It seems that every large company is guilty of this to some extent. I used to work at Intel and they had this exact problem when they tried to shrink the work force. The dynamic goes like this: Managers find it easier to use the performance management tool to make everyone happy rather than to follow the policies and procedures in place. So you end up with lots of quirks on an individual level -- someone wants more pay and less stock so you stick them on a low stock grant and high pay increase. Or the work in a given team simply isn't that difficult and so as your traditional journeyman gains more experience they get more expensive but not more useful- so they become at risk.<p>Then HR comes in to do the mass headcount cut, look at performance reviews and just cut all the people with low performance reviews. Because it's done on a mass scale of 1,000s of people they really can't do it on a case by case basis. The problem is that to safely fire staff you need to have treated them fairly and that's where it all comes out of the woodwork. You put all the data together and it turns out you've fired way more people over 50 because the organisation is a pyramid and older workers aren't value for money at the bottom of the pyramid and there's not many places at the top.<p>Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 older engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 younger engineers. It's the easy option.<p>Not to mention the fact that if you've been at a company a long time you've most likely had your salary rise during the good years and stay flat in the bad years, either way when you get to a bad cycle again suddenly you look very expensive to the organisation.
Years ago I read an article with a headline something like "So you think you're indispensable?" - it argued that if you don't have written affirmation of your value, that value probably exists in places where those making firing decisions won't see it. Since then I've made a point of making sure I get the occasional kudo in writing, be that from my boss or a co-worker, and tack them into any periodic evaluations. When someone thanks me for some extra effort I can say "Happy to help, feel free to sing my praises to manager@example.com :) ".<p>It's annoying and shouldn't be necessary - but it's also fairly low effort (lower effort than concocting fake annual "goals" to be striving towards when our work changes more rapidly than that) and has given me comfort in more than one "tight budget" situation at various companies. Anything low-effort that keeps anxiety in check is worth it, and if it actually proves useful, then bonus. Also, my managers tend to LIKE getting this written feedback from others, because they can cut-and-paste it or refer to it in their evaluations, which makes THEIR lives easier (no one likes evaluations).<p>It's one of the few clickbait-ey headlines that actually delivered, and I recommend the same advice to anyone else.
I actually find ageism to be one of the most overt forms of illegal discrimination. People talk about how they are looking for young devs in a way that would seem insane if they were talking about white devs or male.
It looks to me like, in general, the bigger a company gets, the more the "leadership" starts acting like they are running a hedge fund. The money becomes more important than the product. Then when the product is de-emphasized, the employees obviously lose their importance and then the "leadership" start treating them like cattle to be moved from grazing location to grazing location. I put "leadership" in quotes because they somehow tend to be managers, who never actually built anything, who are clueless about the nuances of the product.
Good. Much like all the other "isms" ageism is rarely overt but still exists and has real effects. Leave policies and on-call schedules are tuned to make life difficult for those who have to deal with their own or family members' medical conditions. Offices are designed to be disproportionately unpleasant for those who have undergone well known age-related changes in hearing and vision. IBM seems to have gone with the tried and true approach of laying people off based on proxies for age, just as others hire using proxies for race or social class, with "skills" as the shorthand. They'd better be prepared to explain exactly what criteria they used to decide which skills were valuable, how skill levels were evaluated, and how they concluded that layoffs and subsequent replacement hires were preferable to internal transfers (with or without retraining). It's a good thing that more companies are being held accountable for practicing this form of discrimination.
One thing that concerns me more than ageism is the tendency to retain management while refreshing engineers. Bad management will always fail no matter what the engineering skill is.
Ooh, tricky.<p>Is it a case of corporate douchebaggery, hiring recent grads at half the salary of the veterans and then laying off the veterans? Or is it 'lay off the fogeys that can't let go of Fortran 77 long enough to learn Java or JS or C#' I've seen both circumstances in my career. Given that it's IBM, I am inclined towards the former.
