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

• jiveturkey 8y ago
  https://outline.com/bMsZxj https://outline.com/bMsZxj
• throwaway6497 8y ago
  Age discrimination for older software engineers is real. It gets enforced in subtle ways. It is up or out culture at the end. Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.
  • jpindar 8y ago
    We could start right here on HN by calling out those who use "grandma" to mean "person who can hardly even use a computer". People who are now old enough to be grandparents INVENTED computers and the internet.
    • newnewpdro 8y ago
      Soon its meaning will be replaced with "person who knows how to type"
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • skj 8y ago
      My grandpa once fetched cigarettes for Von Neumann. Which is to say, he basically invented the computer.
      • masonic 8y ago
        When I operated mainframes, the raised floor area (where all the computers, drives, and major printers reside) was the only place one couldn't smoke.
    • Gibbon1 8y ago
      I'm reminded of my dad, bought some surplus home security cams. They were surplus because they were discontinued on account of the firmware being shitty + spyware. Basic shlocked together embedded linux crap. Found someone that had developed fixed firmware. Re-flashed them with that. Figured out how to get them to send a notification to his phone when the motion sensor goes off so he knows when the deer are eating his wife's plants. My dad is 83.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • neilv 8y ago
        One of the early Foscam pan-tilt-zoom IR cameras? Your dad did better than I did. I liked the hardware, for the price point, and wasn't aware of alternative firmware. I ended up putting it on its own LAN with an old OpenWrt router, and kludging simple motion detection with a little program that ran on the router. (Script pulled frames from the camera with some HTTP interface using wget or curl, and used ImageMagick for the hard part.)
        • Gibbon1 8y ago
          Foscam sounds familiar. My dad just mentioned it in passing. My dad is also retired. And the only thing he doesn't seem to be able to do is nothing.
      • coldacid 8y ago
        I wish my dad was still that clever and he's almost two decades younger. Your dad is awesome.
      • vkazanov 8y ago
        My dad's in his 60s. Runs marathons once a year. Works on backend stuff in a ML startup. I am not sure I can make 10 km these days...
    • sbilstein 8y ago
      Fact. As someone who runs a startup that targets grandparents, they know the internet well. I’ve even had a customer say “why do young people think we don’t know how to use the web? We invented the fucking thing!”
    • smadurange 8y ago
      I remember I was sitting at a coffee shop and a lady sat in front of me and we started chatting. She would have been in her late 40s or early 50s. I thought she worked in banking or sales as many do around here. Turned out she was at IBM building early Unix systems. I was so impressed by our chat. She had left the industry at the time.
    • 52-6F-62 8y ago
      Heheh. My grandmother literally was a programmer. Not a computer scientist by a mile but she wrote software as a Sr Analyst in the oil industry— I believe her lingua franca were FORTRAN and COBOL. She retired in the late 80s and was hired back for a few years in the 90s because even then they didn’t have enough people working in the language to draw from. She passed away a few years ago now.
    • Xavdidtheshadow 8y ago
      Let me start by saying that I absolutely agree with you - it's a dumb insult now and always has been. That said, anecdotally, my grandmother recently passed away having never used a computer in her life. Never sent an email, googled anything, or had a Facebook account. She was in her 90s and simply never had to use one. I often wondered what that life was like in 2019, but she had nothing to compare it to and thus couldn't really share. All that is to say, there really are both ends of the spectrum out there.
      • masonic 8y ago
        I bet there are more 20 year olds that have never driven than grandmas who have never used a computer.
    • kyrieeschaton 8y ago
      Part of this is boomer performative incompetency at computers, which they do as a status/power move to demand humans serve them at various levels.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • csixty4 8y ago
        This sounds more like the behavior of a narcissist than a generational thing (and there are plenty in that generation).
      • eropple 8y ago
        This is important to echo, I think. In service industries (I'm most familiar with property management) there's a very real tendency for folks in today's "Grandma" range to just flap their hands and yell when asked to email instead of call, even when they get a receptionist who can take the problem down and email it in for them. But it's unreasonable to admit that they just want a person to bow and arrow and treat them specially, so it becomes an "I can't [so you have to]". And now a lot of this performative incompetency has now seeped into the general reference pool.
    • jaabe 8y ago
      We do a lot of digitisation in the public sector of Denmark, in fact we’re world leaders in it along side Estonia. Being an old social democracy we tend to build solutions to be inclusive. This means you can opt out of a range of our digitised options, and it also means we do extensive service design and benchmarking to make sure meaningful software gets to the citizens and that they know how to use it. Almost every elderly citizen in my municipality is a digitally competent citizen. The ones who aren’t, often suffer from sicknesses like dementia or mental disabilities. By contrast we have twenty year olds who don’t know how to install a program that isn’t part of “the App Store” or don’t know double clicking with a mouse is a thing. In the tech part of it, we have old developers who’ve been through decades of soa vs microservices and a billion frameworks who can build solutions that require minimal maintenance. While some of our freshly educated engineers build things that can’t even last a year without needing major updates or refactoring because their hipster packages broke. We also have extremely talented youngsters and old engineers that can’t write a for loop, but in general, age is extremely valuable if you want to actually operate the software after you build it. Ageism is simply put silly, unfortunately it isn’t just a thing in tech l. I see it in several areas, even in the public sector of a Scandinavian country. I’m not sure what we can do about it, but we need to do something.
    • anticensor 8y ago
      Grandma testing refers to one's own grandmother, not a random person.
      • jpindar 8y ago
        People can say whatever they want about their own grandma, but I've seen many comments that were clearly referring to grandmothers in general.
    • AlexB138 8y ago
      I think, by and large, "calling out" is something we ought to be doing much less of.
      • jpindar 8y ago
        When I said "calling out", I meant responding to a post here, not doxing someone or stalking them on other platforms. If people started posting blatantly racist things here, should we not say anything?
    • iak8god 8y ago
      This usage of "grandma" is sexist as well -- it's much more common than "grandpa".
