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IBM Is Being Sued for Age Discrimination After Firing Thousands

480 points by Deinos 8y ago

serg_chernata 8y ago
I'd love to hear a first-hand perspective of a current or past IBM employee.
- drewbug01 8y ago
  There are first-hand perspectives in the ProPublica report that this lawsuit is apparently based on: https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/ https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a... It's good reading.
  - my_usernam3 8y ago
    I second this, also if you're just skimming it, at least read the end.
  - housingpost 8y ago
    ProPublica does great work, this is just another example.
    - russdpale 8y ago
      I agree, their work is absolutely top notch.
- harvestsnaps 8y ago
  I’ve been with IBM for about 3 years now and I’ve found the talent pool to be diluted. There’s talented engineers and not so talented engineers. I’ve met some people where I get the impression that they’ve settled and are just coasting to earn their paycheck. IBM isn’t doing a good job with keeping the top talent in terms of compensation, so the good people leave. I don’t know how they’re determining people to fire. My opinion is that they’re pruning the moochers
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - blihp 8y ago
    Unfortunately that's what happens to a company that's been run the way IBM has for the last ~25 years. The top talent with career aspirations bailed long ago. That's not to say there aren't still competent and talented people there, just that the most ambitious (whether for money, cool projects, promotion track etc) are long gone. Unfortunately for IBM, those were the folks that should have been helping management identify the dead wood which has been piling up. The most talented people still around probably learned long ago to keep their head down and mouth shut so they've de-prioritized 'the company' and it's probably just put in their hours each week and forget about work when they clock out.
  - pkaye 8y ago
    If they have a lot of moochers then they should fire the executives for bad decisions.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    It wont be from direct experience at other large companies the sort of people you are talking about are clued up enough to tick the right boxes. It will be disabled, BAME etc that will get targeted / put on pip's etc.
- NikolaNovak 8y ago
  Hmm, tricky, as first-hand perspectives of a current IBM employee can be dangerous to one's career prospects :) That being said, my dad was hired by IBM Canada at age ~55, as a developer, and he retired of his own free will at 70 3-4 years back. The clients respected his knowledge, experience, approach and output tremendously; and in turn IBM management recognized his value. His local management begged him to stay in any capacity - part time, consultant, anything - but he felt he could not easily keep up with daily demands anymore, and that time has come for him to hang the keyboard & mouse. During his tenure he received a promotion/band increase, and was frequently encouraged to go for a second promotion/band increase, but did not want to go to management track. Note that he was in consulting services, which may have completely different culture than in-house development, with which I have limited exposure. ---- I myself am a current IBM employee; for my first decade, I was constantly the junior member of the team - if anything, we had a reverse issue where we weren't hiring new grads but instead prized experience and leadership skills. Eventually recognizing this gap, last few years we had a flurry of programs to bring in fresh blood. At 40, I'm still probably near the median and average age on many projects I've been part of. Occasionally I get a bit jealous at rapid career progress of some of the brighter new hires, who are taking advantage of paths, programs, and culture of promotion we didn't have when I was in their spot, but I recognize that if things are getting better, that is an overall good thing and just because I missed out / didn't have that opportunity, doesn't mean nobody else should - quite the opposite :). I've been called an IBM lifer before, and the nickname is somewhat likely to stick. I'm not particularly worried about age, I see it as up to me to demonstrate my value, and have a lot of good role models and examples in technical and technical leadership roles around me who are senior in age to me to gain some confidence I'm not deluded. That being said, this is a personal anecdote and not anecdata; milleage will differ in different parts and situation of IBM. It's a publicly traded technical company that's survived for a century, and it (we? they? whatever the appropriate pronoun is:) did not do so by being overly emotional. I've seen IBM cut commodity hardware (HDD, Thinkpads, then x-series), and I've seen IBM cut commodity business units and teams; so I'm actively trying not to be a commodity person that's in the crosshairs, I suppose - would be true in any company as I'm actively aware nobody has guarantees of job for life anymore. I've trained youngsters and off-shore replacement several times to take over my roles, and just had to keep swimming up to keep my head above the water :-) - My 100 Turkish Lirae :->
yashap 8y ago
Would be interesting to see, for each of the layoff events, an age-histogram of those laid off vs. the company overall.
- outworlder 8y ago
  Maybe IBM Watson could help crunching that data?
  - mattigames 8y ago
    Watson was fired as well; and is now suing for fleshism
sillyquiet 8y ago
Ooh, tricky. 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.
- mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
  Is that first example age discrimination? In that case it sounds like they're discriminating based on what salary the workers are willing to accept and not their age.
  - sillyquiet 8y ago
    No it's not illegal, in my not-a-labor-lawyer opinion. Just douchebaggery that should possibly be illegal. It's only undisputedly illegal if they refused to hire new devs based on age alone. Or if they used age as their metric for letting people go, but why would they do that, since they undoubtedly know what folks make. I do think though that this douchebaggery would have a disproportionate impact on older folks, just give years of experience = higher salary and all that.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - sokoloff 8y ago
      Are you saying that it should be illegal/possibly illegal/DB to make layoff/firing decisions taking salary heavily into account? To me, a layoff is about trimming expenses and retaining the maximum value/output per dollar of future total salary. If that means that person A is (perceived to be) more valuable per dollar spent on salary than person B, person A should be more likely to be retained. Why should that be illegal (or even judged to be DB behavior)? In theory, a company is paying a person to deliver value, not simply to have been stably at the company (or in their career or "be old"), right? (If context matters, I'm 47 and so "old" by some measures...)
notacoward 8y ago
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.
Soundest 8y ago
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. 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. 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. 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.
- markbnj 8y ago
