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So if someone is a sub standard employee, either in their own output or in the team environment and their age could be a contributing factor are you unable to f

• jrockway 16y ago
  Admittedly, it's a fine line to walk. That's why we're letting the most experienced judges in the state sort it out.
• _delirium 16y ago
  He seems to be claiming that it was mainly his age, which would be less permissible. In particular, as far as terminating him goes (as opposed to merely changing him to a different role), the reason Google gave that they couldn't find him any future role in the company was that he was a bad "cultural fit" for the company, which is a lot more vague and questionable-sounding than saying he was a "substandard engineer" or anything more performance-oriented like that. Reid is more or less alleging that "not a cultural fit" is a euphemism for "old guy", and he claims he has some statistics to back that up, showing that Google fired old people disproportionately often.
  • nailer 16y ago
    > Google gave that they couldn't find him any future role in the company was that he was a bad "cultural fit" for the company, which is a lot more vague and questionable-sounding I don't think it's vague at all: Google has a culture where everyone codes, there are no architecture astronauts, no enterprise crapware, less emphasis on documentation and meetings and even user experience, more on Making Stuff. I'm not making any judgement call on that, merely saying that it's a culture many people wouldn't fit in to, in particular ex-government employees.
    • _delirium 16y ago
      I agree that's reasonable, but that does seem rather more specific than "cultural fit". Something like, "at Google, all the engineers code, and so-and-so wasn't willing to code" seems like a pretty air-tight, neutral reason to fire someone, but it doesn't seem like it's the reason Google gave here.
  • sliverstorm 16y ago
    > He seems to be claiming that it was mainly his age If the reasons he was let go were all typically legitimate reasons but also possibly directly due to age, would that be discrimination? I can't think of solid examples for programmers, but to use another field: Suppose a firefighter is let go because his age has robbed him of his ability to perform physically. Is this ageist?
    • _delirium 16y ago
      It's a complicated area, but I think generally the answer is that that's allowed, but with a fairly high bar for the employer to show that what they're testing really is a "bona fide occupational qualification". One of the important cases in the area is Dothard v. Rawlinson (1977), where the Supreme Court held that Alabama's height and weight requirements for prison guards, which disproportionately impacted women, were not justified, because there was no evidence that these height and weight cutoffs correlated strongly with prison safety: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dothard_v._Rawlinson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dothard_v._Rawlinson
    • roel_v 16y ago
      You can't discriminate on gender either, yet someone advertising for a prostitute (in itself legal in my country) can specifically request women and prevail in court, whereas someone advertising for an accountant will not. There needs to be an objectively justifiable reason, the modalities of which have been (to an extend) worked out in hundreds of courts cases over the years. In the firefighters case, I guess that by now most fire brigades have set limits and reached agreements with union and the legislation to sort these things out, as have other fields.
  • JBiserkov 16y ago
    "old guy" =?=> "not a cultural fit" There might be a correlation - older people may already have locally wrong opinions that are harder to change.