    • Nasrudith 8y ago
      Now I know plenty of competent and masterful tech pioneers but they are sort of the exception that proves the rule - it generally is or was their career or at least a hobby and it isn't expected for them to know it. A young person from the first world who wasn't say a mennonite not knowing how to send an email attachment is seen as incompetent. An older person who doesn't is seen as not adapting to a changing world. While stereotyping is grossly unfair on an individual level judging the group based on the right end of the bell curve isn't a good representation. It would be like judging the intellectual capabilities of all children by 12 year old college graduates. Sure they prove capability and not to dismiss them out of hand but certainly not universality - moving all elementary school students to high school wouldn't be too effective for most.
  • all_blue_chucks 8y ago
    "If he hasn't made it to management / principal engineer by that age he must be a slow learner and therefore not [company] material"
    • JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      I taught myself to code on a C=64. I took a detour in life and was in management of a completely non tech related industry while putting myself through an engineering degree. I've been programming professionally for some time now. Through it all, all I have ever wanted to do was program. Why is it so bad that that is all I still want to do that at 47? Especially when I'm damned good at it!?
      • all2 8y ago
        The US Military used to have a separate track for technical specialists. The only rank left over from that track is "Specialist - E4". That line went all the way up to SGT Major, IIRC. So, you aren't bad for wanting that; specialization (to the degree of artisan) seems to have fallen out of vogue (except for rockstar roles, which some exist in programming).
      • danbolt 8y ago
        It was before my time, but I really love the Commodore 64's accessibility and learning curve in certain ways. One could mess around in Basic and slowly learn programming, as well as decide to drop into 6502 and manipulate things more intimately. Someone interested could slowly learn the ins/outs of their computer and become a competent operator while having fun making something interactive. I really admire the generation older than me having that sort of experience, as I think by the time I was exposed to later PCs things had become more and more abstracted. Not that we should return to my romantic notion of Commodore 64s, but there's something that feels holistic about it than a more conventional PC setup today.
      • scarface74 8y ago
        I also started programming in 65C02 assembly in the 80s on an Apple //e and have been a professional developer since 1996. During that time, I’ve only been anything close to management (the dev lead for a medium size company) for 2 years. I hated every minute of the lead part. I left the company to work for a small startup and negotiated not to be a team lead. I reiterated that at my last review. I’m much more effective just being a member of different teams and guiding the teams through just mentoring, advising and demonstrating. If at all possible, I plan to be here at least another 4 or 5 years, but this will be my last software development full time salaried job hopefully. I’ll be 50. I personally haven’t heard ageism being that much of an issue from other developers who are also 40+ who have kept their skills and their network current - ie we hardly ever get rejected from jobs we apply for. But, I definitely plan on contracting or consulting after I leave my current job.
  • jacobolus 8y ago
    One reason for a lower proportion of older programmers is that the field overall has grown dramatically, and many older programmers move to management, while new people entering the field tend to be younger. But median age for programmers is ~40.
    • leereeves 8y ago
      > median age for programmers is ~40. That's encouraging, but a bit difficult to believe. What's your source?
      • jacobolus 8y ago
        web search -> data from the american community survey (done by the US census bureau) But here’s a BLS page, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11b.htm Adding up a few related categories that’s only counting about 2 million workers, so it’s also possible that some younger workers aren’t being properly counted in the right category. Dunno... Also keep in mind, a whole lot of programmers are working on some legacy enterprise applications instead of working at young companies on web apps. In some companies the age distribution is going to skew much younger.
    • sys_64738 8y ago
      Those youngsters will age too and be over 40 someday.
  • jimrhods23 8y ago
    This is one of the reasons I am now contracting. Most of my clients have never even seen my face and I don't have to get involved in company culture clashes or politics.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      If I look back at my career, the stress has never come from the technical responsibility of producing software, it’s always the politics and red tape. I don’t do large companies. I realized that I’m just not a fit for them after working at what was then a Fortune 10 (non tech) company. Not dealing with corporate politics by either working for a small company as a salaried employee or working for any company as a contractor is the only way that I’m going to be able to keep doing this for another two decades.
    • cutler 8y ago
      How do you manage to never show your face? Do you mean sub-contracting where someone else does the work and interfaces with clients?
      • pdwetz 8y ago
        Remote work? I rarely have in-person client meetings anymore. And honestly at my old job it had offices around the country so even then there were people I'd worked on projects with for years and had never met in person.
      • jimrhods23 8y ago
        Remote work. It's 99% over the phone/skype/webex (usually voice only). On occasion, it's video.
        • cutler 8y ago
          Video or in-person - they're still going to see your face.
  • jimmaswell 8y ago
    Some would say it's simply that cognitive decline due to aging makes older people less likely to be able to cut it as a programmer, especially given the higher rate of change in the field placing less emphasis on crystalized intelligence and more on adaptability compared to other fields.
    • diego_moita 8y ago
      > Some would say it's [...] cognitive decline due to aging And I say that this assumption without evidence is a textbook example of a prejudice. Therefore, those "some" are bigots but the good news is they'll stop being it in a few decades, when they'll become the target of this very same bigotry.
      • jimmaswell 8y ago
        An individual can easily remain capable into late age, but it's not evidence of age discrimination if mostly young people work at/apply to some positions. Here's some evidence of cognitive decline: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/
        • millstone 8y ago
          You just cited "mostly young people work at some positions" as evidence against age discrimination.
        • howard941 8y ago
          Skimming, that is an interesting article. I feel more productive in my newfound dotage than I was in my twenties. Nevertheless I suppose the data don't lie, do they? Or mislead? > Results from three methods of estimating retest effects in this project,... converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s. If you (and I hope you do) live well beyond your 20s and 30s I hope you'll remember that getting fucked by ageism is real and unavoidable if you work for the man in this industry.
  • _jal 8y ago
    I think a lot of companies don't realize the damage they do to themselves. I can understand the appeal to startup managers; to be blunt and a bit uncharitable, hire youngins' and you get cheaper people whom you can push around more and train up in your own particular pathologies, instead of dealing with imported ones. But if the firm survives the startup phase, you really want anchors, both in technical and cultural dimensions. A certain type of tech-manager feels threatened by that, I think, so they jettison anyone who might be too independent. Not to mention, experience matters. There are a few folks on my team who are the go-to folks, not because of their title, but because they tend to know the correct answer/are able to diagnose and fix your weird issue. Those people, without exception, are neither young nor managers. "Sonny, that reminds me of the time I canceled a 3 month reporting project with two hour's worth of awk..."