  Yeah I tend to think this is the more likely explanation, as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work. In any case, as a 57 year-old working engineer it is somewhat against my nature to delegate responsibility for my being able to make a living to any company. I learned a long time ago to take responsibility for it myself by constantly staying engaged, challenging myself, and learning new things. If I'm let go by an organization for whatever reason I will have the skills needed to land a new position, and I'd much rather spend my time keeping them sharp and acquiring new ones than wondering why BigCorp (who I probably won't work for anyway) didn't keep me around for the rest of my working life. The only security is what you create for yourself, in my opinion.
chadash 8y ago
> “Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” Ed Barbini, a spokesman for IBM said in an emailed statement. 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? edit: I'll answer my own question. According to an article I found [1]: > 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. [1] https://aaronhall.com/does-being-fired-because-of-your-salary-constitute-age-discrimination/ https://aaronhall.com/does-being-fired-because-of-your-salar...
- mfringel 8y ago
  Now I'm wondering if they would have to make all of the salaries part of the court record if they tried using that defense.
- pnw_hazor 8y ago
  Though for just about every other protected class category it is the result (disproportionate effects) that matter.
- notacoward 8y ago
  You left out an important word. The SC has held that an employer does not automatically violate the ADEA etc. As your own source continues: "Age discrimination may exist, however, where an employer terminates an employee based on a factor such as experience or salary where the employer presupposes a correlation with age and uses that factor as a proxy for age." That is in fact what ultimately happened with Hazen, by the way. The use of proxy criteria as a facade for discrimination has been addressed in many other discrimination/quota cases, and courts routinely see right through it. So the answer to your question is basically no, unless the employer can prove that they were more than normally oblivious to the disparate effect their choices would have. I don't think any of IBM's lawyers are likely to suggest such a defense.
rb808 8y ago
Does IBM have any good products that are worth paying for any more? It seems like a dead company still walking somehow.
- lnanek2 8y ago
  They are basically a services company now. That's why they sold off printer division, storage division, laptop division, etc.. They just weren't making as much money as consulting.
- Shivetya 8y ago
  the still make money hand over fist with the midrange and mainframe offerings. I know it is vogue to dismiss both here but the simple matter is many businesses rely on such hardware and they are companies many don't suspect. I know the refrain, they need to switch to X, Y, or Z. Well the issue always comes down to, they don't know everything their current A, B, and C, platforms do. Then you look at all the touch points and realize that to swap X for A you suddenly need to get D through G to re engineer their solution too
  - rb808 8y ago
    Yes you're right, but it feels like its just a matter of time. Lots of companies rely on old IBM platforms now, but every year there are fewer. It isn't sustainable. Whether consulting will be the thing that gets them through the next few decades is the real question.
- Someguywhatever 8y ago
  No, they don't. The only reason they make money is that they have connections and in's at large organizations and access to lucrative government contracts. Many governments only deal with IBM scale organizations because for some reason they think that they can sue IBM if something goes wrong! (lololol) That idea is so ridiculous, IBM has some of the best lawyers around (and a literal army of them), there's NO WAY to sue IBM, it's not possible, and even doing so would be so costly and time consuming it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
jl2718 8y ago
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.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  This. It freaking kills me that management always gets to stay and engineers get the axe. What makes it worse is these places always talk about loyalty like it means anything at all to engineers. Loyalty seems to only work one way.
  - jgalt212 8y ago
    Not always true. It just that the managers leave after their plan of firing 25% of staff doesn't pan out. It's just a question of how much damage can a bad manager do before he or she is forced out.
  - iamdave 8y ago
    > Loyalty seems to only work one way. The asymmetry of relational power between employer and employee/job-seeker and job-creator has gotten so bad in the American work force it should probably be studied as a real economic indicator.
    - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
      So, you support communism? Yep, Ive heard that. I only wish it were sarcasm. Questioning anything about capitalism and how it fails people is the ultimate taboo. Sure, you are allowed to grouse about it as lower class, but 'that was brought upon yourself'... It always is, in a system like ours.
      - prolikewh0a 8y ago
        I've heard that too and I have to remind people that there's nothing in the US constitution against implementing some far left checks on capitalism to keep the worker/employer relationship fair and equal. I hear so many stories from the 90's and early 00's about how wonderful the corporate environments I now work in were great places to work with great benefits, happy workers, constant raises and opportunities for bonuses, some people even got a guaranteed $1 yearly raise. Now some grandfathered people that have been here that long are making $50-60/hr for a job they now pay $25/hr for. That environment is long gone and it seems things are only getting worse on a daily basis unless you're a Software Engineer and I don't doubt the hammer will come down on them soon as well.
dgudkov 8y ago
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?
- tabtab 8y ago
  If you fire say 10% of those 20 to 45, and 20% of those 46 and up, you have some explaining to do. Assuming you fire people only on merit, which should be IBM's claim, then the percentage should be about the same. I suppose IBM could make a case that older people are simply less productive, which may not go over well with a jury. They could also claim HR "inadvertently paid too much" for years spent at the company, and that they are now correcting it. That's also a hard sell. Going to be an interesting trial... As an "older person" I find that experience has made me cynical such that I'm less likely to be enthusiastic about bullsh&t fads, and managers don't like people second-guessing their poor decisions (even if right). Ego often trumps merit of a argument. Maybe we oldbies need to take Fake Smile classes. "Distributed node.js microservice blockchains for a 7-user CRUD app? Oh wonderful, I'm so happy, I can fart rainbows!" I wish my experience-induced skills in spotting BS were more valued. (Yes, it's good to keep up on trends, but there's so many that one has to pick with care.)
  - lacker 8y ago
    Assuming you fire people only on merit, which should be IBM's claim, then the percentage should be about the same. This is not accurate. Older people being more likely to be fired in a particular layoff could be a correlation, not a causation. You can't statistically prove discrimination in this way.
