
Heath and Fillekes v. Google Inc. Lawsuit - howawaygoog
https://secure.dahladmin.com/HEATH/Index
======
throwawayforme
TL;DR: Google often does not know how to hire senior people who are not
luminaries, this screws people in their 40s.

I think this happened to my wife, but her job category was not listed. When my
small company was acquired by Google (and I had to interview to keep my job),
we were forced to re-locate across the country from the east coast to Mountain
View. My wife is a stats professor with tenure at a mid-tier university on the
east coast, and she moved with our family. As its hard to get a tenured
academic job, we found something at Google that sounded exciting to her.

She applied to Google for a Sr. Data Scientist job, and passed the phone and
on-site interviews with flying colors. However, she was rejected by the
committee. The problem was that, at Google, the committee both decides if you
passed your interview, and then decides on your job level. The job level is
arrived at using past work experience.

In my wife's case, the problem was that the committee deadlocked on how to
level her. She had 5+ years of academic experience, and 5+ years of research
experience (think national lab type stuff; research w/o teaching). However,
she'd only briefly worked in industry many years ago between her MS and PhD.
So rather than hire her, they told her to "go work someplace else for a year,
then apply again". (direct quote, as relayed by her recruiter to me, as I
referred her)

If she was a fresh PhD, there would have been no problem. She would have been
hired as a level 4, and everything would be fine. But given that they didn't
know how to rate her experience, it was just easier for them to pass on her
entirely. This tends to bias the hiring process to hiring younger folks,
without experience.

And, BTW, that's why I'm no longer at Google, and we're all back on the east
coast.

~~~
DannyBee
"In my wife's case, the problem was that the committee deadlocked on how to
level her. She had 5+ years of academic experience, and 5+ years of research
experience (think national lab type stuff; research w/o teaching). However,
she'd only briefly worked in industry many years ago between her MS and PhD.
So rather than hire her, they told her to "go work someplace else for a year,
then apply again". (direct quote, as relayed by her recruiter to me, as I
referred her)"

(note, the below are all very very much personal opinions :P Most of what i'm
going to talk about is all covered by a large number of books by various
people, etc at this point.)

First, sorry to hear about your experience. Hope you don't take the below
personally.

Having sat on google hiring committees (2-3 a week sometimes) for the better
part of 11 years now, i'm going to say this is probably not accurate. Note
that i only do SWE committees, though.

I'm also not sure how you derived this view of what occurred (if you are going
by what the recruiter said, know that most recruiters have a jaded view of
committees who reject their candidates. Otherwise, i'd love to know what facts
you have) . You seem to be assuming a lot of the reasons the committee said
what it did.

The answer you received is, in my view, usually the answer given when "we
don't think they did well enough to hire them, but think that they may get
there with practice". For example, in SWE world, this is usually what happens
when committees feel like these people are on the wrong side of being able to
design and implement stuff, but saw things in the interviews that made folks
believe they may be able to get above that bar. (or put bluntly, not obviously
worth the risk right now, may be worth the risk in the future). That isn't to
say Google doesn't hire people who need mentoring in coding/etc, it's more
"committee didn't feel it was a sure enough thing to take the risk".

Note that there are second chance, etc committees if the recruiter felt the
committee was wrong. Committees aren't always right, and they definitely
aren't meant to be always right.

The leveling decision is also completely independent of the hiring decision in
just about all cases. There's some interesting history here, but the statement
"both decides if you passed your interview, and then decides on your job
level", is wrong now, and was wrong for pretty much everywhere but MTV for a
long time.

In any case, if what you say occurred, generally in SWE world the only reason
they wouldn't make an offer at the lower level is if "they've not grown in
10000 years to a sane level of engineer, so we don't ever expect them to", or
the person has said they wouldn't take it and so it would be pointless. In
fact, most of the discussion that used to happen was "we think they are
qualified for this lower level, is it worth discussion or have they said they
wouldn't accept it" (because they have competing offers.

The first seems ... not the case here, unless your wife did _very_ badly (IE
would have had to be two levels down). Sorry. So i find your experience very
very strange, though i don't do data scientist committees.

You started with: "Google often does not know how to hire senior people who
are not luminaries, this screws people in their 40s."

This is not right.

IMHO, Google often tries not to hire people who have failed to grow to the
level and skill set they want out of people with a large amount of experience
_or_ who want a senior position.

But that's literally not about age (despite people wanting to claim it is),
it's about growth vs experience. They do even try to account for what the
experience was, etc. But usually it's the other way around - person wants
senior position at Google, isn't qualified for it, complains google hates
people who are older. Google would, in most cases, happily offer them a
position they are qualified for, they just don't want that one (or google
doesn't have such a need ATM). Personally, I wish that being XXX level
engineer at some company mattered. But i've also met plenty of people who got
promoted a lot just for surviving long enough, and couldn't code/design their
way out of a paper bag despite being "senior principal engineer" or whatever.
So i understand why they use interviews to try to gauge level instead.

Past that, if you've spent 35 years in industry, and can't code/do
algorithms/design/or _any_ measurable metric better than a person fresh out of
college, and aren't more self directed, etc, than the fresh out, it may not
make sense to hire you.

But again, that's still not about age. Because the person fresh out of college
could be 70. I'd still say "hire that person", because they still have
potential. The person who has 35 years of experience and _still_ not grown is
a known quantity, and that known quantity is not above the bar.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>The answer you received is, in my view, usually the answer given when "we
don't think they did well enough to hire them, but think that they may get
there with practice".

If you don't want to hire a tenured stats professor with 10+ years research
experience to work in data science, I think that's _your_ problem. Maybe OP's
wife had some horrifying deal-breaker personality trait, but really it just
sounds like Google's committee was too snobby about Industry Versus Academia
to hire an experienced statistics expert to do statistics.