    • scarface74 8y ago
      Firms aren’t trying to survive the startup phase. That’s just it. A minuscule number of startups ever survive as an ongoing independent entity especially if they are venture backed. Their main goal is to get acquired. Look no further than YC funded companies. Only one has ever gone public. I used to be idealistic about software development and architecture and wanted to do things “right”. When I realized that venture capital backed companies wanted me to just apply enough duck tape to get customers to survive until they got their next round of funding or got acquired, I stopped thinking long term.
      • pm90 8y ago
        There are still companies that build good products and focus on core engineering. Maybe not (all) startups, but despite the preponderance of every kind of startup, there are still many who at their core are solving difficult engineering problems. Of course, reality gets in the way and they often have to cut corners every now and then.
        • scarface74 8y ago
          That may be the case, but if they take outside funding, their primary focus is by definition not to be a “lifestyle company”, but to have an exit strategy. Statistically, that exit strategy is to get acquired. Your investors don’t care about how well architected your code is or the amount of automated test coverage you have.
  • kevingadd 8y ago
    It's really nasty. Imagine how bad the intersection of it must be, like the odds of getting laid off if you're old and black or old and female? I bet the odds approach 100%.
    • PorterDuff 8y ago
      Hard to say. Me = 35+ years in harness. Black coworkers in that time = 0 Female coworkers in that time = 3
    • scarface74 8y ago
      I’m Black and have a disability that only allows me to type with one hand. I can tell you with almost 100% certainty that I haven’t been discriminated against. How do I know? My success rate from applying for a job to not getting rejected (ie I take myself out of the running after I get an offer) is close to 100% over the past 20 years. I also don’t blindly submit my resume without an internal referral or through an external recruiter. Software development is very egalitarian. I could say the same about age but no one can tell my age yet. I go to interviews clean shaven and most non Blacks can’t tell my age without any outward signs like grey hair or a receding hairline.
    • dx87 8y ago
      It depends on what kind of work they're doing. If they're doing government contracting, they'll probably never get fired because they fill so many "diversity checkboxes" that their company will want to keep them on just for help winning contracts.
  • willart4food 8y ago
    Age discrimination for older workers everywhere is real.
    • godzillabrennus 8y ago
      Not in medicine and there are some legal roles and financial roles where it’s beneficial.
      • kamaal 8y ago
        You don't start working soon in Medicine either. Basically the decade you spend studying, the lost decade of early adult life of 20's gets shifted the 50's.
      • arkades 8y ago
        Not in the same way, but there definitely is in medicine. It’s less severe because you don’t finish training until you are in your thirties, so you’re good until your ... oh, fifties? Maybe sixties? After that, you had better be visibly up to date on your field, because it will be people’s starting assumption that you are woefully behind the times. And, in fairness, it seems like many docs at that stage of their career are.
        • hopler 8y ago
          Sixties is retirement age.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
    Part of the reason age discrimination does not get the coverage is that age discrimination disproportionately affects white males. This is due to the fact that as you go back in time in the US, white males made up a higher percent of college graduates and professionals than they do now. One side effect of this is that age discrimination likely makes your diversity numbers better.
    • colllectorof 8y ago
      Age discrimination affects everyone. But older people tend to vote conservative, so left-leaning media has no interest in engaging with that group and right-leaning media is more interested in the "corporations are always good" meta-narrative. It's not politically opportune.
    • novaRom 8y ago
      Interesting observation.
    • C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Age is part of diversity as well
      • RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y ago
        I agree, but not everybody sees it like that. I have seen companies talk about how they hired more people of a specific gender or race and increased their diversity with respect to gender or race. I have never ever seen a company ever talk about how they hired more older workers and increased their diversity with respect to age.
    • SolaceQuantum 8y ago
      I'm really confused here, anecdotally I see age-discrimination concerns about the same rate as female-representation concerns in my engineering-related social media (HN). But I'm open to being incorrect as I'm only a human; do you have any statistical media analysis to verify the lack of coverage?
  • freyir 8y ago
    > "why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering" No, there's a small percentage of older folks in software engineering. In almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's because actual engineering principles change very slowly. Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense; most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and useless in a few years.
    • mk926 8y ago
      Yes
    • markbnj 8y ago
      I have no doubt there is some age discrimination, though I haven't experienced it personally. What I want to point out here is that there were a lot fewer of us in total when I first started (I'm 58 now). I find very few peers my own age now, but I also found very few peers my own age when I was 25. So just going by percentages may be misleading for a relatively young discipline.
      • commandlinefan 8y ago
        I wonder about that, too, although I'm "only" 45. I still have tons of people pinging me with new job offers, and they don't look like the sort of job offers that they're going to offer a 25-year-old. Regardless, I put a lot of effort into making sure that they need me more than I need them.
    • manfredo 8y ago
      I'm always unsure about how to judge whether the lower percentages of older engineers I see is due to age discrimination or just a low percentage of older engineers period. Software developers are young in general. And interestingly the United States has the highest average age [1]. At my workplace I can count at least one "greybeard" on most teams. I don't get the sense that they are discriminated against because of their age. I've always enjoyed talking with them about how software development used to be back in the day. I remember talking to one guy that worked on a text editor back in the 80s that was backed by a mainframe. The terminal didn't have enough computing power to manage the whole document, so it only stored a few pages locally and swapped them in from the mainframe as the user scrolled to them. Things like bulk find-replace were done via an RPC. It's interesting how many parallels this has to modern client-server web-apps. I especially like to hear from people that programmed on punch cards - that's kind of stuff is fascinating to me. I also wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is due to expectations of an ever-increasing salary. I remember one older co-worker that interviewed for a job, liked the company, and got an offer that he dismissed as "not much higher than entry level" and even called the offer insulting. My line of reasoning was that if he didn't have relevant domain experience why wouldn't get paid not much more than a new grad? It was still well into the 100-200k range - in the Bay Area but in a cheaper city (San Bruno I think). More than enough to save and live a comfortable life. I wonder how much of the perceived age discrimination is more about being realistic about the fact that years of experience don't automatically translate into higher productivity, paying younger folk commensurate with their contribution - as opposed to other industries where it's entrenched that young people get paid less and older people get paid more. Not saying age discrimination doesn't exist. I've seen job adverts that explicitly specified an age cap of 40 (despite this being blatantly illegal). 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programmer-2015-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-age-programme... It's worth noting that surveying from Stack Overflow can mean significant selecting bias.
