8 ms·

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 f

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.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work Any sufficiently common bias has the same effect as a conspiracy. While it's very unlikely that IBM had an actual plan to eliminate older workers, because that would be illegal and stupid, there could well have been enough culture and cues leading to myriad "independent" actions with the same effect. Bias is something that must be actively countered. > 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 That's a very reasonable attitude, but irrelevant. Whether people have other options or not does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong.
  - pathseeker 8y ago
    Not sure why you're trying to argue. OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior rather than requiring explicit intent to discriminate against older people and then shared his/her strategy to fight it. Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile to people offering their perspectives, particularly when they are in the very class of victims under discussion.
    - mfringel 8y ago
      The OP's strategy to fight, while clearly a valid approach, has the twin problems of survivor bias, and absolving corporations of their actions. [IANAL] "Emergent behavior" is a pretty weak defense, because now you have to prove that you had no idea that the bad thing would happen. Getting into a trap of "You're either evil or incompetent, and we're just deciding which." is a bad place to be.
    - notacoward 8y ago
      > OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior Incorrect. OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias. I pointed out that it could still be bias even if it's not coordinated. > Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. I was calling only that part irrelevant. > they are in the very class of victims under discussion. So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group. It doesn't matter whether any of us, or the IBM employees have alternative strategies. It only matters whether IBM discriminated against them. > Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile Advice best taken yourself. I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion. Please don't be so quick to take sides and attribute ill intent to anyone who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.
yardie 8y ago
Good thing they've got Watson. "Hey Watson we need to lay off X,000 employees but need to control for age." "I'll get right on that, Rose."
- tabtab 8y ago
  "Sorry, Dave, you've been fired and the pod bay doors are locked. I hope you remembered your helmet. Oh, and that was a great sketch you did of Dr. Otherdeadguy."
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
If you fire the 20 younger engineers, you're also firing the people who will be the "10 older engineers" in a decade. You're killing the future. But firing the 10 older engineers, you may be killing the present. Even with no bias, it's not easy to know what the right answer is.
- dj-wonk 8y ago
  You've made two good points. I would suggest the next step is to synthesize them. As with many things, moderation is important. A strategy that balances the two downsides is probably better.
  - rosege 8y ago
    Odds are that each group has a bit of dead wood so taking some from each group would be best - identifying that is the harder part for those several rungs higher
- chii 8y ago
  you'd fire 5 older engineers, and 10 young ones.
- zentiggr 8y ago
  Fire 5 old and 10 young? QED
- dunpeal 8y ago
  As if in today's job market, keeping any engineer provides any sort of guarantee that the engineer will stay with the company "for the future". Most likely he'll stay until he gets a better offer (if he's a good performer) or gets laid off in a couple of years (if he's a poor performer).
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sjg007 8y ago
This is a SQL query.. in terms of a large organization, you should expect a large-scale performance review based firing to follow the demographics of the company. If your query has enriched for older people you have a problem. Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier. I would find it very suspicious if you said they performed poorly this year vs last year and that is why they were fired as most big companies have processes to improve performance over a time period. The statistics will tell the story. IBM needs to made an example of.
- rtkwe 8y ago
  One thing I'm worried about is if companies will be able to argue that the older workers weren't fired because of their age but because their pay relative to their work was higher than other employees doing similar work. That is is there ruling that would prevent them from just trimming the top earners in every job post which should be a fairly accurate proxy for experience/age in the industry?
  - cannonedhamster 8y ago
    In which case the same employees could turn around and point out that CEO pay, which is ostensibly tied to performance, is only getting higher despite any real provable impact on company performance for most of them. The problem for any company comes when it is driven more by the economics of the company than the mission of the company to product something good.
    - rtkwe 8y ago
      I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure that'd actually affect their case and the company's argument that 'we didn't look at age at all just price per position and started at the top (for the positions we were looking to cut).'
- solveit 8y ago
  >Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier I mean, presumably they were cheaper in the past.
lazyllama 8y ago
I think this is the reason Intel's 10nm chip production is a disaster. They did their systematic lay-offs 2 years ago and got rid of all the key senior people and management replaced them with recent college graduates (since you know we're all easily replaceable "resources") and this is what happens. I'm pretty sure this is also part of the reason behind BK getting fired.
- Soundest 8y ago
  I disagree, the 2016 layoffs were organisational in nature. Basically they canned the Mobile CPUs, a big chunk of the GPUs and several other areas they decided they weren't performing. They didn't really touch the core chip design teams.
mr_toad 8y ago
> engineers on higher salaries By that logic, men should also be disproportionately represented in the group that got fired. I’d be curious to know. And does that count as sex discrimination?
- notacoward 8y ago
  > does that count as sex discrimination? In a practical legal sense, generally no. Discrimination against a class that many believe is already over-represented is almost never prosecuted. It can happen, in fields (e.g. nursing) or workplaces where men are the minority, but it's rare. Otherwise, the attitude is that no social good comes from prosecuting such cases. Not saying it's right or wrong, and undoubtedly such discrimination can create real victims, but that seems to be the prevailing view.
codeonfire 8y ago
"Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 black engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 white engineers. It's the easy option." That's how 22-35 year old you sounds.
outside1234 8y ago
I would buy that except that they do a massive amount of analysis to make sure they aren't cutting diversity. They need to do the same sort of analysis to include age and make sure there isn't a bias towards older workers.
- logicfiction 8y ago
  It seems odd that age wouldn't be a dimension of diversity, unless that was shorthand for a very specific type like ethnic.

