Google Sued by Job Candidate for Age Discrimination
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
No, this is all about class action procedures.
1. As in most such cases, the named plaintiff is there only to satisfy the technical requirement that a representative be named to represent the class.
2. The underlying claim, then, in the absence of any direct proof of discrimination in any given case, is based on an "effects" theory: Google stats show that it has an average workforce whose age is considerably lower than what other stats show is the average age of computer programmers; this "proves" that latent discrimination is happening; ergo, the class is entitled to massive damages because Google's hiring practices single out older people and treat them unfairly by rejecting them as job applicants on unlawful grounds.
3. Google recently settled an age discrimination case in which there appears to have been real evidence that they treated an older worker unfairly. This case now seeks to take the evidence in that one instance, combine it with stats evidencing a young workforce at Google, and hope this is enough to justify the class action claim.
4. This is as flimsy a basis on which to sue as one might imagine but its point is to try to pry open Google's confidential employment files to hope to find real evidence somewhere in the mix. In other words, it is a fishing expedition.
No particular sympathy here for Google. I am sure it does treat older workers unfairly at some level. The tech industry does this across the board. But that does not make this lawsuit something attractive. It is a stick-up suit, pure and simple, from all surface indicators. Given how flimsy it actually is, I predict it will go nowhere in the long term. There may yet be a potent case lurking against Google over its policies. This just is not it.
Then he got sent to someone else (someone technical?) for a phone screen, and they decided he wasn't a great fit. It's possible his experience just wasn't really what they were looking for, and that wasn't evident from his resume.
I'm not trying to defend Google. As a 40+ year old programmer, I'm concerned about age discrimination, too. The article just doesn't make a very compelling case to me, I guess.
That's certainly understandable, but another article[1] goes into some of the details of that interview that do make it seem a bit odd:
The interviewer was 10 minutes late to the call, "barely fluent in English," and "used a speaker phone that did not function well." Heath politely asked him, repeatedly, to use the phone's headset but the request was declined.
One part of the interview involved writing a short program to find the answer to a problem posed by the interviewer. Heath accomplished the task and offered to share it via Google Docs or email, but, instead, the interviewer required Heath "to read the program coding over the phone."
I'm not suggesting that's grounds for an age discrimination lawsuit, but it's easy to see how it could seem the interviewer wasn't that interested in giving the candidate a fair shot.
[1] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2914233/it-careers/medi...
The recruiter was personable and polite.
But the engineer had my 7 year old resume even though I sent the recruiter a recent one. They didn't seem interested in asking much about what I did in the last 7 years. They seemed tired and frustrated and I in turn got nervous and started to stutter and then got into a dead end programming some stupid tree building program. It was pretty bad, and left me with a bad impression.
Year later they contacted me again, and I refused to interview with them.
Yeah, if that actually happened, Google should fire the interviewer. How incredibly absurd.
After showing up to the call half hour late, we got started. My interviewer was quite verbally irate when I asked clarifying questions and had some connection problems. Then he asked me to explain my code over the phone, brace-by-brace, colon by colon. I asked to share a document it was declined, I asked if we could talk about the algorithm and pseudo-code, but he wanted the C++. Afterwards he told me it wouldn't compile because it was missing some semicolons.
A few months later I tried again, thinking it was a fluke. Second interview started much the same as the first. I just hung up, not worth my time.
I had a phone screen with Google earlier this year and it had great audio quality and used a shared Google Doc. It is really sad to hear that you and others are having such a different experience.
I wonder if the quality of people's interviews are affected by the location and position they're interviewing for. I was interviewing for a smaller location instead of the main campus.
My impression is that bad interviews are the exception and get disproportionate attention. Glassdoor interview ratings for Google are 54% positive, 26% neutral, 18% negative. http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-Question...
(source: first hand experience with Google recruiters, and first hand experience of being sent further in the process after explaining the long list of ridiculous flaws in the phone interview I had, all of which the recruiter agreed with me on. I declined to continue the process, though, after it became clear that if I had gotten the job I would have been managing the guy who gave the phone screen; I had no desire whatsoever to ever work with that person based on the way he acted).
Twenty minutes later, he returned and asked for a solution, which my friend didn't have. The interviewer ended the call and my friend was turned down. He raised his objections to the process to his recruiter, who apologized and agreed to send him a Google branded mug and T-shirt for his troubles (what a joke). He still hasn't received them.
It's understandable if people find it ridiculous to read their code line by line but it's not at all clear from the article this is what was being asked as opposed to asking about the general approach to the problem. I feel like if the person's English was not that good, one thing that the interviewer might have wanted to know was whether the person could communicate effectively with coworkers.
