Alternatively, she has good qualifications and Google has interview practices or policies that are - intentionally or not - age-discriminatory.
Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;)
Considering that the typical programming interview in this industry does not involve writing any actual code (no, waving your arms against a whiteboard in a coding-like way doesn't count), I'm generally inclined to believe interviews are more problematic than interviewees.
>Generally speaking, if well-qualified people are constantly failing your interviews, the problem may not be these well-qualified people and instead might be your interviews ;)
Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview. I am assuming there will be ~10 interviewed candidates per role and they have pre-screening essentially for "qualified on paper".
I've no position on whether they're discriminatory, but that statement simply doesn't hold water.
> "Google have [probably] rarely interviewed anyone who was not well qualified - yet around 90% of candidates fail the interview."
This statement hinges on the belief that these 90% of candidates fail because, while qualified on paper, they are not actually qualified for the job.
I suspect it isn't actually true, and that in reality the Google interview process fails very large number of actually-qualified candidates, while also admitting a large number of not-actually-qualified candidates. In short, I suspect beyond pre-screening people for paper qualifications, the actual on-sites have an effectiveness in the order of a coin toss.
But yet we take pride in failing hordes of people, because it somehow implies nice things about our surviving it. Somehow the fact that the process for hiring programmers doesn't involve any programming, and that we are hiring people to architect large systems by solving isolated CS101 algorithms questions, doesn't bother us.
It doesn't really hinge on them not being qualified for the job the way I read it. It hinges on them not being 'the most qualified' for the job. As failure of the interview to me is defined as not getting the job. And interviewing 10 people for every position leads to them choosing a most qualified out of those 10 and leaving notes for future teams looking to fill a position.
I am no way saying their practices are not discriminatory, just that I read that statement differently.
I think due to the complete lack of disclosure about why you don't get a job in the tech industry it will be interesting to see Google have to justify their decisions with the facts to a court. I personally ask after most every interview what I could do to improve, or what I did wrong. With very rare exceptions I am told they can not disclose that information for liability reasons. (Google and Amazon both definitely gave me this answer) A handful of companies have told me things like, we went with a candidate that had more experience in ________. And once a company told me that a project was cancelled so they unfortunately no longer had a position available.
> "And interviewing 10 people for every position leads to them choosing a most qualified out of those 10 and leaving notes for future teams looking to fill a position."
I'd agree with you if the above was true - but it isn't at Google, nor is it true throughout the majority of the industry.
Most companies (Google included) hire based on a fairly simple "first past the post" system. A candidate comes in, interviews, and a hire/no-hire decision is made shortly after. In cases where two candidates are interviewing simultaneously some comparison might be made between the two, but otherwise the candidates are decided upon serially.
I don't know of any companies that practice the "interview N people, choose best" methodology - if they did, then yes, I agree that "failing" 90% of people might be more reasonable.
I don't even know if that strategy is practicable - sourcing candidates generally takes a long time. Getting N people to interview within a short time window for the same position is nearly impossible for any N > 2.
The company I work for very much does that, as have others I have interviewed at and knew people working at. The company I currently work for is legally required to interview N (I don't know what N is) candidates for each position, hiring takes a long time due to clearances, and they have firm dates they need to have people started by so they can finish projects on time as they get projects. In the case they can not find enough qualified candidates where I work they relax the criteria and interview unqualified ones and hire the best they can find in that bunch, probably how I got hired with no experience. A candidate search usually starts 6 months prior to a project starting, with a decision made at least 2 months prior. While it is not the company I currently work for Salesforce.com is a company I have good reason to believe uses a system of choosing a single person out of a pool of interviewed people after a certain number have been interviewed.
Since google has the multiple rounds of interviews and they very much had notes on my first time interviewing for my second time interviewing (neither of which did I make it to the second round of in person interviews). I suspect that googles last day of in person interviews, (2nd day? 3rd day? don't know how many days of in person interviews they have but I know it is more than one) is when they perform things in the manner you are describing. I have been told all the technical portions of the interview are over by the last day of in person interviews by some people who work there, although I am taking that information on faith based off the fact they are people I trust, and do not know first hand. Also from what I could tell Google does not use a short time window for their interview process either, as each time I entered the process it took over 3 weeks to go from recruiter to the first in person round.
The times I interviewed at google it was made clear to me that I was interviewing for a position on a specific team, and not a general hiring pool. So far as I met most of the team members, maybe you are correct though and the team size was just very flexible.
Biggest point here. You can't flunk out 90% of your applications and complain you have a shortage of qualified staff. You have people begging to work for you, how about you hire a few of them and teach them anything that's missing. Oh the horror, the employees aren't replaceable meat cogs in some giant machine.
That is illogical. If a million plumbers and no programmers applied to be programmers, would Google be wrong to not hire them? We are talking about skilled jobs in a specific trade.
Why are you interviewing the plumbers? If a million plumber and no programmers applied, you would immediately reject every resume and not interview anyone.
Note that this assumes none of the plumbers have been working on teaching themselves software development in order to make a career change and thus do not have non-work evidence of competence.
Four times does seem excessive, but I have been called back by companies to interview for other positions in the past. I wasn't a fit for some reason in the first instance, but my information was saved and presented again when another opportunity came up that they thought I would be a fit for.
Maybe. It is very hard to prove one way or another.
The only way to "prove" discrimination is to show a pattern of behaviours rather than isolated incidents. That's what lawsuits like this often hinge upon, they will use discovery to primarily prove that discrimination is occurring.
After the first interview she was re-contacted by the Google recruiters who told her she had done very well in her interview, and that was why they were contacting her for other positions.
As an industry we basically have no idea how to hire coders. Worse, copying interview practices from the big tech companies is rampant, even though the big companies are by far the most dogmatic of them all.
Remember when asking "logic" brain teasers was believed to be highly correlated with programming ability? Why are manhole covers round? How many jelly beans are in this jar? Why is this lightbulb so fucking warm? Not so long ago these were serious interview questions.
Then the big tech-cos moved onto simply making people scribble algorithms problems on a whiteboard and everybody else followed unquestioningly.
There is shockingly little self-reflection when it comes to tech interview methodology, and for an industry so obsessed with proving assumptions with data, we also do very little of that. Most interview "best practices" are accepted on faith and their validity is literally never tested.
The reason she joined the lawsuit is because she believed that Google was never going to hire her anyway. So you're sort of implying that she is somehow burning a bridge that was never built.
