
Google Sued by Job Candidate for Age Discrimination - molmalo
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/04/23/google-sued-by-job-candidate-for-age-discrimination/
======
grellas
This case has nothing really to do with the claim of the named plaintiff. If
being brushed off after a brief interview, etc. and similar skimpy items were
the criteria for filing a claim for age discrimination, the courts could be
loaded with such claims. There is basically zero evidence from the interaction
noted in the article to make for a sustainable claim of this type.

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.

------
csbrooks
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.

~~~
frostmatthew
> 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/medi...](http://www.computerworld.com/article/2914233/it-
careers/median-age-at-google-is-29-says-age-discrimination-lawsuit.html)

~~~
kelseyfrancis
> 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.

~~~
freeformthought
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.

~~~
egli
> I have interviewed twice at Google now and it seems pretty par for the
> course.

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.

~~~
JesseAldridge
I second this. I just finished interviewing on-site at Google. The phone
screen was fine -- I was given a link to a Google Doc ahead of time. Audio
quality was fine and the interviewer was personable. I actually found the on-
site interviewers to be significantly nicer than other places I've interviewed
at. I mentioned this to one of them and he said that all interviwers are
required to go through special training. This was on the main Mountain View
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...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Google-Interview-
Questions-E9079.htm)

------
CodeSheikh
We had recently interviewed a female candidate for a Lead engineering role at
our company. What impressed us about her resume was that she was mentioned as
co-inventor in at least 11 patents while working for IBM, various SW
"Architecture" projects yada yada. During the interview she could not explain
the basics of database queries processing before we could even asked her how
to write a simple statement that prints out the dupes.

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.

~~~
wyclif
I agree with this comment and there's a lot of truth to this observation,
except for one tiny nitpick: "buddy, you're out of market."

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.

~~~
nitrogen
C++ is _drastically_ different today from 10-15 years ago. Sure, so is
Javascript, but C++ as a language and as an ecosystem encompasses vastly more
concepts and operations than Javascript, and the language itself seems to add
complexity at a much greater rate.

~~~
oconnore
There are new features in both, sure, but "drastically different" seems to
imply that someone proficient in the C++ or Javascript of 10-15 years ago
would take more than 2 weeks to get up to speed. I think that's unlikely.

"Oh, the compiler does that automatically now!" is not such a steep learning
curve.

~~~
nitrogen
I know old-school C++ with templates. I think it would take me more than two
weeks to get up to my current level of Ruby proficiency due to all the changes
in the STL, Boost, auto pointers, lambdas, etc.

------
fit2rule
Age discrimination is definitely an issue in this industry. I encourage all
the <40's to consider their position towards their elder peers in light of
just how quickly 10 - 15 years can fly by when you spend a majority of it in
front of a screen ..

~~~
M8
Could you please recommend a line of actual real private-sector salaried work
where time doesn't fly? Or is it that recent generations are entitled to some
better fate than previous ones?

~~~
smtddr
_> >Or is it that recent generations are entitled to some better fate than
previous ones?_

We should all be striving to make our children's lives & the world they'll
inherit better than our own.

~~~
fit2rule
"We should all work hard while we still can and make sure our parents are
taken care of.."

It goes around and around. When you're older you'll know. Only the young
understand.

------
math
For software engineers at least, I think the Google interview process would
naturally select younger people. You need to have a pretty good grip on
algorithms / ability to do programming competition like problems and in my
experience at least you're not frequently practicing a lot of the required
knowledge in real world software dev roles. You get rusty. By comparison, this
is fresh in the minds of people just out of university. Also, I think younger
people are more open to doing the required prep. I've heard many an older
developers complain that they think their time is better spent learning /
doing other things (which have more immediate real-world benefit).

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.

~~~
ChristianGeek
Didn't Google admit recently that there was not a strong correlation between
how well a developer did on their interview questions and how well they
performed within the company?

~~~
kagamine
Considering how many google products have failed in the past and are how
divided users are on the existing ones I would question whether google's
culture is worth anything at all.

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.

~~~
diminoten
> I would question whether google's culture is worth anything at all.

Uh, how about $385.46Bn?