    - tabtab 8y ago
      Every "correlation" reason I've seen anyone come up with still looks pretty much like discrimination done in a round-about way, or at least could be seen as such in front of a jury. Still, I could be surprised.
      - 8y ago
jedberg 8y ago
I half expected to see a story about how they were discriminating against people under 50.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  Where on earth (in tech) are young people discriminated against? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. Taken advantage of? Oh yes. Discriminated against??
freddy418_sc 8y ago
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.
- Someguywhatever 8y ago
  IBM has been dead since the 90's. Back when Lou Gerstner supposedly "saved" IBM from death he actually didn't, back then Real IBM the thing we think of as IBM actually died, and instead Zombie IBM took it's place (zIBM). zIBM is run as you say, like a hedge fund. Making products is incidental to zIBM and it doesn't care what it makes as long as somebody will pay (so it doesn't care if it's products are good or even usable). zIBM also implemented this infamous stack ranking system, the executives are terrible, and there are so many layers between management and action on the ground that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. Management is so insulated from whats actually happening by all these layers nobody can effectively steer the organization, there are so many divisions and people that nobody can really track what is happening. The only thing that zIBM is actually really good at is managing its share price, and crafting it's artisinal financial statements so that nobody actually has any idea how bad it's doing. But we all know that zIBM revenue is declining for almost 10 years, so it's going to be a long slow crawl to zIBMs true final fiscal death.
  - owenversteeg 8y ago
    I agree. Meanwhile, the IBM stock is up 1,320% since 1993. At one point it was nearly 2,000%. That's the problem with playing the stock market: you've not only got to be right, you've got to be right at the exact right time or you'll get slaughtered.
    - Someguywhatever 8y ago
fipple 8y ago
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.
- vosper 8y ago
  Yes, I've been astonished by how freely ageist hiring is discussed (at least behind closed doors of hiring committees). I assume it's because it's not even really being considered discrimination in the minds of the people who're doing the talking. Getting that recognition might be the part of the battle. It's also astonished me how at least some of the people trying to find the young devs who will work long hours are going to be in the discriminated group in a few years time! They don't seem to realise that by perpetuating the discrimination they're making themselves the future victims. It's a bizarre kind of cognitive dissonance.
  - kristopolous 8y ago
    You should read "Disrupted" by Dan Lyons, a middle aged tech reporter from Newsweek who went to work for a Boston company called HubSpot. He has some pretty good insight and stories about this.
  - codeonfire 8y ago
    They are all going to be CTO's in the future, not future victims! I assume by saying hiring committee you work at Google. A whistleblower sued Google in March alleging overt age discrimination and illegal race quotas. They copied some damning information including screenshots of their quota tool. What kind of information do you know about it?
- umvi 8y ago
  Possibly because, unlike race or gender, age-related biases are much more exagerrated between individuals. I would guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change or stray from their "tried and true" methods. The same cannot be said of a white person vs. a black person.
pigscantfly 8y ago
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? 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?
- mung 8y ago
  I don't believe the parent is not saying that, they are saying these employers are using age as a metric but calling it 'skills'. In which case they better be able to explain what these supposed skills are.
- Zelphyr 8y ago
  I don't think the suggestion is to not hire based on skill but rather to ignore age as any kind of requirement for the position.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  They could offer to retrain these people in new technology instead of just laying them off and hiring new people. I learn at least one or two new technologies with every job change I make, and I'm not even usually given formal training. With formal training policies I'm sure they could shift employees to other projects and then keep their domain knowledge, but because they're old and more expensive than the young'ns, we'll just claim they don't have the skills for the new jobs and lay them off instead, and save that money! Domain knowledge and experience is criminally underrated nowadays. A company I've worked for is currently going through one fire after another constantly because the executives haven't valued domain knowledge and has forced or outsourced just about everyone who knows anything about the projects that they still have paying clients for and need to support to keep making revenue, and things are just barely not falling completely apart (looks like things are going to get worse here pretty soon though). And this isn't even ageism, really, even the young devs that have only been there a couple of years are being forced out.
  - scarface74 8y ago
ergothus 8y ago
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 :) ". 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). It's one of the few clickbait-ey headlines that actually delivered, and I recommend the same advice to anyone else.
- DenisM 8y ago
  True hacker! Simple and elegant.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I like to remind myself of that quote attributed to Stalin, that the gulag is full of people who thought they were indispensible...
  - gaius 8y ago
    I believe that was Napoleon and the graveyard, but it’s still as pertinent
- cortesoft 8y ago
  I have been at my current job for a while, but I worked for a number of failed startups before that. The lesson I learned there is that sometimes it doesn't matter how good you are at what you do, or even how good everyone around you thinks you are. I had all sorts of written evaluations saying I was doing great work, but that doesn't matter when the entire business goes belly up. The way I built security for myself was to maintain a network of people who know me and my work, and make sure that network is distributed across many companies. When I am in need of work, I reach out to them. Anything you do to increase your survival odds at the company you are in is still putting all your eggs in one basket.
Shivetya 8y ago
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.
throw2016 8y ago
If seniority and experience do not add up for the majority then it makes software engineering a very dicey proposition. 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. 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? 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.
- rb808 8y ago
  > If seniority and experience do not add up for the majority then it makes software engineering a very dicey proposition. Yes it is. Look out there now at the huge "shortage" of software developers. Meanwhile the 50+ yo IBM guys laid off here will struggle to ever find computer work again.
- henryfjordan 8y ago
