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An age discrimination case against Mountain View-based Google will be argued before the California Supreme Court at a hearing in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Brian Reid, 60, claims the Internet search giant unfairly fired him in 2004 because of his age.
He alleges that a younger supervisor’s remarks that he was “sluggish” and that his ideas were “too old to matter” and co-workers’ comments that he was an “old fuddy-duddy” show that he was fired because he didn’t fit in with Google’s youthful culture.
Reid, who had been an assistant professor at Stanford University and had worked in Silicon Valley, was hired in 2002 to be the then-startup company’s director of operations and engineering.
He was fired one year and 10 months later when a lesser position he had been transferred to was terminated.
Google contends he was fired because the company wasn’t satisfied with his performance and not for reasons to do with age.
The seven justices of the state high court won’t be deciding whether Reid was in fact discriminated against, only whether he can have a trial on his lawsuit in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
A trial judge dismissed the lawsuit, but the state Court of Appeal in San Jose reinstated it, and Google has appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court.
The court will have three months to issue a decision after Wednesday’s hour-long hearing.
A key issue in the case is whether judges and juries should be allowed to consider so-called “stray remarks.”
Google claims the alleged comments by Reid’s supervisor and co-workers are not relevant to the case because they were either not based on age or were not made by people with decision-making authority over his employment.
Too bad the lawsuit could not also include all those people not considered to work for Google because of their age. THAT is what makes up their “youthful culture” – age discrimination in hiring.
Further context, absent from this Bay City News story, is that Brian Reid (a respected computer security expert, appearing in television documentaries on the subject) was well known around the Internet long before Google existed. The Bay Area had an unusually large population with Internet email and news access in the 1980s, owing both to the concentration of schools and firms directly connected, and to early public-access service providers, one of which served the entire Bay Area and began in 1985.
Reid is also remembered for promoting public discussion of food and cooking on the Internet. He and associates created the unregulated “alt” newsgroup hierarchy “after dinner May 7, 1987 at G.T’s Sunset BBQ in Mountain View.” Reid wrote that the “alt” hierarchy was largely “created for the purpose of carrying alt.gourmand,” a moderated recipes forum. Reid had started such a forum in 1985 but was dissatisfied with its positioning after the existing newgroup structure was revised in 1987.