Indeed, the article even says that the interviewer could not understand what was being read. For someone so senior, it's likely that he would have had to mentor junior developers. Seems like it would be a bad experience if they were unable to understand him and vice versa.
person = interviewer, or candidate?
The interviewee may have wanted to know the same thing about Google employees...
And indeed the interviewee should probably know that too. Either way it sounds like it was a poor fit if they couldn't understand each other
One more possible scenario: some manager thinks your team absolutely needs more people. You don't think so, because there's some limit on how many people are needed to change a light bulb. So you, in fact, actually aren't that interested in the candidate unless you see that he is perfect fit, somebody you just cannot lose only because you don't need more people right now. And I cannot judge you, it's, well, _OK_ to not to hire someone. Yeah, in the perfect world everybody is always polite and sincerely interested in others and so on, but c'mon, lets just allow people do their job and keep them away from all these political bullshit.
Reading between the lines, it sounds like the guy got angry and argumentative with the interviewer, and that never ends in employment.
A better legal angle could be that the crappy phone line is discriminatory against people with bad hearing, such as many old people.
When I interviewed at Google in 2006, I had to read my scribbled 14 lines of code over the phone. It was kinda reasonable then, but I'm astonished they still do that when we have simple tools like this: https://coderpad.io/ not to mention Google's own Docs.
Sounds a lot like my Google interview. And then it took a month for the interviewer to send his feedback. Along with a bunch of other ridiculous things, it really was the worst interview process I've ever had.
How about this one: About 2005, shortly after completing my Ph.D., I interviewed with th' Goog', including an on-site in Dublin (they said they had just started doing on-site interviews outside of Mountain View); the next day I received email from the recruiter in Dublin saying, "looks like we're coming to a successful conclusion", and a few days later received their standard thanks-but-no-thanks letter. I was unable to get more information from them. Clearly, I was denied by the mother ship, but one of the few solid reasons I could come up with was that I was 37 at the time.
I'm sorry but you have to give specific reasons. Otherwise this is just an imaginary persecution complex.
What's more likely is that you had some positive scores and feedback from several interviewers initially. Then, the remaining feedback from the other interviewers came in a little later and was below the mark. Interviewers have focus areas typically, so it's not uncommon to see candidates do very well in one area (e.g. culture fit) and poorly in another (e.g. technical ability).
The recruiter shouldn't have lead you on like that. They should know that until all the scores and feedback is in, nothing is final. That said, it is their job to keep candidates engaged. So, perhaps this one was a little over zealous?
The interviewer is probably an engineer who had to find a random conference room to conduct the call in (hence being 10 minutes late and using a lousy speakerphone). Asking the interviewee to talk through the code he's written would not be unusual if the interviewer wanted to find out about the thought process that went into writing the code.
And it's impossible to know without context, but the "barely fluent in English" part sounds more like bias on the side of the interviewee than anything.
(Of course, this is pure speculation based on a third-hand one-sided account.)
If so, it has nothing to do with discrimination.
It's also easy to see how it could seem the interviewee wasn't that interested in giving the interview a fair shot, but you forgot to point this out.
"I cannot hear you, could you use the headset instead of the speaker phone mode?"
How does this make it seem the interviewee wasn't interested? He couldn't hear and asked the interviewer if he could use the headset which would have taken no effort and made the whole process a lot better.
My point isn't that either of these straw man situations happened, its that any of a wealth of possible scenarios are possible given the extremely vague details given by the interviewee it is easy to see many different interpretations by the parties involved as reasonable.
Legally, in the US, it isn't. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act specifically only protects workers 40 or older. http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm
There is nothing illegal at the US federal level about discrimination in the reverse direction (favoring workers over 40, perhaps by overlooking a bad interview), nor about age discrimination against a 39-year-old who is perceived to be too old for the company or industry.
If that'd genuinely be the case, there's no reason for a hard minimum age limit to be codified.
I personally can see the potential for a younger candidate, if given a chance, to be able to mobilize a ton of young voters and even win, especially given the current state of social media.
If Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Page can effectively run billion dollar companies in their twenties and early thirties, I can totally see a 20-something be a better POTUS than folks who came before her.
So in other words, in any given area there will be 2 or 3 candidates that have a decent chance of winning. Those 2 or 3 candidates are selected by their parties to be allowed to run in that area. Obviously some independents will get elected, but not enough to control government policy.
Now imagine a system where the people who run for their parties are selected by an internal vote inside the party. If you are not a member of the party, you have no say in which candidates are allowed to run in the area that you vote in. Which, of course, seems completely fair because why should outsiders determine which candidates a party runs?
