6 ms·

There's not a lot of detail about the actual case. But to me based on what's there, it sounds like a recruiter reached out and told him "you would be a great ca

There's not a lot of detail about the actual case. But to me based on what's there, it sounds like a recruiter reached out and told him "you would be a great candidate to come work at Google", which is kind of what recruiters always say. 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.

lqdc13 11y ago
Definitely agree. 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...
mikekchar 11y ago
I have to agree with you. Even if they said that the person looks like a great candidate, failing a telephone interview is not necessarily a sign of age discrimination. We once had a guy who looked absolutely fabulous on paper, and was older than me (and I'm pushing 50 ;-) ). To be honest, I was incredibly excited to get the opportunity to work with someone who had more experience than me -- especially with the CV that he had. I'm the oldest person on our team and having someone else who had been there and done that was really enticing. But the phone interview just didn't go well enough. I still kind of regret not calling him in for a face-2-face, but we already had a full plate of people who's phone interview did go well. Sometimes that's just the way it works out. I've screwed up interviews in the past too. One can't very well overlook a bad interview because the candidate is older. That would also be age discrimination.
- T-hawk 11y ago
  > One can't very well overlook a bad interview because the candidate is older. That would also be age discrimination. 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 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.
  - infamouscow 11y ago
    What I find interesting is that you must be at least 35 years old to hold the office of POTUS, which is age discrimination in the other direction.
    - cauterized 11y ago
      When was the last time we had a seriously-regarded candidate between 35 and 40, though, let alone under 35? It seems like the field self-selects and voters also select for candidates with a high degree of experience in politics, anyway.
      - infamouscow 11y ago
        Wikipedia has a good section about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy#Controversies
      - mehrdada 11y ago
        > voters also select for candidates with a high degree of experience in politics, anyway 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.
frostmatthew 11y ago
> Then he got sent to someone else (someone technical?) for a phone screen, and they decided he wasn't a great fit. 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/median-age-at-google-is-29-says-age-discrimination-lawsuit.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2914233/it-careers/medi...
- kelseyfrancis 11y ago
  > the interviewer required Heath "to read the program coding over the phone." Yeah, if that actually happened, Google should fire the interviewer. How incredibly absurd.
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is common (the same happened to me).
  - freeformthought 11y ago
    I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the course. They didn't tell me the interview date and time until the day before, and despite having to rearrange my schedule on short notice, they couldn't have the courtesy of being on time. 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.
michaelochurch 11y ago
I worked at Google and I'm not a fan of the place, but I never felt like it had a strong culture of ageism. That said, I wasn't there for long and I didn't see much. Also, I was in the NYC office and ageism seems to be a California thing. If you had a good manager and team, age didn't seem to matter. 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.
- tracker1 11y ago
  Having been on the screening side and candidate side... it's rough either way. I just turned 40, and see certain biases even from myself, and tend to think that a lot of developers by their mid 30's simply are less inclined to use or keep up with newer tools. I see the same "Enterprise" patterns used over and over again, because that's the way it is done not because it's even a good fit. And this is from someone in that age group... so I can definitely understand it. 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.

lqdc13 11y ago

Definitely agree. 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...

mikekchar 11y ago

I have to agree with you. Even if they said that the person looks like a great candidate, failing a telephone interview is not necessarily a sign of age discrimination. We once had a guy who looked absolutely fabulous on paper, and was older than me (and I'm pushing 50 ;-) ). To be honest, I was incredibly excited to get the opportunity to work with someone who had more experience than me -- especially with the CV that he had. I'm the oldest person on our team and having someone else who had been there and done that was really enticing. But the phone interview just didn't go well enough. I still kind of regret not calling him in for a face-2-face, but we already had a full plate of people who's phone interview did go well. Sometimes that's just the way it works out. I've screwed up interviews in the past too. One can't very well overlook a bad interview because the candidate is older. That would also be age discrimination.

T-hawk 11y ago
> One can't very well overlook a bad interview because the candidate is older. That would also be age discrimination. 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 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.
- infamouscow 11y ago
  What I find interesting is that you must be at least 35 years old to hold the office of POTUS, which is age discrimination in the other direction.
  - cauterized 11y ago
    When was the last time we had a seriously-regarded candidate between 35 and 40, though, let alone under 35? It seems like the field self-selects and voters also select for candidates with a high degree of experience in politics, anyway.
    - infamouscow 11y ago
      Wikipedia has a good section about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy#Controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_candidacy#Controversies
    - mehrdada 11y ago
      > voters also select for candidates with a high degree of experience in politics, anyway 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.

frostmatthew 11y ago

> Then he got sent to someone else (someone technical?) for a phone screen, and they decided he wasn't a great fit. 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/median-age-at-google-is-29-says-age-discrimination-lawsuit.html http://www.computerworld.com/article/2914233/it-careers/medi...

kelseyfrancis 11y ago
> the interviewer required Heath "to read the program coding over the phone." Yeah, if that actually happened, Google should fire the interviewer. How incredibly absurd.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is common (the same happened to me).
- freeformthought 11y ago
  I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the course. They didn't tell me the interview date and time until the day before, and despite having to rearrange my schedule on short notice, they couldn't have the courtesy of being on time. 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.

michaelochurch 11y ago

I worked at Google and I'm not a fan of the place, but I never felt like it had a strong culture of ageism. That said, I wasn't there for long and I didn't see much. Also, I was in the NYC office and ageism seems to be a California thing. If you had a good manager and team, age didn't seem to matter. 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.

tracker1 11y ago
Having been on the screening side and candidate side... it's rough either way. I just turned 40, and see certain biases even from myself, and tend to think that a lot of developers by their mid 30's simply are less inclined to use or keep up with newer tools. I see the same "Enterprise" patterns used over and over again, because that's the way it is done not because it's even a good fit. And this is from someone in that age group... so I can definitely understand it. 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.