  • burtonator 8y ago
    I with mental disorders would get more attention. ADHD, PTSD, dyslexia, social anxiety disorder, etc. Just because someone is white and male doesn't mean they're not struggling or discriminated against.
  • duxup 8y ago
    I did a coding bootcamp with a bunch of folks. A few older guys like me, and mostly younger folks. We all had a great time working together (I wish we could have more) and we compared notes after interviews. Older folks like me, got lots of "culture" questions that were so vague. I'd ask what they mean but they can't really explain what they were getting at. I'd just explain that I've worked with a lot of different people, mentored new employees, etc. When we compared interview notes younger folks, never heard that phrase. Now that could be nothing, but it felt like something. One guy from the camp actually had the HR person call him up and say they were concerned about his age. When he asked her what that meant, she couldn't explain exactly. He thought maybe she realized what she said and was embarrassed, he was annoyed so he asked later what they were concerned about "oh your age, you're older".... nope, she apparently didn't think anything was wrong with that. Meanwhile I got my job eventually. I see folks come and go. Younger folks realizing they don't like the work and moving on (nothing wrong with that) others invited to move on. The president of the company says to me one day "You just seem to get a lot of these things, you can talk to customers, our sales guys, I like your communication.." and so on. Like yeah, because I've done other technical things before, have experience. Experience pays in a lot of ways.
    • Mandatum 8y ago
      Honestly I think the best way to address this, is to call it out before it becomes an issue. Tell them why you're still in an engineering role. There is a reason, and some folks are just bad at their jobs, have no people skills or their skills stalled decades ago and they checked out. Others, like yourself, are still interested in engineering and have no interest in management. You're at an age where you will always be put on equal footing or above those you interview with BECAUSE of your age. Use it.
      • duxup 8y ago
        Yup, you have to sort of go on offense I think and say "I've got experience, that's an asset, here is why."
  • profalseidol 8y ago
    Yet the bigger issue is allowing only a handful of hands make these decisions while we give them the lionshare of our blood and sweat.
  • shams93 8y ago
    They have tried to push me out of the industry many times, I'm pushing 50 but my ability to learn new things rapidly has enabled me to hang on long past what some might consider my expiration date. To some extent the 21st century can seem like Logan's Run, really the Feds expect us to work until we're over 70 years old, but given tech is perhaps the only decent paying industry left the impact of age discrimination has a broad impact across a lot of areas including projected tax revenues.
    • koffiezet 8y ago
      > but my ability to learn new things rapidly This is one of the issues in my experience, you might be in the minority there. I'm pushing 40 and notice I have a lot more interest in new technology and stacks than many of my colleagues (I've always been like that) - but the 'more experienced' they get, the harder it becomes to convince them of the advantages of new approaches, and disadvantages of their 'proven' way of working, especially seasoned developers. They are also usually in more senior or team leader positions, which means they are very influential or can call the shots. I've seen months wasted on projects that could be just as well written in Python in a few days by a single developer, just because the 'senior dev' had something against interpreted languages and the only option for him was C++. As much as I liked the guy personally, and respected his skillset, he seriously limited technological progress within that company - which was a huge part of the reason I quit there and became freelance. Ever since - I've seen quite a few very similar situations. Young people will jump into things without looking - which is not good, but saying no to them and blocking off their stupid ideas is a lot easier than saying no to a guy with 30 years of experience...
  • Fnoord 8y ago
    Not just for software engineers. Age discrimination is real. It exists for young people, but it also exists for the group at hand here: old people. It is real in general and in the end of last century it has become severe because of our quickly shifting society (the "computer" and "networking" revolutions, among others)
  • jillesvangurp 8y ago
    This comes up a lot. People are definitely biased towards young, white, males doing most of the coding because it is mostly young white males doing the coding. Part of this is simple demographics. Part of this is confirmation bias. And part of this is our education system and culture filtering out disproportionate amounts of women and non whites who for whatever reason never even get on the career-path for becoming an engineer. Some countries are much worse at this than others. Uncle Bob has a nice article explaining that the number of programmers doubles every five years: https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/06/20/MyLawn.html So the chance of encountering somebody over 40 in a project is about 2^4 or one in 16, assuming lots of people in their early 20s are outnumbering those in their forties. It jumps to 32 for people over 45, 64 for people in their early fifties. I know people who are still coding in their late sixties. I'm 44, and most people I deal with are below 30. Most of the people my age that I know or used to work are by and large still active in the field though a few of them have become managers. Also, seniority means they tend to be big earners and typically too expensive for small projects. Quite a few are doing very lucrative free lance gigs at premium rates, disappeared into big corporations in some senior role, etc.
  • Angostura 8y ago
    I'm in my 50s, so I hope you take this the right way - is it actually age discrimination, or is it higher salary discrimination?
  • coldtea 8y ago
    >Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination. That's because the vocal parts for the "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" are mainly white well-off younger people. Gender causes naturally draw them in. And through they are predominantly white, race causes make them appear as hip and invested in other cultures. For them being old is not a reality. If it's anything, it's obscene. Why don't these old people just die? That's the same reason those giving coverage to "gender, race or sexual orientation discrimination" also get a free pass on pissing on poor people (whether "white trash" or black/latinos/etc when they're not subjected to race-driven but poverty driven abuses).
  • therockhead 8y ago
    "Age discrimination for older software engineers is real." Can't say I've seen this in Ireland, I found that good experienced developers are highly valued. Do you think it's worse in places like SF than the rest of the USA ?
