More Software Engineers Over Age 40 May Join a Lawsuit Against Google (yahoo.com) 162
More trouble for tech giants and how they are dealing with people. Google suffered a setback in an age discrimination suit this week. A judge ruled that other software engineers over age 40 who interviewed with the company but didn't get hired can step forward and join the lawsuit. From a Business Insider report: The suit was brought by two job applicants, both over the age of 40, who interviewed but weren't offered jobs. Specifically, the judge has approved turning the suit into a "collective action" meaning that people who "interviewed in person with Google for a software engineer, site reliability engineer, or systems engineer position when they were 40 years old or older, and received notice on or after August 28, 2014, that they were refused employment, will have an opportunity to join in the collective action against Google," the ruling says. While this isn't good news for Google, the ruling was strictly focused on whether the suit could be broadened to include more people. It doesn't mean that Google will ultimately lose the case. Google says it's fighting the suit.
Re:I kid. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is tough to teach an old dog new tricks.
but an old dog knows already a lot of tricks, knows how to implement the tricks in such a way they can be extended later, and will not fall in most of the beginner traps when executing the tricks.
Re:I kid. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 45 and have not noticed any change in my ability to learn new stuff. What I have noticed is a decline in my willingness to put up with BS. You want me to work 14 hours per day? Uhm. No. I have a life. Ask that 22-year old fresh out of university without any serious experience, he'll fall for that.
Does that make me less employable? Not really. Of course employers will know I have this attitude, but everyone over 40 does, so the fact that I feel that way doesn't change much for me personally.
Once again, it is not about being able to learn, it is about what you will put up with. Once you are over 40, the kind of treatment you will accept shrinks dramatically, and with it, your employability.
Re:I kid. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm 58, last three years have be learning and developing in NodeJS, CouchDB, JQuery, Lodash, Async, etc. Right now am prototyping an architecture using Swagger and a127.
There are exceptions to every categorization. If you dismiss somebody as unable to learn because they are older, then you are prejudging them. That's age discrimination.
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I'm 58, last three years have be learning and developing in NodeJS, CouchDB, JQuery, Lodash, Async, etc. Right now am prototyping an architecture using Swagger and a127.
There are exceptions to every categorization. If you dismiss somebody as unable to learn because they are older, then you are prejudging them. That's age discrimination.
I always think it's a young developer's thing to name drop technologies they are learning.
The great older developers are past that phase and actually have created or worked on creating or improving the modern software technologies, not just merely learning them.
Re:Age and ability to learn aren't correlated (Score:1)
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Very funny. Sharing at work.
"Web speed" is still going at web speed. Our servers are still running Node v0.11.4, and I believe the current version is 4.6-something. Keeping up with the versions is work in itself.
Re:I kid. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
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Exactly. I hear about these "new tricks" all the time, and then it will twig something in my memory; either I did it, or I read an article about how IBM prototyped it int he 1960s or something along those lines.
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Yeah, but on occasion the tricks didn't work back in the old days and will now. My wife wanted something like an iPad back in the 1980s, to give a hardware example.
Modern App Design (Score:5, Funny)
...trying to explain why you need 100 lines code, a transpiler and knowledge of css+js+typescript+node+whatever they can pile up to write an angular js hello world "application" where the programmer spent 6 months agonizing about "UX", the post-build footprint is a five GB executable (not counting dragging in a few more GB of frameworks it needs to run), which in turn requires a 4 GHz multicore CPU to run it without dragging the computer to its knees, which would fall immediate prey to the first hacker who decides it's a target, will only run on the very, very latest bleeding-edge OS's, and turns out to be infected with the GPL so Corporation X's nest of lawyers forbids its use before it even gets to market anyway.
FTFY. :)
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The problem is that few of these "new tricks" are actually new. People are rediscovering bad ideas, over and over again.
And so it should come as no surprise that they won't hire experts who argue against them.
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Yes, that's kind what I'm getting at, Captain Obvious.
However, companies should be free to screw themselves in whatever way they want.
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That might be a problem if old dogs were interviewing at Google.
If you were trying to refer to older people then I suggest you refrain from painting an entire group with your broad brush.
