This was MTV, and it was several years ago, so perhaps things have changed.
I admittedly know very little about the hiring process. The whole hiring, interview process at Google just pissed me off in general so much that I refused to participate when I was there -- never even took the interview training.
When we interviewed for our jobs, we were lied to and told we were not doing technical interviews (which it turns out is Google company policy for handling acquisitions, according to a friend of mine from school who was a CTO at a different acquired company). So there I was, at 40ish, totally cold, being asked tech interview questions drawing on uni stuff I hadn't seen in 20ish years. I flubbed the interview, and came in one level below my peers. (though I was promoted after 2 years to the level I was working at). I almost refused to go for the promo, but just treated the entire thing as a joke and wound up getting it easily.
If you don't want to hire a tenured stats professor with 10+ years research experience to work in data science, I think that's your problem. Maybe OP's wife had some horrifying deal-breaker personality trait, but really it just sounds like Google's committee was too snobby about Industry Versus Academia to hire an experienced statistics expert to do statistics.
1. Google, from what i can tell, is okay with it being it's problem as long as it can meet its hiring goals.
2. You have pretty much no data to base this on. Seriously.
Unless Google has made their internal hiring notes and private information public, there's no data to be found on that. I don't know why you'd expect an opinion like that to have data to it when the opposite does not have data to it, either.
Also, be careful, logic as in item #1 is the same logic that companies use to justify any form of discrimination.
This is unfortunate, because hiring is one of the areas where a responsive, streamlined approach is most critical to acceptable outcomes. Creating a committee of irrelevant appointees to come in at a late stage and give an indirect evaluation based on the notes from two prior interviews only creates an opportunity to block good people w/ bikeshedding.
If someone whose company is getting acquired can't even get fast tracked out of this demeaning and silly process, it's no wonder Google turns off non-luminaries more interested in getting good stuff done than dealing with red tape and bureaucracies.
In modern academia, there are hundreds of aspirants for each tenure-track job. To both get a job and then get tenure means you've been peer-reviewed as excellent dozens of times over since finishing school.
>After all the whole point of tenure is to protect people from getting fired regardless of how bad their peer-judged performance is.
No, the point of tenure is to protect people from getting fired when they have controversial political opinions like, "Stop gutting state university funding".
But they won't hire someone with 15-20 years of experience as non-senior, and let them do the same. Because of demonstrated trajectory and the belief that a company only needs leaders and future leaders (see also: why Google has so much trouble polishing maintaining products, polish and maintenance requires non-senior-level elbow grease)
Yes, is because if uncertainty, but it has a disparate impact on older/experienced people.
It's not explicit ageism no, but of courses committees arnet explicitly racist and sexist either, yet Google has no problem admiting there is an implicit problem there.
Because they've already washed out in a sense?
I dunno, it seems sensible to me.
Internally, I believe we were told that all SWEs were expected to be capable of growing into a level 5 (senior SWE) role, and it was "OK" to not be promoted any higher.
So if somebody was hired in their 20s, it would be reasonable to expect they'd plateau at level 5 by 40, and would have shown most of their growth in their late 20s and early 30s. Would you hire this same person?
Sure. I've done it. I have hired senior swes who are happy being senior swe's, for a variety of reasons. As long as they can actually maintain a minimum level of performance at that level, SGTM.
"Would you hire this same person?"
Yes.
The bar is basically set at the point they aren't serious overhead to others, can figure out what needs to get done, and get it done.
Anything over that is just gravy.
There are a variety of opinions on this matter. My personal one is "set the bar at the point they can do good self-directed and mostly self-managed work". If they can get and stay above the bar, awesome, i would never replace them.
(note, the below are all very very much personal opinions :P Most of what i'm going to talk about is all covered by a large number of books by various people, etc at this point.)
First, sorry to hear about your experience. Hope you don't take the below personally.
Having sat on google hiring committees (2-3 a week sometimes) for the better part of 11 years now, i'm going to say this is probably not accurate. Note that i only do SWE committees, though.
I'm also not sure how you derived this view of what occurred (if you are going by what the recruiter said, know that most recruiters have a jaded view of committees who reject their candidates. Otherwise, i'd love to know what facts you have) . You seem to be assuming a lot of the reasons the committee said what it did.
The answer you received is, in my view, usually the answer given when "we don't think they did well enough to hire them, but think that they may get there with practice". For example, in SWE world, this is usually what happens when committees feel like these people are on the wrong side of being able to design and implement stuff, but saw things in the interviews that made folks believe they may be able to get above that bar. (or put bluntly, not obviously worth the risk right now, may be worth the risk in the future). That isn't to say Google doesn't hire people who need mentoring in coding/etc, it's more "committee didn't feel it was a sure enough thing to take the risk".
Note that there are second chance, etc committees if the recruiter felt the committee was wrong. Committees aren't always right, and they definitely aren't meant to be always right.
The leveling decision is also completely independent of the hiring decision in just about all cases. There's some interesting history here, but the statement "both decides if you passed your interview, and then decides on your job level", is wrong now, and was wrong for pretty much everywhere but MTV for a long time.
In any case, if what you say occurred, generally in SWE world the only reason they wouldn't make an offer at the lower level is if "they've not grown in 10000 years to a sane level of engineer, so we don't ever expect them to", or the person has said they wouldn't take it and so it would be pointless. In fact, most of the discussion that used to happen was "we think they are qualified for this lower level, is it worth discussion or have they said they wouldn't accept it" (because they have competing offers.
The first seems ... not the case here, unless your wife did very badly (IE would have had to be two levels down). Sorry. So i find your experience very very strange, though i don't do data scientist committees.
You started with: "Google often does not know how to hire senior people who are not luminaries, this screws people in their 40s."
This is not right.
IMHO, Google often tries not to hire people who have failed to grow to the level and skill set they want out of people with a large amount of experience or who want a senior position.
But that's literally not about age (despite people wanting to claim it is), it's about growth vs experience. They do even try to account for what the experience was, etc. But usually it's the other way around - person wants senior position at Google, isn't qualified for it, complains google hates people who are older. Google would, in most cases, happily offer them a position they are qualified for, they just don't want that one (or google doesn't have such a need ATM). Personally, I wish that being XXX level engineer at some company mattered. But i've also met plenty of people who got promoted a lot just for surviving long enough, and couldn't code/design their way out of a paper bag despite being "senior principal engineer" or whatever. So i understand why they use interviews to try to gauge level instead.
Past that, if you've spent 35 years in industry, and can't code/do algorithms/design/or any measurable metric better than a person fresh out of college, and aren't more self directed, etc, than the fresh out, it may not make sense to hire you.
But again, that's still not about age. Because the person fresh out of college could be 70. I'd still say "hire that person", because they still have potential. The person who has 35 years of experience and still not grown is a known quantity, and that known quantity is not above the bar.