IBM purged ‘gray hairs’ and ‘old heads’ as it launched Millennial Corps: lawsuit

Age discrimination for older software engineers is real. It gets enforced in subtle ways. It is up or out culture at the end.<p>Age discrimination doesn&#x27;t get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.

I know I will be downvoted to hell by the young folks that don&#x27;t know how things work, but the only way to fix the absurd power imbalance and worker hostile laws we have in the USA is through strong unions.<p>It is such an obvious thing that you can even spot when union-busting laws were passed in the trends for inflation adjusted wages.<p>Software engineers think they are irreplaceable and our current conditions will last forever but it&#x27;s a lie.<p>Good news is it seems we have a new generation of politicians worried about it but we as workers have to do our part or we will progressively lose more and more of our hard earned &quot;privilege&quot; and make sure more can benefit from it.

I don&#x27;t know if the suit has merit but I was pretty amazed at the stuff IBM wanted me to sign when I left. There is a saying that every clause in a contract tells a story, well there were a <i>lot</i> of stories in my separation agreement :-). Comparing it to the agreement I signed when I left Google it was clear that over its lifetime, IBM has been sued a <i>lot.</i> :-)

This appears to be the initial complaint, from 2018: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regmedia.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;17&#x2F;ibmdiscriminationsuit917.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;regmedia.co.uk&#x2F;2018&#x2F;09&#x2F;17&#x2F;ibmdiscriminationsuit917.p...</a><p>On the surface, allowing recent hires to be exempt from performance-based layoff programs isn&#x27;t particularly unethical, as they may still be ramping up. It certainly seems like there&#x27;s substance here, though, beyond just &quot;think <i>like</i> a millennial&quot; or &quot;give recent hires a chance&quot; rhetoric. Will be interesting to follow. It&#x27;s essential to our entire industry that lawsuits like this draw lines in the sand - we&#x27;re all in danger as we age if big tech can get away with age discrimination.

I am 63 and I&#x27;m having an amazing career right now. I am levels and levels above where I ever thought I&#x27;d be. It&#x27;s too stimulating to retire. I&#x27;ve always been attracted to the hardest problems I could find and that paid off, but it took a long time. I don&#x27;t know how people do that quickly, unless it&#x27;s partly luck. I&#x27;m not Ivy League so I had to earn every opportunity.

Never trust anyone who attempts to get you to waive your right to collective action, or attempts to force you in to binding arbitration. This is especially true when it comes to employment.<p>There is <i>never</i> any benefit for you, and it means that they will, one day, try to screw you.

I worked on a team that had a lot of amazing talent (many members of the team had 20+ years of experience in the field). Got a new manager who wanted to reduce cost and bring in &quot;new ideas&quot;. Funny thing was: those experienced engineers had been promoting many of those new ideas for quite a while to no avail. End result was the green team that was brought in ended up taking way too long to redo everything and missed the market opportunity. They also missed the boat on the new ideas, confusing different techniques and tech for new product features that would be useful for customers. The whole thing died.

I think the appropriate market response is to start pricing this behavior into our salary asks as younger engineers.<p>Rather than assuming a long career with increasing pay, point to cases like this in salary negotiations. Your highest income generating years maybe be 30-40.

IBM is in a bind. They were so behind for so many years that anyone talented left. The ones who stayed were around were there because of tenure, not talent. What do you do when your best employees are gone and your best days are past? Share buybacks, overmarketing, and aggressive pursuit of license audits. But none of those require a large senior employee base. So they took the most aggressive policy possible while still plausibly remaining inside the law.

In case you missed the deep discussion on this “wake up” call from 2 months ago.<p>“64 and unemployed: One man’s struggle to be taken seriously as a job applicant”<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19022000" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19022000</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;radio&#x2F;thesundayedition&#x2F;the-sunday-edition-for-january-27-2019-1.4989313&#x2F;64-and-unemployed-one-man-s-struggle-to-be-taken-seriously-as-a-job-applicant-1.4991626" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbc.ca&#x2F;radio&#x2F;thesundayedition&#x2F;the-sunday-edition...</a>

I’m in my late 20s and I’ve already learned not to trust our society&#x2F;economy to ensure that I’ll have a stable financial future. You need to have a plan and be doubly hedged against shittiness. Keep costs low. Save and invest. Job hop as much as necessary to boost your income. Try to build a business that can generate wealth (but don’t depend on that outcome).<p>Above all trust no one to care for you. Not your government. Not a company offering options. Not even FAANG. Be ruthless and look out for yourself and those you love first and foremost. No one else will.

