11 ms·

Google dealt setback in age bias case by judge interested in 'Googleyness'

65 points by belltaco 10y ago

mc32 10y ago
As a result of this, could companies be expected to have a workforce age profile reflective of the local area or national pool, as might be the case in other recruitment efforts? How would they do by seniors or those approaching retirement age and reflecting those proportions in their workforce. As the demographics change does a company's workforce have to change along with it, if so to what degree and with what allowable lag?
- bweitzman 10y ago
  One would hope that the age/gender/race/etc profile of a company would at least reflect the profile of the applicants.
  - mc32 10y ago
    I take issue with that. What if it's graduation time and a whole group of graduates without experience decide en masse to apply somewhere. Or lets say a group of retirees are given an assignment to liven up their lives and apply at places they would not normally consider. There are reasonable expectations.
  - skj 10y ago
    It's more complicated than that. Even given that there is no demographically inherent advantage (something I generally believe), the hiring process is only one of the last steps in a long pipeline that can be damaged earlier on to skew the ratios.
  - cobookman 10y ago
    I also take issue with that. Certain age/gender/race profiles tend to fair worse than others in the interview process. Think h1b visa abuse. For example males tend to have resume's which over qualify oneself vs females. Asians and Westerners also have these kind of differences. This causes the rate of resume to hire to be different for different demographics. Generally though interview feedback will state the facts and can be pulled up to back a companies actions. This is what needs to be judged.
ethbro 10y ago
I'm all for getting case law in the record for calling a spade a spade in situations like this. The US has laws against age and other discrimination. The 'More Perfect' podcast had a great episode about Batson, jury selection, and racially motivated peremptory challenge that speaks to the same points (though sadly, still unresolved in our justice system). See http://www.wnyc.org/story/object-anyway/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/object-anyway/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/supreme-court-black-jurors-death-penalty-georgia.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/supreme-court-black-jur... If the laws need changing then that's a discussion we should have. But you shouldn't be able to weasel around them by inventing a term and then equating it to things that are illegal.
eganist 10y ago
> The judge limited the class to people who had an in-person interview, which means that job applicants who only had phone interviews can't join the class. I feel (anecdotal only) that it's pretty easy to approximate age due e.g. to lexicon and potentially dialect, and that it's even easier to pick up on certain vocal changes in older candidates, so I can see the argument in favor of including phone interviews in the class. That said, the argument for restricting it to only people who passed the phone screens appears to be that the phone screen establishes an initial impression of qualification (skimmed from page 13 of the ruling; I could be entirely wrong and could've quoted an irrelevant passage, but I'd like to think this is accurate): > The proposed class would include an unknown number of “applicants” who demonstrate no plausible qualifications for the job. To establish a prima facie case of an ADEA violation, the plaintiff must show, among other things, that he was qualified for the position. https://www.scribd.com/document/326637833/Google-Age-Discrimination https://www.scribd.com/document/326637833/Google-Age-Discrim...
- mc32 10y ago
  In addition to age discrimination (telling apart) via lecicon choice, one can also listen for heavy breathing, lethargy, etc. and come to conclusions which could be counter to proscribed hiring practices.
  - eganist 10y ago
    I'd argue that these could also be used to illegally discriminate against potentially disabled (including invisibly disabled) candidates.
- dfrey 10y ago
  You can usually tell from a roughly how old a person is just from reading their resume. If they list themselves as a team lead in 1990, then you can be pretty sure that they are at least 50. I would guess that the judge wants to limit to people who had in-person interview because that shows that they were at least close to getting the job. If you have gotten past the phone interview stage then you have already demonstrated basic competence. If you're trying to fill a junior position, then you don't want to hire someone who has been working as a chief architect for the last 10 years. It's not about their age. It's about the fact that they are way overqualified and will probably quit as soon as they can find something that they are qualified for.
diyseguy 10y ago
Perhaps explains why Sergey has been dumping stock lately.
- abz10 10y ago
  I'd expect it's because ad growth is disappointing and paid search manipulation isn't the money earner they hoped for.
  - abz10 10y ago
    Ok down-voters. I left the search industry over my refusal to participate in search manipulation. So which part are you down-voting. The idea that it exists? or do you think I'm some alt-right conspiracy nut? I'd actually like to know. I don't care about points but I'm getting the message that I belong on HN and I'm perfectly happy to quit on the assumption that HN punishes dissent.
    - diyseguy 10y ago
      I believe we are getting downvoted because Google does a lot of perception management, esp in places like this. See also the Asch Effect.
      - abz10 10y ago
        Thanks for letting me know. That makes sense. I'd actually love work with HN to flush out perception management behaviours.
        diyseguy 10y ago
        Not hard to flush out. Reasonable comment pounded into oblivion because it mentions X Co. Net effect: people afraid to speak ill of X Co.
    - Buge 10y ago
      I didn't downvote. But I don't believe google does paid search manipulation. The only time I've heard google accused of that was the Hillary and Trump liar autocomplete thing, which was completely false. Of course there are people manipulating search results from the outside, SEO is a job. But are you saying you have evidence that google is doing manipulation, or just that other companies do it?