  • cameldrv 8y ago
    While certainly age discrimination does exist, I'm 41 and I haven't experienced it yet. If anything, I've found that what I do is more in demand than ever, partially because there's been so much growth in the industry that there are proportionately very few people that have been around as long as I have. A big part of the reason you see so few gray hairs is that there just aren't that many of them to hire.
  • madrox 8y ago
    I have hired a good number of "grey hairs" in my time. Usually they're lead engineer IC types. They typically have a couple kids, have great stories about software development in the 80s (one guy was at NeXT with Jobs!), and know everything about your favorite framework but don't think it's world-changing. They usually have a story about how they took 5 years doing something wild and non-software related. These engineers, in my experience, have the greatest likelihood of being great hires. They require less management, understand getting results, and have a much easier time working with more kinds of people. They write code with an eye for maintenance, and are more likely to stick around for the long haul to maintain that code instead of job hopping for promotions and raises. Bad managers can be reluctant to hire them or keep them because they can be intimidating to manage. They quite often have more experience than their managers, and are more inclined to challenge their ideas. Inexperienced software engineering managers I've met think they have to know more than than their team or they'll be a threat to their position. There are also the usual "soft concerns" that are very similar to the ones leveled against hiring women, such as being more likely to choose work/life balance. I was lucky in that I worked with my first grey hair for several years before becoming a manager and taking them on, so we already had a working relationship. Without that, I imagine I would've fallen into the traps above.
• btown 8y ago
  This appears to be the initial complaint, from 2018: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/09/17/ibmdiscriminationsuit917.pdf https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/09/17/ibmdiscriminationsuit917.p... On the surface, allowing recent hires to be exempt from performance-based layoff programs isn't particularly unethical, as they may still be ramping up. It certainly seems like there's substance here, though, beyond just "think like a millennial" or "give recent hires a chance" rhetoric. Will be interesting to follow. It's essential to our entire industry that lawsuits like this draw lines in the sand - we're all in danger as we age if big tech can get away with age discrimination.
  • around_here 8y ago
    It's generally very difficult to get younger STEM people on board with this. They often believe themselves to be different or just straight up better than their predecessors. For them, it doesn't matter because they're clearing not going to be ousted, or are so short sighted that they believe it won't matter if/when it happens to them.
• avs733 8y ago
  I'll care when wage discrimination against younger works is made illegal.
  • scarejunba 8y ago
    Wouldn't it make sense for you to care now since you're guaranteed to get old but you're not guaranteed to become any younger?
    • sosodev 8y ago
      You could care about your fellow human.
      • scarejunba 8y ago
        I mean, yeah yeah, all true. But he seems to be coming from a solely self-interest POV and I felt like even from that POV it's inconsistent to not support this protection.
    • neilv 8y ago
      "A society grows great when old [people] plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit."
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • ummonk 8y ago
      Well, they aren't guaranteed to get old...
    • tom_ 8y ago
      Additionally, caring now, while self-serving in the long run, could appear to others to be a selfless act.
    • joel_ms 8y ago
      That's the attitude that's running our civilization to the ground...
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I don't know if the suit has merit but I was pretty amazed at the stuff IBM wanted me to sign when I left. There is a saying that every clause in a contract tells a story, well there were a lot of stories in my separation agreement :-). Comparing it to the agreement I signed when I left Google it was clear that over its lifetime, IBM has been sued a lot. :-)
  • shereadsthenews 8y ago
    Why did you sign anything when you left Google? Did they offer you contingent compensation?
    • NegativeLatency 8y ago
      I expect so. But I also suspect the parent is not allowed to answer per the terms of said agreement.
      • CoolGuySteve 8y ago
        I never understood how you could sign away a constitutional right like that. It seems like any aspect of employment could be discussed under the first amendment as that corporate charter was granted by the government and the civil court that might enforce the clause is also run by the government. Obviously I'm not a lawyer because I have no idea how this shit is even legal.
        • coldacid 8y ago
          Unfortunately, most court cases involving businesses don't involve facts of law as much as they involve having more money to fling at lawyers.
        • atwebb 8y ago
          Some would argue that removing the ability would be counter to constitutional rights.
        • ChuckMcM 8y ago
• 40acres 8y ago
  I think age discrimination is really hard to prove because the plausible deniability is so strong. For one, older workers make more -- so discrimination can be masked as reducing costs. Secondly, management is usually older, so if you're reshuffling divisions and reducing management overhead that also disproportionately affects older workers. There are other tactics that I've seen used like holding those with higher pay grades to stricter requirements, making it easier to get rid of them. All and all, I can't really see I being found at fault. I'd bet on a settlement being reached.
• ben_jones 8y ago
  I think the hard truth here is that there will always be clever ways to get around anti-age discrimination laws and companies will always optimize to pay employees less even if they project a culture antithetical to that. I wonder what the graph would look like at i.e. FANG in terms of average age per employee over time. My understanding is that they've been hiring undergrads very aggressively in the past few years such that the trend would be similar to more brazen companies such as IBM in terms of declining age of employees. It's happening everywhere in very subtle ways. LPT: don't get old? \s.
  • banku_brougham 8y ago
    I disagree. This attitude is analogous to the US approach to healthcare, which is a compelling story until you examine one, then a few, then dozens of other industrialized countries’ implementation of health care policy.
• sp527 8y ago
  I’m in my late 20s and I’ve already learned not to trust our society/economy to ensure that I’ll have a stable financial future. You need to have a plan and be doubly hedged against shittiness. Keep costs low. Save and invest. Job hop as much as necessary to boost your income. Try to build a business that can generate wealth (but don’t depend on that outcome). Above all trust no one to care for you. Not your government. Not a company offering options. Not even FAANG. Be ruthless and look out for yourself and those you love first and foremost. No one else will.
  • neilv 8y ago
    I think you generally have the right idea (go Bogleheads for the investing part), but please go easy on the "ruthless" part. There's way too much of that already in this industry and in the world, and it would be better for everyone if we tried to move the norm.
