Google age bias suit reaches California Supreme Court
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
The one warning I'll give to older programmers who want to come to Google is that everyone codes here. There is an attitude that some people get after decades in the working world. That attitude is, "I'm so senior and experienced that it makes no sense for me to actually do something so menial as write code." If you have that attitude, then Google won't have a place for you. There is no such thing as a non-coding software architect here.
But if you have experience, ability, understand algorithms, and are willing to code, then Google can be a very friendly place indeed. People here are very aware of the difference between one year of experience 10 times, and 10 years of experience. The former has no place here. The latter is highly valued. And 20 years of experience is even more highly valued.
(Disclaimer: I'm only 40, and have only been in the software world a dozen years.)
People who do the first thing can be OK if you only need easy stuff done in a routine way, and have someone to give them direction. People who do the latter are invaluable resources.
Within engineering, about 1/3 of tech leads do not code beyond mocks, and no one in engineering management codes. Staff and above also have diminishing coding activity; which is necessitated by the requirements of group leadership and planning.
You can speak to SRE coding activity. But to continue, many in test only manage contractors and their coding is no more than small python scripts for tool automation.
And most importantly, Program Management is the single quickest growing group in terms of influence and employee percentage. I do no believe most even remember how to code.
But that said, I'd be very, very surprised if anyone got through the engineering interview process without being asked to write code. Multiple times. So even if you did wind up not writing much code, you're not getting the job unless you're both willing and able.
So I wonder if situations like these make people say, "Screw it, I'm hiring someone that can't sue me if they don't work out." Not a good thing, but I think a very possible secondary effect of this sort of thing.
Here, it sounds like the lower courts have determined that there's a basis for a trial, but Google is trying desperately to prevent a trial from taking place. Frankly, I'd like to see why.
Do you mean this particular law doesn't need to exist for lawsuits to exist? Because all lawsuits need grounds to bring suit.
> Google is trying desperately to prevent a trial from taking place. Frankly, I'd like to see why.
Because they have literally nothing to gain from being dragged into court, paying legal fees, with a chance of being forced to pay millions of dollars and getting their reputation bashed, but gain nothing if they win? I think anyone sane wouldn't want that scenario to happen, it's lose/lose for them.
Yes, that's what I mean. Eliminating the protected class won't eliminate lawsuits from people who believe that they have been the victim of unfair discrimination, because people who believe they are unfairly fired can still file suits for wrongful termination. They just can't explicitly claim age/gender/religion/whatever as a basis.
If I can provide evidence that Foogle, Inc. fired me without cause, I might possibly have grounds for a case of wrongful termination against them, regardless of my age, gender, etc. But if the law also says that I can't be fired for my age, then it suddenly becomes much more important that I can demonstrate that Foogle, Inc. has a pattern of firing people who reach their Nth birthday.
Basically, eliminating the protected class just makes it harder for people who are legitimately being discriminated against to make their case. It doesn't really deter people who are simply irrationally angry or looking for a cheap payout.
If we imagine a universe where age isn't a protected class, your professor's secretary would cause just as much trouble -- she'd still lose, and she'd still have her day in court while doing losing. Unfortunately, it suddenly becomes possible for Foogle to start firing people en masse at age N, simply by fictioning up a few bad performance reviews. But now nobody can prove it, because age isn't a protected class, and will be ignored by the court.
Now, you could mention that's against the law too, and you'd be right. But I'll give you a real life example of how this happens. There's specific laws in California about doing what's called a "condo conversion", that is, turning a rental property into a condominium and selling it. There were quite a few condo conversions from 1998 to 2008 in California.
The law says the previous renter needs to get a payout - for people under age 55 or 60, the payout is something like $4000. For people over that age, the payout if $15,000 or so. (don't remember the exact numbers - just that the payout for people over a certain age was more than double)
Now, if you were renting an apartment and considering doing condo conversions in a year or two once you had more money, would you ever rent that apartment to an elderly person? No, you wouldn't. Not because you're a jerk. Not because you hate the elderly. But because, well, why would you want to pay $15,000 to someone to leave an apartment after renting it for 10 months? Hell, they might pay less rent than $15,000 in the 10 months! You'd be better off leaving it unrented!
