4 ms·

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 tel

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
      I think you might be misconstruing a "constitutional right". In the US the 'free speech' right has been understood to be political speech, not anything you happen to want to say. Want to complain about government, fine, want to tell people how your previous company achieves the results they do? You can legally be constrained from doing so with an NDA. Failing to do so can result in hefty civil penalties (aka paying cash, not particularly jail time). It can get pretty nuanced and I'm not a lawyer so I really can't speak authoritatively on the topic, but it has been litigated many times and found to be both legal and constitutional. Most people sign two contracts with Google, the first when they join which says what they agree to not do while employed, and another when they leave which says what they agree to not do when they leave. If you are in a "protected class[1]" you are more likely to see the exit contract than if you're not. You can choose not to sign it of course, but unless you're really pissed off and planning some sort of legal action, signing is the polite thing to do and it keeps everyone friends. In a world where your friends can help you and your non-friends can hurt you, having more friends is never a bad strategy. [1] "protected class" - Legal term for a class of employee where discrimination is legally proscribed, like being gay, female, old, non-white, Etc.
      - biztos 8y ago
        I wonder, are there things they aren’t allowed to ask of you in the second case, as there are in the first? For example noncompete clauses are not allowed in California. Would one be enforceable if signed voluntarily for money and not for employment?
        dragonwriter 8y ago
        > For example noncompete clauses are not allowed in California. Post-employment non-competes are generally invalid in CA.
        biztos 8y ago
        Thanks for the clarification, I should have been more specific. But are they also invalid if signed outside the employment context?
scarface74 8y ago
I'm usually down voted a lot on threads like these because I usually say that ageism is overblown (I'm 45). But when you have smoking guns like: One in-house presentation showed that this posture meant doubling the proportion of workers receiving negative performance evaluations, so 3,000 employees could be laid off and replaced with “early professionals,” according to the suit... IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’— IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.'” It's pretty obvious.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I tend to agree with you that ageism is over blown but that statement isn't a "simple" statement because ageism is complex. There are institutional issues, where a single job can take 5 years to learn do do efficiently but company policy is to give raises every year to people who meet expectations (called a "salary ratchet"). In such a situation, if someone has been doing the same job for 15 years they probably have 10 years of raises that were "seniority" based rather than "skill" based. The discrepancy between what it costs to get the 'skill' to do a job versus keeping someone on who has a lot of history can easily reach a breaking point. Is that ageism? Or is it a failed compensation policy? Would it be better if a company said "The max we are going to pay for this position is $X" and once you get to $X you won't be getting any more raises in this job."? That might work for some jobs, it sounds a bit like forced attrition in others. There is also skills movement, which is to say that an engineer that has developed skills and understanding in a particular "stack" may find that when that stack is no longer current, their skill level on the new "stack" is functionally identical to a new hire, with a bonus of additional wisdom. But is that pay the same as their current pay? People change jobs to get an increase in pay, which works until it doesn't. People rarely accept a reduction in pay when they transfer within a company. It's hard to internalize how you are "worth" $X in one role, but only worth $0.8X in a different role. So that transaction has the person leaving and someone getting hired who currently only makes $0.75X and they get a bump up to $0.8X and they are happy to come on board. The "new" thing in HR would appear to be that salary ratchets are dead and variable pay on a fixed base is the thing. This is a fairly common situation at big tech companies these days, base pay plus some variable modifier, either additional pay bonuses or stock 'units' that convert to a variable number of shares based on contribution. My guess is that today's new engineers will find that 10 to 15 years from now their pay is no longer growing and their bonuses and RSUs never seem to quite be all that much better than they were the previous year. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but as a career, engineering is becoming a lot more 'standardized' than it was. The way I see this expressing itself is that older engineers who are up front about being ok with more median salaries tend to get hired. Ones who insist on their 'top of the tech ladder' salary from the previous place where they worked for a decade or more, have a much harder time of it. I know from being both an engineer, a manager, and an executive that they equations usually have nothing to do with age and more to do with work product per unit $ applied. It is easier to hire someone below their optimum value and give them a pay raise than it is to hire someone at a premium and ask them to take a pay cut to bring them in line. I also know that Google tried to do this with their 'slotting' system and it had a lot of issues (mostly negative), and that the stack ranking type systems that Microsoft used to have were similarly designed to prune toward the optimum value. Bottom line is that there isn't a good system that I know of for having this kind of salary discussion that works.
inlined 8y ago
You signed something when you left? What do you think they were planning to do if you didn’t? Fire you?
- the_jeremy 8y ago
  It's how you get severance in most cases. I had to sign something to get my severance when I left a grocery store (the whole chain died and everyone got laid off)
  - biztos 8y ago
    Some countries have legal minimum severance, sometimes well above what other countries pay in exchange for signing away your rights. I wonder what the incentives are in those countries (sadly not the ones I live in).
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
I'm 50 this year, and this stuff obviously concerns me. But if there's one thing that comes ringing through the story, it's that IBM has been very, very intentional in how they've gone about this. I'm quite certain they have their bases covered, and that they will prevail in court under current law. That the laws should be changed is another matter altogether...
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  If its on record (which it appears to be) that they laid off (made redundant) people with the express reason of replacing them with cheaper younger people - they have some nasty legal problems.

