Google's diversity post makes no mention of age | Hacker News Reader

Google's diversity post makes no mention of age

brianstorms.com

146 pointsbrianstorms43 comments

I'm a google engineer who is cough well over 40. I haven't experienced any age discrimination. The engineering team for the product I work on, Google Play Music, is roughly 15% older engineers (rough guess, because I don't actually know how old everyone is). And across google, many of the most well regarded engineers (not talking about managers) are also older folks. Should there be more older engineers? Possibly, but the population is skewed because google is growing very fast of late and the vast majority of hires come straight out of college.

Also keep in mind that software engineering is a tough profession, and burnout is a real issue. Many of the people I've worked with over the years have moved on to other careers, in high tech or in something completely unrelated. The luckier ones cashed out on stock options or IPOs, and no longer need to work for a living - they either have their own little companies where they play around or they just retire. I'd say probably 40-50% of the engineers I worked with in my 20s and 30s are no longer doing any coding.

Bottom line: age discrimination is generally not a problem at google. One discrimination suit means nothing - those happen all the time at every successful company, and most of them are from folks angling for a quick settlement. (I don't know the merits of the particular case in question.)

There's only one person on my immediate team who is under thirty. Much of the company's engineering leadership is on the "ex-dec" mailing list. Let's just say that there are no 22-year-old engineers on ex-dec.

Based on these statements, would that mean that there is no cause for concern; while female engineers over-represent the percentage of CS majors?

What does CS majors have to do with it?

Engineers capable of working at Google != majoring in computer science.

Computer science degrees are handed out like cracker jack prizes these days.

Men graduate college at a lower rate than women, graduate high school at a lower rate, and have a lower literacy rate. What does that have to do with the specific pool of talent from which an uber engineering company like Google would pull from?

That seems to be a non-sequitur, but in any case:

17% of "tech" employees at Google are women (worldwide): http://www.google.com/diversity/at-google.html#tab=tech

18% of CS degrees are earned by women (in the US): http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp

so women are not in in fact over-represented among Google engineers, at least by that measure.

Curious about the "ex-dec" mailing list. Link? Google isn't of much help (top result is this thread)

Since the discussion is age, I would say digital equipment corporation which would put everyone at 40+.

yep, its ex employees of DEC. A lot of really good people came from the Palo Alto-based DEC WRL in particular.

The engineering team for the product I work on, Google Play Music, is roughly 15% older engineers (rough guess, because I don't actually know how old everyone is)

I'm 41, work at an investment bank as a software engineer and I think I'm probably one of the youngest people in IT here.

Having an IT work force with only 15% of people above 40 doesn't happen by accident and in my 20 year career in IT, it's not the norm of most companies.

the vast majority of hires come straight out of college.

You realize that happens because of policies that make that happen, right?

Umm, no. Competition for experienced engineers in Silicon Valley is incredibly fierce - I get probably a couple dozen cold recruitment pitches every week, from startups and big companies alike. Any decent engineer with 10+ years of experience can write their own ticket pretty much anywhere they want, and many choose do so at startups where the potential rewards are higher.

On the other hand, most new grads would kill for a job at google, which is one of the best high tech companies to work for (if not the best). And most new grads don't want to take the risk and lower pay of a startup (not with all those student loans to pay off).

More supply == more employees. No sinister policies needed.

Edit: appended clarifying sentence to first paragraph

Umm, no. Competition for experienced engineers in Silicon Valley is incredibly fierce - I get probably a couple dozen cold recruitment pitches every week, from startups and big companies alike.

Cold recruitment pitches aren't job offers. They're also typically made with no idea how old the person they're speaking to is.

More supply == more employees. No sinister policies needed.

I would say it's more a matter of when you specifically target recent graduates for hiring, you tend to hire a lot of recent graduates. Are you disputing that Google specifically targets recent graduates for hire?