    • sp527 8y ago
      I know it doesn’t sound like it but I consider myself a fairly principled person. Ruthless is a deliberately suggestive word I chose to drive home the extent to which I believe it’s necessary to self-optimize. I did not mean for it to imply ‘amoral’ or that a person should devote all their time to the pursuit of money. My intent was simply that people should never be deluded into thinking that the fluff like emotional appeals, a company’s ‘mission’, a startup posturing as a family, internal propaganda, etc are things that really matter. If you are exchanging your time for money, my opinion is you should always get to the heart of what’s important: “What’s in it for me?” Related questions: “Can this business be successful?” “What are the true (non-bullshit) hard numbers that underpin this business?” “Will I be compensated according to the value I’m creating?” “What’s the value of the career capital I’ll get out of this?” My experience is that a good number of modern tech companies will leave the answers to these questions deliberately opaque. Ideally you also avoid working for unprincipled organizations that are rationalizing bad behavior. But that’s not always feasible because it could imply a high opportunity cost. For example, having seen it from the inside, Facebook is in my opinion a shitshow. They will do absolutely anything that isn’t outright illegal (including things that would seem blatantly unethical to a neurotypical person) to pad their bottom line. But they pay well and it looks good on your resume. And that tragic cycle of ‘do shitty things -> make more money -> grow -> hire more people -> repeat’ is the dumpster fire we’ve collectively chosen to base our society on. ‘Hate the game not the player’ more or less captures how I feel about all of this.
• jmpman 8y ago
  Companies shouldn’t be allowed to force arbitration on protected classes. Employees shouldn’t even be allowed to sign over that right. If IBM is found innocent, the laws need to change.
  • Gibbon1 8y ago
    Given the power imbalance that exists between employers and employees arbitration should be illegal in employment contracts.
• neilv 8y ago
  I don't know the merits of this particular suit, but I'd say everyone working at the company, or considering it, should see how it plays out. There's a bit of a general rule that applies to a lot of situations, and can be phrased many ways. One way is: someone who is mean to others, but nice to you, will be mean to you.
• asfarley 8y ago
  I think the appropriate market response is to start pricing this behavior into our salary asks as younger engineers. Rather than assuming a long career with increasing pay, point to cases like this in salary negotiations. Your highest income generating years maybe be 30-40.
  • banku_brougham 8y ago
    This is sound strategy for the individual (if its successful) and will benefit the oldies on a macro scale as well .
  • chaosbutters 8y ago
    That is my plan, invest like I will be forced to retire by 50. I mean, I'll probably pick up some 'fun' min wage job in my 50s to get social interaction. But I save heavily assuming the worst
    • ozzyman700 8y ago
      I feel like beavis constantly thinking "FIRE FIRE FIRE" at work
    • jjtheblunt 8y ago
      At 51, I want to say it's a viable plan. ;)
• around_here 8y ago
  Never trust anyone who attempts to get you to waive your right to collective action, or attempts to force you in to binding arbitration. This is especially true when it comes to employment. There is never any benefit for you, and it means that they will, one day, try to screw you.
  • ilaksh 8y ago
    Isn't arbitration now a standard part of employment contracts? So all employers would like the option to screw you if they can get away with it.
    • around_here 8y ago
      It's becoming standard because they're able to skirt employment law using a continuing relationship with an arbitrator as a lever. So yes, they're all trying to screw you. Or least, have the option to screw you at their leisure. Legal protections should not be signed away. Collective action is the power labour wields.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  • m4x 8y ago
    There was a direct benefit to waiving their rights: > Employees were offered severance worth a month’s salary, continuing health and life insurance coverage for a period depending on time with the firm, free career counseling, and up to $2,500 for skills training
    • banku_brougham 8y ago
      this is not very much. don’t sign.
    • C1sc0cat 8y ago
      That's a lot less than the statutory minimum in the UK - I got 9 Months from BT on Voluntary Redundancy 15+ years ago. Some Higher grades got 100,000 k and 6 years extra pension.
• kazinator 8y ago
  When your generation has slogans like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#%22Don%27t_trust_anyone_over_30%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#%22Don%27t_trust... what do you expect from the kids and grandkids.
  • groby_b 8y ago
    > my one sentence in history turns out to be something I said off the top of my head which became completely distorted and misunderstood So yay on you for distorting it some more.
    • kazinator 8y ago
      It was distorted at the time; it became a popular slogan for throngs of hippies.
      • groby_b 8y ago
        No, it really did not. It became popular for the media and right-wing figures to claim it became a popular slogan. Quoth Wikipedia: "The saying then went viral, becoming a favorite for reporters and columnists wishing to ridicule the young, the New Left, or the hippie/Yippie movement" It's still being used that way. You're a shining example.
  • robotron 8y ago
    Did you actually read that? It's not saying that was any generation's slogan but a bunch of reporters...
    • kazinator 8y ago
      Well, that text is neither saying that it was any generation's slogan, nor that it wasn't. Though Weinberg tried to wash his hand of it, it was in fact used as as slogan, and was attributed to multiple sources.
      • 8y ago
• openloop 8y ago
  I’ll allow it. Fuck gramps. Fuck me too.
• lloydde 8y ago
  > IBM appeared to be winding down the Millennial Corps, cited in several legal actions as evidence the firm was biased against younger workers. Pretty awkward typo in the article. Should be “bias towards younger” or “discriminate against older”
• wallflower 8y ago
  In case you missed the deep discussion on this “wake up” call from 2 months ago. “64 and unemployed: One man’s struggle to be taken seriously as a job applicant” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022000 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-january-27-2019-1.4989313/64-and-unemployed-one-man-s-struggle-to-be-taken-seriously-as-a-job-applicant-1.4991626 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition...
• PorterDuff 8y ago
  I've always wondered why you don't see self-funded startups that just hire old people. The customers don't care.