Now imagine that these votes are not one vote per person, but rather vote-by-proxy. In other words, if a member of the party does not wish to vote for candidate selection, they can, instead, assign a proxy to vote for them. In practice, there will be certain very senior people in the party who have a very large number of proxy votes that they can vote with. The average party member will be encourage to assign their proxy to experienced, trusted party leaders because actually attending a convention and voting yourself is a PITA. Through political dealings, there will be big blocks of votes that can can sway the selection very easily.
Now imagine that you are some shadowy entity outside of the political system. You have some money that you want to use to influence the political system. Let's say that you want to ensure that enough people sympathetic to your cause are elected (from whatever party) so that you can control public policy. How much money would it cost?
Let's say there are 3 parties with a realistic chance of controlling public policy. You don't need to bribe every official. Instead you only need to bribe the people with many proxy votes. Those people can insist that in exchange for promoting the candidate to run in an area, the candidate must "tow the party line" on these kinds of issues.
That way the majority of the candidates that realistically stand a chance of affecting public policy are on board with the shadowy entity. The public never really gets a chance to vote on the issue because it has all been controlled at the candidate selection level.
Now imagine that you are a young, idealistic candidate that will refuse to make such a horrible deal just to get selected as a candidate. Well, you won't be selected as a candidate. Every 4 years you will try and try and try and after 4 or 5 times you will realize that there is absolutely no way to be a candidate without playing ball with the party politics. By the time you are 40 or 50, you've become realistic and even if you hate it, you will realize that you must compromise on some issues in order to push through the issues that are more important to you.
And so any "seriously-regarded" candidate is older, because nobody gets to even pay attention to you until you agree to compromise. And even if you agree to compromise, it takes time before the people with the proxy votes trust that you will follow through.
Of course the above is complete fiction. But, I have always thought about it this way: in computer security we feel that if an exploit exists, it is only a matter of time before it is used. The above sounds like a nice little exploit.
I was absolutely amazed at the number of people with a decade or more of web development with ASP/ASP.Net SQL and JavaScript that didn't get past that first stage (about 1 in 4). It actually made me very upset that was the state of the hiring process for technical roles.
I can't imagine what it's like for Google, given that they tend to ask for more conceptual understanding of common algorithms, which I know for a fact I'd fail at because I simply don't work in constructs that low level, and it's been years since I've read much on them. I do have an understanding of how to distribute work, and connect complex solutions together to a relatively fine grained detail... but being well rounded with a good high-level vision isn't what companies like Google and Microsoft tend to screen for (I have gone through the interview process for MS a few times, but never with Google).
The line that is cited by the employee is that the company is "embarking on its largest recruiting / hiring campaign in its history" and that they are very interested in the candidate. This is actually the exact line many people get when they get approached by Google recruiters.
Then he didn't pass the phone screen...
If there was something worse said during phone screen itself, then they probably would have put it in the article as an argument on his side...
That said, I've only worked in one company that seemed overtly ageist (a piece-of-shit startup where I spent 3 months after Google). Maybe I'm not in-tune enough to see it. The fact that it exists disturbs me, but Google seems pretty good on this issue compared to most California tech companies that make it more obvious.
On the flip side, it's been over a decade since I've looked at a lot of things at a lower level (implemented a b-tree or quick-sort) or even really used a fully compiled language; favoring .Net, JavaScript and other scripted languages. The kinds of things that Google/MS and others seem to screen for just don't interest me as much as building a distributed system that can handle scale and load consistently. I've never been a fan of OO and tend to favor more functional patterns. Almost every time I've looked at a Java or .Net solution I cringe as there's always a number of design patterns that don't fit well, and implemented by any number of people who I wouldn't consider craftsmen.
People tend to get too comfortable with a given situation... I think after the bubble burst around 2000 a pretty large divide was created between those before the bubble and those since... Especially given that a lot of people came in and left software development during the early 2000's... I see a lot of people 35+ and a lot of people under 30.. and a bit of a gap in between. It's almost a given that ageism is bound to flourish in the environment.
A lot of attention is given to bringing more women into technology in terms of using "inclusive phrasing", having recently had an interesting discussion following someone come into an IRC channel and asking, "can one of you guys help me with something". I think the younger generation should work on re-thinking about their own ageism.
Agreed. See, it's knowledge like this that makes older programmers the best hires. Most people don't realize that OOP's design patters are detrimental until after a decade of programming experience.
Especially given that a lot of people came in and left software development during the early 2000's... I see a lot of people 35+ and a lot of people under 30.. and a bit of a gap in between.
