Feds: IBM did discriminate against older workers in making layoffs

I&#x27;ve seen it spun as a move away from the legacy stack into the new modern architecture. Of course the legacy stack programmers have a suspicious common element.<p>Also, of course, 2-3-5 years later the legacy stack is still what keeps the business running while all the new shiny toys have come and gone.<p>I had a boss who came over, asked me what was working on and then looked me in the eye and said, firmly and deliberately, &quot;So you are working on transitioning to the new architecture&quot;. I shrugged, said &quot;I guess&quot;, and he left. Only later did I realize that he was saving my hide.

A fellow older classmate of mine and I were looking for work after changing careers.<p>We were talking about his recent interview when he got a call from the recruiter and put her on speakerphone. She told them they were going with someone else because they thought the other person &quot;fit the culture&quot; better.<p>He asked if she could give some feedback on what that meant and she flat out said &quot;Some people thought you were too old.&quot; Shocked he asked again and she repeated it. I don&#x27;t think it even occurred to the recruiter that it was wrong.<p>My buddy chose not to do anything, both of us looking for work and etc really didn&#x27;t want to get into some legal situation and looking for work.

Not surprising. Years ago one of my (gray haired) mentors opened my eyes to ageism in this industry by asking me to pay attention to how many programmers in the office have gray hair. Once you start looking for it, it becomes obvious that age discrimination is rampant. Some blame the young workforce on the industry being young, but the industry is decades old at this point so I don&#x27;t think that excuse holds water.

Could add &quot;... to the surprise of absolutely no one.&quot; to that headline :-).<p>Blekko was acquired by IBM, and as a result I worked there for 18 months as we transitioned from company to being part of IBM. That they were trying to aggressively move the &quot;old guard&quot; out was not much of a secret.<p>In their particular case I actually felt some sympathy for them because, as a 100+ year old company, a lot of long time veterans had a comfort zone around what used to work but no longer worked. I had a long, largely one-sided, conversation with a senior leader in their &quot;Cloud&quot; organization to try to explain how companies like Google and Facebook use and deploy data centers as essentially very large computers. But this person was so comfortable and confident in the &#x27;enterprise data center&#x27; concepts that died with Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems they just couldn&#x27;t wrap their heads around it.<p>I get that, I struggle with it as well, when the world changes as fast as it does, your have to <i>actively</i> re-evaluate what is &quot;canon&quot; and what isn&#x27;t. If you cannot do that, then it doesn&#x27;t help you to stay in a leadership position because you will drive right into the iceberg confident in all your decisions.

This happens repeatedly and isn&#x27;t anything new. This happens because there are a bunch of mentally ill people running tech companies that want jobs to be about &quot;belief&quot;.<p>They don&#x27;t want older people in tech because they want to empire build with the latest and greatest insecure technology.<p>They want to create frustration engines with poor engineering practices they older tech workers won&#x27;t put up with it. The goal is to make technology more difficult so they can slowly re-train you to go to other people and hate all technology. This is a real thing and has burned out so many software engineers you&#x27;d be shocked at how many of them don&#x27;t know their manager was the person who purposely made their job difficult to burn out another software engineer.<p>They want strange conspiracies about what the software actually does that older workers don&#x27;t need to put up with (because some of it is illegal). If you&#x27;re good at reading source code and figure out what they are actually doing in the source code, in some cases companies blatantly selling software that doesn&#x27;t do anything they are selling their customers on. In some cases people inject code into a repository when no one is looking, so they can run side businesses using the company infrastructure. There are a ton of older tech workers who read every line of the source code and when they start asking too many questions people freak out and fire them to maintain a conspiracy.<p>This happens for all sorts of reasons.

It appears that IBM executives specifically told managers to direct layoffs at older workers to make room for younger hires. And apparently they did so in recorded communications:<p>&gt; The investigation uncovered top-down messaging from Respondent’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires.

Median age at Facebook is 28? Wow. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;median-tech-employee-age-chart-2017-8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;median-tech-employee-age-cha...</a>

I&#x27;m not surprised. A few years back IBM started a &quot;back to the lab&quot; initiative to dissuade workers from working remotely. Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company. My impression is that this disproportionately affected older workers. It seemed like soon after the dust had settled they no longer enforced the requirement. Note, this was after I left the company, so it&#x27;s all second-hand knowledge.<p>I do also recall that they were sued for ageism years ago after a round of layoffs. Afterward they preemptively sent out a list of the ages and titles of all workers prior to layoffs in order to be more transparent. The funny thing is that it was possible in some cases to tell ahead of time who was being laid off based on the age and title. Not a good way to find out about being let go.