MrTonyD 10y ago
I'd really like to see problems like this addressed in another way. I'd like to see that people have other alternatives - so that being turned down for a job isn't a life destroying experience. I think of "corporativism" - where multiple interest groups are involved in creating policies. In Scandinavia they decided to allow companies to "fire at will" in exchange for free education and a good social safety net. But I think that system can be much improved, with much better alternatives.
- convolvatron 10y ago
  thats a great trade. trying to address these issues after the fact by establishing protected classes, affirmative action, hiring diversity programs and punitive law suits is a losing game for so many reasons. since the value of people's hands and backs is rapidly decreasing, we need a much better framework for harvesting the important things like creativity from the working population.
kabdib 10y ago
Fallout from this: Companies will go to great lengths to avoid contact with people who submit resumes that imply they are old. No phone screens, no responses. It's going to be wintertime for folks in their late 30s now.
- evgen 10y ago
  That would be great! Insta-lawsuit. Age is a protected class in the US, and if it is discovered that your company did something like this you are going to be paying out bigtime.
  - illumin8 10y ago
    But, how would you ever know you were discriminated against? They never called you because your resume was filtered out before the initial contact.
    - gcp 10y ago
      Submit equal resumes that only differ in age. If a significant difference in responses exists, you sue. There are several organizations that are doing this in my country, but for immigrants.
      - massysett 10y ago
        That's very difficult to do for age. If one applicant is 20 years older, he is expected to have longer work experience; if his work experience is too short, it's a red flag. Of course they still might not hire the more experienced person because she is "overqualified".
        gcp 10y ago
        You can fiddle and have them start their career in another field for example.
        evgen 10y ago
wyldfire 10y ago
Google accepts such a terribly small slice of applicants that it's easy for any engineer in the top 0.75% of overall engineers to think they're talented and deserving but come to find out they're just not in the top 0.5%. That distinction can be really hard to see and easy to attribute to ageism. That said, I suppose there could be some actual ageism going on too. > The lawsuit claimed the median age at Google was 29, based on data collected by Payscale, which the judge cited in the ruling. Article also said that Google's going to guesstimate ages based on graduation dates in order to provide evidence of applicant ages. But knowing the median age of applicants is critical. It's a shame they included the median age of employees without including the median age of applicants in the article. "29" might match perfectly with the applicant pool.
- CGamesPlay 10y ago
  The natural way to test this would be to see if the age distribution or applicants matches the age distribution of hires. If so, probably not ageism. If not, how could one argue that it's still not ageism? This is an honest question, I think I can imagine some scenarios where unequal age distribution != age discrimination, but I'd like to hear others thoughts.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > The natural way to test this would be to see if the age distribution or applicants matches the age distribution of hires. If so, probably not ageism. If not, how could one argue that it's still not ageism? It could quite easily not be ageism if the distribution of the skills actually sought and relevant to the job were not equally distributed by age within the applicant pool. Providing direct evidence of this in court may be difficult (or not, depending on how Google documents its interviews.) (And, really, the scenario where the age distribution matches because of age discrimination is also possible, for the same reason.)
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I expect that you could have several biases: - Preference for new technologies or languages will favor people who were recently trained or recently spent a period training, which will tend to be people younger in their careers. Can test for this bias versus ageism by comparing pairs of candidates with similar learned technologies, and seeing just their outcomes. (May have to control for confounding factors, though.) - Preference for candidates who are willing to accept more intrusive or abusive working conditions. This will tend to skew towards people with less work experience and fewer other commitments in life, which again would bias towards younger candidates. Again, you could test for this versus ageism, but the pairings of matched candidates becomes harder because it depends on psychological profiles and life circumstances. - Google has a bona fide business reason to prefer recent graduates (ie, even if this is agist, it might still be legal), because there's a higher variability in their career engineering RoI (lifetime value generated over lifetime cost to employ) versus established engineers, and Google's main mechanism of value creation is people farming -- getting high returns on engineers, which requires the underlying variability of recent graduates to generate high returns. It's similar to CDOs on mortgages: you can generate a higher return by increasing the variability of the underlying asset and decreasing the risk of systemic failure. Google just does that with engineering talent. This is testable versus ageism by pairing people based on recent graduation, or a score of outcome variability, and see if Google is preferring highly variable people. I would expect that the reality is a combination of these, often enacted by different departments: HR prefers the abusable hires; technical interviewers prefer the new technologies and languages; both prefer the variability, as part of a broader corporate strategy, and because it provides benefits to each department individually. However, with several legitimate business decisions each giving a slight bias towards younger candidates, you can get a situation with a heavy hiring bias against older candidates without any agist policy in place (or any agist bias on the part of hiring manager or interviewers), simply because lots of other developmental processes correlate highly with the process of aging.