~~~
DannyBee
"If you don't want to hire a tenured stats professor with 10+ years research
experience to work in data science, I think that's your problem. Maybe OP's
wife had some horrifying deal-breaker personality trait, but really it just
sounds like Google's committee was too snobby about Industry Versus Academia
to hire an experienced statistics expert to do statistics. "

1\. Google, from what i can tell, is okay with it being it's problem as long
as it can meet its hiring goals.

2\. You have pretty much no data to base this on. Seriously.

~~~
fjdlwlv
_Is_ Google meeting its hiring goals? They seems desperate to land everyone
they decide they want, so if they can get better at identifying who can help
them, they'd benefit a lot.

Also, be careful, logic as in item #1 is the same logic that companies use to
justify any form of discrimination.

~~~
cookiecaper
People are very bad at hiring. I'm sure that adding committees and crap into
the process doesn't make it any better, just more bureaucratic.

This is unfortunate, because hiring is one of the areas where a responsive,
streamlined approach is most critical to acceptable outcomes. Creating a
committee of irrelevant appointees to come in at a late stage and give an
indirect evaluation based on the notes from two prior interviews only creates
an opportunity to block good people w/ bikeshedding.

If someone whose company is getting acquired can't even get fast tracked out
of this demeaning and silly process, it's no wonder Google turns off non-
luminaries more interested in getting good stuff done than dealing with red
tape and bureaucracies.

------
howawaygoog
just got email for this, I did interview for Google and I'm over 40, (wonder
how they got my info). I passed the interview but was shut down at the
committee, very much doubt that age was a factor.

~~~
jedmeyers
I've read that being rejected at a committee level happens relatively
infrequent. Did they hint to what might be the reason for rejection at such a
late stage?

~~~
howawaygoog
I was a bit pissed that the way the recruiter told me initially I thought the
hiring committee was just a safety check and pretty much a rubber stamp so I
got all excited for abut a day until he told me I didn't pass the committee.
He gave me no feedback whatsoever about interviews or anything, just
encouraged me to apply in a year, which may be standard talk for all
candidates (he did invite me later to an online seminar so there's hope).

The way I understand it now is that besides gauging your expertise level and
general review they may simply select the top X for the positions they have,
given a larger number of candidates that passed the interviews.