  I think a lot of this stems from the way Software Development, as a practice, is evolving almost as quickly as Computer Science is (or at least there is a perception that it is evolving). Bridges are built largely the same way as they were 100 years ago. Software built today looks different from software built 10 years ago. So when a hiring manager sees a software engineer with 25 years of experience, they can basically ignore the first 10-15 years as irrelevant. Imagine someone who has spent the last 25 years learning everything there is to know about SQL Databases. They aren't going to do very well in a lot of environments today with NoSQL all over that have only been around en masse for ~10 years. Maybe that hiring manager is wrong. Maybe he's not. The engineers with 5 years experience have the same keywords the hiring manager is looking for on their resume as the engineer with 25 years experience. Maybe they aren't really as adept, but since we seem to be unable to really get a good reliable measure on skill, the difference between those engineers looks very small on paper. The project is likely to turn out the same at the end of the day anyway. So when you do the math at the end of the day, the more junior engineers look like a better deal (and they really might be).
dschuetz 8y ago
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.
- slivym 8y ago
  Or more simply "We're laying off 10,000 people, that's saving us >$500m USD per annum so we can afford a law suit or two"
  - dschuetz 8y ago
    Plausible. But it also means bad publicity, and bad publicity is bad for business.
Crontab 8y ago
IBM should be sued. It is blatantly obvious what IBM did and I hope they they get their asses handed to them.
mancerayder 8y ago
It wouldn't be quite as bad for these folks if the hiring side of things also didn't discriminate on age. 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. 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. Some friends climbed the corporate ladder into senior management. That works, too, but it's a slog and you better enjoy it.
nwmcsween 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
toss1 8y ago
>>“Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” Ed Barbini, a spokesman for IBM said in an emailed statement. If that were the case, they'd be investing in retraining, not repeated mass layoffs that focus on older workers. 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.).
pfdietz 8y ago
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.
throwaway5250 8y ago
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. 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.
- crazygringo 8y ago
  > If a company thinks they can make more money by not hiring me, I don't really want to work there. What if that same sentence weren't about age, but were about gender or race or sexual orientation? Genuinely curious... seems like it would be the same argument, but then some people feel age shouldn't be a protected class like the other ones are.
  - throwaway5250 8y ago
    Speaking only for myself (again, white/male/old/straight), I'm okay with that, too. It does feel like there's a bias against my groups right now, but this mostly annoys me due to the dummy interview problem I mentioned. (If this seems paranoid, take a look at the detailed stats Google released about their workforce and observe what's been happening to their tech white male category.)
  - scarface74 8y ago
    How so? My being hired by a company is based on value proposition. It has to both be worth my time to work there and they have to be able to make as much money as they can off of me. How else should a company decide who to hire?
- ryandrake 8y ago
  Yea the dummy interview phenomenon is infuriating. Seems like companies are not seriously hiring. Instead they are “fishing” for that mythical person who will take a tiny salary and sacrifice their life doing death marches. Just so happens that person is almost always young so we see bias.
jayalpha 8y ago
This happens in non-IT companies too. And companies have no idea about the institutional knowledge that they throw out of the door.
trumped 8y ago
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)
erik_landerholm 8y ago
I’m sure IBM modeled the risk and found it to be worth it.
jmpman 8y ago
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. Would that have been illegal?
- notacoward 8y ago
  Yes, it would, and thank you for bringing that up. I'd forgotten that little bit of news, but now I'm pretty sure it will figure into this case.
jonnnyquest 8y ago
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. 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. 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.
- donbright 8y ago
  maybe if college campus tech leaders didnt ogle 19 year olds, there would be more women in tech.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  > I also get to do practically nothing when I feel like it and also walk around campus ogling 19yo coeds on a sunny day It's funny that the people who cry "ageism!" the loudest also tend to make comments like this.
mancerayder 8y ago
It seems our jobs are a double-edged sword. 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. We're able to learn and shift, going from developer to sysadmin, architect, manager or security professional and back again. Pre-sales anyone? 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. 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). On the other hand, I'm pushing 40. That means events beyond my control are pushing me down the hierarchy, or at the very least making the ladder rungs more slippery. Would you take it all back and pick a different profession, if my assessment is balanced?
fouc 8y ago
A lot of people in this thread seem to be assuming that IBM was laying off software developers mainly. Could've just been managers and the like.
jiveturkey 8y ago
thousands, yes but still clickbait. the class action is for 3 employees. 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.
jordache 8y ago
what about culture fit criteria? if a company wants to hire bros, then an old dude would likely not qualify
privateSFacct 8y ago
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. This should be an undervalued labor pool given how discriminatory things sound. It would seem like a business opportunity? 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?
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Probably because for every fifty year old who boasts here about how they kept their tools sharp there are another ninety nine who let their skills atrophy and would struggle to code FizzBuzz in anything but Cobol.
caymanjim 8y ago
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. 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. 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. 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. IBM isn't stupid enough to fire people just because they're old. They're firing dead weight.
danschumann 8y ago
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?
- pjc50 8y ago
  Because that's firing for age with a tiny figleaf. Besides, you have no way of knowing how long people will work for you and younger employees are more mobile.
TangoTrotFox 8y ago
Calling ever more things discrimination or some form of ism 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'. 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. 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.
known 8y ago
Tax IBM Revenues, not Profits