Hm. I'm exactly in that gap (I'm 31) and I never thought about it in those terms. I think that a part of the problem is that 2002-2005 and 2008-9 were terrible years to come out of college, while 2006-7 were pretty good. Even though I've made a lot of career mistakes, the year of graduate school that I did (I was in a math PhD program for a year, before I realized that academia was a declining industry best escaped) actually made me better off by putting me on the market in a much better year (2006) to start a career. 2005 was still awful.
Successful people under 35 definitely seem to have birth-year clusters (obviously, there are individual exceptions): there's a 1984-86 cluster and a 1990-92 cluster. 2002 tanked salaries and job availability, while 2008 tanked job availability but not salaries, so the people who were able to establish themselves in 2006-7 and get on a decent track, before the shit-fan interaction term became nonzero, were able to work their way into high salaries and leadership roles (since leadership roles follow from high salary, and not the reverse, in most companies) during the boom times of 2012-15.
I think the younger generation should work on re-thinking about their own ageism.
I don't think that the younger generation (meaning the people under 30 now) is ageist at all. Most young programmers are as much against ageism as the older ones being affected. I think that the ageism comes from middle-aged businessmen who see middle-aged programmers as not having made the cut to get into management. It's an attitude of, "If you're so smart, why aren't you like me?"
Middle management can often be the worst of both worlds. I don't know if that's intrinsic to the job, or just intrinsic to how organizations conceive of the job.
The sad truth, however, is that most people have no options other than climbing, because so much of this industry is "manage or be managed". It's at the point where I would generally not take a job without a manager-equivalent title at the VP/Dir level unless it was a small organization or one that I knew well, even though I have no need to be running a team. Ideally, you want to be a programmer in terms of what you actually get to do, but VP-equivalent in terms of being able to get shit done, be listened to when you need something, and avoid undesirable and distracting work being dropped onto you.
The thing is we (as I address to most of the HM community which I am assuming is tech/IT related) work in a very lucrative yet highly dangerous field. If you don not keep up with ongoing technologies and have failed to update your skills even in a time frame of 6-12 months, buddy youre outta market.
Companies like IBM, HP/Compaq, Dell, Oil firms, Networking companies have this culture (btw i have had experienced it first handed) where they promote their engineers to lead roles so early on and have them do all of the Project Management tasks and in the midst of everything, years pass by and they are left with obsolete technical skills and 20 years of work experience. I wish things were not like this.
That depends on many factors, though...primarily the employer and what kind of work is done. For instance, Google has a huge C++ codebase that needs to be maintained. I guess it could be argued that even in C++, one needs to keep up with the C++11/C++14 curve, but I doubt that curve is as extreme or difficult to keep current on as, say, new developments in JavaScript.
It would be a poor argument. An accomplished senior level candidate may not not follow all the proceeding of some language committee, but could have all kinds of important technical and non-technical skills. It's often more valuable that your engineers understand your problem domain well, produce code with a low defect rate in a steady rhythm, encourage others to excel through management or mentoring, etc.
"Oh, the compiler does that automatically now!" is not such a steep learning curve.
Your example, I assume, refers to SQL, which was first released in 1986. The absolute latest standard was released in 2011. The lingua franca to be proficient in say, Postgres, changes far slower than that.
I also don't understand why you mentioned that she was a woman or what this has to do with the article in the first place.
seems like an arbitary detail to add, among the many possible details you could have chosen.
Perhaps this is true for certain segments of "this industry", but, like so many blanket statements on HN, this is just false for the larger industry as a whole. Most of the jobs in "this industry" are enterprise/corporate/consultancy, and those jobs are simply not age-discriminatory. For those who seek a work environment where the latest/greatest is paramount, please prepare yourselves to deal with the consequences. For the vast majority of us, other forms of discrimination are INCREDIBLY more relevant.
...because you will face well known and rampant age discrimination right?
The wsj article list also includes Salesforce, Nvidia, Adobe, Intel, Samsung and, IBM which I believe qualify as being corporate. But even if they were not discriminatory it would not remotely excuse those who are.
Speaking of blanket truths on HN, what percentage of ycombinator founders are over 40?
In fact, I think if somebody does maintain that accomplishment density and is interested in YC, they become a partner. :)
Of course what you and others say is quite plausible. But also often contradictory. It really looks like a very real phenomenon for which intuitive but post hoc conjectures are being generated. You could do the same thing for women or any other group as well (thank goodness sensible people don't)
Ycombinator is not evil or unusual but really ageism is a very measurable, irrational problem in the industry that is undoubtedly resulting in lost efficiency and we have a choice of addressing it or just ignoring it with facile explanations.
It seems obvious to me that even in a world with no discrimination, programs with an introductory/learning aspect that require massive drive will mostly have younger people in them, because older people with the same drive will have largely already gone through something like that.
