I've experienced people figuring out my age when looking at my resume, then weirdly warping the questions while accusing me of Googling the answers in response. (Based only on hearing me type. I was scripting a Python script to give the answer.)
There are a surprising number of candidates & engineers that simply give up when they encounter a hard problem.
Interesting, because many candidates would (rightly and safely) assume that you're asking if they already know the answer - not if (duh) they could just google it. And accordingly, to respond with "just google it" would mark them as a plodding, uninspired programmer - and definitely cost them points (or even outright sink the interview).
There are a surprising number of candidates & engineers that simply give up when they encounter a hard problem.
It sure is easy (and gratifying) to feel categorically superior to a significant portion of the people who walked in through that door with the idea of landing a job.
But Occam's Razor suggest that, rather than being a bunch of gutless dolts - they were (perhaps as a result of being bludgeoned by one soul-crushing interview experience too many) simply assuming a more conservative acceptance level to your question than you thought they were.
I do not believe that this logic works in all/most/many scenarios. I would not be asking a question in an interview that could "just" be googled. That generally would suggest that I am asking for trivia as opposed to asking for understanding.
But I have told interviews that I don't know, but I'd google it if I needed to in a work situation, and that's always been received positively. I guess it depends on what they're asking about though. Some stuff you should know off the top of your head...
They all had been able to get that far in their academic career because they had been able to solve problems, and solve them well and quickly.
When they ran into hard problems in the real world that they couldn't solve, some couldn't handle it well.
He didn't get it. He was sure that her expression changed negatively very slightly once she saw him on the video conference. My friend is quite sure it was due to either ageism or subtle racism. He is not white.
He's moved on but it confirmed to him fair is not a word he believes in anymore.
And I suspect much of that is not conscious, which of course makes it difficult to talk about and address.
That said, I do worry about how my presentation will be perceived elsewhere, it comes time to move on.
A candidate who is conflict-adverse, for instance, would not be a "culture fit" in an organization where decisions are made in screaming matches.
The problems come when your culture is toxic, particularly for certain types of people. If older candidates wouldn't be successful or happy in your work-20-hours-a-day-know-it-all culture, that's a culture problem, not a dog-whistle for ageism.
Some interviewers use "culture fit" to explain a not-like-me discrimination against people with a different gender, background, age, race, etc. Those people are generally toxic—but also indicative of an organizational culture that tolerates those biases by employees who are external-facing representatives of that company.
As a candidate, if you're ever rejected as a "bad culture fit", you probably dodged a bullet. That's a negative reflection on the company, not on you.
Agreed. But should they? I mean if I start a company with no recourse to public funds why should I obliged to employ someone I wouldn't want to work with? I understand why it is illegal. I think the ethics are debatable too. Most importantly, I think both are routinely violated under some guise such as 'culture fit', etc.
Because otherwise certain classes of people will never be able to get certain classes of job, despite being qualified, because the people who hold those jobs are all members of another class who doesn't want to work with them.
For example, at various times both women and African Americans couldn't become doctors. There is no evidence that women or African Americans are worse at being doctors than men or white people, but the people who _were_ doctors (mostly men and mostly white) at those times didn't want to work with them, and culture suggested they were not capable of performing that profession.
Preventing discrimination against protected classes is a balancing act - balancing the infringement on the liberties of a group that systemic discrimination brings vs infringement on the liberties of an individual or single entity by saying they cannot make choices based on certain criteria. The protected classes that exist now (such as gender and race) exist because far more harm is done to far more people when they don't exist, even factoring in the fact that certain people will lose the ability to make certain choices based on all the criteria they'd like to.
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm
The Age Discrimination in Employment Act is much narrower than commonly assumed. It only forbids discrimination against workers age 40 or older. It does not forbid ageism for being too young, nor against a 39-year-old for being too old.
More generally: discrimination in employment is legal by default and excepted only by specific prohibitions, which include race and religion and gender but not much more than that. Here are some attributes that are legally perfectly permissible to discriminate either for or against: smoking, obesity, height, glasses, alcohol use, vegetarianism, sports team favoritism.