480 points by Deinos 8y ago

serg_chernata 8y ago

I'd love to hear a first-hand perspective of a current or past IBM employee.

drewbug01 8y ago
There are first-hand perspectives in the ProPublica report that this lawsuit is apparently based on: https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/ https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a... It's good reading.
- my_usernam3 8y ago
  I second this, also if you're just skimming it, at least read the end.
- housingpost 8y ago
  ProPublica does great work, this is just another example.
  - russdpale 8y ago
    I agree, their work is absolutely top notch.
harvestsnaps 8y ago
I’ve been with IBM for about 3 years now and I’ve found the talent pool to be diluted. There’s talented engineers and not so talented engineers. I’ve met some people where I get the impression that they’ve settled and are just coasting to earn their paycheck. IBM isn’t doing a good job with keeping the top talent in terms of compensation, so the good people leave. I don’t know how they’re determining people to fire. My opinion is that they’re pruning the moochers
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- blihp 8y ago
  Unfortunately that's what happens to a company that's been run the way IBM has for the last ~25 years. The top talent with career aspirations bailed long ago. That's not to say there aren't still competent and talented people there, just that the most ambitious (whether for money, cool projects, promotion track etc) are long gone. Unfortunately for IBM, those were the folks that should have been helping management identify the dead wood which has been piling up. The most talented people still around probably learned long ago to keep their head down and mouth shut so they've de-prioritized 'the company' and it's probably just put in their hours each week and forget about work when they clock out.
- pkaye 8y ago
  If they have a lot of moochers then they should fire the executives for bad decisions.
- walshemj 8y ago
  It wont be from direct experience at other large companies the sort of people you are talking about are clued up enough to tick the right boxes. It will be disabled, BAME etc that will get targeted / put on pip's etc.
NikolaNovak 8y ago
Hmm, tricky, as first-hand perspectives of a current IBM employee can be dangerous to one's career prospects :) That being said, my dad was hired by IBM Canada at age ~55, as a developer, and he retired of his own free will at 70 3-4 years back. The clients respected his knowledge, experience, approach and output tremendously; and in turn IBM management recognized his value. His local management begged him to stay in any capacity - part time, consultant, anything - but he felt he could not easily keep up with daily demands anymore, and that time has come for him to hang the keyboard & mouse. During his tenure he received a promotion/band increase, and was frequently encouraged to go for a second promotion/band increase, but did not want to go to management track. Note that he was in consulting services, which may have completely different culture than in-house development, with which I have limited exposure. ---- I myself am a current IBM employee; for my first decade, I was constantly the junior member of the team - if anything, we had a reverse issue where we weren't hiring new grads but instead prized experience and leadership skills. Eventually recognizing this gap, last few years we had a flurry of programs to bring in fresh blood. At 40, I'm still probably near the median and average age on many projects I've been part of. Occasionally I get a bit jealous at rapid career progress of some of the brighter new hires, who are taking advantage of paths, programs, and culture of promotion we didn't have when I was in their spot, but I recognize that if things are getting better, that is an overall good thing and just because I missed out / didn't have that opportunity, doesn't mean nobody else should - quite the opposite :). I've been called an IBM lifer before, and the nickname is somewhat likely to stick. I'm not particularly worried about age, I see it as up to me to demonstrate my value, and have a lot of good role models and examples in technical and technical leadership roles around me who are senior in age to me to gain some confidence I'm not deluded. That being said, this is a personal anecdote and not anecdata; milleage will differ in different parts and situation of IBM. It's a publicly traded technical company that's survived for a century, and it (we? they? whatever the appropriate pronoun is:) did not do so by being overly emotional. I've seen IBM cut commodity hardware (HDD, Thinkpads, then x-series), and I've seen IBM cut commodity business units and teams; so I'm actively trying not to be a commodity person that's in the crosshairs, I suppose - would be true in any company as I'm actively aware nobody has guarantees of job for life anymore. I've trained youngsters and off-shore replacement several times to take over my roles, and just had to keep swimming up to keep my head above the water :-) - My 100 Turkish Lirae :->

yashap 8y ago

Would be interesting to see, for each of the layoff events, an age-histogram of those laid off vs. the company overall.

outworlder 8y ago
Maybe IBM Watson could help crunching that data?
- mattigames 8y ago
  Watson was fired as well; and is now suing for fleshism

sillyquiet 8y ago

Ooh, tricky. 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.

mandelbrotwurst 8y ago
Is that first example age discrimination? In that case it sounds like they're discriminating based on what salary the workers are willing to accept and not their age.
- sillyquiet 8y ago
  No it's not illegal, in my not-a-labor-lawyer opinion. Just douchebaggery that should possibly be illegal. It's only undisputedly illegal if they refused to hire new devs based on age alone. Or if they used age as their metric for letting people go, but why would they do that, since they undoubtedly know what folks make. I do think though that this douchebaggery would have a disproportionate impact on older folks, just give years of experience = higher salary and all that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - sokoloff 8y ago
    Are you saying that it should be illegal/possibly illegal/DB to make layoff/firing decisions taking salary heavily into account? To me, a layoff is about trimming expenses and retaining the maximum value/output per dollar of future total salary. If that means that person A is (perceived to be) more valuable per dollar spent on salary than person B, person A should be more likely to be retained. Why should that be illegal (or even judged to be DB behavior)? In theory, a company is paying a person to deliver value, not simply to have been stably at the company (or in their career or "be old"), right? (If context matters, I'm 47 and so "old" by some measures...)

notacoward 8y ago

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.