Stratoscope 10y ago
In addition to people who made it through a phone screen and got an in-person interview, there are those of us who simply never applied after hearing so many stories about Google's style of interviewing and their reputation of favoring young CS grads. I worked as a contractor for Google from 2008 through 2013 (along with other clients), building election results and voter information maps for their Maps and News teams. My maps ran on google.com and were syndicated out to a number of news sites. How I got in was an odd fluke: I'd been active on the Maps API mailing list answering people's questions, and a couple of weeks before the 2008 Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, Google realized that the company they'd hired to build those maps wasn't going to deliver, so they asked if I could jump in and build something in a hurry that worked. The first year I did the whole thing myself: GIS processing to turn geographic boundary files into usable form, back-end processing to gather vote data from AP and other sources, and the front-end UI design and map development. Among other things, I developed a way to display polygons on a map many times faster than the Maps API itself. A couple of the maps blew up in a spectacular way (I managed to DDOS Google Code on Super Tuesday 2008!), but mostly they were pretty successful with millions of viewers. After that a couple of Google developers handled the back-end vote processing and I took care of the GIS and front-end work, both for the US and a number of international election maps. For some of the international maps, local teams worked with my front-end code to enhance it for their needs. It was a pretty good run and Google seemed very pleased with my work. Eventually a great team in their DC office took over the map development, and I started to think about what to do next. One obvious idea, of course, was to apply for a job at Google! After all, I'd already worked for them rather successfully for five years. But I didn't even apply. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part. I just had a feeling that my history of developing successful products for Google wouldn't count for much - that instead I'd get logic puzzles, quizzes about algorithmic minutiae and have to code a red-black tree on the spot on a whiteboard - all things that favor recent CS grads. Plus, I'd just turned 61! I wonder how many other people there are like me, experienced developers with demonstrated ability, who never applied because of Google's interview practices (or the rumors about them)? FWIW, I'm still actively programming, getting into something new every year or two - right now it's an odd mix of VR and Microsoft Office development - and definitely looking for the next great opportunity. Anyone who wants a multitalented developer and doesn't care how old I am, email is in my profile. :-)
gxs 10y ago
I really don't know how I feel about the government legislating stuff like this. Sure, I understand all the -isms of the world make it so that we can't have nice things. But what if a business figures out that a certain demographic, young or old, fits their business better? That over the course of 10+ years it leads to drastic differences in value creation? Are we really saying, ignore that, and hire for diversity anyway? It just always feels like we're running against the wind. I don't know what the solution is but there has got to be a better way, to sound cliche at 9:55AM.
- omginternets 10y ago
  I share your sentiment. *ism is undoubtedly a bad thing, but legislating against these things feels like a particularly slippery slope. What next: sue modeling agencies for hiring young, attractive people?
  - gxs 10y ago
    Yeah - don't understand the downvotes, is what it is I guess.
DocSavage 10y ago
Surprised there was no mention of the lawsuit by Brian Reid against Google: http://abusergoestowork.com/tag/reid-v-google/ http://abusergoestowork.com/tag/reid-v-google/ He was, by far, the best prof I've ever had. The Google experience was so distasteful to him he doesn't even list that employment on his resume.
socrates1998 10y ago
Isn't it pretty easy to tell the age of someone by their resume? I mean, if they put the year they graduated college, that means they were 22 or close to that, right? I know that's a generalization, but given Google's data on people, I think it would insanely simple for them to discriminate based on age even if you tried to hide it from them. I don't know, clearly, but I would guess Google and other tech companies do this because it's cheaper to hire young people, right?
- Buge 10y ago
  Why would it be cheaper to hire young people? Google doesn't give a pension.
  - greenyoda 10y ago
    - It's easier to convince young people to accept lower salaries and work long hours (e.g., if they have no family to support or spend time with). - It's more expensive to buy health insurance for an older pool of employees. - Young people are probably less likely to be dissatisfied with cheap work accommodations like open-plan offices. On the other hand, there are increased efficiencies associated with older employees: - People earlier in their career might have significantly higher job-turnover rates. - Older employees have more work experience, and can prevent lots of problems before they happen. - Older employees have had the time to become better at what they do. I don't think the best developers reach their peak skills after only working for 5 years.[1] Learning from your mistakes takes time. (I'm a developer in my 50s, and I work with lots of older developers who are good at what they do.) [1] See, for example, Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years": https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html
    - drawkbox 10y ago
      > It's more expensive to buy health insurance for an older pool of employees. Until we disconnect health insurance from employment like everywhere else in the world, ageism will be a problem in every industry. We don't get auto, life, home or any other insurance from employment, why the most important and one that contributes to ageism?