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Like teaching Google to hire people over 40.
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Even if that were true, so what? MacDonald's made a successful business out of replacing experienced cooks with well-defined processes and inexperienced young staff. Are you going to force MacDonald's to hire 40+ experienced French chefs and operate their automated deep
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Even if that were true, so what? MacDonald's made a successful business out of replacing experienced cooks with well-defined processes and inexperienced young staff. Are you going to force MacDonald's to hire 40+ experienced French chefs and operate their automated deep fryers? What 40+ experienced French chef would even want such a position?
Just like lots of other industries, the software industry is constantly changing. Companies like Google are the software equivalent of large, fast-food restaurant chains. There is no point in complaining about it, and there is nothing to be done about it. Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
The point is that 40+ French chefs should be the ones to decide whether or not they want to work the fryer.
The hiring company cannot use "they wouldn't want it anyway" as an excuse to refuse to interview/hire a 40+.
I heard that excuse used endlessly as to why we didn't interview blacks or women where I worked back in the 1960's and 70's
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If a 40 year old french chef actually wants the job even at an hourly rate that McDs is willing to pay, why not? It's not as if the employee gets to decide the pay after being hired.
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Well, that's a big "if". Most senior developers wouldn't be willing to be hired into an entry level position at entry level salaries.
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So what's the need for age discrimination? Let the company make the offer it intended to make and leave it up to the applicant to accept or not.
Of course, the real answer is that they don't want to hire the senior guy even if he finds the offer acceptable because they intend to boil the frog. They intend to have routine "emergencies" and a never ending "need" to all pull together for the team to meet a tight deadline (which will be promptly replaced with a new tight deadline). Effectively they want to sile
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Correct: the more senior an applicant is, statistically, the less malleable and the less flexible they tend to be. Furthermore, the older applicants get, the less they are willing to put up with b.s., if not for any other reason than that they usually have more job options. Hence, companies are not discriminating based on age, they are discriminating based on m
Re:Age Discrimination is real and everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like.
Incorrect. If it's not too late, spit that cool aid out now. You are talking of the "new reality". This is actually a good illustration. If you were old enough to be discriminated against, you might actually remember a time when people were expected to be productive while at work and then go home at 5 P.M. unless there was a truly exceptional circumstance (not the emergency excuse of the week). For those few jobs where crunch times were intrinsic, the employees were likely to be free to leave early or take a day off between the crunch times.
If management is competent and the compensation is adequate, crunch times will be few and far between.
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There is nothing "new" about it: if you want to be on the top of your field, whether it's music, science, engineering, computer programming, business, law, medicine, or anything else, you have to work very, very hard. Some of the hardest working and lowest paid workers are, in fact, grad students and early career academics. I don't see why it should work any differently for some of the top corporations in the country.
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Enjoy your cool aid slaveboy. Do try this tonight when you're working late again, look around and ask yourself who's there to notice. Especially look around and see how many people who already got ahead of where you are are still there with you.
Now consider all the productivity studies that demonstrate diminishing returns after 6 hours in a day.
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I notice. I love what I'm doing, and it benefits me as much as my company (since I get paid to work on open source projects).
Of course, this may be hard for you to understand, given that your business appears to be supporting outdated Linux cluster solutions.
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You're sounding more than a little defensive there.
Unless you are writing your own performance reviews and get to decide on your own raise and other advancements, you noticing makes not one whit of difference and adds no support to your previous argument.
How would leaving on time hinder you from working on free software in your free time?
So that leads to the next question, who notices if you leave promptly at the end of office hours?
As for my work, it's quite interesting actually. I have at various times de
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Really? What argument did you imagine I was making?
Sure--a decade ago.
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If you don't remember the argument you were trying to make it's probably because you keep working past the point where fatigue saps productivity. I suggest you scroll up a few messages to remind yourself what you were saying.
As for the rest, This month actually except for the BIOS. Working smarter has it's advantages.
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I suggest you do the same thing. You'll find that I simply concluded that these complaints lacked a rational basis and even if they were true, wouldn't matter.
I'm sure you "delved" into these things, they are simply dull and boring, that there are tons of other people with similar skills, and that there is little demand or need for those
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Actually, you claimed that the 40 hour workweek has never been a thing for professionals.