• luckydata 8y ago
  I know I will be downvoted to hell by the young folks that don't know how things work, but the only way to fix the absurd power imbalance and worker hostile laws we have in the USA is through strong unions. It is such an obvious thing that you can even spot when union-busting laws were passed in the trends for inflation adjusted wages. Software engineers think they are irreplaceable and our current conditions will last forever but it's a lie. Good news is it seems we have a new generation of politicians worried about it but we as workers have to do our part or we will progressively lose more and more of our hard earned "privilege" and make sure more can benefit from it.
  • scarface74 8y ago
    I’m 45 and the last thing I want is a union. Unions tend to make all workers equal even those who work harder/smarter. If I am 50, staying current with technology, kept my resume up to date, and kept my network strong, why would I want to be lumped in with someone who has done none of those things?
    • Barrin92 8y ago
      because you can still benefit from collective bargaining power even if you see yourself as personally superior to your peers. Not to mention that this is a somewhat terrible attitude to be honest. A lot of 45 year olds might have legitimate disadvantages compared to younger workers. Like say children, health issues, other commitments that keep them from being as flexible as someone in their youth. So this isn't just an individual issue, it's a collective one. A little bit of looking out for each other rather than treating this like a olympic competition probably wouldn't hurt. And it's probably what got us into this situation to begin with.
      • dodobirdlord 8y ago
        I'd value a strong professional association, and I would even pay meaningful dues to it, but I don't want a union. I'd like to be part of an organization that can keep a staff of lawyers around to review contracts and have an official policy on what clauses are acceptable and what aren't acceptable, what to expect in terms of intellectual property ownership, working hours, etc. Having a cadre of lawyers around to protest discriminatory hiring and firing practices would also be great. But having quotas, or formal seniority, or having said organization have a seat at the table during hiring and firing discussions or salary decisions sounds like a total disaster. Perhaps what I want is a guild? Maybe a licensing board? Professional association seems like the best terminology, but I want a professional association with some teeth.
• a-dub 8y ago
  "let's fire all the people who will actually do the horrifically boring work our company actually does that makes a lot of money so that young people who would never work here can replace them!". brilliant!!!
  • reustle 8y ago
    I've found that a lot of that horrifically boring work could easily be optimized or automated, but the old pensioners have little inventive to budge.
• TheSpiciestDev 8y ago
  Just reading some of the comments here makes me want to ask: is there an opportunity to disrupt the whole interviewing / hiring process with something along the lines of the show The Dating Game?.. where employers know a limited amount of data to make a hire? Could some private company vet candidates for skills, culture and level of experience and provide clients profiles of candidates without name, race, age, etc... essentially scrubbed? Would this solve problems, or make more?
  • biztos 8y ago
    Didn’t California forbid employers from asking about salary history? I think it’s ripe for disruption, maybe more so outside the US. Many otherwise progressive countries still expect a headshot with your CV.
    • C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Its very surprising that Places like Germany get away with this.
• feralhacker 8y ago
  Honestly looking for discussion: Why should we treat ages all the same? Age does change a person, physically/ mentally/ emotionally. It would seem that some companies and industries are better served by the young and some the old. Why is there a problem with that? Clearly these companies aren't firing the old out of spite, are there are reasons?
  • lame88 8y ago
    What do you value? You can also make this argument to advocate ignoring web accessibility because its not a cost benefit tradeoff that is worth a single entity’s bottom line for the sake of the small percentage of people that are disabled. Private actors in the capitalist economy regularly make very shortsighted decisions. It’s up to us to establish the boundaries in which those decisions get made, and to some extent, our laws are a reflection of our values. What kind of world do you want your possibly disabled children to grow up in? (Edit: and what kind of sentiment do you want to be established in society and the industry when you are 50+ years old and looking for a job?)
• cleandreams 8y ago
  I am 63 and I'm having an amazing career right now. I am levels and levels above where I ever thought I'd be. It's too stimulating to retire. I've always been attracted to the hardest problems I could find and that paid off, but it took a long time. I don't know how people do that quickly, unless it's partly luck. I'm not Ivy League so I had to earn every opportunity.
  • redact207 8y ago
    Yours sounds like an incredible career. I've never worked with any developer who was past their 40s. What did you do throughout your career? Did you experience ageism or any hurdles based on your age? I saw in your comments you worked for MS, was working for a large corporate easier than getting involved in a startup or small business?
• martin1975 8y ago
  This depends on the company - where I work I regularly see people retire after 25-30 years of tenure, and it is a large, publicly traded company. The CEO/board sets the tone. It is possible to meet a company's bottom line AND treat your employees at the same footing as your clients/customers.
• mathattack 8y ago
  IBM is in a bind. They were so behind for so many years that anyone talented left. The ones who stayed were around were there because of tenure, not talent. What do you do when your best employees are gone and your best days are past? Share buybacks, overmarketing, and aggressive pursuit of license audits. But none of those require a large senior employee base. So they took the most aggressive policy possible while still plausibly remaining inside the law.
• lame88 8y ago
  I wonder how much age bias is to blame for the constant reinvention of the wheel and hype-tech in the industry
• axaxs 8y ago
  Unpopular opinion: most 'gray hairs' I've worked with absolutely deserved to be let go. Keep in mind this is a sample size of 1 company, however. I'm 100 percent against age discrimination, and some of my mentors fall in this age range. That said, I've also worked for a big corp full of 'distinguished engineers', which essentially in our company meant they did something really interesting in the 80s or 90s. Many rested on some one accomplishment, and found ways to interject themselves onto new projects while giving extremely vague or extremely outdated advice. Our industry is ageless, if you keep up to date and keep learning. If you're relying on tenure, you're going to have a bad time.
• _robbywashere 8y ago
  This is always so weird to me because I feel like older software engineers would have so much wisdom and be able to see through the hype and fads
• tyingq 8y ago
  The suit took aim at a 2006 IBM internal report on employee demographics that purportedly called older workers “gray hairs” and “old heads,” and concluded that younger workers were “generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.” Ouch. That seems pretty damning.
• segmondy 8y ago
  Holberger has noticed that there is almost no one in the basement involved in CPU design who is over 35. What happens to old CPU engineers? Holberger is 26 now, and though not exactly on his deathbed, he is curious about what a computer engineer does "afterward." This was written in 1981 about late 70's in "Soul of a new Machine" Nothing new.