65 points by belltaco 10y ago

mc32 10y ago

As a result of this, could companies be expected to have a workforce age profile reflective of the local area or national pool, as might be the case in other recruitment efforts? How would they do by seniors or those approaching retirement age and reflecting those proportions in their workforce. As the demographics change does a company's workforce have to change along with it, if so to what degree and with what allowable lag?

bweitzman 10y ago
One would hope that the age/gender/race/etc profile of a company would at least reflect the profile of the applicants.
- mc32 10y ago
  I take issue with that. What if it's graduation time and a whole group of graduates without experience decide en masse to apply somewhere. Or lets say a group of retirees are given an assignment to liven up their lives and apply at places they would not normally consider. There are reasonable expectations.
- skj 10y ago
  It's more complicated than that. Even given that there is no demographically inherent advantage (something I generally believe), the hiring process is only one of the last steps in a long pipeline that can be damaged earlier on to skew the ratios.
- cobookman 10y ago
  I also take issue with that. Certain age/gender/race profiles tend to fair worse than others in the interview process. Think h1b visa abuse. For example males tend to have resume's which over qualify oneself vs females. Asians and Westerners also have these kind of differences. This causes the rate of resume to hire to be different for different demographics. Generally though interview feedback will state the facts and can be pulled up to back a companies actions. This is what needs to be judged.

ethbro 10y ago

I'm all for getting case law in the record for calling a spade a spade in situations like this. The US has laws against age and other discrimination. The 'More Perfect' podcast had a great episode about Batson, jury selection, and racially motivated peremptory challenge that speaks to the same points (though sadly, still unresolved in our justice system). See http://www.wnyc.org/story/object-anyway/ http://www.wnyc.org/story/object-anyway/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batson_v._Kentucky http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/supreme-court-black-jurors-death-penalty-georgia.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/supreme-court-black-jur... If the laws need changing then that's a discussion we should have. But you shouldn't be able to weasel around them by inventing a term and then equating it to things that are illegal.

