What does Google do with developers who are 40 or 50?
What does age diversity look like at Google for engineering staff?
Sooner or later this issue is going to come to a head when all the 20-30-something year old Javascript hackers grow older...
What does age diversity look like at Google for engineering staff?
Sooner or later this issue is going to come to a head when all the 20-30-something year old Javascript hackers grow older...
Google, and most larger tech companies, optimize their hiring process to aggressively deny candidates if they aren't a slam dunk. The negatives that come from hiring a bad engineer far outweigh the positives that come from hiring a good engineer.
Not saying there isn't an age bias, just not an obvious one I noticed.
There is very little statutory protection for employees in the USA so the actual cost of firing some one isn't that high.
The legal cost is low, but the social cost of a workplace where people often get fired is high.
So think about it from Google's point of view. You take a risk, hire a programmer that doesn't pan out. You fire him after 6 months. That's 6 months of salary and benefits. 6 months of bad code sitting in your code base. 6 months of lower productivity for whoever was on that person's team. And probably another 6 months after that of clean up either ripping out bad code, or worse, leaving passable code that turns bad at a later date causing even more work.
It is better to just take no action on a potentially good candidate and let them try again in a year than it is to take even a small risk on someone who might cause things to snowball.