As for the rest, if you think embedded devices and microcontrollers are somehow obsolete, I would say you're either living under a rock or you have a bad case of the sour grapes. If it's the former, perhaps if you weren't so busy making charitable contributions to your employer's yacht fund, you would have time to notice these things.
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I'm sorry, but you need to read that more carefully. What I said was "this is what starting a successful career in a competitive field has always been like." Do you understand the qualifications "starting", "successful", and "competitive"?
You misunderstood. I was just referring to your skills, based on your web site.
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Now if you can explain how a comment about starting a career is applicable to a seasoned veteran, you might just weasel out of it.
As for the rest, you are being snotty because I didn't fall on my knees and kiss your feet when I saw your obviously divine correctness. Mighty big attitude for a willing slave boy. I doubt very much that you have any relevant knowledge to judge what is or is not current technology in any of the areas I mentioned.
And note, while starting a career has always involved some after ho
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It is decidedly not applicable to a "seasoned veteran". That is the point: seasoned veterans tend not to be willing to do the kinds of things that kids starting out are willing to do. That was your very own diagnosis. That means that companies like Google are not engaging in age discrimination, but rather that older workers are objectively different from younger workers.
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Seasoned veterans don't NEED to do the things students do, because they're already up to speed. Anything beyond extra study to come up to speed you imagine is another word for being taken advantage of by a sleezy employer.
Enjoy your sour grapes and cool aid.
Re: Age Discrimination is real and everywhere (Score:2)
Just deal with it: there are plenty of other jobs around.
Given the push to avoid hiring citizens:
[Citation needed]
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Yeah, you do need a citation for your bullshit claim that there is a "push to avoid hiring citizens".
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but we as a society deserve better. Western civilization was founded on high standards and greater morals.
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Western civilization was founded on conquering. Go read about the history of the Roman Empire; it was all about conquering as much land as possible and setting up trade networks for economic benefit. "High standards and greater morals" weren't part of it. Later on, Christianity took over, and then the feudal ages came, and Christians were burning each other at the st
Is it how it works in the US? (Score:4, Interesting)
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And the PROBLEM is that the employer is trying to fill their diversity quota, and they're really low on women under 40 at the moment.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
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Only applies to women because diversity. The men wouldn't be hired anyway, google would have already put in applications for H1B's and claimed there's no people capable of doing the job.
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I work at Google and I've seen salaries of both, and they're the same. Sure, there are contractors and whatnot, but boatloads of full time H1Bs paid the same salary/bonus/stock as trailer-loads of non-H1Bs. So if you want to spread that FUD, point to the appropriate companies, not Google. kkthxbye
Re: Is it how it works in the US? (Score:2)
Why not, it's exactly how affirmative action works.
You don't even have to be capable or qualified for the job but, because of some quota stating you must hire X minorities, they will get the job before you do.
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Recruiting (Score:2)
And you would think that alone would cue recruiters that younger people typically think in much smaller chunks.
But then again, that would require the recruiter to think in larger chunks, and that... lol.
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But not necessarily deliberately. That's the interesting thing about Google and lots of companies like it; they're so concerned about not accidentally picking up dead wood that they err on the side of rejection. As a result, plenty of competent programmers (young and old alike) don't make it through the process because they don't test well.
Unfortunately, the older you are and the less job hopping you've done, the ha
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Not unless their black, women, Asian, gay, transgender, etc.
Not unless their black, women, Asian, gay, transgender, etc what?
Over 40 turned down by Google (Score:5, Interesting)
For no other reason than I flubbed an easy problem during the interview.
Not sure that Brain Fart is grounds for a lawsuit.
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Exact same thing happened to me when I had a Google phone screen at age 41. I'm not sure what happened - it was the first time ever that I did that. My best guess is that I was wound too tightly because I was interviewing with Google.
But could it have been age? I can't say no for sure. I've definitely seen some changes to how my mind performs at I get into my lower 40's. It hasn't necessarily been a net negative, but I'm certainly a little less sharp in some categories of mental function.