Soundest 8y ago

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. 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. 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. 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.

markbnj 8y ago
Yeah I tend to think this is the more likely explanation, as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work. In any case, as a 57 year-old working engineer it is somewhat against my nature to delegate responsibility for my being able to make a living to any company. I learned a long time ago to take responsibility for it myself by constantly staying engaged, challenging myself, and learning new things. If I'm let go by an organization for whatever reason I will have the skills needed to land a new position, and I'd much rather spend my time keeping them sharp and acquiring new ones than wondering why BigCorp (who I probably won't work for anyway) didn't keep me around for the rest of my working life. The only security is what you create for yourself, in my opinion.

chadash 8y ago

> “Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” Ed Barbini, a spokesman for IBM said in an emailed statement. 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? edit: I'll answer my own question. According to an article I found [1]: > 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. [1] https://aaronhall.com/does-being-fired-because-of-your-salary-constitute-age-discrimination/ https://aaronhall.com/does-being-fired-because-of-your-salar...

mfringel 8y ago
Now I'm wondering if they would have to make all of the salaries part of the court record if they tried using that defense.
pnw_hazor 8y ago
Though for just about every other protected class category it is the result (disproportionate effects) that matter.
notacoward 8y ago
You left out an important word. The SC has held that an employer does not automatically violate the ADEA etc. As your own source continues: "Age discrimination may exist, however, where an employer terminates an employee based on a factor such as experience or salary where the employer presupposes a correlation with age and uses that factor as a proxy for age." That is in fact what ultimately happened with Hazen, by the way. The use of proxy criteria as a facade for discrimination has been addressed in many other discrimination/quota cases, and courts routinely see right through it. So the answer to your question is basically no, unless the employer can prove that they were more than normally oblivious to the disparate effect their choices would have. I don't think any of IBM's lawyers are likely to suggest such a defense.

rb808 8y ago

Does IBM have any good products that are worth paying for any more? It seems like a dead company still walking somehow.

lnanek2 8y ago
They are basically a services company now. That's why they sold off printer division, storage division, laptop division, etc.. They just weren't making as much money as consulting.
Shivetya 8y ago
the still make money hand over fist with the midrange and mainframe offerings. I know it is vogue to dismiss both here but the simple matter is many businesses rely on such hardware and they are companies many don't suspect. I know the refrain, they need to switch to X, Y, or Z. Well the issue always comes down to, they don't know everything their current A, B, and C, platforms do. Then you look at all the touch points and realize that to swap X for A you suddenly need to get D through G to re engineer their solution too
- rb808 8y ago
  Yes you're right, but it feels like its just a matter of time. Lots of companies rely on old IBM platforms now, but every year there are fewer. It isn't sustainable. Whether consulting will be the thing that gets them through the next few decades is the real question.
Someguywhatever 8y ago
No, they don't. The only reason they make money is that they have connections and in's at large organizations and access to lucrative government contracts. Many governments only deal with IBM scale organizations because for some reason they think that they can sue IBM if something goes wrong! (lololol) That idea is so ridiculous, IBM has some of the best lawyers around (and a literal army of them), there's NO WAY to sue IBM, it's not possible, and even doing so would be so costly and time consuming it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.

jl2718 8y ago

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.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago
This. It freaking kills me that management always gets to stay and engineers get the axe. What makes it worse is these places always talk about loyalty like it means anything at all to engineers. Loyalty seems to only work one way.
- jgalt212 8y ago
  Not always true. It just that the managers leave after their plan of firing 25% of staff doesn't pan out. It's just a question of how much damage can a bad manager do before he or she is forced out.
- iamdave 8y ago
  > Loyalty seems to only work one way. The asymmetry of relational power between employer and employee/job-seeker and job-creator has gotten so bad in the American work force it should probably be studied as a real economic indicator.
  - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
    So, you support communism? Yep, Ive heard that. I only wish it were sarcasm. Questioning anything about capitalism and how it fails people is the ultimate taboo. Sure, you are allowed to grouse about it as lower class, but 'that was brought upon yourself'... It always is, in a system like ours.
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      I've heard that too and I have to remind people that there's nothing in the US constitution against implementing some far left checks on capitalism to keep the worker/employer relationship fair and equal. I hear so many stories from the 90's and early 00's about how wonderful the corporate environments I now work in were great places to work with great benefits, happy workers, constant raises and opportunities for bonuses, some people even got a guaranteed $1 yearly raise. Now some grandfathered people that have been here that long are making $50-60/hr for a job they now pay $25/hr for. That environment is long gone and it seems things are only getting worse on a daily basis unless you're a Software Engineer and I don't doubt the hammer will come down on them soon as well.

dgudkov 8y ago

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?

tabtab 8y ago
If you fire say 10% of those 20 to 45, and 20% of those 46 and up, you have some explaining to do. Assuming you fire people only on merit, which should be IBM's claim, then the percentage should be about the same. I suppose IBM could make a case that older people are simply less productive, which may not go over well with a jury. They could also claim HR "inadvertently paid too much" for years spent at the company, and that they are now correcting it. That's also a hard sell. Going to be an interesting trial... As an "older person" I find that experience has made me cynical such that I'm less likely to be enthusiastic about bullsh&t fads, and managers don't like people second-guessing their poor decisions (even if right). Ego often trumps merit of a argument. Maybe we oldbies need to take Fake Smile classes. "Distributed node.js microservice blockchains for a 7-user CRUD app? Oh wonderful, I'm so happy, I can fart rainbows!" I wish my experience-induced skills in spotting BS were more valued. (Yes, it's good to keep up on trends, but there's so many that one has to pick with care.)
- lacker 8y ago
  Assuming you fire people only on merit, which should be IBM's claim, then the percentage should be about the same. This is not accurate. Older people being more likely to be fired in a particular layoff could be a correlation, not a causation. You can't statistically prove discrimination in this way.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    Every "correlation" reason I've seen anyone come up with still looks pretty much like discrimination done in a round-about way, or at least could be seen as such in front of a jury. Still, I could be surprised.
    - 8y ago

jedberg 8y ago

I half expected to see a story about how they were discriminating against people under 50.

ryandrake 8y ago
Where on earth (in tech) are young people discriminated against? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. Taken advantage of? Oh yes. Discriminated against??

freddy418_sc 8y ago

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.