  • yborg 8y ago
    Not exactly the same thing. A 35 year old in 1981 would have entered college in 1964; "computer designer" would not have been a career path most people would have been familiar with. The entire field was relatively new, so it of course tended to trend younger. We tend to forget that virtually the entire history of our industry fits in one human lifetime.
• _bxg1 8y ago
  Forced arbitration is a racket and needs to be outlawed.
• Simple_Guy 8y ago
  What is the problem? If they are valuable, they can surely get another job. if they are not, why should IBM keep them around?
• jayalpha 8y ago
  No-one gave me a job when I was a young engineer. Now, why is it bad when your swap young people for older folks that might just sit on their desk and counting their days until retirement? If they have anything to offer I am sure they can find a new job easily on the market. Seriously. IBM, well done!
  • banku_brougham 8y ago
    One day you will be old and will remember these things you said.
    • jayalpha 8y ago
      Doubt it. After years of nightmarish struggling I feel well prepared to every challenge that I may face in the future (this includes health challenges by the way :-) ). In the end I realize it was always meant to be that way. But this is your only argument why I should care about this older folks?
      • SolaceQuantum 8y ago
        You should care about older folks because discrimination against the elderly is illegal and is a signal to your employees that they will not be valued at your company based on their merits but instead valued for a quality they have no control over and thus reduce morale in your workforce. Furthermore, as the lifespan expectations of humanity grows, we can anticipate that the economic view will also expand- more older people means more customers for products regarding their needs, more jobs available to understand their needs.
        • jayalpha 8y ago
          Ah. So discriminating against young is okay? I assume if they can perform they will find a new job in this job market very quickly. Just on merits. "reduce morale in your workforce" I don't know how old you are but this sentence lacks wisdom. Companies are never grateful or anything. In fact, it sounds to me like career advice from the last century. The time for employees is over, you better get your own shit together. Pursuing a corporate career can be a very dangerous thing. I remember a post from a MIT lawyer who observed how his mid 50 peers were either making a shitload of money (MDs, laywers) or struggling (engineers in their mid 50ies) and based on his observations he said that when even MIT graduates are struggling later in live this field then you should ask yourself if this is really a good field to pursue.
• banku_brougham 8y ago
  Management at IBM is so damaged and disfunctional that this is a primary strategic intiative that consumed their top level planning. I dont see great product coming from all this.
• aryehof 8y ago
  It would seem that "experience" is of little value in information technology, while knowledge of the latest technologies is all that is valued. It says something about the industry that (it appears) there are few lessons to learn over time. Perhaps the term software "engineering" is a total misnomer.
• sidcool 8y ago
  This scares me a lot at 35 years old. Is my tech job going to put me out of work in a few years? Should I be looking for something else? It's scary honestly.
• tomohawk 8y ago
  I worked on a team that had a lot of amazing talent (many members of the team had 20+ years of experience in the field). Got a new manager who wanted to reduce cost and bring in "new ideas". Funny thing was: those experienced engineers had been promoting many of those new ideas for quite a while to no avail. End result was the green team that was brought in ended up taking way too long to redo everything and missed the market opportunity. They also missed the boat on the new ideas, confusing different techniques and tech for new product features that would be useful for customers. The whole thing died.
• jijji 8y ago
  I think the more experience a person has with software engineering, the more they write efficient and secure software, and quickly. With junior developers, it takes longer to produce working code and it is buggier and less efficient. Same with construction work. Alot of this work is complicated. People who have decades of experience generally perform better.
• beastman82 8y ago
  This is 100% cost reduction, not age discrimination. Correlation != Causation
• yborg 8y ago
  And the strategy works! https://imgur.com/a/hpeFTyP https://imgur.com/a/hpeFTyP
  • cryptonector 8y ago
    For some definition of "works", indeed.
• rezeroed 8y ago
  Something for the younger generations to look forward to.
• calimac 8y ago
  Amazing how libtard tech executives can virtue signal to protected classes of people in one breath and blatantly discriminate against age based on their naive rationalization judgement bias. Aside from all this stupidity in Big blue management, I wonder if the grey hairs they cut were slackers or not?
• Mikeb85 8y ago
  Millenials are the largest and most educated generation ever. Also the first to grow up using computers from a young age. And, incidentally, the first generation with less purchasing power than the previous generation. Why the fuck wouldn't a company opt to hire the most educated, computer savvy workers for less money?
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > Millenials are [...] the first to grow up using computers from a young age. No, they aren't. -- Generation Xer who grew up using computers from a young age, and was not at all alone in that.
    • Mikeb85 8y ago
      You're in the minority, or are a very young Gen Xer.
• jamjribm 8y ago
  Age discrimination in technology is alive and well, flourishing under the veils of "over qualified" and "culture fit" and "no experience with the xyz product". I have had many great phone interviews. On site, in the presence of hiring decision makers, while I look like a typical white corporate employee, the gray hairs blending in with brown are visible enough for the comments such as, "this role may not be challenging enough for you", and the end result is being over qualified. Not too old for them, just too qualified. Makes everyone feel better. If and when I need surgery, I hope my surgeon is overqualified! But thecreal focus is on tools. "Do you have x years experience with the xyz software product?" I spent at least a decade of my career evaluating new technology...And implementing some of it. A tool is a tool. But what is the process? What is the purpose of the tool? A person says they have 5 years experience with a Milwaukee hammer. That's what the job req says is required. This person gets hired because the person with 7 years weilding a Craftsman hammer doesn't have the Milwaukee hammer experience. But what is the purpose? In the end, the 5 year Milwaukee experience person gets the job but still can't hammer in a nail without bending the nail. And places nails with no regard for rhe building code. Experience is not about the tool, but that is not what today's HR hiring/vetting process is about. ISAM, VTAM, DB2, Paradox, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, nosql, hadoop... tools. Third Normal Form? Data dictionary? Index optimization? Processes not addressed by a specific tool. Similarly, does memory management enhancements make the C coding language that much different? But I digress. Hire the experience with the process, not necessarily with a tool. Especially the "flavour of the year" tools.