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.

notacoward 8y ago
> as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work Any sufficiently common bias has the same effect as a conspiracy. While it's very unlikely that IBM had an actual plan to eliminate older workers, because that would be illegal and stupid, there could well have been enough culture and cues leading to myriad "independent" actions with the same effect. Bias is something that must be actively countered. > 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 That's a very reasonable attitude, but irrelevant. Whether people have other options or not does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong.
- pathseeker 8y ago
  Not sure why you're trying to argue. OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior rather than requiring explicit intent to discriminate against older people and then shared his/her strategy to fight it. Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile to people offering their perspectives, particularly when they are in the very class of victims under discussion.
  - mfringel 8y ago
    The OP's strategy to fight, while clearly a valid approach, has the twin problems of survivor bias, and absolving corporations of their actions. [IANAL] "Emergent behavior" is a pretty weak defense, because now you have to prove that you had no idea that the bad thing would happen. Getting into a trap of "You're either evil or incompetent, and we're just deciding which." is a bad place to be.
  - notacoward 8y ago
    > OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior Incorrect. OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias. I pointed out that it could still be bias even if it's not coordinated. > Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. I was calling only that part irrelevant. > they are in the very class of victims under discussion. So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group. It doesn't matter whether any of us, or the IBM employees have alternative strategies. It only matters whether IBM discriminated against them. > Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile Advice best taken yourself. I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion. Please don't be so quick to take sides and attribute ill intent to anyone who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

yardie 8y ago

Good thing they've got Watson. "Hey Watson we need to lay off X,000 employees but need to control for age." "I'll get right on that, Rose."

tabtab 8y ago
"Sorry, Dave, you've been fired and the pod bay doors are locked. I hope you remembered your helmet. Oh, and that was a great sketch you did of Dr. Otherdeadguy."

AnimalMuppet 8y ago

If you fire the 20 younger engineers, you're also firing the people who will be the "10 older engineers" in a decade. You're killing the future. But firing the 10 older engineers, you may be killing the present. Even with no bias, it's not easy to know what the right answer is.

dj-wonk 8y ago
You've made two good points. I would suggest the next step is to synthesize them. As with many things, moderation is important. A strategy that balances the two downsides is probably better.
- rosege 8y ago
  Odds are that each group has a bit of dead wood so taking some from each group would be best - identifying that is the harder part for those several rungs higher
chii 8y ago
you'd fire 5 older engineers, and 10 young ones.
zentiggr 8y ago
Fire 5 old and 10 young? QED
dunpeal 8y ago
As if in today's job market, keeping any engineer provides any sort of guarantee that the engineer will stay with the company "for the future". Most likely he'll stay until he gets a better offer (if he's a good performer) or gets laid off in a couple of years (if he's a poor performer).

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sjg007 8y ago

This is a SQL query.. in terms of a large organization, you should expect a large-scale performance review based firing to follow the demographics of the company. If your query has enriched for older people you have a problem. Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier. I would find it very suspicious if you said they performed poorly this year vs last year and that is why they were fired as most big companies have processes to improve performance over a time period. The statistics will tell the story. IBM needs to made an example of.

rtkwe 8y ago
One thing I'm worried about is if companies will be able to argue that the older workers weren't fired because of their age but because their pay relative to their work was higher than other employees doing similar work. That is is there ruling that would prevent them from just trimming the top earners in every job post which should be a fairly accurate proxy for experience/age in the industry?
- cannonedhamster 8y ago
  In which case the same employees could turn around and point out that CEO pay, which is ostensibly tied to performance, is only getting higher despite any real provable impact on company performance for most of them. The problem for any company comes when it is driven more by the economics of the company than the mission of the company to product something good.
  - rtkwe 8y ago
    I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure that'd actually affect their case and the company's argument that 'we didn't look at age at all just price per position and started at the top (for the positions we were looking to cut).'
solveit 8y ago
>Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier I mean, presumably they were cheaper in the past.

lazyllama 8y ago

I think this is the reason Intel's 10nm chip production is a disaster. They did their systematic lay-offs 2 years ago and got rid of all the key senior people and management replaced them with recent college graduates (since you know we're all easily replaceable "resources") and this is what happens. I'm pretty sure this is also part of the reason behind BK getting fired.

Soundest 8y ago
I disagree, the 2016 layoffs were organisational in nature. Basically they canned the Mobile CPUs, a big chunk of the GPUs and several other areas they decided they weren't performing. They didn't really touch the core chip design teams.

mr_toad 8y ago

> engineers on higher salaries By that logic, men should also be disproportionately represented in the group that got fired. I’d be curious to know. And does that count as sex discrimination?

notacoward 8y ago
> does that count as sex discrimination? In a practical legal sense, generally no. Discrimination against a class that many believe is already over-represented is almost never prosecuted. It can happen, in fields (e.g. nursing) or workplaces where men are the minority, but it's rare. Otherwise, the attitude is that no social good comes from prosecuting such cases. Not saying it's right or wrong, and undoubtedly such discrimination can create real victims, but that seems to be the prevailing view.

codeonfire 8y ago

"Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 black engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 white engineers. It's the easy option." That's how 22-35 year old you sounds.

outside1234 8y ago

I would buy that except that they do a massive amount of analysis to make sure they aren't cutting diversity. They need to do the same sort of analysis to include age and make sure there isn't a bias towards older workers.

logicfiction 8y ago
It seems odd that age wouldn't be a dimension of diversity, unless that was shorthand for a very specific type like ethnic.