If you work at Google and one of the founding employees of the mega search engine company starts calling you “obsolete” and “too old to matter,” your days may be numbered.

That’s what Brian Reid, Google’s vice-president of engineering, is claiming happened before he was fired at age 54 from the company. He worked at the tech giant from 2002 to 2004 and detailed a host of old-guy bashing comments on the part of Google employees in his suit against the company.

This former Stanford professor who said he got great reviews, believes Google, based in Mountain View, CA, gave him the axe because of his age.

His case was thrown out by a lower court because the direct manager who fired him never said a disparaging word about Reid’s age, at least not to his face. Even though other Google staffers made fun of his age, the court viewed those comments as “stray remarks,” and not relevant to Reid’s case.

Well, the state’s highest court ruled yesterday that those stray remarks may indeed matter and the case is now moving forward, much to the chagrin of employers across the country. (more…)