Taken in at age 27, it might be the spark that sets one down a life path where "time in a felt cube" is minimized in favor of higher priority things.
My 30s flew. But very little of it was spent actually heads down coding.
In my 30's I got smarter and programmed as much as I wanted (which was still a lot more than I got paid for). Career was still a huge priority for me though. I struggled to find work/life balance because I thought it was a zero sum game.
In my 40's I took 5 years off and taught English in Japan. I came back to a programming career 2 or 3 years ago.
What have I learned? Heads down coding is really important to me. I prioritise it. It is what I enjoy doing most in this world. I pretty much ignore my career now and just try to help out my team the best way that I can. I like helping people (I learned that from teaching). I also try to write as much code as I can before I get tired. And then I rest.
My job is fun (most of the time). Sometimes helping people who make my job not fun is very hard, but you always have a choice whether to help people or not. Sometimes if I can't help someone, I have to let it go. I have learned that there are some jobs where you have to let the job go because you can't help the people who are there. But in my experience, most jobs aren't like that. Usually there is a place for people who like to write code.
This kind of life can be good too :-)
... or if you (like me) ignore it because your knowledge and experience are 'state of the art'. Really depressing seeing those 'shortage of IT workers' articles. I would laugh if I could laugh.
We can have it better and we don't need 100 hour weeks. The company I work for has cornered the industry and won out over MS for our last major contract.
We should all be striving to make our children's lives & the world they'll inherit better than our own.
It goes around and around. When you're older you'll know. Only the young understand.
How you spend remaining time is entirely up to you. Me, for example, I've been through much more and grown quite a bit as a person in last 5 years (moved to different country), then in first 28 years of my life (33 now). Looking back, it feels like a lifetime and a bit more (weekends mostly in the mountains, either ski touring or hiking/climbing/etc), travelling around the world - recently 2 weeks in indonesia, etc). No, even those 5 years didn't fly by at all.
I also don't think Google should consider changing an interview process that is working for them on the grounds that it may be indirectly penalizing older people.
note: I'm an older software dev about to go through the Google interview process.
If true then it violates the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA):
Some jobs likely have a lot more young applicants than old applicants - would those places be required to match the county, state, or national ratio of young to old in their workforce? (which of course is impossible for most locales).
If hiring practices don't match the overall ratios, that in itself is not illegal. Otherwise we could sue the NBA for both age and sex discrimination. However, if an old person or a woman could perform as well, they could get NBA spots. If they were as capable at everything as a younger/male athlete, and the reason they were not selected is because they are also old/female, then it's illegal.
Some jobs just have more capable candidates in various age/gender pools, so those hired reflects that reality.
It's because only successful candidates appear in the statistics. If Google let everyone in, you'd see a good correlation between how well developers do in the interviews and how well they do at Google. If you dump the 95% of people who don't perform well in the phone interview, then what you're left with is a bunch of high performers who performed well to different extents (where the purpose of the interview is not to gauge ability but to demonstrate minimum ability), where the extent to which they performed well is largely noise.
Either a positive or negative correlation would be bad in this case.
You might still hire bad engineers, but the uncorrelated nature of your interview/job performance data won't help you explain that.
Seems to me that many of the big tech companies are losing the reality plot like coked up Hollywood starlets. I think we might see a paradigm shift in tech again soon including how recruitment is carried out.
Uh, how about $385.46Bn?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
Yes, brainteasers are worthless and "structured behavioral" questions yield better informations but there is a gap between claiming that technical interviews are worthless and that.
Also, it is usually the duty of the author to support their claims with a direct reference to sources not the opposite.
I don't know anyone working in Google that hasn't gone through 6 months+ of weekly interviews. The second time I entered the process I went through six phone interviews without any indication on when the presential interviews would begin.
I'm willing to do a lot of things for the right position. But I won't put everything on hold and let other interesting opportunities pass for half a year or more just in case Google deems me worthy.
And strangely enough, "managers" who used to be good in their 20's and who have been only producing powerpoint-esque bullshit for the last 15 years are not very valuable assets, despite being overpaid, resulting in poor quality products.
The only market that appears to differ from this (based on advertised salaries) is the banking/finance sector. But despite the fact that they're not doing anything that the rest of the technology sector are doing (from a technology perspective), their incestuous hiring practices make it all but impossible to get in unless you know the right person or already specifically have banking/finance experience. So you could have 25 years of extremely relevant experience from other fields spread across various startups, small businesses and huge multibillion dollar corporations, have in depth experience writing platforms and APIs for leading corporations with highly scalable web facing platforms with all the latest technologies, have spent 5 years at some point in your past cobbling together antiquated technologies such as Access databases and Excel spreadsheets, just as many of these companies still are, but unless you've specifically got experience in the financial sector, they're not interested... despite their common claim that it's really hard to find good developers.