Companies shouldn’t be allowed to force arbitration on protected classes. Employees shouldn’t even be allowed to sign over that right. If IBM is found innocent, the laws need to change.

&quot;let&#x27;s fire all the people who will actually do the horrifically boring work our company actually does that makes a lot of money so that young people who would never work here can replace them!&quot;. brilliant!!!

I wonder how much age bias is to blame for the constant reinvention of the wheel and hype-tech in the industry

And the strategy works! <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;hpeFTyP" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;hpeFTyP</a>

I think the hard truth here is that there will always be clever ways to get around anti-age discrimination laws and companies will always optimize to pay employees less even if they project a culture antithetical to that.<p>I wonder what the graph would look like at i.e. FANG in terms of average age per employee over time. My understanding is that they&#x27;ve been hiring undergrads very aggressively in the past few years such that the trend would be similar to more brazen companies such as IBM in terms of declining age of employees. It&#x27;s happening everywhere in very subtle ways. LPT: don&#x27;t get old? \s.

Age discrimination in technology is alive and well, flourishing under the veils of &quot;over qualified&quot; and &quot;culture fit&quot; and &quot;no experience with the xyz product&quot;. I have had many great phone interviews. On site, in the presence of hiring decision makers, while I look like a typical white corporate employee, the gray hairs blending in with brown are visible enough for the comments such as, &quot;this role may not be challenging enough for you&quot;, and the end result is being over qualified. Not too old for them, just too qualified. Makes everyone feel better. If and when I need surgery, I hope my surgeon is overqualified! But thecreal focus is on tools. &quot;Do you have x years experience with the xyz software product?&quot; I spent at least a decade of my career evaluating new technology...And implementing some of it. A tool is a tool. But what is the process? What is the purpose of the tool? A person says they have 5 years experience with a Milwaukee hammer. That&#x27;s what the job req says is required. This person gets hired because the person with 7 years weilding a Craftsman hammer doesn&#x27;t have the Milwaukee hammer experience. But what is the purpose? In the end, the 5 year Milwaukee experience person gets the job but still can&#x27;t hammer in a nail without bending the nail. And places nails with no regard for rhe building code. Experience is not about the tool, but that is not what today&#x27;s HR hiring&#x2F;vetting process is about. ISAM, VTAM, DB2, Paradox, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, nosql, hadoop... tools. Third Normal Form? Data dictionary? Index optimization? Processes not addressed by a specific tool. Similarly, does memory management enhancements make the C coding language that much different? But I digress. Hire the experience with the process, not necessarily with a tool. Especially the &quot;flavour of the year&quot; tools.

Forced arbitration is a racket and needs to be outlawed.

I&#x27;ve always wondered why you don&#x27;t see self-funded startups that just hire old people. The customers don&#x27;t care.

I don&#x27;t know the merits of this particular suit, but I&#x27;d say everyone working at the company, or considering it, should see how it plays out.<p>There&#x27;s a bit of a general rule that applies to a lot of situations, and can be phrased many ways. One way is: someone who is mean to others, but nice to you, will be mean to you.

It would seem that &quot;experience&quot; is of little value in information technology, while knowledge of the latest technologies is all that is valued.<p>It says something about the industry that (it appears) there are few lessons to learn over time. Perhaps the term software &quot;engineering&quot; is a total misnomer.

<i>The suit took aim at a 2006 IBM internal report on employee demographics that purportedly called older workers “gray hairs” and “old heads,” and concluded that younger workers were “generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”</i><p>Ouch. That seems pretty damning.