Someguywhatever 8y ago
IBM has been dead since the 90's. Back when Lou Gerstner supposedly "saved" IBM from death he actually didn't, back then Real IBM the thing we think of as IBM actually died, and instead Zombie IBM took it's place (zIBM). zIBM is run as you say, like a hedge fund. Making products is incidental to zIBM and it doesn't care what it makes as long as somebody will pay (so it doesn't care if it's products are good or even usable). zIBM also implemented this infamous stack ranking system, the executives are terrible, and there are so many layers between management and action on the ground that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing. Management is so insulated from whats actually happening by all these layers nobody can effectively steer the organization, there are so many divisions and people that nobody can really track what is happening. The only thing that zIBM is actually really good at is managing its share price, and crafting it's artisinal financial statements so that nobody actually has any idea how bad it's doing. But we all know that zIBM revenue is declining for almost 10 years, so it's going to be a long slow crawl to zIBMs true final fiscal death.
- owenversteeg 8y ago
  I agree. Meanwhile, the IBM stock is up 1,320% since 1993. At one point it was nearly 2,000%. That's the problem with playing the stock market: you've not only got to be right, you've got to be right at the exact right time or you'll get slaughtered.
  - Someguywhatever 8y ago

fipple 8y ago

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.

vosper 8y ago
Yes, I've been astonished by how freely ageist hiring is discussed (at least behind closed doors of hiring committees). I assume it's because it's not even really being considered discrimination in the minds of the people who're doing the talking. Getting that recognition might be the part of the battle. It's also astonished me how at least some of the people trying to find the young devs who will work long hours are going to be in the discriminated group in a few years time! They don't seem to realise that by perpetuating the discrimination they're making themselves the future victims. It's a bizarre kind of cognitive dissonance.
- kristopolous 8y ago
  You should read "Disrupted" by Dan Lyons, a middle aged tech reporter from Newsweek who went to work for a Boston company called HubSpot. He has some pretty good insight and stories about this.
- codeonfire 8y ago
  They are all going to be CTO's in the future, not future victims! I assume by saying hiring committee you work at Google. A whistleblower sued Google in March alleging overt age discrimination and illegal race quotas. They copied some damning information including screenshots of their quota tool. What kind of information do you know about it?
umvi 8y ago
Possibly because, unlike race or gender, age-related biases are much more exagerrated between individuals. I would guess young people are more eager to change/try new things whereas older people are more reluctant to change or stray from their "tried and true" methods. The same cannot be said of a white person vs. a black person.

pigscantfly 8y ago

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? 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?

mung 8y ago
I don't believe the parent is not saying that, they are saying these employers are using age as a metric but calling it 'skills'. In which case they better be able to explain what these supposed skills are.
Zelphyr 8y ago
I don't think the suggestion is to not hire based on skill but rather to ignore age as any kind of requirement for the position.
cableshaft 8y ago
They could offer to retrain these people in new technology instead of just laying them off and hiring new people. I learn at least one or two new technologies with every job change I make, and I'm not even usually given formal training. With formal training policies I'm sure they could shift employees to other projects and then keep their domain knowledge, but because they're old and more expensive than the young'ns, we'll just claim they don't have the skills for the new jobs and lay them off instead, and save that money! Domain knowledge and experience is criminally underrated nowadays. A company I've worked for is currently going through one fire after another constantly because the executives haven't valued domain knowledge and has forced or outsourced just about everyone who knows anything about the projects that they still have paying clients for and need to support to keep making revenue, and things are just barely not falling completely apart (looks like things are going to get worse here pretty soon though). And this isn't even ageism, really, even the young devs that have only been there a couple of years are being forced out.
- scarface74 8y ago

ergothus 8y ago

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 :) ". 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). It's one of the few clickbait-ey headlines that actually delivered, and I recommend the same advice to anyone else.

DenisM 8y ago
True hacker! Simple and elegant.
cm2187 8y ago
I like to remind myself of that quote attributed to Stalin, that the gulag is full of people who thought they were indispensible...
- gaius 8y ago
  I believe that was Napoleon and the graveyard, but it’s still as pertinent
cortesoft 8y ago
I have been at my current job for a while, but I worked for a number of failed startups before that. The lesson I learned there is that sometimes it doesn't matter how good you are at what you do, or even how good everyone around you thinks you are. I had all sorts of written evaluations saying I was doing great work, but that doesn't matter when the entire business goes belly up. The way I built security for myself was to maintain a network of people who know me and my work, and make sure that network is distributed across many companies. When I am in need of work, I reach out to them. Anything you do to increase your survival odds at the company you are in is still putting all your eggs in one basket.