eganist 10y ago

> The judge limited the class to people who had an in-person interview, which means that job applicants who only had phone interviews can't join the class. I feel (anecdotal only) that it's pretty easy to approximate age due e.g. to lexicon and potentially dialect, and that it's even easier to pick up on certain vocal changes in older candidates, so I can see the argument in favor of including phone interviews in the class. That said, the argument for restricting it to only people who passed the phone screens appears to be that the phone screen establishes an initial impression of qualification (skimmed from page 13 of the ruling; I could be entirely wrong and could've quoted an irrelevant passage, but I'd like to think this is accurate): > The proposed class would include an unknown number of “applicants” who demonstrate no plausible qualifications for the job. To establish a prima facie case of an ADEA violation, the plaintiff must show, among other things, that he was qualified for the position. https://www.scribd.com/document/326637833/Google-Age-Discrimination https://www.scribd.com/document/326637833/Google-Age-Discrim...

mc32 10y ago
In addition to age discrimination (telling apart) via lecicon choice, one can also listen for heavy breathing, lethargy, etc. and come to conclusions which could be counter to proscribed hiring practices.
- eganist 10y ago
  I'd argue that these could also be used to illegally discriminate against potentially disabled (including invisibly disabled) candidates.
dfrey 10y ago
You can usually tell from a roughly how old a person is just from reading their resume. If they list themselves as a team lead in 1990, then you can be pretty sure that they are at least 50. I would guess that the judge wants to limit to people who had in-person interview because that shows that they were at least close to getting the job. If you have gotten past the phone interview stage then you have already demonstrated basic competence. If you're trying to fill a junior position, then you don't want to hire someone who has been working as a chief architect for the last 10 years. It's not about their age. It's about the fact that they are way overqualified and will probably quit as soon as they can find something that they are qualified for.

diyseguy 10y ago

Perhaps explains why Sergey has been dumping stock lately.

abz10 10y ago
I'd expect it's because ad growth is disappointing and paid search manipulation isn't the money earner they hoped for.
- abz10 10y ago
  Ok down-voters. I left the search industry over my refusal to participate in search manipulation. So which part are you down-voting. The idea that it exists? or do you think I'm some alt-right conspiracy nut? I'd actually like to know. I don't care about points but I'm getting the message that I belong on HN and I'm perfectly happy to quit on the assumption that HN punishes dissent.
  - diyseguy 10y ago
    I believe we are getting downvoted because Google does a lot of perception management, esp in places like this. See also the Asch Effect.
    - abz10 10y ago
      Thanks for letting me know. That makes sense. I'd actually love work with HN to flush out perception management behaviours.
      - diyseguy 10y ago
        Not hard to flush out. Reasonable comment pounded into oblivion because it mentions X Co. Net effect: people afraid to speak ill of X Co.
  - Buge 10y ago
    I didn't downvote. But I don't believe google does paid search manipulation. The only time I've heard google accused of that was the Hillary and Trump liar autocomplete thing, which was completely false. Of course there are people manipulating search results from the outside, SEO is a job. But are you saying you have evidence that google is doing manipulation, or just that other companies do it?

MrTonyD 10y ago

I'd really like to see problems like this addressed in another way. I'd like to see that people have other alternatives - so that being turned down for a job isn't a life destroying experience. I think of "corporativism" - where multiple interest groups are involved in creating policies. In Scandinavia they decided to allow companies to "fire at will" in exchange for free education and a good social safety net. But I think that system can be much improved, with much better alternatives.

convolvatron 10y ago
thats a great trade. trying to address these issues after the fact by establishing protected classes, affirmative action, hiring diversity programs and punitive law suits is a losing game for so many reasons. since the value of people's hands and backs is rapidly decreasing, we need a much better framework for harvesting the important things like creativity from the working population.

kabdib 10y ago

Fallout from this: Companies will go to great lengths to avoid contact with people who submit resumes that imply they are old. No phone screens, no responses. It's going to be wintertime for folks in their late 30s now.