~~~
tedunangst
You think Google's products and assets are worth zero?

------
vvpan
Dunno about Google, but in the past couple of companies where I worked age was
a strong source of bias no doubt.

~~~
nolok
For my (admittedly relatively short) experience in office jobs it was also a
self fulfilling prophecy: because tech companies avoided to hire people past
30-35, those either started their own companies or remained at their current
jobs even where they didn't want to be there anymore, which gave those
established companies a negative view of older devs. Rinse and repeat, add the
sad european (?) classic "experienced people have to be manager and mostly
stay away from code, senior developer doesn't exist" and you get a poor state
of affairs.

~~~
xroche
And this is why major software companies are actually American. Most European
software companies are terrible places, where "coding" people are considered
as the lowest class. I don't want to generalize, there are incredible startups
and small companies out there, but hey, no European Google or Facebook.

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.

~~~
balabaster
Having been monitoring the software development market in Europe for quite
some time (being European and always wondering what it would be like to come
home and continue my development career) it astounds me why anyone would
pursue development there given the advertised salaries for developers. With
the high cost of living and the ridiculously low (comparatively speaking)
salaries, it's a wonder any software developer would even take an interview -
especially given that software developers can make 3-4 times more in other
markets with comparatively lower costs of living.

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.

~~~
_delirium
In Denmark, the usual reason people work here despite higher salaries
elsewhere is that many people just strongly prefer to live in Denmark (or if
not in Denmark, at least in the Nordic region), for a mixture of cultural and
quality-of-life reasons. The specific reasons vary based on the person, but
some include: this is where your family/friends already are, prefer the urban
layout of the cities (transit, biking, safety, etc.), prefer the working
conditions (hours, vacation policies), prefer the social support, especially
for families (subsidized childcare, parental-leave policies, no university
tuition), etc. That and reasons like people wanting to raise their kids as
Danes, which is harder to do if they grow up elsewhere. It's very common for
people to work abroad for a bit in their 20s, though, as a kind of seeing-the-
world thing that combines work and tourism, and then return later.

------
joelberman
I am 68 and working as much as I want to. I had no trouble finding a job and
am actually in demand. I guarantee this is not because I am a genius.

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.

~~~
datashovel
Interviews are like politics. The people who are good at it usually aren't the
people you want.

~~~
HelloMcFly
This is a poor way to interpret the reality. Interviews have relatively weak
validity, but the relationship is still positive. Of course that assumes a
structured interview from competent interviewers, which is more the exception
than the norm.

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.

~~~
datashovel
I wouldn't want someone to get the impression I completely write off
interviews as a way to assess the potential in someone. It's been around
forever, and I don't see it going away anytime soon.

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.

~~~
datashovel
I'm replying to my own comment here just because it's a different point.

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 first you wonder if their ambition will be enough to get them over
many technical hurdles in the course of the job. When bringing someone like
this onto your team you almost need to take personal stake in their success
for fear that by hiring them you're potentially taking them away from another
opportunity where their immediate qualifications may be a better fit.

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.

------
swimfar
A little off-topic, but a fact that I find amazing is that around the time of
the first moon landing the average age of the mission controllers was 26.

[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tothemoon/kranz.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tothemoon/kranz.html)

~~~
laurenbee
NASA specifically wanted people right out of college to do operations so that
they would not have to unlearn bad habits and since everyone would have to
learn new skills for the moon landing to be successful.

[http://history.nasa.gov/monograph14.pdf](http://history.nasa.gov/monograph14.pdf)
(see p. 17)

------
j03m1
In reference to the table with national age averages, I would love to see
those numbers redrawn from the perspective of development staff only. I'm
curious about this because I think in recent years there is a corresponding
jump in the number of computer science graduates. There may just be more
programmers in those lower age brackets and as an organization that skews
heavily toward developers your age grouping may just be lower.

That said, google's recruiting process is horrible and robotic. Feel for the
guy.

------
HillOBeans
I can't help but wonder where this might leave someone such as myself, who is
over 40, but relatively new to professional software development. I've
programmed for years as a hobby, but was educated in a different field and
have only recently decided to pursue programming work for a living. Not only
am I _old_ , but I also have little experience compared to others my age.

