A Florida man named Robert Heath has filed an age-discrimination lawsuit against Google in federal court, seeking to form a class action of workers who allege they were denied a chance to work at the search giant because of their age.

Heath was rejected by Google in 2011, despite the fact that he had "highly-pertinent qualifications and experience," with a Google recruiter calling him a "great candidate," according to the complaint (PDF). At the time, Heath was 60 years old.

The lawsuit claims that the median age of Google employees is 29 years old, well below the median age of all US workers, which US Department of Labor reports as 42.4 years. The median ages for US workers in computer-related fields are similar: for "computer and mathematical occupations" the median age is 41.1 years, for "computer programmers" it's 42.8 years, and for software developers the median is 40.6 years.

Heath's online resume stated he was looking for a position with “opportunities related to software development [and] I would be interested in assignments related to embedded systems or the world wide web and internet assignments regarding C++, Java, PHP, and other software technologies.”

He had a master certification in Java and C++, and boasted of scoring "higher than 96% of all previous test takers" for the Java certification and being in the 89th percentile for the C++ test.

Awkward interview

In February 2011, Heath was contacted by Sam Chun, a Google recruiter. They arranged for Heath to have a phone interview with a Google engineer, but it didn't go well. Heath's lawyer lays it out in the complaint:

The Google interviewer was barely fluent in English. The interviewer used a speaker phone that did not function well. Mr. Heath asked him, politely and repeatedly, if he would use his phone’s handset, and the interviewer refused, stating that “we” would have to “suffer” through the interview using the speaker phone because he did not want to have to hold the handset through the whole interview. Communication was very difficult, and Mr. Heath and the interviewer had difficulties understanding each other throughout the interview.

The interview included three sets of technical questions. Heath says he answered the first two sections were answered "completely and accurately," but the Google interviewer refused to look at his documentation for the solution to the third set of questions, instead requiring him to read the program code over the phone.

The lawsuit cites evidence in an earlier age discrimination case, Reid v. Google, which California appeals courts had allowed to progress towards trial, before it was settled. In that case, Reid said he was called an "old man," and an "old fuddy-duddy" by colleagues, and was told in his performance evaluation that Google was different in part due to its "younger contributors" and "super fast pace." Reid said he was told he wasn't a "cultural fit," and later fired.

A state appeals court ruled that Google would have to face trial in the Reid case in 2007, and the case settled shortly thereafter.

Unlike Reid, who says he got fired unfairly, Heath was simply never hired at Google. Heath's lawyers seek to form a class of all individuals 40 or older who sought work with Google but weren't hired, from August 13, 2010 through the present. Google's "pattern and practice of discriminating" violated federal age discrimination laws, the complaint claims.

Younger workforces

Google didn't respond to Ars' request for comment about the case. The company told the Wall Street Journal it believes the case is meritless and it will vigorously defend itself.

The WSJ also looked into where the "median age" data in Heath's lawsuit came from. The numbers are derived from Payscale.com, which determined the median based on self-reporting by 840 Google employees. Payscale found that four other tech companies—AOL, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Salesforce—have even younger workforces.

The full data from Payscale is posted below. (The company said Google's median age was 29 in 2013, which explains the discrepancy between the lawsuit and this table—presumably Heath's lawyers didn't have access to the newest data.)