evgen 10y ago
That would be great! Insta-lawsuit. Age is a protected class in the US, and if it is discovered that your company did something like this you are going to be paying out bigtime.
- illumin8 10y ago
  But, how would you ever know you were discriminated against? They never called you because your resume was filtered out before the initial contact.
  - gcp 10y ago
    Submit equal resumes that only differ in age. If a significant difference in responses exists, you sue. There are several organizations that are doing this in my country, but for immigrants.
    - massysett 10y ago
      That's very difficult to do for age. If one applicant is 20 years older, he is expected to have longer work experience; if his work experience is too short, it's a red flag. Of course they still might not hire the more experienced person because she is "overqualified".
      - gcp 10y ago
        You can fiddle and have them start their career in another field for example.
      - evgen 10y ago

wyldfire 10y ago

Google accepts such a terribly small slice of applicants that it's easy for any engineer in the top 0.75% of overall engineers to think they're talented and deserving but come to find out they're just not in the top 0.5%. That distinction can be really hard to see and easy to attribute to ageism. That said, I suppose there could be some actual ageism going on too. > The lawsuit claimed the median age at Google was 29, based on data collected by Payscale, which the judge cited in the ruling. Article also said that Google's going to guesstimate ages based on graduation dates in order to provide evidence of applicant ages. But knowing the median age of applicants is critical. It's a shame they included the median age of employees without including the median age of applicants in the article. "29" might match perfectly with the applicant pool.

CGamesPlay 10y ago
The natural way to test this would be to see if the age distribution or applicants matches the age distribution of hires. If so, probably not ageism. If not, how could one argue that it's still not ageism? This is an honest question, I think I can imagine some scenarios where unequal age distribution != age discrimination, but I'd like to hear others thoughts.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > The natural way to test this would be to see if the age distribution or applicants matches the age distribution of hires. If so, probably not ageism. If not, how could one argue that it's still not ageism? It could quite easily not be ageism if the distribution of the skills actually sought and relevant to the job were not equally distributed by age within the applicant pool. Providing direct evidence of this in court may be difficult (or not, depending on how Google documents its interviews.) (And, really, the scenario where the age distribution matches because of age discrimination is also possible, for the same reason.)
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  I expect that you could have several biases: - Preference for new technologies or languages will favor people who were recently trained or recently spent a period training, which will tend to be people younger in their careers. Can test for this bias versus ageism by comparing pairs of candidates with similar learned technologies, and seeing just their outcomes. (May have to control for confounding factors, though.) - Preference for candidates who are willing to accept more intrusive or abusive working conditions. This will tend to skew towards people with less work experience and fewer other commitments in life, which again would bias towards younger candidates. Again, you could test for this versus ageism, but the pairings of matched candidates becomes harder because it depends on psychological profiles and life circumstances. - Google has a bona fide business reason to prefer recent graduates (ie, even if this is agist, it might still be legal), because there's a higher variability in their career engineering RoI (lifetime value generated over lifetime cost to employ) versus established engineers, and Google's main mechanism of value creation is people farming -- getting high returns on engineers, which requires the underlying variability of recent graduates to generate high returns. It's similar to CDOs on mortgages: you can generate a higher return by increasing the variability of the underlying asset and decreasing the risk of systemic failure. Google just does that with engineering talent. This is testable versus ageism by pairing people based on recent graduation, or a score of outcome variability, and see if Google is preferring highly variable people. I would expect that the reality is a combination of these, often enacted by different departments: HR prefers the abusable hires; technical interviewers prefer the new technologies and languages; both prefer the variability, as part of a broader corporate strategy, and because it provides benefits to each department individually. However, with several legitimate business decisions each giving a slight bias towards younger candidates, you can get a situation with a heavy hiring bias against older candidates without any agist policy in place (or any agist bias on the part of hiring manager or interviewers), simply because lots of other developmental processes correlate highly with the process of aging.

