a pittance. Substantial payments to everyone in a class would wipe out the defendant.

Is that actually bad? I'm not really sure why preserving entities that severely wrong large classes is necessarily a desirable goal.

How much would've it cost to actually litigate this? I'm wondering if this settlement was similar to how much it would've cost to litigate and they just wanted the people to go away.

Considering that it is a claim from a _prospective_ employee about the interview process, the settlement of 35k per person seems relatively generous.

"Generous" is hard for me to have an opinion about. $11M is less than a rounding error for Google.

"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.

If you see it from the other side, it is more than 50,000 for each of the 200 people, even if the lawyers will likely get 1/3 of that, it remains 35,000 US$ or so.

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?

Engineers at google can make way over 200k in salary and even more in total compensation. Given these guys were over 40, and many of them likely seasoned it is likely they would have made way more than the numbers you are suggesting.

I don't doubt that, it was just an attempt to put the numbers in pespective, if you believe that it is only 1 month or 15 days of wage it is ok as well, but what was the actual inconvenience to them?

Let's bring it to the extreme, 35,000 US$ for the hassle of making four (fruitless) interviews?

The point of the payout is not really for the people who did not get a job -- its just a good place to put the money. These lawsuits are actually to punish the companies so they change their ways. 11m as pointed out is a rounding error for google. I would be surprised zero happens at google related to age determination as a result of this lawsuit.

Had the lawsuit resulted in 1B -- something significant -- I can assure you that something would change in the way they handle older applicants.

It's very demoralizing to be realize nobody wants to hire you because you're over a certain age. So this is not about the inconvenience of wasting time with the interview but more generally about age discrimination.

I perfectly understand the issue, I work (I might say worked) in a field where - for completely different reasons - the work opportunities are scarce to non existant for senior people, but the question was more about how the sum was quantified.

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?

I don't have an opinion about the compensation, some could argue that it is or it isn't excessive. My understanding is that the wealthier the company the less likely they are to change their bad practices when fined a small amount compared to their size.

Here's an interesting story, somehow related to the size of the fine vs. the wealth of the person given the fine, though this is in Finland and about a speeding ticket.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

Considering what they would have earned the first year at Google if they weren't discriminated against that looks more like a drop in the bucket.

Doesn't your statement assume that they were all good enough to actually be hired?

All good enough to be hired AND that if they were, that the job they eventually did get paid substantially less. That is very possible, but it's still a loaded assumption indeed.

They were all good enough to get in person interviews at least[1]. If I read that document correctly Google would have been able to argue about the qualifications of various individuals and have them removed from the lawsuit after discovery concluded. Of course I am not a lawyer so I might be wrong.

[1]see court document on https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/bizwomen/news/latest-news...

Phone screens at google are not foolproof, and some candidates get to skip them for various reasons. I've seem some candidates make it to onsite and then be unable to answer my warmup question of: write a function that takes an integer, leaves all the zero bits alone, changes all the one bits into zero bits, and returns the result.

How is a disguised return 0 anything remotely resembling a good question? I highly suspect most people who are "unable to answer" are actually just misunderstanding the question, since it's phrased in such a bizarre way. The way you phrased it, I'm not even 100% sure that "return 0" is the answer you're looking for!

It is a warm up meant to take 20 seconds. Before we get to something actually meaningful

That’s the right return value of course but ignoring everything else doesn’t actually meet the requirements of the question. Of course in a live situation you can ask if that’s ok or if they actually want useless bit twiddling.

But there's no such thing, semantically, as "leaving zero bits alone". The value 0 has no notion of "where it came from". The expression "x & 0" is semantically equivalent to the expression "0", in that they represent the same value.

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.

Oh I don’t disagree. Literally going through bit by bit and zeroing any bit not equal to zero would be grossly inefficient especially if you know it’s unnecessary.

It's not grossly inefficient to do 64 iterations of an arithmetic loop for a trick toy function that has no reason to ever be called in practice.

As far as I understood the document Google could have argued to have individual members of the class action dismissed based on qualifications after discovery concluded. The "in person interview" was just the initial requirement to join the class action and not a guarantee that they would remain part of it. The article I linked already mentioned 269 and that dropped to 227 in the bloomberg article linked by the guardian, so around a sixt no longer qualified for one reason or the other.

> 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.

The best answer is just return 0

With the 20 second duration you mention in a different comment that makes more sense. I think I spend more time just overthinking on the requirments.

are you saying you know the best interest of the people who accepted the settlement?

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com