I didn't see anything that seemed to discriminate by age. One interviewer was
a woman in her 40s ro 50s. That said it is true that Silicon Valley (I also
interviewed for Facebook) is all white or Asian men in their late 20s or early
30s, (with some sparse women). I saw literally zero black people in three days
in SV and the only obvious Hispanic were the staff at my hotel.

~~~
gohrt
There was a miscommunication. The recruiter intended to communicate that "VP-
level committee is usually a safety check and pretty much a rubber stamp".
That's the review layer above the main Hiring Committee.

If you got rejected by VP committee, that is unusual and work grumbling about
-- and possibly constrained by amount of funding available for new hires.

The "come back in a year" is absolutely honest. Many people are hired a year,
or 2, or 3 later. Google is happy to say "not sure / not yet" to people and
"yes" later.

~~~
howawaygoog
somewhere I read that "come back next year" for the specific position I
applied is actually a common thing they do since they like to see persistence
and growth, so that's looking good.

------
blauditore
Regardless of whether it's justified or not, can someone explain how age
discrimination could be proofed in such a case? Especially in this quickly
evolving industry, Google may always find arguments like "candidate A had
never worked with XY, but candidate B had, so we took B" to explain decisions.

~~~
matt4077
The US legal system has this interesting "discovery phase" where the parties
basically get to request all possibly relevant data from the other side.
They'll try to find incriminating mails or other documents.

They could also work with statistics. Google being google, they most certainly
have enormous amounts of data on their recruitment process. I'd even bet
Google has algorithms to uncover discrimination in its hiring – biases are bad
for business, after all. They may not have had age discrimination on their
radar, but whatever they have on race/gender/dog-vs-cat-owners should be
easily adaptable.

------
wonko1
Based on my experience of Google interviews, they seem like one of the
companies least likely to discriminate based on age.

Their interviews tend to be very tech/algorithm focused. To the point where
they disregard almost everything else.

I would have thought, fast and loose early stage startups would be far more
likely to discriminate.

~~~
fjdlwlv
People who have more years are expected to show either "trajectory" or have a
compelling excuse. People with fewer years are judged by potential.

Interestingly, there is research that claims that in businesses women are more
often judged by last performance, while men are judged more by potential.

------
vemv
Why would to want to work for an organsisation that (supposedly) discriminates
against you anyway?

~~~
cjhopman
Why would you want to eat at a restaurant that discriminates against you
anyway? Why would you want to go to a school that discriminates against you
anyway? Why would you want to ride a bus that discriminates against you
anyway?

~~~
vemv
I'd be happy to not use those services.

Generally, commerce/work is a voluntary exchange between two willing parts,
not a right.

Most forms of real discrimination have become extinct; now a significant % of
cases (at least in the IT world) it just a bunch of complainers.

~~~
Beltiras
Sounds like privilege talking. I'm a middle-aged white male. I try to stay
mindful of my privilege when others explain perceived wrongs.

~~~
golemotron
It takes extraordinary privilege to even conceive of the idea of privilege.
Everyone else just lives their lives.

~~~
grzm
A similar comparison can be made with respect to a lot of specialist fields or
esoterica. For people using the internet as consumers, concepts like the CAP
theorem aren't going to be something they would just stumble across: it would
take interest in the field and concentrated study. It doesn't say anything
about the validity of the concept, either for or against.

~~~
golemotron
Wouldn't it be useful to for people to acknowledge the privilege of being able
to conceive of privilege, and step back so that other voices can be heard?

I am serious. There are many other ways to see humanity and the relationship
between groups of people. Some may be more beneficial.

~~~
grzm
If your aim is to encourage people to "step back so that other voices can be
heard", please elaborate how your initial comment supports this in a
meaningful and constructive way.

~~~
golemotron
Hopefully, it encourages reflection. The privilege narrative seems to be
accepted as truth rather than one of many ways of looking at things. Why don't
we examine it? Isn't it notable that it originated with the thoughts of two
very educated people Du Boise and Peggy McIntosh, and that there isn't an
evidentiary basis? How do we know that it is better than other narratives? We
seem to just accept it to be true.

~~~
grzm
_It takes extraordinary privilege to even conceive of the idea of privilege.
Everyone else just lives their lives._

These words do nothing to encourage reflection or elicit any of the questions
you're now asking; they just trivially dismiss the parent.

Edit to add:

I'm not discussing privilege. I'm arguing that your comment says nothing about
whether or not a concept is valid because some people aren't aware of it or
concerned about it.

Anyway, I recognize this is now well off-topic and likely fruitless. I
apologize for the noise.