<i>&gt; IBM appeared to be winding down the Millennial Corps, cited in several legal actions as evidence the firm was biased against younger workers.</i><p>Pretty awkward typo in the article. Should be “bias towards younger” or “discriminate against older”

Just reading some of the comments here makes me want to ask: is there an opportunity to disrupt the whole interviewing &#x2F; hiring process with something along the lines of the show The Dating Game?.. where employers know a limited amount of data to make a hire?<p>Could some private company vet candidates for skills, culture and level of experience and provide clients profiles of candidates without name, race, age, etc... essentially scrubbed?<p>Would this solve problems, or make more?

This is always so weird to me because I feel like older software engineers would have so much wisdom and be able to see through the hype and fads

I think the more experience a person has with software engineering, the more they write efficient and secure software, and quickly. With junior developers, it takes longer to produce working code and it is buggier and less efficient. Same with construction work. Alot of this work is complicated. People who have decades of experience generally perform better.

Holberger has noticed that there is almost no one in the basement involved in CPU design who is over 35. What happens to old CPU engineers? Holberger is 26 now, and though not exactly on his deathbed, he is curious about what a computer engineer does &quot;afterward.&quot;<p>This was written in 1981 about late 70&#x27;s in &quot;Soul of a new Machine&quot; Nothing new.

Millenials are the largest and most educated generation ever. Also the first to grow up using computers from a young age. And, incidentally, the first generation with less purchasing power than the previous generation.<p>Why the fuck wouldn&#x27;t a company opt to hire the most educated, computer savvy workers for less money?

This depends on the company - where I work I regularly see people retire after 25-30 years of tenure, and it is a large, publicly traded company. The CEO&#x2F;board sets the tone. It is possible to meet a company&#x27;s bottom line AND treat your employees at the same footing as your clients&#x2F;customers.

This is 100% cost reduction, not age discrimination. Correlation != Causation

Unpopular opinion: most &#x27;gray hairs&#x27; I&#x27;ve worked with absolutely deserved to be let go. Keep in mind this is a sample size of 1 company, however.<p>I&#x27;m 100 percent against age discrimination, and some of my mentors fall in this age range. That said, I&#x27;ve also worked for a big corp full of &#x27;distinguished engineers&#x27;, which essentially in our company meant they did something really interesting in the 80s or 90s. Many rested on some one accomplishment, and found ways to interject themselves onto new projects while giving extremely vague or extremely outdated advice.<p>Our industry is ageless, if you keep up to date and keep learning. If you&#x27;re relying on tenure, you&#x27;re going to have a bad time.

Management at IBM is so damaged and disfunctional that this is a primary strategic intiative that consumed their top level planning. I dont see great product coming from all this.

This scares me a lot at 35 years old. Is my tech job going to put me out of work in a few years? Should I be looking for something else? It&#x27;s scary honestly.

I think age discrimination is really hard to prove because the plausible deniability is so strong. For one, older workers make more -- so discrimination can be masked as reducing costs.<p>Secondly, management is usually older, so if you&#x27;re reshuffling divisions and reducing management overhead that also disproportionately affects older workers.<p>There are other tactics that I&#x27;ve seen used like holding those with higher pay grades to stricter requirements, making it easier to get rid of them.<p>All and all, I can&#x27;t really see I being found at fault. I&#x27;d bet on a settlement being reached.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;bMsZxj" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;outline.com&#x2F;bMsZxj</a>

Something for the younger generations to look forward to.

When your generation has slogans like:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Weinberg#%22Don%27t_trust_anyone_over_30%22" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Jack_Weinberg#%22Don%27t_trust...</a><p>what do you expect from the kids and grandkids.

What is the problem? If they are valuable, they can surely get another job. if they are not, why should IBM keep them around?

Honestly looking for discussion: Why should we treat ages all the same? Age does change a person, physically&#x2F; mentally&#x2F; emotionally. It would seem that some companies and industries are better served by the young and some the old. Why is there a problem with that?<p>Clearly these companies aren&#x27;t firing the old out of spite, are there are reasons?

I&#x27;ll care when wage discrimination against younger works is made illegal.

No-one gave me a job when I was a young engineer. Now, why is it bad when your swap young people for older folks that might just sit on their desk and counting their days until retirement? If they have anything to offer I am sure they can find a new job easily on the market. Seriously.<p>IBM, well done!