~~~
hox
As long as you get the right hiring manager it shouldn't matter. I agree that
it is a valid concern of yours, and rightfully so in this hiring climate. But
fair hiring managers do exist, and they build some of the best teams around.

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.

------
typicalday
I can't speak for El Goog. What would you do:

[http://www.bobheath.com/](http://www.bobheath.com/)

[http://www.aspnet.net/](http://www.aspnet.net/)

[http://www.visit-new-york-city.com/](http://www.visit-new-york-city.com/)

~~~
wambotron
I'm assuming they weren't interviewing him for his design skills.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
He claims to have developed a widely-used CMS built on Java.

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.

------
jqm
So that movie "The Internship" with Owen Wilson was just fiction and Google
doesn't really hire out-of-work 40 somethings who don't know anything about
tech for their sales experience?

~~~
danans
Oh man, that movie was just horrible. And at least you have a sense of humor
about how horrible it was, but I've face-palmed so many times when people ask
me, as a Google employee, if that's how it really is to work there.

~~~
loopbit
On the other hand, I do have a couple of friends working in Google in the
London office that, not only love that movie, but have incorporated some of
the things in it in their teams :)

I must say I haven't seen it myself, so I can't judger.

------
rockdoe
The article looks interesting, not so much for the merits of the case but for
the data on the median age per employer.

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.

~~~
pyrophane
Unfortunately I'm not sure how valid those stats are. I'm not familiar with
the website that conducted the survey, but there may be a substantial self-
selection bias based on who chose to respond in the first place.

------
UUMMUU
This honestly just sounds like a recruiter trying to get their numbers of
hires up by getting more people to interview. I too was told I'd be a great
fit at Google but in my interview my lack of intense algorithm study showed up
and my non-ivy league college didn't win me any points. Poor guy because it
sounds like they really got his hopes up.

------
mathattack
I've seen a lot of complaints about the interview process at Google. One core
issue to me seems to be that they outsource a lot of their recruiting. Another
may be the metrics. Hiring the equivalent of gym membership salespeople to do
recruiting has issues.

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.

------
blfr
Previously
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9429576](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9429576)

------
HeidiWalker
This is why the time has come for blind auditions like GapJumpers offers -
helps to avoid all bias when deciding who to interview. Bias for age, women
returning from career breaks, education pedigree etc - all avoided if you
focus on how a candidate completes a job challenge first.
[https://www.gapjumpers.me](https://www.gapjumpers.me)

~~~
hessenwolf
Or you could all choose the German solution...

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.

~~~
rockdoe
_1\. A photo on your cv. Or it goes in the bin._

I've never understood why this isn't outright illegal. There's literally no
reason for it but to discriminate.

~~~
ptaipale
Actually there is a practical reason in some hiring processes: you get many
applicants, you look at their papers, then you interview them. Being able to
map the face to the correct paper helps, particularly afterwards when you are
contemplating the results.

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.

~~~
riffraff
and what is the practical purpose of marital status and whether you have
children?

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.

~~~
DanBC
Some companies collect that data so they can check they're not discriminating.
Ideally it's on a seperate sheet or different part of the website; the
information is psuedo-anonymised and goes direct to HR and never goes to
someone doing hiring.

~~~
infinite8s
In the US this is typically collected after they hire you (where it can then
go into said statistics).

~~~
DanBC
How do they check their processes pre-hiring? Like selection for interview?

------
estefan
Maybe the older guys are contracting so wouldn't show up those stats...

------
hownottowrite
The fellow in question seems to have a fairly robust resume, at least
according to LinkedIn:
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertpheath](https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertpheath)

~~~
dreaminvm
If you read into the job summaries, it seems like he's been doing the same
things for a long time without progressing to roles of greater responsibility.
On a side note, hes also starting an Oracle certification class.

------
solve
California badly needs to be taken down a notch with all the age
discrimination and wage fixing that's been going on there.

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.

~~~
freyr
I was at Google's NYC offices last week, and I immediately felt like I was on
a college campus. The vast majority of people there look very young.

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.