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
    I think you might be misconstruing a "constitutional right". In the US the 'free speech' right has been understood to be political speech, not anything you happen to want to say. Want to complain about government, fine, want to tell people how your previous company achieves the results they do? You can legally be constrained from doing so with an NDA. Failing to do so can result in hefty civil penalties (aka paying cash, not particularly jail time). It can get pretty nuanced and I'm not a lawyer so I really can't speak authoritatively on the topic, but it has been litigated many times and found to be both legal and constitutional. Most people sign two contracts with Google, the first when they join which says what they agree to not do while employed, and another when they leave which says what they agree to not do when they leave. If you are in a "protected class[1]" you are more likely to see the exit contract than if you're not. You can choose not to sign it of course, but unless you're really pissed off and planning some sort of legal action, signing is the polite thing to do and it keeps everyone friends. In a world where your friends can help you and your non-friends can hurt you, having more friends is never a bad strategy. [1] "protected class" - Legal term for a class of employee where discrimination is legally proscribed, like being gay, female, old, non-white, Etc.
    - biztos 8y ago
      I wonder, are there things they aren’t allowed to ask of you in the second case, as there are in the first? For example noncompete clauses are not allowed in California. Would one be enforceable if signed voluntarily for money and not for employment?
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > For example noncompete clauses are not allowed in California. Post-employment non-competes are generally invalid in CA.
        biztos 8y ago
        Thanks for the clarification, I should have been more specific. But are they also invalid if signed outside the employment context?

scarface74 8y ago

I'm usually down voted a lot on threads like these because I usually say that ageism is overblown (I'm 45). But when you have smoking guns like: One in-house presentation showed that this posture meant doubling the proportion of workers receiving negative performance evaluations, so 3,000 employees could be laid off and replaced with “early professionals,” according to the suit... IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these employees with ‘EPs’— IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.'” It's pretty obvious.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I tend to agree with you that ageism is over blown but that statement isn't a "simple" statement because ageism is complex. There are institutional issues, where a single job can take 5 years to learn do do efficiently but company policy is to give raises every year to people who meet expectations (called a "salary ratchet"). In such a situation, if someone has been doing the same job for 15 years they probably have 10 years of raises that were "seniority" based rather than "skill" based. The discrepancy between what it costs to get the 'skill' to do a job versus keeping someone on who has a lot of history can easily reach a breaking point. Is that ageism? Or is it a failed compensation policy? Would it be better if a company said "The max we are going to pay for this position is $X" and once you get to $X you won't be getting any more raises in this job."? That might work for some jobs, it sounds a bit like forced attrition in others. There is also skills movement, which is to say that an engineer that has developed skills and understanding in a particular "stack" may find that when that stack is no longer current, their skill level on the new "stack" is functionally identical to a new hire, with a bonus of additional wisdom. But is that pay the same as their current pay? People change jobs to get an increase in pay, which works until it doesn't. People rarely accept a reduction in pay when they transfer within a company. It's hard to internalize how you are "worth" $X in one role, but only worth $0.8X in a different role. So that transaction has the person leaving and someone getting hired who currently only makes $0.75X and they get a bump up to $0.8X and they are happy to come on board. The "new" thing in HR would appear to be that salary ratchets are dead and variable pay on a fixed base is the thing. This is a fairly common situation at big tech companies these days, base pay plus some variable modifier, either additional pay bonuses or stock 'units' that convert to a variable number of shares based on contribution. My guess is that today's new engineers will find that 10 to 15 years from now their pay is no longer growing and their bonuses and RSUs never seem to quite be all that much better than they were the previous year. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but as a career, engineering is becoming a lot more 'standardized' than it was. The way I see this expressing itself is that older engineers who are up front about being ok with more median salaries tend to get hired. Ones who insist on their 'top of the tech ladder' salary from the previous place where they worked for a decade or more, have a much harder time of it. I know from being both an engineer, a manager, and an executive that they equations usually have nothing to do with age and more to do with work product per unit $ applied. It is easier to hire someone below their optimum value and give them a pay raise than it is to hire someone at a premium and ask them to take a pay cut to bring them in line. I also know that Google tried to do this with their 'slotting' system and it had a lot of issues (mostly negative), and that the stack ranking type systems that Microsoft used to have were similarly designed to prune toward the optimum value. Bottom line is that there isn't a good system that I know of for having this kind of salary discussion that works.

inlined 8y ago

You signed something when you left? What do you think they were planning to do if you didn’t? Fire you?

the_jeremy 8y ago
It's how you get severance in most cases. I had to sign something to get my severance when I left a grocery store (the whole chain died and everyone got laid off)
- biztos 8y ago
  Some countries have legal minimum severance, sometimes well above what other countries pay in exchange for signing away your rights. I wonder what the incentives are in those countries (sadly not the ones I live in).

TheRealDunkirk 8y ago

I'm 50 this year, and this stuff obviously concerns me. But if there's one thing that comes ringing through the story, it's that IBM has been very, very intentional in how they've gone about this. I'm quite certain they have their bases covered, and that they will prevail in court under current law. That the laws should be changed is another matter altogether...

C1sc0cat 8y ago
If its on record (which it appears to be) that they laid off (made redundant) people with the express reason of replacing them with cheaper younger people - they have some nasty legal problems.