Google's age-hate
scripting.com
scripting.com
What a bogus thing to say. A company sued by someone they fired can't defend themselves in the press. They just have to sit and take it when someone who knows so little about the case that they didn't even hear about it till a NYT article 8 years later uses it as an excuse to write a linkbait post like this.
Maybe Reid was too set in his ways. It does happen. Or not. The point is, we just don't know. No thoughtful person could even form an opinion based on the evidence presented in that NYT article, let alone write an inflammatory blog post about it.
This post tells absolutely zero new, except about Dave Winer. It's embarrassing to see it getting so many upvotes.
Younger people who are unwilling to move away from hardware are often going to be unemployed in Silicon Valley; older designers and software engineers won't be.
If somebody actually is a "poor cultural fit", a "fuddy-duddy" with "ideas too old to matter", then that actually is a valid cause for concern. Now in most countries that would not be a sufficiently valid reason to just fire someone, but that is more an American thing than an age thing.
Besides, I've encountered those properties in people starting in their late 20's. With some exceptions, tech is not a good place for people with a conservative mindset, but that is not the employer's fault.
The question is, as far as Google is concerned: is Google one of those companies that systematically conflates age with stagnation. So far I've only seen one third-hand anecdote of that, not enough to accuse Google of "age-hate".
I mean, its one thing to criticize Google for something that may, in fact, been a real case of agism. But 1) we really don't know more than the facts reported in the original NYT article (which, by the way, seem to indicate that if Google did something wrong, they've done enough monetary penance that "all parties" are "satisfi[ed]") and 2) have little evidence other that Dave Winer's brash and unfounded assertions to believe that such attitudes, if they even existed are still around today-- let alone as the dominant culture at Google.
But I guess that doesn't that stop Dave Winer from judging every Google employee he meets based on the actions of a few that occurred nearly a decade ago.
I'm forced to conclude that what Winer really wants is to believe that a culture of agism does exist at Google, and then go find "evidence" to support that desire, whether or not it makes any sense at all.
Were we living in the universe of Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I'd suggest he get out Diax's Rake.
[1]http://scripting.com/stories/2011/11/01/theIdiotsOfHackerNew...
I'm not saying the things that were said were right (they weren't) but how do you handle firing someone that doesn't fit in with the company culture without them claiming age discrimination?
You've just described something that actually is pure age discrimination: maintaining a company culture in which there is no room for people above a certain age, regardless of their skill, knowledge, personality and other qualifications.
Edit: Just to clarify: nobody "doesn't work well with everyone else" because of their age. That is a bogus argument, a clear sign of age discrimination.
What you can't have is the wrong reason for termination, which is why Google got in trouble. Using terms like “old guy” and “fuddy-duddy” implies that age is illegally shading your judgment, just like mentioning sex or religion or race would imply illegally shaded judgment.
(I'm not sure what to do with "doesn't fit in with the culture." On the one hand, I know what you mean. On the other, it seems like if you're really referring to corporate culture and not age, religion, national origin, etc., there should be something more specific you can say. Being vague and dropping a loaded word like "culture" sounds legally (even ethically) precarious. IANAL though.)
Manager tells employee to do something. Employee refuses. Usually this falls under "insubordination."
Manager tells employee to learn something new. Employee doesn't. This falls under "Employee is unable to perform duties assigned at an acceptable level."
Without talking about age, race, ethnicity, etc, this looks pretty cut and dry - person couldn't fulfill the duties they were hired to perform.
Of course anyone can sue for anything. But if you leave it as fact-based and about the work, not the person, it's pretty easy to avoid those issues.
[edited for typos]
Generally if someone doesn't fit with the culture you just fire them. Doesn't matter, old, young, black, gay, or muslim.
how do you handle firing someone that doesn't fit in with the company culture without them claiming age discrimination?
You don't "try to get them to quit" by making the workplace hostile. There is a great talk on this that one of Google's legal contractors gives which basically explains that if you don't think someone is a good fit, in Calfornia at least, you just fire them. It's common that firing someone is unpleasant, the mistake is "trying to make them uncomfortable so they just quit."
That last bit is where people make the big mistakes. It should never be the case where you (as a manager) are thinking "I just wish they would figure it out and leave."
Google screwed up here, and I don't believe for a second that the plaintiff would object if they admitted they did and apologized for it.
And if they have a sense that the PR is working against them on this, perhaps they will do exactly that.
Cloud, Agile, BI and so on. Businesses would be well served to realize that the efforts of those who came before my generation (34yo) are not so irrelevant. Shared a round of golf recently here in Austin with a true pioneer in our industry who regaled me with tales of the NSA's early days, DARPA, the military-industrial complex in computing and so on.
We particularly enjoyed the irony of today's mobile application developers struggling to write applications with limited state, memory, power and processor requirements which still are massive in comparison to the constraints his teams developed against.
The notion that we could not benefit from this perspective and those of so many others is sad to say the least.
"Cultural fit" is a legitimate reason to fire someone. While the jabs at age sound bad out of context, working at a place like Google while being stuck in the 60's mindset could cause problems
Also keep in mind, this happened almost a decade ago.
Given that they went into space and landed on the moon in the 60's, that decade might not be a bad place for your mind to rest. It was, in many ways, much more visionary than the times in which we now live.
Not to mention that quite a few groundbreaking technologies were invented in the 60's.
With that said, I do agree that if someone doesn't fit into the culture, that can cause big problems. But, as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the way to avoid that problem is by not hiring those people in the first place.
I didn't mean that from a visionary perspective as much as a practical one. For instance, stick someone who's programmed in FORTRAN and COBOL all their life and then set them loose on a newer OO language. The mindset is completely different there. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly a great deal harder than having a blank slate - and the age makes this a greater problem. The person this article references would be 60+ by now. Entire pillars of programming have shifted since the 60's and now.. that's a lot of damn time in the tech world.
>the way to avoid that problem is by not hiring those people in the first place.
Some things you can't find out until you've actually got someone working with you day by day. You can minimize this somewhat with a decent interview process, but i'd say "culture fit" is one of those concepts that you can't really twig in an interview or two.
Same with me.. I started out with BASIC, and it's taken a lot of time to unlearn some of the bad habits introduced there. (Didn't Dijkstra say something about that?)
Obviously Google was a pretty successful place, and became more successful. It's hard to argue they made the wrong decision.
Yes, old, out-of-touch engineers exist. There are women in the world who can't do math. There are black people who steal. There are alcoholic Native Americans. There are programmers with Asperger's. But lumping an individual person into those stereotypes -- especially in the workplace -- is just asking for a lawsuit.
Do you see nothing wrong with the phrase, "You're just another out-of-touch old man"? Besides just being flat-out mean, it's also so devoid of any specific meaning as to be blatantly discriminatory.