I think many o
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There is no doubt Google is very much ageist, that can not be denied, extremely so. The real problem with older coders is they do not keep up with newer languages in sufficient numbers (averages) to show they are capable of it and hence are a bad bet. They can test for this but they simply take the easier options. Get inexperienced coders, ad in a modicum of training, mainly on the job, and when they get expensive turn them over for the new batch. Reality is over 40 don't bother with Google as far as they
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Not my impression at all. The recruiter flat out told me that their hiring process was very much in favor of recent grads for one reason only: much of the material that pops up in many of the interviews is covered in an academic setting and theif you graduated long ago you had probably forgotten a lot of it.
Google was interested in me be extremely proficient in C, Java, or C++. At least for this position they didn't care about anything else. Flat out did not care.
Aside from that, it was algorithmic and data
over 40 means working 40 (Score:1)
Actually, you want those people over 40 because the demographics are trending to a more aged population, and those over 40 want to be working 40 hours a week so the motivation is high to build things that are reliable. I don't necessarily care about redoing something every 6 months in its entirety; I want to build something that can be extended and enhanced without re-inventing the wheel. If the person isn't qualified that's one thing, but eventually the young people will be 40, and if you're male then watc
Who would want to work at Google anyways? (Score:4, Informative)
Lawsuit is Discriminatory (Score:1)
I was rejected by Google at 33. However, I can't join the lawsuit because I'm not old enough. The lawsuit is clearly ageist. I'm going to sue the lawsuit.
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Complain to Congress not Google. Age discrimination of someone who is under 40 is legal.
Largely an issue with Overtime Exemptions. (Score:1)
The Software development industry is a project-driven industry, exactly like building construction, but without the real-world constraints of material and space. The reason why building architects have to be so well educated and experienced is because simply the cost of material and labor spirals out of control when mistakes are made. We have the same exact problem in the software development industry, except the only input into projects are man-hours and CPU cycles. Nobody ever tracks the number of man-
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You'll be there someday, if you're not already (Score:5, Interesting)
For the younger guys who are developers: Use those long-term thinking skills and remember where you might be in XX years.
Are you a person who loves to learn (and keep up with) new technologies and solve real problems, and has learned a lot over the first few years of your career?
Do you think you'll be any different any years down the road (other than being more experienced and more mature maybe)?
If so, then welcome to the life of may older developers. Granted, some people don't keep up nor want to, but the same can be said for virtually any age group.
My point is simply: Be careful who you prejudge as you will potentially be an older developer one day yourself. Unless you've gone into another role/career or made your retirement $$ before age 40, be kind to the ones who can offer a lot of talent, even at their age.
Thanks for reading.
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The problem is that the people 'in charge' (management) are the people who DO NOT love to learn, keep up with new technologies and solve real problems. They are the people who took CSci in College because they thought it might be a lucrative career. The people who step up into managment or sales positions as soon as they can because for them engineering is a 'drudgery.'
They can't possibly imagine why any of their peers in engineering would like that stuff, and they figure if someone is 35 and hasn't 'step
Interviewing at Google (Score:1)
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The people making the hiring decisions don't see you or your résumé. They just see the comments from the randomly selected interviewers. If you passed that test (answering the questions and being able to explain/defend your answers without coming across as an arrogant jerk), I don't see how an age-related bias could even be possible.
There could, however, be some sort of accidental systemic bias in the nature of the questions themselves. If so, that's worth investigating and fixing.
Job Hoping (Score:3)
You would think with the incredible amount of job hopping that goes on nowadays, there simple is no one being hired right out of college, and then putting in 40 year in that company before retiring, that companies would prefer 35-50 year olds who are settled and who will not upend their life's to get a new job in some other city.
Hating Old People (Score:1)
Personally, I doubt this has anything to do with if old people have the skills for the job, but a cultural one. Did you see the backlash from Brexit? The youth of today do not believe anyone over 29 should be allowed to vote as old people simply do not believe in the same things that the youth do. Perhaps if these 40-somethings went to the interview in a "*uck Trump" or "Black Lives Matter" t-shirt they might stand a better chance. But baring some form of virtue signaling the 20-something interviewee is lik
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I'm in this category (40, interviewed and rejected at Google). Everyone who I spoke with during the day I was there was around my age (+/- 5 years). Yes, Google is a fairly young company as a whole but there are plenty of old farts like me in management.
