Heath and Fillekes v. Google Inc. Lawsuit
TL;DR: Google often does not know how to hire senior people who are not luminaries, this screws people in their 40s.<p>I think this happened to my wife, but her job category was not listed.  When my small company was acquired by Google (and I had to interview to keep my job), we were forced to re-locate across the country from the east coast to Mountain View.  My wife is a stats professor with tenure at a mid-tier university on the east coast, and she moved with our family.  As its hard to get a tenured academic job, we found something at Google that sounded exciting to her.<p>She applied to Google for a Sr. Data Scientist job, and passed the phone and on-site interviews with flying colors.  However, she was rejected by the committee.   The problem was that, at Google, the committee both decides if you passed your interview, and then decides on your job level.  The job level is arrived at using past work experience.<p>In my wife&#x27;s case, the problem was that the committee deadlocked on how to level her.  She had 5+ years of academic experience, and 5+ years of research experience (think national lab type stuff; research w&#x2F;o teaching).  However, she&#x27;d only briefly worked in industry many years ago between her MS and PhD.  So rather than hire her, they told her to &quot;go work someplace else for a year, then apply again&quot;.  (direct quote, as relayed by her recruiter to me, as I referred her)<p>If she was a fresh PhD, there would have been no problem.  She would have been hired as a level 4, and everything would be fine.  But given that they didn&#x27;t know how to rate her experience, it was just easier for them to pass on her entirely.   This tends to bias the hiring process to hiring younger folks, without experience.<p>And, BTW, that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m no longer at Google, and we&#x27;re all back on the east coast.