> <i>“Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” Ed Barbini, a spokesman for IBM said in an emailed statement.</i><p>I'm assuming this is just an excuse and it has more to do with the fact that their older workers have higher salaries. But would the defense "we fired older workers because they were paid more" hold up in court?<p>edit: I'll answer my own question. According to an article I found [1]:<p>> <i>The United States Supreme Court has held that an employer does not violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, 29 U.S.C. §§ 621-634, by acting on the basis of a factor, such as an employees’ pension status, seniority or salary, that is empirically correlated with age.</i><p>[1] <a href="https://aaronhall.com/does-being-fired-because-of-your-salary-constitute-age-discrimination/" rel="nofollow">https://aaronhall.com/does-being-fired-because-of-your-salar...</a>
It seems our jobs are a double-edged sword.<p>Unlike professionals like doctors, lawyers, and many accredited within their professions, we don't need degrees. I certainly don't have a stem degree, and many of my friends, some of whom make a third to half a million dollars in the Northeast of the US (not SV), don't have any college degrees at all.<p>We're able to learn and shift, going from developer to sysadmin, architect, manager or security professional and back again. Pre-sales anyone?<p>We can choose relaxed, helpful-to-society non-profit companies, mean, 24/7 work ethic startups with monthly death marches, low-salary beer keg outfits with bright colored furniture, boring investment banks or many other.<p>We have a sort of highly competitive meritocracy where I can go home and learn something I happen to know is hot in the market, and maybe climb the hierarchy (maybe).<p>On the other hand, I'm pushing 40.<p>That means events beyond my control are pushing me down the hierarchy, or at the very least making the ladder rungs more slippery.<p>Would you take it all back and pick a different profession, if my assessment is balanced?
IBM recently forced remote workers to move back to specific offices. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t move were let go. I expect that policy adversely impacted employees over 40 whose families were unable to relocate due to school, spouses jobs or caring for aging parents. My cynical view is that IBM likely knew that was the case and enacted the policy specifically to target those over 40. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some emails from executives so excited about their scheme that are still discoverable. Probably a good power point deck on the benefits too.<p>Would that have been illegal?
I'm old (and indeed pale, male, and stale), but not sure whether I care about age discrimination or not. If a company thinks they can make more money by not hiring me, I don't really want to work there.<p>I _do_ wish there was some way to eliminate "dummy" interviews--interviewing older people but with no intention to hire, just to make the numbers look good. In my recent experience, this seems to be fairly common.
My apologies that this is slightly off topic to the wider discussion about IBM's layoffs, but if hiring people based off of their skills is unacceptable as you say, how are people supposed to make hiring decisions?<p>EDIT: Somehow, the parent comment this was made as a reply to (notacoward's above-thread) has moved, and this comment has become top-level (and a non-sequitur). Is this a bug?
It wouldn't be quite as bad for these folks if the <i>hiring</i> side of things also didn't discriminate on age.<p>There's a really good business profit-oriented reason to discriminate: older workers ask for more money, defend their interests better, and generally are less open to things like death marches, on-call and such.<p>I don't know what the solution is. I'm pumping my money into income-producing real estate assets as a hedge, while I sell myself as a consultant. But I can already smell the difficulties that lie ahead.<p>Some friends climbed the corporate ladder into senior management. That works, too, but it's a slog and you better enjoy it.
Do tech employers tend to hire in places that, by their nature, reduce the number of older workers? If it's too expensive to own a house or raise a family somewhere, that will tend to filter out the older candidates.
If seniority and experience do not add up for the majority then it makes software engineering a very dicey proposition.<p>A civil engineer who has built 10 bridges or a doctor with hundreds of operations behind them is much more valued than those entering the field.<p>Why would this not apply in software, surely someone who has built tons of products has valuable experience or is there some other factor at work that is devaluing experience?<p>This will also impact decisions to study more as that shortens potential career time, if this is the case then for those choosing streams in engineering maybe choosing another is a more rational decision.
Calling ever more things discrimination or some form of <i>ism</i> is really starting to make the words lose and and all meaning. Does IBM like young workers because they're young, or do they like young workers because they disproportionately have traits, outside of youth, that IBM considers desirable. I think few would argue that it's the former, yet that's precisely what's necessary to suggest this action is the production of discrimination or 'ageism'.<p>Companies like young workers because not only is their real value substantially lower than experienced employees, but because they also tend to have a poor understanding of themselves even being worth that value. They also tend to have few obligations outside of work and may be more anxious to try to 'prove' themselves. Older workers tend to not only demand more money but also have a much better understanding of their worth, and their role. They're not going to be trying to prove anything to anybody, and they are also going to generally have obligations outside of work, such as family.<p>You can see this view and its effect play out very visible in other areas of IBM. For instance as of last year IBM became primarily an Indian company, in at least as much as they have more Indian engineers than American engineers. And given they not that long ago had practically 0 Indian engineers and nearing 100% American engineers, that means they were actively firing Americans to hire Indians. Racism? Obviously not. It's the exact same thing in play. This doesn't mean I in any way support what they're doing. But at the same time I also don't support using emotionally charged buzzwords to try to rally against it.
