
A 64-year-old engineer is suing Google for age discrimination - Libertatea
http://qz.com/390835/google-age-discrimination/
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mak4athp
While age discrimination may exist at Google, and the legal case may have
merit, the article does a horrible job of communicating where.

It makes it sounds like the guy had a bad interview (perhaps because of the
interviewer) and didn't move on. That happens all the time, every day, to
every sort of candidate. Often it's because of legitimate issues with
candidate, and many times because of incidental circumstances surrounding the
interviewer.

It would have been interesting to see something more suggestive of
discrimination.

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more_corn
Um. That's the standard Google interview process. Everyone goes through it.
Contacted by an overzealous recruiter who gushes about qualifications but has
no real understanding of what it would mean to be qualified. Annoying and
frustrating phone interview with someone who doesn't actually understand the
questions or answers (and who is hard to hear and understand). The phone
interviewer just has a list of questions and correct answers. Slightly
different answer? Sorry. Better answer than the one on the list? Sorry, I
don't understand what these mean, your answer doesn't match.

The false positives come with staggering frequency. If you were to put the
same candidate through the process twice you'd get two different results.

Google is terrible at interviewing, but the good thing for their legal case is
that they are uniformly terrible without regard to age, race, ethnic origin or
sexual preference.

Google employees go through mandatory annual diversity and anti-discrimination
training. Hiring managers have an additional managing within the law training.
Google also hosts optional classes to help employees identify and overcome
unconscious bias. They're about the least discriminatory company I've ever
heard of and actively encourage diversity in the company and the world.

They just suck at hiring.

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dudul
I don't know if the poor interview can really prove discrimination. Yes the
conditions sound like they were awful (I mean, coding exercise over the phone?
wtf), but based on my experience interviewing at Google is pretty terrible,
regardless of your age. How is he gonna prove that he was treated unfairly
when it is well known that Google interviewers are terrible?

To be clear, I do believe that there is a significant bias against older folks
in tech. I have witnessed it when I was trying to hire a 50+ year old guy and
encountered strong resistance from my supervisor.

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spacemanmatt
Maybe it's possible he has a case if the same awful interview is more awful
because of his age. I think it will be interesting to see how it unfolds,
regardless.