It's not hard to find good developers if you take your blinkers off and ask yourself what is it you're doing that's so special that you can't hire someone with all the right personality traits and technological experience but because of some arbitrary bias that they don't specifically have experience in your sector, they're unsuitable.
So that's my two biggest gripes about hiring practices - one specifically pertaining to hiring software developers in Europe, but the other equally applies in North America too.
Agism isn't nearly as evident as cronyism and incest.
PS: calling the USA America, that makes me smile, too!
The poster did not use the word "America" but "American". That is simply the correct demonym for the USA in the English language, and is used internationally. Alternatives have been proposed, like "US-American", but they have never caught on and have always been completely unidiomatic. Other languages do make this distinction, like "estadounidense" in Spanish. Perhaps usage of the term "americano" in Spanish could trigger your smirk of superiority, but not that of the English term "American".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_United_States_citizen...
United-Statesian? Usonian? Unisian? USian? Uessian? US-American?
It has nothing to do with an alleged superiority complex, and is just a matter of language.
"But why this term "America" has become representative as the name of these United States at home and abroad is past recall." –Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings 1894–1940, p. 100.
> United-Statesian? Usonian? Unisian? USian? Uessian? US-American?
Well, in Spanish-speaking countries (not just Central America) you could just use the term that already exists in Spanish to resolve this ambiguity (which is basically the same as your first, only derived from the Spanish for "United States" by Spanish rules): Estadounidense.
In a sense, what the Central Americans are getting offending over is a false cognate. And false cognates can often lead to these kinds of problems: if I referred to trousers as "pants" around Brits, I get yelled at for being a stupid American. There are countless examples of this. This is by no means a problem unique to Americans or unique to the English language. While travelers should be aware of local idioms and the potential for false cognates, they can't exactly be blamed for lacking perfect knowledge either.
All other English-speaking countries use the term "American" in this way. Note especially that Canadians share the same idioms, speaking of America and Americans (although they might favor using "the States" over "America"). Also note that Canadians colloquially use "North America" to mean the USA + Canada, leaving out Central American countries.
Just for the record, this doesn't shock me. While Americas are geologically two, I've always been taught about North, Central an South America from a geopolitical point of view.
Upon reread I see that I come of as a SJW Berk. I apologize; I just got reamed by my fellow gringos so much it is second nature.
You are correct; I don't know what the word should be, but I do feel we need one.
Citizens of the USA are Americans.
We're happy this bit of reality made you smile.
United States of Mexico -> Mexico
Dominion of Canada -> Canada (I think they dropped "Dominion of" some time ago, though)
Kingdom of the Netherlands -> Netherlands
Federal Republic of Germany -> Germany
It's a fairly common abbreviation style, and USA is the only country that has "America" in its name.
If the OP thinks that the USA is any more of a monoculture than Europe is, perhaps he should spend some time in Manhattan followed by some time in Luckenbach, Texas. :-)
I don't have enough information to comment on your example, but I suppose that in every small village on Earth you'll always find the progressive and the conservative guy, and you'll always find a different environment in a big city than in the countryside.
My comment was more to point out that in Europe each people still has his uniqueness. You know how Swiss people are proud of their neutrality, Finnish school system is (one of) the best in the world, Englishmen love their queen, Greeks invented democracy and Italians are immune to Stendhal Syndrome? Well, none of those sentence makes any sense if you substitute the national adjective with "European".
Europe being not a nation is not only a matter of traditions, but of everyday life as well. We don't share a television system, which would be anyway complicated by the multitude of languages. We don't follow political debates in other countries, and newspapers will report about foreign election only for a handful of states or when an extremist party wins. We have the football European Champions League final, but it's nowhere like what I heard about the Super Bowl, with stars and celebrities, because we don't share stars and celebrities.
Maybe this is just a case of "far away, thus homogeneous". For example, some time ago I was talking about south-Asian cuisine, when suddenly I found myself wondering how I could talk about a south-Asian cuisine. Does a south-Asian cuisine even exist? What would I do if I traveled to China and entered a "European" restaurant serving both pizza and haggis? I'd run away while screaming!
I have hired many people over the years, many worked out well. I have also rejected many candidates over the years. I am sure many of them would have worked out too, but I will never know. Believe me, when you need to hire someone you want to find the right person quickly. And often you know in the first few minutes if the candidate is a fit or not. Then to be polite and fair you spend the next 30-45 minutes even with the candidate you are certain you do not want. Think about the first 2 minutes, because that is where you lost it. Not in the code you wrote or the phone connection.