Stratoscope 10y ago

In addition to people who made it through a phone screen and got an in-person interview, there are those of us who simply never applied after hearing so many stories about Google's style of interviewing and their reputation of favoring young CS grads. I worked as a contractor for Google from 2008 through 2013 (along with other clients), building election results and voter information maps for their Maps and News teams. My maps ran on google.com and were syndicated out to a number of news sites. How I got in was an odd fluke: I'd been active on the Maps API mailing list answering people's questions, and a couple of weeks before the 2008 Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary, Google realized that the company they'd hired to build those maps wasn't going to deliver, so they asked if I could jump in and build something in a hurry that worked. The first year I did the whole thing myself: GIS processing to turn geographic boundary files into usable form, back-end processing to gather vote data from AP and other sources, and the front-end UI design and map development. Among other things, I developed a way to display polygons on a map many times faster than the Maps API itself. A couple of the maps blew up in a spectacular way (I managed to DDOS Google Code on Super Tuesday 2008!), but mostly they were pretty successful with millions of viewers. After that a couple of Google developers handled the back-end vote processing and I took care of the GIS and front-end work, both for the US and a number of international election maps. For some of the international maps, local teams worked with my front-end code to enhance it for their needs. It was a pretty good run and Google seemed very pleased with my work. Eventually a great team in their DC office took over the map development, and I started to think about what to do next. One obvious idea, of course, was to apply for a job at Google! After all, I'd already worked for them rather successfully for five years. But I didn't even apply. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part. I just had a feeling that my history of developing successful products for Google wouldn't count for much - that instead I'd get logic puzzles, quizzes about algorithmic minutiae and have to code a red-black tree on the spot on a whiteboard - all things that favor recent CS grads. Plus, I'd just turned 61! I wonder how many other people there are like me, experienced developers with demonstrated ability, who never applied because of Google's interview practices (or the rumors about them)? FWIW, I'm still actively programming, getting into something new every year or two - right now it's an odd mix of VR and Microsoft Office development - and definitely looking for the next great opportunity. Anyone who wants a multitalented developer and doesn't care how old I am, email is in my profile. :-)

gxs 10y ago

I really don't know how I feel about the government legislating stuff like this. Sure, I understand all the -isms of the world make it so that we can't have nice things. But what if a business figures out that a certain demographic, young or old, fits their business better? That over the course of 10+ years it leads to drastic differences in value creation? Are we really saying, ignore that, and hire for diversity anyway? It just always feels like we're running against the wind. I don't know what the solution is but there has got to be a better way, to sound cliche at 9:55AM.

omginternets 10y ago
I share your sentiment. *ism is undoubtedly a bad thing, but legislating against these things feels like a particularly slippery slope. What next: sue modeling agencies for hiring young, attractive people?
- gxs 10y ago
  Yeah - don't understand the downvotes, is what it is I guess.

DocSavage 10y ago

Surprised there was no mention of the lawsuit by Brian Reid against Google: http://abusergoestowork.com/tag/reid-v-google/ http://abusergoestowork.com/tag/reid-v-google/ He was, by far, the best prof I've ever had. The Google experience was so distasteful to him he doesn't even list that employment on his resume.

socrates1998 10y ago

Isn't it pretty easy to tell the age of someone by their resume? I mean, if they put the year they graduated college, that means they were 22 or close to that, right? I know that's a generalization, but given Google's data on people, I think it would insanely simple for them to discriminate based on age even if you tried to hide it from them. I don't know, clearly, but I would guess Google and other tech companies do this because it's cheaper to hire young people, right?

Buge 10y ago
Why would it be cheaper to hire young people? Google doesn't give a pension.
- greenyoda 10y ago
  - It's easier to convince young people to accept lower salaries and work long hours (e.g., if they have no family to support or spend time with). - It's more expensive to buy health insurance for an older pool of employees. - Young people are probably less likely to be dissatisfied with cheap work accommodations like open-plan offices. On the other hand, there are increased efficiencies associated with older employees: - People earlier in their career might have significantly higher job-turnover rates. - Older employees have more work experience, and can prevent lots of problems before they happen. - Older employees have had the time to become better at what they do. I don't think the best developers reach their peak skills after only working for 5 years.[1] Learning from your mistakes takes time. (I'm a developer in my 50s, and I work with lots of older developers who are good at what they do.) [1] See, for example, Peter Norvig's "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years": https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html
  - drawkbox 10y ago
    > It's more expensive to buy health insurance for an older pool of employees. Until we disconnect health insurance from employment like everywhere else in the world, ageism will be a problem in every industry. We don't get auto, life, home or any other insurance from employment, why the most important and one that contributes to ageism?