Of course I'm not disputing that. Google absolutely targets new graduates, very aggressively. We also target experienced engineers, very aggressively. As @mark_l_watson said in another comment: "Google is hungry for good people, and they are casting a wide net". Experienced employees are, in fact, valued far more than new grads, since they've proven themselves in industry, and because of that google gives employees substantial referral bonuses for bringing in good people.

As for cold recruitment pitches, they typically come from recruiters on linkedin. And its very easy to tell roughly how old I am from my linkedin profile. But you make a fair point about recruitment pitches not being the same as job offers.

You say you work in IT - am I guessing correctly when I say you don't work in the Bay Area or Seattle? Because it really is a crazy job market right now, and its probably hard to believe how much so if you don't experience it yourself. Its hugely different from how things were in 2008, when I got laid off by Adobe and had to take a less than ideal job to pay the bills. Today I am very confident that I could get a new job by making a few phone calls, but I choose to stay at google because I'm working on a great product with a great team, at a company that spoils me to a point I actually find embarrassing.

That's great that you feel that way and that your team may not discriminate. So why can't Google post those numbers, too? It would make them look great!

I'd like to see google post those numbers as well. I do realize that my own experiences are merely anecdotal, but hopefully of interest to enough people to be worth the post.

Google's blog post about diversity stats doesn't say anything about age, they diversity website does (but not with age stats.)

Of course, there are lots of possible diversity axes for which they don't have stats, including, among others, veterans status and sexual orientation (which, also, though they aren't in the stats, are addressed on the diversity web page.)

Its even weirder that the blog post complains that Google's federally mandated EEO-1 report includes only the information that prescribed in the federal mandate.

That is one way to spin it but not what I mean. My point of the post is that it is unfortunate that the EEO-1 doesn't care about age, because age is a problem in Silicon Valley and it's going to be worse as the workforce gets older. The EEOC doesn't care about age, so we can't count on EEOC to require companies to talk about age. It's going to have to come from the companies.

> The EEOC doesn't care about age

"The EEO-1 doesn't include age" is a readily verifiable fact.

"The EEOC doesn't care about age", OTOH, is claim which requires some argument beyond merely the observation that EEO-1 doesn't include age. [1]

[1] See, e.g., http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/litigation/selected/adea.cfm [2]

[2] which, I suppose, is also good evidence for the claim that "the EEOC doesn't care about keeping its website listing current cases particularly current", but that's a different issue.

>is a readily verifiable fact

Yeah, but people can also read behind the lines. We're good at pattern matching and we have a lot of experience in corporate bs.

> Yeah, but people can also read behind the lines.

Or, IOW, can insert their own bias into their interpretations without supporting evidence.

Or, IOW, can make assesments based on what they know, without necessarily having some kind of forensic level or mathematical level proof.

Which is an essential skill in real life (even in court actually). Seems like a lot of people, especially programmers, conflate real life discussions with theorem proving.

While I agree that age should be addressed, your post seems to be a very good example of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good." Here we have a major company apologizing for its poor diversity and providing a confidential report to the EEOC along with visualizations, very publicly on its website. It seems like a great start, with plenty of room to grow. So why "so-called diversity"? There has to be a more constructive way to address this and call on Google to release more demographics - but let's not forget that everyone else is keeping even the "so-called" diversity stats secret.

A fair comment, and I agree that Google's opening up about diversity is a good start. It's unfortunate that the EEOC doesn't require age info, and that Google doesn't volunteer it. Google opened the debate by posting on their blog, and my hope is that the ensuing debate expands to include more than just the very important issues of gender and race.

I worked as a contractor at Google last year when I was 62. No age discrimination :-)

My opinion is that Google is hungry for good people, and they are casting a wide net.

BTW, a little off topic, it is much easier getting a job as a contractor at Google, so if you are curious about life at Google you might want to try the easier route. I think roughly 40% of the people there are contractors.

Note, most of the reasons why companies discriminate against old people can be mitigated by making them contractors, so I don't know if that's a fair comparison.

There is the insurance issue- not an issue if you are a contractor. (I mean, on a google Engineer salary, it's less of a big deal, but still, we're talking a 5x increase in insurance premiums, it's not nothing.)