What interviews may lack in utility for predicting good performance they can potentially make-up for in determining cultural/supervisor-candidate fit. But this also requires the interviewer to 1) accurately represent the culture and 2) to not implicitly discriminate with things that might correlate with fit, which many things (age, religion, gender) might do. No simple ask there.
I think the primary value of interviews it that it makes the process seem more fair. Everyone had a chance to put their thumbprint on the experience, including the interviewee. In the absence of other selection measures (e.g., work samples) I understand its use, but if you have better tools then you should use those. For me, an interview's primary outcome question should really only be "Is this person completely unqualified or terribly unprofessional?" If the answer is "no", rely on the other indicators to make a decision.
Also I don't think my comment implies that outgoing / social people are bad at what they do.
I wouldn't think too hard about the correlation I'm trying to make. Really my point is that the skillset you need in order to "pass" an interview is far different skillset in many cases than what the actual job requires.
Same with politics. The irony is the skillset necessary to "win" an election is far from what is necessary to do a good job once you're elected.
EDIT: Also, I would clarify that the context of the original thread is about hiring a software engineer at Google. The interview(s) necessary for hiring for that position I imagine could not possibly be conducted in the proposed "2 minutes at the beginning of the interview" I was originally replying to.
I have no doubt that there are plenty of positions that an interview can be conducted in 2 minutes, but software engineer at Google I doubt is one of them.
I posit, interviews are unlikely candidates to truly separate the wheat from the chaff in these 2 distinct but probably not uncommon scenarios.
1) ambitious person with limited skills
2) highly skilled person with limited ambition
With the second person I imagine it's a different kind of challenge to try to uncover this kind of personality trait during an interview process.
But they still probably make a 95%-accurate assessment in those first couple minutes.
Could you share on past interview experiences when you decided a candidate was not a fit from those first 2 minutes?
The problem with most interviews is that they fallback to a confirmation bias thing.
http://history.nasa.gov/monograph14.pdf (see p. 17)
That said, google's recruiting process is horrible and robotic. Feel for the guy.
I work at Twilio, and we put a lot of effort into providing a hiring experience that removes as many biases as possible. The end result is a solid, diverse workforce that understands that we all come from different walks of life and have different employment expectations. Other companies, such as Stripe, also seem to have similar initiatives in their hiring practices.
It's a concern, but some of us are actively fighting it.
Getting my first job was hard and age was definitely an issue, no doubt about it. A guy I graduated with who was a year older than me at the time (mid 30s) was flat out told by one recruiter that he was too old for post-grad Microsoft-university (which is a 1 year paid internship focussing on MS development).
But his sites use Joomla, which is strange when he's supposedly offering and selling a better CMS of his own.
I'm surprised he got an interview.
Even ignoring all of the dates mentioned, his sites and his resume do not look like the work of somebody who has up-to-date software development knowledge.
And some are saying that their "front end" skills are bad - they don't have to be. I can whip up something better in a day just using the default Twitter Bootstrap template and not touching a line of CSS.
I must say I haven't seen it myself, so I can't judger.
There's going to be a bias in there related to at what point the company was growing the fastest.
The question is if there is a another bias - that of actual discrimination.
On the other side, I've only had very positive interactions with Google recruiting. When you have a company growing so fast in both relative and absolute numbers, you're likely to run into some issues.
In the broader sense, technical people have to stay relevant. I was recently helping a Phd data scientist try to get a new job. When I suggested that he learn Python to augment his SQL, he said he was too old to learn new tricks. After hearing that I new he wouldn't be of use in my firm, or many others.
The flip side is that the people who do stay relevant and have all the experience are enormously valuable. Someone who is programming in Python or Ruby on Rails that also had to learn Assembler and C will have enormous insights into performance and what's going on in the guts of the machine. Those types of folks can solve problems other don't even know how to frame. It's hard to find 21 year olds with such breadth.
1. A photo on your cv. Or it goes in the bin.
2. Birth date.
3. Marital status and children.
4. Every educational achievement documented officially since highschool.
5. Every working position with an official written reference, in deeply codified form, written mandatorily by your boss, who probably inspired you to want a new job in teh first place. The last company I left had a secret ten factor 5 level numeric rating system, which was then translated into the codified text by the personel department.
I've never understood why this isn't outright illegal. There's literally no reason for it but to discriminate.
At some point earlier in my career I sometimes did a hundred interviews in a week to hire a dozen people. To decide between different people, it was useful to have the pictures attached in application letters.