And mind you, this is a legally protected right, the landlord can't even explain, "I'm thinking of doing a condo conversion, I'm happy to rent to you, but if you want this can you waive the mandatory payment? If not I might wind up giving you more money than you pay me in rent." That's not possible, this payment is a non-waiveable right in California.
That law is to protect elderly people, thinking it's harder for them to move. But a result is that it's harder for them to rent in high transition areas. Okay, make a law prohibiting that too, but if someone gets five candidates for an apartment they're considering a condo conversion on, they don't want to rent to someone that they're going to have to pay more money to than they receive in rent. Hence, less housing de facto available for the elderly as a result of the de jure anti-discrimation law.
So you might be doing more harm than good.
> If we imagine a universe where age isn't a protected class, your professor's secretary would cause just as much trouble
She wasn't a secretary, she was either an electrical engineer or a coder in assembly language. They were making systems to transfer energy to different power grids efficiently at a crowded train station back when he worked in industry. I do think it's funny you just assumed she was a secretary though when I just said my professor of technology hired a female minority who interviewed well with good credentials, but turned out to be bad at her job. Even in academia she could've been a researcher or lab technician or administrator.
In the US, the general rule is at-will employment, which means they can fire you whenever they want for whatever reason. There are some exception - discrimination, the family medical leave act for new parents, retaliation against whistleblowers, and employees who refused to break the law. That's about it. Sure, an employee COULD file a lawsuit alleging that the employer broke one of those rules, but, if it's made up, they're all easily disproved except discrimination - which means nobody would bother with it, unless they had a grudge and money to burn, because there would be no payoff.
Do you not think that part of a person's motivation for suing is their perceived odds of winning? There's still a cost to the accuser to bring a suit.
(Smaller companies, of course, can get away with pretty much whatever they want as far as hiring decisions go, as long as they don't say something stupid in public, because their number of hires isn't enough for anyone to conclude a strong pattern.)
She may have never heard criticism of her abilities in her entire life, was working for a boss who had nothing but positive feedback for her for an extended period of time, and then was suddenly canned with no warning for being incompetent. Every professor and teacher she's ever known is in unanimous agreement: she's awesome. Clearly, the boss must be racist.
Actually, it was kind of sad. He was really a sweet, kind, nice person, literally no temper at all but gently assertive, very balanced and helpful. The class I was in was a low-ish level technology class and we had quite a diversity of people in there. He helped everyone as much as they needed, assigned intelligent and fun assignments... really just a great guy.
The opinion from the appeals court is here http://www.gmsr.com/writing/scw-reid.pdf he offered a statistical analysis of promotion and compensation that indicated a pattern of discrimination against older employees, Google did not offer their own statistical analysis. He has more than hearsay or "stray comments" driving the case.
How could statistics possibly indicate causality?
A high percentage of people with certain characteristics being fired or having poor bonuses is factually not equivalent to those characteristics being the basis for those people being fired.
There are well established relationships between membership of particular groups and academic performance. It is generally not accepted to say that those people are being discriminated against when marking due to their ethnic groups unless there is specific evidence to prove that such wrongdoing has occurred. In fact, generally accepted reason behind the statistics in one not of discrimination, but of high rates of poverty amongst those groups causing other problems.
It's like being blindfolded and strapped to a chair and having to decided if something is on fire.
You don't have any direct evidence. But you can smell smoke, you can feel the heat on your face and you hear a crackling noise.
Now none of those by themselves are proof, but together they add up to a preponderance of evidence, and you (the judge) may (rightfully) conclude that there is indeed something on fire.
Either that or someone is going to great extremes to trick you.
Lawsuits like these are rarely decided on absolutes.
Now, the other side can play the same game, they can show partial evidence to the contrary. They can suggest that the noise you hear is made by the wind playing with a plastic bag, the heat is the sun on your face and the smoke smell is because last week there was a fire but there is none today.
It wouldn't take a smart judge very long to ask some follow up questions to figure out who has it right and who is fibbing.
When it's a really close call or when both sides 'have a point' the judge may order mediation.
