I expect that economics of many of these companies doesn't work with people doing 35 or 40 hours a week. Which means that all these castles are built on sand because this will catch up with them.
Maybe Mountain View is different, but the Seattle office has a pretty fantastic work-life balance as far as I can tell.
I'm not sure what would make you think that some of the most profitable companies in history are castles built on sand.
I'm not good enough at reading these quarterly reports to be surer than this :-)
.. and on that note, having the age data of 823 employees from payscale.com seems a rather small sample set for a company of ~50k employees. I also wonder what kind of bias the source introduces, ie. whether your interest in your salary is different based on your age (I don't know).
Free cash flow $3.69B, total employees 55,419
$66,583 per employee of free cash flow (that is simply money they deposited in the bank) or
GAAP Net Income $3.556B for $64,166 per employee in net income.
I believe the $270K/employee is long gone and won't be seen again.
[1] http://investor.google.com/earnings/2015/Q1_google_earnings....
I'm sitting in an office at 6pm and everyone under 40 is headed to a bar. I looked around and things currently reflect the median age mentioned in the article.
I doubt it. Google would be just fine if 99% of employees limited themselves to 40-hour weeks. People aren't productive-- not in the long term-- when pushed to work longer hours.
The age issue isn't about work hours; besides, I know plenty of older people who work quite a lot. It's about pliability, deference to authority, and not knowing what they're worth. There's also a bit of union-related fear in it. I think that the likelihood of Google unionizing is very low, but Silicon Valley's leaders are terrified of collective bargaining arrangements (even if they come in a form like the lightweight unions of Hollywood for actors and writers) and one of the best ways to prevent that is to avoid hiring older, seasoned people with the organizational skills and experience to pull it off.
Age discrimination also puts a harmful time pressure on workers. It encourages to take career risks (and, often, those risks are unwise for them) because, at least as things are presented to them, they have to do everything in the first third of a normal career or they will be cast aside. It's much easier to push someone into bad decisions (or, I should say, decisions where he'll defer to your expertise because he's out of his depth and scared) if you convince him that he'll probably never get another chance to be a founder, learn a new technology, program again, etc.
I look forward to the outcome of this suit. There's bound to be more gold dug up in discovery than there was for Ellen Pao. I hope it doesn't end in a settlement, because I want this issue to see enough air to set off a chain reaction and crush this age discrimination problem. After all, we're all going to get old.
Sure, but this business model doesn't care about that. Get people in, work them 'til they're burnt out, then get new people.