Then, there is the hours issue; It is thought that old people usually won't pretend to work for long hours like young people will. But you don't want your contractors to pretend to work long hours, you are paying them by the hour! Here, the perceived disadvantage of old people becomes an advantage, if you hire them as contractors.

Old people expect more pay. Sure, contractors are expected to get more pay.

Then, I think there are some vestiges of "expected loyalty" that are left in the system. Firing a bunch of old people is seen as worse, I think, than doing the same to a bunch of young folks. Making them contractors mitigates this problem, too.

Now, I'm not saying that there is age discrimination at google; I know a fair number of "greygoolers" or however you spell that. I'm just saying that almost all of the reasons why a company might discriminate against an old person no longer apply if they are hiring said old person as a contractor.

That is a good point about using contractors being more flexible, but that advantage holds across all age groups. Another good point on the increased health care costs.

They also don't give a breakdown of what colleges they hire from. (Which is a good heuristic for social class) Not everyone had the privilege to be able to go to Stanford.

Even if Stanford were a public school with a well-developed CS program, it's still the nearest notable school. Is there a shock that Amazon and Microsoft hire a lot of UW grads?

There are many reasons close schools would have an advantage. I would be surprised if there aren't adjunct faculty at Stanford from Google (and UW from Microsoft) and interns sometimes prefer local opportunities to those far away.

It might be interesting to look at which colleges they hire from, but just drop Stanford (or control for the number of miles from Mountain View.

Google probably hires more UW grads than Microsoft (and definitely at the PhD level). Back when I was an undergraduate, even intel hired more than Microsoft (replace google for intel these days).

Diversity across arbitrary axes would be silly. Half the country didn't go to college. Should Google hire half non-college-attending people?

I didn't have the privilege to be able to go to Stanford.

I didn't have the privilege to be able to go to any Ivy League University. Nor to any university in the US, for that matter - I got my Engineering degree from an unknown university in a small south american country. But I did fine in the interviews so they hired me.

So many people say "yeah, they only hire PhDs from Stanford". OK, how do I put this - no.

Sure, and there are lots of companies that don't have any policies against hiring women. It's just that everyone who does hire, happens to hire from their fraternity, or their best friend's recommendations (which are from his fraternity), etc. And it just happens that there are no women in any positions of power at that company, so nobody ever even asks the question if they should do things differently.

One other thing that I notice is that they didn't have an ethnicity group for Indians and Middle Eastern. Maybe they categorized them as white because their white chunk was huge.

I think Indians would be counted as Asian, but I'm not 100% sure.

That's because Indians get lumped under Asians. Not sure about people of middle eastern origin.

The instructions are here: http://www.eeoc.gov/employers/eeo1survey/2007instructions.cf...

"Asian (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian Subcontinent, including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam."

"White (Not Hispanic or Latino) - A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa."

Your "so-called" diversity blog post makes no mention of color-blindness. :-p

Perhaps they're not including age because it's a lot more variable than "static" traits such as race and gender, even when using ranges. Such information would quickly become outdated, which is dangerous if they don't release updated stats often.

>Such information would quickly become outdated, which is dangerous if they don't release updated stats often.

Nothing stops them from releasing it once a year.

It's not like people grow older more than a year each year.

Except, it does. Click 'At Google' -> Greyglers.

http://www.google.com.au/diversity/at-google.html#tab=greygl...

Yes and I mention Greyglers in my blog post. But Google's tiny mention way down on a page that there's a group of old-timers in the company is nothing new and is not part of their new openness about transparency, nor does it say anything about age demographics across entire workforce or hiring practices.

That is because it is gender diversity that is the sexy topic (for obvious reasons). Then racial diversity often gets tacked on at the end as just some motions you have to go through to deflect criticism.

A lot of people overplay the defenders of "gender diversity" to look cooler/more progressive to their group (which sometimes is ironically motivated by trying to get laid).

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