More likely the parties will then settle because neither will want the case to be decided on such a slim margin because a ruling 'against' could be much more costly than a settlement.
My statistics brain shouted 'eeek, correlation != causation' but you make a pretty compelling argument with the fire analogy.
Using a programming analogy, you could think of a bayesian spam classifier. The word 'viagra' might not on it's own constitute spam, but 'viagra' 'hard p3n1s' and 'meds' scores enough to be safely considered spam.
Consider my mind changed.
Here is an interesting wikipedia article on that subject:
Why are there laws against age discrimination?
For example, if I want to fill my company with pretty young women, competent or otherwise, why should the law prohibit me from doing so?
Let me ask a possibly unpopular question because
the answer is not immediately obvious to me:
Here's an explanation I've heard: Yes, it's your business, your property, and in most things you're free to do as you like with it. But it doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can have a business and a good life because you live in a particular society, so you have some obligations back to that society. That can take the form of, well, taxes (for example), but also as special protections for select groups of people.
Let look at this way. Each law we made will have potential side-effects, which is most likely to be negative. Thus, the law of unintended consequence.
For example, a business deciding who to hire might decide on only the merit/performances of employees. However, this end up with lot of white people, because white people are disproportional represented in the tech industry. Any minority in the tech industry have to swim against lot of talented white people. So what we end up with is a firm with mostly white people.
However, discrimination against race is prohibited in our law and it looks like the firm is engaged in favoring white people over other type of colors. So people either sue the firm for racial discrimination, or the firm decided a quota of people from each race to hire.
Thus, we end up with the strange situation of a color-blind company being sued for discrimination that it never engaged in, or forced to take a racist route to avoid lawsuits.
So we better be careful of how we make our laws. A law with good intentions and made with great moral conviction may end up doing the opposite.
"It is a saying among Divines, that Hell is full of good Intentions, and Meanings." -- 1654 R. Whitlock Observations on Manners of English 203
I absolutely agree, and offered the explanation as one I've often heard, but it isn't one I can get my heart into. But even if it's true in general principal, the idea of trying to do good by roundabout methods is indeed tricky, and if you cannot accurately measure the results you're doing witchcraft not statecraft.
As a strictly positive rather than a normative statement: because "old" people vote, and "old" people see value in not getting thrown out of their jobs in favor of cheaper young people, and instruct their elected representatives as to their preferences in that regard.
In a parallel universe where young people voted and old people did not, one could imagine a law which made it illegal to pay 20 year olds and 40 year olds different amounts of money for the same job. Hah hah hah, hah hah hah, hahahaha. What a quirky universe that would be.
That parallel universe might also have very interesting discussions about, e.g., health care financing.
I rush to note that I am not necessarily in favor of the status quo policies of either our world or the parallel universe.
I do think there's an alternate-history scenario where nondiscrimination laws might not have been passed in the US, if discrimination were mostly random and idiosyncratic. But when a huge portion of companies uniformly discriminated in the same way and ended up creating what amounted to a permanent underclass, it became a fairly unsustainable situation, and was eventually overturned. And it's fairly hard to go back now, because race relations haven't reached a point of sufficient trust: a lot of African-Americans believe that if the Civil Rights Act were overturned, companies would go back to not hiring them due to racism (at the very least, many would interpret overturning the Civil Rights Act as an action with unfriendly intent).
Why would fire a good employee for something as stupid as sex or age?
Yes, there are people who would do that, but if they're that brainless I don't think their business is going to be long-lived.
I mean a younger employee could also be slow or not on the same page as their coworkers and they would be being fired for the same reason.
I don't think it's vague at all: Google has a culture where everyone codes, there are no architecture astronauts, no enterprise crapware, less emphasis on documentation and meetings and even user experience, more on Making Stuff.
I'm not making any judgement call on that, merely saying that it's a culture many people wouldn't fit in to, in particular ex-government employees.
If the reasons he was let go were all typically legitimate reasons but also possibly directly due to age, would that be discrimination?
I can't think of solid examples for programmers, but to use another field: Suppose a firefighter is let go because his age has robbed him of his ability to perform physically. Is this ageist?
There might be a correlation - older people may already have locally wrong opinions that are harder to change.