Shivetya 8y ago

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.

throw2016 8y ago

If seniority and experience do not add up for the majority then it makes software engineering a very dicey proposition. 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. 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? 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.

rb808 8y ago
> If seniority and experience do not add up for the majority then it makes software engineering a very dicey proposition. Yes it is. Look out there now at the huge "shortage" of software developers. Meanwhile the 50+ yo IBM guys laid off here will struggle to ever find computer work again.
henryfjordan 8y ago
I think a lot of this stems from the way Software Development, as a practice, is evolving almost as quickly as Computer Science is (or at least there is a perception that it is evolving). Bridges are built largely the same way as they were 100 years ago. Software built today looks different from software built 10 years ago. So when a hiring manager sees a software engineer with 25 years of experience, they can basically ignore the first 10-15 years as irrelevant. Imagine someone who has spent the last 25 years learning everything there is to know about SQL Databases. They aren't going to do very well in a lot of environments today with NoSQL all over that have only been around en masse for ~10 years. Maybe that hiring manager is wrong. Maybe he's not. The engineers with 5 years experience have the same keywords the hiring manager is looking for on their resume as the engineer with 25 years experience. Maybe they aren't really as adept, but since we seem to be unable to really get a good reliable measure on skill, the difference between those engineers looks very small on paper. The project is likely to turn out the same at the end of the day anyway. So when you do the math at the end of the day, the more junior engineers look like a better deal (and they really might be).

dschuetz 8y ago

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.

slivym 8y ago
Or more simply "We're laying off 10,000 people, that's saving us >$500m USD per annum so we can afford a law suit or two"
- dschuetz 8y ago
  Plausible. But it also means bad publicity, and bad publicity is bad for business.

Crontab 8y ago

IBM should be sued. It is blatantly obvious what IBM did and I hope they they get their asses handed to them.

mancerayder 8y ago

It wouldn't be quite as bad for these folks if the hiring side of things also didn't discriminate on age. 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. 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. Some friends climbed the corporate ladder into senior management. That works, too, but it's a slog and you better enjoy it.

nwmcsween 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

toss1 8y ago

>>“Changes in our workforce are about skills, not age,” Ed Barbini, a spokesman for IBM said in an emailed statement. If that were the case, they'd be investing in retraining, not repeated mass layoffs that focus on older workers. 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.).

pfdietz 8y ago

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.

throwaway5250 8y ago

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. 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.

crazygringo 8y ago
> If a company thinks they can make more money by not hiring me, I don't really want to work there. What if that same sentence weren't about age, but were about gender or race or sexual orientation? Genuinely curious... seems like it would be the same argument, but then some people feel age shouldn't be a protected class like the other ones are.
- throwaway5250 8y ago
  Speaking only for myself (again, white/male/old/straight), I'm okay with that, too. It does feel like there's a bias against my groups right now, but this mostly annoys me due to the dummy interview problem I mentioned. (If this seems paranoid, take a look at the detailed stats Google released about their workforce and observe what's been happening to their tech white male category.)
- scarface74 8y ago
  How so? My being hired by a company is based on value proposition. It has to both be worth my time to work there and they have to be able to make as much money as they can off of me. How else should a company decide who to hire?
ryandrake 8y ago
Yea the dummy interview phenomenon is infuriating. Seems like companies are not seriously hiring. Instead they are “fishing” for that mythical person who will take a tiny salary and sacrifice their life doing death marches. Just so happens that person is almost always young so we see bias.

jayalpha 8y ago

This happens in non-IT companies too. And companies have no idea about the institutional knowledge that they throw out of the door.

trumped 8y ago

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)

erik_landerholm 8y ago

I’m sure IBM modeled the risk and found it to be worth it.

jmpman 8y ago

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. Would that have been illegal?

notacoward 8y ago
Yes, it would, and thank you for bringing that up. I'd forgotten that little bit of news, but now I'm pretty sure it will figure into this case.

jonnnyquest 8y ago

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. 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. 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.

donbright 8y ago
maybe if college campus tech leaders didnt ogle 19 year olds, there would be more women in tech.
seattle_spring 8y ago
> I also get to do practically nothing when I feel like it and also walk around campus ogling 19yo coeds on a sunny day It's funny that the people who cry "ageism!" the loudest also tend to make comments like this.

mancerayder 8y ago

It seems our jobs are a double-edged sword. 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. We're able to learn and shift, going from developer to sysadmin, architect, manager or security professional and back again. Pre-sales anyone? 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. 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). On the other hand, I'm pushing 40. That means events beyond my control are pushing me down the hierarchy, or at the very least making the ladder rungs more slippery. Would you take it all back and pick a different profession, if my assessment is balanced?

fouc 8y ago

A lot of people in this thread seem to be assuming that IBM was laying off software developers mainly. Could've just been managers and the like.

jiveturkey 8y ago

thousands, yes but still clickbait. the class action is for 3 employees. 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.

jordache 8y ago

what about culture fit criteria? if a company wants to hire bros, then an old dude would likely not qualify

privateSFacct 8y ago

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. This should be an undervalued labor pool given how discriminatory things sound. It would seem like a business opportunity? 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?

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Probably because for every fifty year old who boasts here about how they kept their tools sharp there are another ninety nine who let their skills atrophy and would struggle to code FizzBuzz in anything but Cobol.

caymanjim 8y ago

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. 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. 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. 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. IBM isn't stupid enough to fire people just because they're old. They're firing dead weight.

danschumann 8y ago

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?

pjc50 8y ago
Because that's firing for age with a tiny figleaf. Besides, you have no way of knowing how long people will work for you and younger employees are more mobile.

TangoTrotFox 8y ago

Calling ever more things discrimination or some form of ism 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'. 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. 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.

known 8y ago

Tax IBM Revenues, not Profits