'Old fuddy-duddy' can continue age discrimination suit against Google

A tech industry legend who claims Google fired him because he was too old to fit into the company "culture" has just won another shot at making his case in court.

A California state appeals court in San Jose on Thursday threw out a lower court's decision to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Internet pioneer Brian Reid. He's best known for helping to create the first firewall, the pioneering AltaVista Internet search engine and the alt.* hierarchy of newsgroups in Usenet.

Reid, who was 54 when he filed his lawsuit in 2004, came to Google as its director of operations and director of engineering in June 2002. He was ultimately fired in February 2004, when he was told by his supervisor that he was not a "cultural fit," according to court filings. For those keeping score, that was not long before Google announced its initial public offering, which Reid's attorneys argued deprived him of millions of dollars in potential stock earnings.

According to court papers, Reid's Google colleagues frequently to him as "old man," "old guy," and "old fuddy-duddy" during his time with the search giant. His boss, then 38-year-old Urs Hoelzle, also made age-related remarks about his performance every few weeks, dismissed his opinions and ideas as "obsolete" and "too old to matter," and called him "fuzzy," "lethargic," and other energy-lacking descriptors, the court filings said. Google, for its part, argued it let Reid go because it eliminated the department, an in-house graduate degree program, to which he had recently been reassigned.

The appeals court said a jury should have been allowed to consider a number of pieces of evidence that Reid presented in support of his case. In addition to the "ageist" comments Reid cited, he also commissioned a statistical analysis, which found younger Google employees typically received better performance ratings and higher bonuses. (Click here for a PDF of the court's opinion.)

Google spokesman Jon Murchison said the company doesn't comment on ongoing litigation, "but as our court filings have stated, we believe this complaint to be unfounded and will vigorously defend against it."

[Len Bullard]

You Can Teach a Cow To Tap

The millenials are having an identity crisis. Instead of taking on their elders in their teens (they were too awed) they are doing it in their thirties (wealth makes some think they earned the right). Note the following from Marc Andreesen:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/go-boomers.html

It's the zeitgeist for a generation that was credited with things it has now become insecure about admitting it didn't.

It isn't a very bright generation and doesn't have a lot to show for its efforts in culture or the sciences. So sad. They will never disco but they can learn to tap dance.

On the other hand, their little brothers and sisters are going to be real winners.

[dondarko]

shhh.

don't say that. truth hurts and no one wants to hear it.

[candlynn]

Age discrimination is real and common in IT

Having been in IT for almost 30 years, I have personally seen and experienced age discrimination. Many older IT employees are treated like aging athletes, which is stupid. Experience has taught me that older employees are less likely to be willing to play fetch the stick with the boss, but they also produce products with far fewer defects and security holes. Older developers are more thorough, more cautious. The young bucks are much more willing to work long hours, but the products they produce clearly demonstration that they lack the experience necessary to produce quality projects. Experience mixed with a little wisdom is great for defect prevention.

Personally, after deciding to reduce my travel and striking out in the job market, I decided to start my own IT business and am doing fine. Not too long ago, I got to clean up after some grossly over-priced 20-something consultants that had no clue what it means to create a professional application.

Unforunately, many older IT workers aren't able to handle the investment required in starting their own business.

[mikeburek]

Get what you pay for

Many times HR seems experienced people as wanting more money and costing the company more. But many experienced people understand that the pay of a job is for the job, not for the person filling it. Although I can manager a huge database system and maximize the speed even on old hardware, if I apply for a job at McDonalds, I expect to get paid a normal wage, not $150k/yr.

The biggest problem is that as people get older, they react slower, but usually with the same or better quality. I know that as I age, I won't be able to handle as many things at the same time. I used to be able to listen to 3 conversations at once and recall everything that was said. Now I can only handle 2. Someday it'll be just one, and then someday I may need a hearing aid to handle just that one.

But I like listening to the experience of older people. I'm not self centered and only pay attention to what affects me directly. I can take that knowledge about older computer systems and the tricks that were used to get programs faster and use it in todays programming.

Today few machines get fully exploited because they are obsolete so fast. But when something sticks around a long enough time, or you work at a company that doesn't want to pay $1000/seat every year for the newest version, you get to know all the tricks and how to really use software/hardware. Older computer systems stayed relevant for years, some for a full decade or more. So people who used those systems know a lot about them. And when new systems / OSes are built on top of the previous version, some of those old tricks work really really great.

Maybe all these older people should work programming cell phones. They can understand there are limitations of the hardware speed and have the experience to squeeze all the performance from small chips. For a kid graduating from school right now with a dual core chip running at 2+ Ghz and a FSB of 800+ and 4 GB of memory, are they going to really understand the needed optimizations for a 300 Mhz cpu with only 32 Mb of ram? If that kid's computer is running slow, he can just upgrade in 2 months. With a cell phone CPU, it's gonna be around for a few years.

It's really annoying all of these cell phones that have menus that are sluggish, or the startup animation that is too fast for the cpu to handle. That's just dumb. To making it faster, a younger person might say "Um, dude, upgrade," while the older person with experience in maximizing a slow cpu would say "Ok, lets see if we can do this without runtime data structure detection and maybe reuse some memory locations."

[4Travel]

Get what you pay for

As a director, I will definteily pay for experience. I want people with the savy to tell me when I'm wrong.

[jimoase]

My experience like many others....

To get a consideration for a position I needed to leave any age
references out of my resume. One the job I experienced much
of what others have talked about being Gramps....

I have children their age and those same years of experience
which after awhile many begin to use to their advantage. Today I
volunteer helping small town companies with their computing,
network and software needs. My knowledge is still in demand
and here on the prairie needed.

Developing database and engineering solutions seems to take
longer. Yet here in small town America its better than no
solution and support is local.

Jim

[4Travel]

If Google wins, they lose

If even a shred of the evidence is true about the superviser's comments then Google should settle the case out of court. If they take the case to trail in a California court, they will most likely find that the jury has an adequate number of "fuddy duddies" to find that a proponderance of the evidence favors the plaintiff.

Even if Google finds a jury to rule in their favor in California, they will lose in the court of public opinion. Google, pay up now and avoid the embarassment.

[Broward Horne]

GoogleWannaBes

I run into the same age issue in interviews. I call them the GoogleWannaBes. There's quite a few of the 20-30 year-old generation that believes themselves to be super-geniuses. They've often oriented around a "priesthood culture of IT" that creates arcane buzzwords and indecipherable wording, creating the illusion of supreme knowledge and almost godlike powers of comprehension.

I like to find these things out in interviews, so I tend to bring it out in conversation so the interviewer can easily write me off, saving me the trouble of working at a company that's unpleasant. I have found that the younger generation is literally incapable of working eight hours per day consistently. There's always a 'kid problem', 'doctor appointment', 'air conditioner repairman', 'cable installer', 'car repair', etc, which occurs at on about a bi-weekly basis.

[dondarko]

....

I agree with you but I've also seen where older generation workers are lazy, arrogant, ignorant, unwilling and holding everyone back. What's the point of haveing a 40-something worker coming to work his hours like clockwork if all he/she is going to do is surf the net, reading article and watching news clips?

So the workforce problems aren't restriced to younger generation, but as the spoiled brat generation starts getting into the workforce it will only increase. And who's fault is it that newer generations are like that? Older generation's spoiling of kids and telling them that they are special(you're only special if you're mentally retarded). So older generations have some blame in this thing.