Do PR people even think of the context in what they are replying to? "Skills change dramatically over time" OK somewhat crap reason to laid off a lot of people, "we invest heavily in retraining workers" wtf are workers getting retrained at? McDonalds? this is the exact opposite of what was just stated.
Interesting, with recent force reductions I have witnessed a document was circulated that showed position and age. no other identifying information was contained. Of course since the numbers were small it isn't hard to know who was what age.
As someone on the older side of things - I'd be curious. Given all the terrible discrimination around age we hear about, why doesn't a company just hire old 55+ year olds to do their coding.<p>This should be an undervalued labor pool given how discriminatory things sound. It would seem like a business opportunity?<p>If you've got folks willing to work equal or longer hours more efficiently with more experience and more current knowledge for equal pay as the 20 year old out of college - that seems like a no brainer?
I find it difficult to believe that IBM didn't see that one coming. I mean, what were they thinking? "They won't notice the pattern anyway!" IBM HR, probably. Were they really that careless? Or is it that somebody detected a wee disproportionality in numbers and thought "let's sue them!" There are no numbers nor details in that article beside 20,000 and "thousands" indicating how bad the discrimination really is.
You can't fire for age, but what about # of working years left? If one person will work for your company for another 20 years, and another will only for 5, why can't you make the business decision to favor the one who will work for you for longer?
thousands, yes but still clickbait. the class action is for 3 employees.<p>very very very much doubt this is going anywhere. my money is that this is a publicity stunt for the lawyer, who’s done other similar high profile cases.
I wonder what's the threshold for a demographic ratio to be considered discriminatory (age, gender, whatever)? Is 90/10 discriminatory? How about 70/30? 51/49?
A lot of people in this thread seem to be assuming that IBM was laying off software developers mainly.<p>Could've just been managers and the like.
>>“Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” Ed Barbini, a spokesman for IBM said in an emailed statement.<p>If that were the case, they'd be investing in retraining, not repeated mass layoffs that focus on older workers.<p>The concept that older workers can't learn is complete nonsense -- some may not learn because of entitled attitude, that's across all ages (no I don't have a study, but I do note the plethora of press commenting on entitled millennials, etc.).
older people tend to lack in the new ideas department (sorry if the truth hurts) lol... I got downvoted in other comments because of this comment (thanks /u/dang)
I'm already over the hill at 45. I don't know that I've ever lost any opportunity due to age, nor do I expect it any time soon, but I see the fear among peers even younger than me.<p>In every situation I've witnessed (both manifested and simply feared), it wasn't age discrimination; it was simply that some older employees had stopped learning long, long ago. They were never good to begin with, they got complacent, and now they're milking dead-end careers until they fade away.<p>Ageism exists, to be sure, but tech is still largely a meritocracy. It may appear to be a young persons' game, but get out of the Silicon Valley/startup bubble, and the vast majority of employers value experience.<p>The key problem with most older workers is that they stop learning. I keep up with technology, and my career options and salary continue to grow.<p>IBM isn't stupid enough to fire people just because they're old. They're firing dead weight.
As a 59 yo who transitioned from development to tech support 20 years ago, I saw the writing on the wall years ago that IT development/engineering is a young man's game and if you don't want to transition into management, ala Bill Lumbergh and TPS reports, which I didn't, you end up fading away. I didn't have mad skills so I took the most hated job in IT, tech support at a college.<p>I can't say it's been a bed of roses, but I don't need a 6 figure salary and I get to interact with a diverse user base. I also get to do practically nothing when I feel like it and also walk around campus ogling 19yo coeds on a sunny day as long as I do my job. Management in the public sector is notoriously weak. I want to believe that the author of "The Peter Principle" worked in academia or the public sector.<p>Anyway, regarding IBM, I've been reading about them culling the herd of the elderly since the early '90's causing many suicides, heart attacks, and substance abuse among their formally well paid and important (in their own minds) denizens. I tried imparting this wisdom upon my favorite nephew to become a doctor (back when it didn't cost an arm or a leg or a military commission to become one, but he chose engineering. Didn't invent anything and now is an over worked mid level manager with a large mortgage and 2 children 5 and 7 years from college subject to lay offs at upper management's whim - he's been through two of them already and is only 42. Oh well.