A 64-year-old software engineer sued Google for age discrimination on Wednesday after the company didn t hire him four years ago.
Robert Heath, of Boynton Beach, Fl., was 60 years old and had a background working at IBM, Compaq and General Dynamics when he interviewed for a Google job in February 2011. His 21-page class-action complaint filed in federal court Wednesday seeks a jury trial, monetary damages and changes to Google s HR policies.
Neither Heath and his lawyer nor Google representatives were immediately available for comment.
The lawsuit claims persons age 40 or older are systemically excluded from positions for which they are well-qualified. The end result of Google s pattern and practice of age discrimination is a workforce with a median age of 29.
It was a Google recruiter who first contacted Heath after apparently discovering his website in February 2011, sending him an email that said the company was embarking on its largest recruiting / hiring campaign in its history, according to the lawsuit. The recruiter emailed that he thought Heath was a great candidate after reviewing his experience.
But a phone interview conducted by a Google engineer who tested his coding skills several days later did not go well, according to Heath. Heath said in the lawsuit that he answered the technical questions correctly, but the Google engineer s lack of English fluency and insistence on using a speaker phone led to communication difficulties. The same recruiter who first contacted him later emailed back notifying Heath that Google was not going to pursue the next step in the hiring process, without fully explaining why.
The lawsuit cites as precedent the high-profile case of Brian Reid, who was fired as Google s engineering director in 2004. The California Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that Reid presented enough evidence, including comments from colleagues mocking him as an old fuddy-duddy and not a cultural fit, to make a discrimination claim.
Above: Google employees walked to and from the Googleplex in Mountain View in June 2014. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)