~~~
solve
From my experience, I'm absolutely sure that large NYC companies are far more
cautious about it. Both cities are full of young people, but CA doesn't even
try.

E.g. the YC application always has directly asked for age. Try that in NYC.

~~~
icefox
Looking just now the YC application doesn't explicitly ask for age, but it
does ask for > Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private)
YouTube video introducing the founders

It would be pretty easy to discriminate on age/race/sex with that.

~~~
solve
You're looking at the wrong page. They've moved the personal questions to a
separate "Founder Profile" form, which each founder gets a special email link
to access and fill out.

------
skj
In my first group at Google the ages were 26, 29, 32 (me at the time), 35, 55,
60, 70.

------
heisenbit
The stats table in the article is imho not a good basis for discussion. The
sample is too small and there is a huge self selection bias for younger people
to sign up to such surveys.

------
rrich
Unfortunately, the nature of the technical interview allows for easy
disqualification of an individual. Miss a semi colon, something we all have
done, you're disqualified. Coupled with the preconceived notions of the
interviewer, even the most skilled individual can be disqualified with ease.
Doesn't bode well in a industry that seems rampant with issues regarding age
and gender .

------
nailer
Not that this contradicts the claim, but Rob Pike (59) and Ken Thompson (72)
from Unix both work at Google.

~~~
Cederfjard
They are really special cases though, aren't they? I don't think it affects
the larger discussion that Google employs a couple of extremely well-known and
proven guys in their older age.

~~~
wyclif
You're right; Pike and Thompson are huge outliers. If there is going to be a
case made that age discrimination doesn't exist at companies where there have
been class-action lawsuits, it's not particularly compelling to point to a
pair of outliers as proof.

~~~
ptaipale
Well, nailer definitely did not provide these outliers as proof. More an
interesting anecdote.

~~~
wyclif
I know he didn't—I can read. I was speaking hypothetically, which is clear
from my comment.

------
deepGem
I doubt this case will hold water. There doesn't seem to be conclusive
evidence that points to the age bias. That being said, the lawyers must be
seeing something that I'm not. They wouldn't file a suit otherwise.

~~~
jacquesm
They might just simply see dollar signs.

~~~
saiya-jin
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.

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.

~~~
elechi

        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.
    

Please, please stop saying this. It wasn't just _hot_.

[http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/10/23/3568411/clovis-
woman-74-...](http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/10/23/3568411/clovis-
woman-74-sues-mcdonalds.html)

~~~
Karunamon
No, but it was being brewed at the recommended temperature (and still is
today, but now the cup is covered in lawyer-safe warnings).

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...](http://www.franchise-hit.com/franchisors-news-
wire/McDonalds®-Premium-Roast-Coffee-Serves-500-Million-cups-of-
coffee-1524.htm)

~~~
Retric
I don't think you understand what _third-degree burns_ mean see: (third-degree
burns on six percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent) Also
she won less than 1Million and much of that went to pay for her attorney they
also settled for _confidential amount before an appeal was decided_.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restauran...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants)

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.[_

~~~
Karunamon
Severity of the injury does not change my evaluation of the matter seeing as
how it was _entirely self inflicted_.

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.

~~~
Retric
_Applying the principles of comparative negligence, the jury found that
McDonald 's was 80% responsible for the incident and Liebeck was 20% at
fault._

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.

~~~
Karunamon
I get the legal principle, really, I do, but that doesn't mean it's
necessarily correct or that I agree with it.

------
artur_makly
"Sanctuary" "Sanctuary" "Sanctuary"

------
googbad2
Don't be evil (unless their old!)

~~~
ape4
their -> they're

------
1971genocide
I hate the trend of new sites putting the stock information for each company
mentioned in the article.

How did this became a thing ? Do ppl need that data to be shoved in the face
like that ?

~~~
maggit
Is it a trend? Note that this is the Wall Street Journal. I think they are
targeting a readership that is particularly interested in stock information.

~~~
1971genocide
I am not sure, I have been seeing it pop up on every article being posted on
HN and reddit.

~~~
pliny
There have been a lot more Bloomberg articles submitted to HN lately.