Of course, in addition it can be used to discriminate.
Those are also obvious things that allow discrimination, but I can't think of a reason why they would be of interest to my employeer.
EDIT: sorry this sounds a bit adversarial, but it was meant as a genuine question.
If the only thing that mattered was individual merit and experience, we could all just sell our work to businesses without a hiring agreement.
NYC shows that it's possible to do vastly better on those. Or at least not to brazenly laugh in the face of those laws.
I'm not sure whether the underlying cause is age discrimination, but clearly it's not a NYC/California issue so much as a company or industry issue.
E.g. the YC application always has directly asked for age. Try that in NYC.
In NYC tech is one of many. The importance is recognized, as it has created jobs while other industries are in decline (cough publishing), but there is no sense here that anyone feels the need to kowtow to the industry.
It would be pretty easy to discriminate on age/race/sex with that.
For what is worth, I've seen a decent number of >40 years old new hires while I was there. Not a huge number, but it's hard to tell what the right number would be; they didn't appear exceptional cases to me.
While the interviewing system at Google is far from perfect (to put it euphemistically), I've seen a very strong practical commitment against any kind of discrimination.
Just kidding :).
On a more serious note, most jobs have all kinds of biases. Army doesn't take older recruits, nor 50% of all recruits are not women/gay/whatever group is right now poplar to fight for. Or commodity traders - one of my ex-gf succeeded in this field, but the amount of macho sh*t she had to go through and still pops up almost daily is unbelievable. Also, some members of her current trading team, which are more on introvert side (yes, there are some traders like that) were asking their boss on private meetings how to handle a WOMAN as their colleague. Some are 50-something, and never worked with woman directly.
She just ain't crybaby like these pathetic people and actually works hard to prove herself in such an environment.
Millions of dollars have been spent as propaganda to spin what happened in order to push tort reform changes that minimize consumer rights. It seems to have worked on you.
Biases are generally acceptable in job hiring. You can refuse to hire someone due to a lack of experience.
However, it's illegal to have biases based on a small number of protected classes: sex, military service, religion, national origin, and a few others. The law does allow some exceptions. There can be a bona fide occupational reason. For example, a strip club is allowed to hire only women performers. Similarly, a church can require that ministers be members of the given faith. The Army's age restriction on recruits falls into this category.
So while it's true that nearly all jobs have biases, that's irrelevant for this discussion, because there is no bona fide occupational reason for age discrimination in hiring at Google.
Your last line incorporates victim blaming. You appear to be using name calling to chastise people who wish to exercise their legal rights.
There are lots of frivolous law suits out there. If you look into this one you will find that it was a legitimate case, and it wasn't her mouth that got burned. Your argument will be more valuable if it is based on facts.
I presume same dollar signs as some (anecdotal) lady who sued McDonald and won millions by burning her mouth with fresh coffee because it was... wait for it... hot.
http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/10/23/3568411/clovis-woman-74-...
Mickey D's sells at least 500M cups of coffee every day, and this was back in 2006[1]. Given that some high-nineties percentage of those people didn't manage to scald themselves, courts be damned (they're arbitrators of law, not correctness), Liebeck was an idiot. Anyone who puts hot and crushable containers of liquid between their legs isn't acting responsibly.
[1]http://www.franchise-hit.com/franchisors-news-wire/McDonalds...
PS: Other documents obtained from McDonald's showed that from 1982 to 1992 the company had received more than 700 reports of people burned by McDonald's coffee to varying degrees of severity, and had settled claims arising from scalding injuries for more than $500,000.[
700 people over 10 years (rough estimate of 1.8 trillion cups if we use the 500M number above) burning themselves isn't even statistically significant.
It sucks, hard, that this lady had to spend the last few years of her life in that kind of pain (skin grafts are no joke), but the idea that it's McD's fault is nuts.
The jury in the case did not find the injury to be entirely self-inflicted.
People on online, tech-related forums, IME, tend very often to have a much more exclusive view of responsibility than either the law or society at large.
Which probably shouldn't be surprising; its easy to see how exclusive views of responsibility and crisp if/then/else logic can easily appeal to the same aesthetic sense.
The principle at work is by selling something vastly more dangerous they were responsible for the extra damage due to increased temperature. In other words at a normal serving temperature she would have suffered but not nearly that much.
PS: The same thing applies in cases like a defective airbag. Yes, the manufacture is not responsible for causing the accident, but they are responsible for increase in damage due to a defect. Or more broadly MD was not responsible for that specific accident, but they know in general terms there would be accidents and they would be making those accidents worse.
How did this became a thing ? Do ppl need that data to be shoved in the face like that ?