This is still going on. In the last half of 2019, IBM in NY got rid of a number of older workers, only to replace them with younger workers. In some cases, a younger worker that was recently let go was rehired to replace an older worker.

The big tech giants have used this marketing ploy that &quot;older workers don&#x27;t understand new tech&quot; to undercut them at almost every opportunity.<p>I honestly have no idea why they are allowed to get away with this in the media and public opinion. Maybe because older people don&#x27;t know new tech, so they think older programmers don&#x27;t know it either?<p>It&#x27;s insane to me that an older programmer with decades of experience and multiple language fluency is somehow &quot;worse&quot; than a 25 year old who has been programming professionally for a few years at best and probably knows fewer languages.<p>Tech companies think they can get away with it because they do exactly what IBM did, fire all the old hats, then hire back the ones they really do need at cheaper, contractor rates.<p>It&#x27;s pretty revolting to me.<p>Sure there are old people at these large tech companies just collecting a paycheck and really aren&#x27;t better than the younger guys, but it&#x27;s clearly not to the extent that IBM would make you think.<p>Another reason why I won&#x27;t ever work for a large company again.

Propublica did some research on this a couple of years ago and posted a pretty in-depth story on it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;features.propublica.org&#x2F;ibm&#x2F;ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;features.propublica.org&#x2F;ibm&#x2F;ibm-age-discrimination-a...</a>

The penalty for IBM: &quot;the Commission now invites Respondent to join with it in an effort toward a just resolution of this matter&quot; and<p>&quot;If you decline to enter into conciliation discussions, or when the Commission’s representative is unable to secure an acceptable conciliation agreement, the Director shall so inform the parties,advising them of the court enforcement alternatives available to aggrieved persons and the Commission.&quot;<p>Basically, not even a slap on the wrist.

So what is the punishment going to be for IBM? Pizza for all laid off employees and a free resuming writing class?

Leetcode is veiled ageism where those who pass have inordinate amounts of free time to study nonsense

While serious, this is still an accusation, and will be ultimately decided by the courts not EEOC.

Health care. The actuarial cost of gold or platinum health plan for a 25 year old single man is about $600 per month. The cost for a couple in their 50&#x27;s, with two college age children, is about $3,000 per month.

I get it. I understand that it is hard for a big company to avoid thinking and optimizing for all the costs associated with older employees versus a younger employee, especially H1Bs.<p>But, why not use the pulpit that comes with tech prestige (is it now all gone?) to lobby for universal healthcare, and other ways to socialize those costs? If things like healthcare and a sane social security system were in place, wouldn&#x27;t that even the playing field and be a win for everyone? I&#x27;m surprised I don&#x27;t see more US companies arguing for changes that would help them.

This is another form of discrimination that should have stricter laws against.<p>IBM is so morally bankrupt I c\don&#x27;t even know where to start. All their products are geared towards having IBM professional services make money. They purposefully do this by making sure the manuals they provide leave out important steps on how to install and configure their software.<p>Also while they discriminate they should start with their CEO who is 58 years old and their ex ceo who is 63 years old.

The actual letter from EEOC <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;7206573&#x2F;2020-09-02-IBM-LOD-Amended-Final-1-003.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;7206573&#x2F;2020-09-0...</a>

IBM&#x27;s (and other tech company) lawyers have been holding this decision off for some 40 years. Late coming; too bad there&#x27;s no punitive damages chargeable against upper management bonuses.

I’m pretty sure that this is in its core not about people being older but people being more expensive.

Fast growing industries tend to hire like there is no tomorrow. Eventually they hit a growth barrier. After a while the age structure of the company is a problem. Could not happen in the social media industry...

Duh, of course they did.

no shit sherlock

These threads always fill up with people banging on about how they’re 82 years old and still get plenty of work. But I still think you’re better off trying like hell to make your money before you’re old, before you even have to engage with these jackals.<p>Our work is not dignified work, our line of work does not have status in the organization nor in the society. Ignore this reality at your peril.