There is also a B cohort (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone over 40, I can say that there is a single benefit of hiring people at least in their late 20s and beyond. Most programmers that I have worked with who sucked, sucked because they had latched onto some technology cluster/methodology and would let go. It was group-think at its worst. One of the benefits of hiring someone with a decade or more experience is that it is easier to detect this. So if you see someone who has 20,000 certifications in a single technology stack over a long period of time and a resume with nothing else, it throws up a massive red flag. Then you can explore this in an interview. Is this their only hammer in the toolkit.
What also amazes me is that many people in their early 20s make it clear that they have largely learned all they plan on learning. Thus they have not only picked a technology, but a version of that technology. So I will walk into a consulting job where I have been brought in because the project has gone to complete hell. I will start looking at things like the overall systems architecture, the internal architecture, and finally the code and the methodologies for creating that code. It is not uncommon that it is a fairly good selection of the worst of breed everything. Someone who didn't know what they were doing made a prototype and then an entire system was built on that. So you get some Ruby, a bad choice of cloud provider, some bastardization of Azure, and they are using some slow as molasses IDE/build system that means 5 minutes between making a change and seeing the change work. Except they have 100,000 lines of this crap code.
But what amazes me is that the above story happens regardless of age. There is some myth that 20 somethings chase the node.js type things of the world and that the 50+ crowd is just decades out of date. The reality is that they are often both wrong but for different reasons. The 50+ crowd screw up because of the "This is how I have always done it." and the 20 year old versions of the same crap programmer is "This is how my professor said was the only way."
The key being that crap programmers are crap for reasons other than their age, and as I said, the advantage of getting someone with a bit of a resume is that their bad attitude is easier to detect.
Counterexample (Score:2)
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Re: If (Score:5, Interesting)
Being white and male isn't an issue, it's a pro.
Being old is a huge issue. Google will learn from this though, they won't even bring in programmers for interviews if they're 40 or older, and if they can't be sure, they won't take the chance.
News to me. I'm over 50 and have had a couple interviews with the googs. But I have a job I like and wasn't terribly interested in the job they were trying to fill, so I wasn't disappointed when the interviews didn't advance to the next round. In fact one of their recruiters just left me a message last week trying to get me to bite....
But maybe I could join the suit anyway – just for shits and giggles – on the basis that they didn't hire me because I'm over 40.
But I have a theory that a lot of these fishing expeditions are just to lure talent away and disrupt other companies. Google, if that's what you're doing, just make an offer. I'm not interested in fucking around with bogus interviews. You can see my work in FOSS going back 25 years. It's all in git, cvs, etc.. If your offer is good enough I might even accept it.
Re: If (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about your conspiracy theory, but I had a phone interview with Google, and I wasn't too impressed. Personally, my theory is that Google's recruiters are incompetent 20-something girls fresh out of college and sororities, and they're just contacting people to do make-work and justify their salaries. And then the obnoxious and arrogant 20-something male developers who conduct the initial phone interviews are only doing it because it's part of their job, and don't really want to hire anyone.
It's like the old maxim: never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Organizations are always coming up with stupid policies for various reasons, and then the people who work there simply carry them out. That's the impression I got of Google. In my case, my resume quite clearly shows I have a EE degree and hardware background, and all my programming experience is low-level embedded stuff, and the phone interviewer immediately asked me a bunch of CS algorithm questions. I don't have a CS degree, so of course that stuff is not my strong suite nor do I want a job doing algorithmic stuff. But from what I read, that's exactly how Google interviews are. I seriously wonder how they get any engineering work done that doesn't involve heavy CS stuff. Maybe they just outsource it.
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Re: If (Score:4, Insightful)
I got contacted by them recently. I responded that I'm an embedded engineer and asked if the position dealt with embedded devices or not, since it looked like the position was for web stuff, and never heard back. Honestly, I expect this kind of incompetence (not understanding that embedded stuff is nothing like web stuff) from Indian "shotgun-style" recruiters, but not from internal recruiters for large, successful companies.
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This can't be good for the company as a whole either. They're wasting money on these ditzy 20-something sorority-girl recruiters' salaries, they're wasting highly-paid developers' time on interviewing candidates for positions they're unqualified for, and there've been a bunch of articles about how bad Google's hiring process is and how it's keeping out the best candidates.
Sooner or later, the house of cards is going to tumble. The company can only get away with milking its cash cows of search, GMail, Maps
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Your attitude does not sound like Google material...
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Yeah, I guess if a company really likes hiring incompetent ditzes to do their recruiting, maybe someone who calls them out on that isn't fit to work at their company...
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It's not an insult if it's true. Do you have some more polite way of calling recruiters incompetent?
I do just fine finding jobs. The secret is not wasting a lot of time with incompetent recruiters. There's some good ones out there, plus you can easily get a lot of jobs by applying directly with companies (ones which aren't so incompetent with their hiring), and talking directly to hiring managers (who generally *are* competent, since they're the ones with open positions and know exactly what kind of cand
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And you sound like a fucking arrogant moron who's shooting his mouth off about something he knows nothing about.
I didn't apply to a job requiring a CS degree, dipshit. Google didn't show me any kind of job requisition with any kind of detail about the position being hired for or its qualifications. It's no different from when I interviewed at Intel years ago; they just interview people willy-nilly, then bring them in and have them talk to a bunch of different managers and see who wants the candidate in th
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its possible however and this is where i insert my fiendish meme : in a free market in a democracy you can hire or sack whoever the fuck you want since its your company
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as long as you don't dress like a gangsta, walk with the "pimp limp" and aks tings with a grammar of a 4 year old, NOBODY is going to throw obstacles under your feet.
this is a 10 minute video where your indoctrination meets reason - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Actually, I'd like to extend it to everyone. I haven't received special treatment, only good treatment, and although I'm not the one to ask (I have no experience not being a white male) it appears that lots of people who aren't white or male get treated worse.
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Plenty of companies need those "old codgers", and big tech companies, including Google, have hired them: Gosling, Thompson, Weinberger, Pike, plus thousands more.
But memory, CPU, hardware, memory management, etc. don't matter for the bulk of computer programming. That's why these companies need only a small number of "old codgers" and a large number of coding drones who grind out large amounts of Java and JavaScript, and do all the other, boring, tedious tasks that software development requires these days.
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Nobody need some old codger who can't hear that whooshing sound unless he turns up his hearing aid.
Re: Old Skills (Score:3)
The fact he can't hear all the office gossip / bullshit means he's able to concentrate on his work instead of contributing to the problem :)
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Well, you sure missed the whooshing sound.
See, what was getting at is that the "Old Skills" post was wrong both in the literal and in the sarcastic interpretation. In reality, companies do need "old codgers", just not very many of them; that's why many "old codgers" have trouble finding jobs even though their skills are still needed.
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Maybe you missed the mobile device revolution, but keeping memory and CPU usage within sane bounds matters an awful lot these days.
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That's a losing battle, since the frameworks (Java, JavaScript, Swift, etc.) themselves end up being extremely bloated. Furthermore, phones have GB of memory these days, which is vast overkill for the trivial little programs people tend to write for them.
Re:Old Skills (Score:4, Insightful)
Most (nearly all) performance issues I have seen are due to naive assumptions built into the implementation. And poor coding. Things like using Exceptions for logic flow, re-instantiating objects that were instantiated earlier in the call stack, building an in-memory database that is slower than the network lag you were trying to avoid, similar logic scattered throughout the code due to cut-n-paste, etc.
No amount of low-level optimization is going to make up for high-level implementation mistakes.
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Need I say more?
unaided internships are not legal (Score:3)
unaided internships are not legal
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That first interview is what I've always informally called a "bozo screen". They mainly exist to keep from wasting a bunch of interviewers' time on somebody who has no prayer of getting hired.
This is where it helps to know somebody at the company where you want to work who will vouch for you. Most companies will skip the phone screen if you have good internal recommendations.
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And, "Having such a policy does not necessarily shield a company from a discrimination suit, particularly in light of the evidence and allegations presented here
There should