14 ms·

Feds: IBM did discriminate against older workers in making layoffs

281 points by pmcollins 6y ago

No1 6y ago
The penalty for IBM: "the Commission now invites Respondent to join with it in an effort toward a just resolution of this matter" and "If you decline to enter into conciliation discussions, or when the Commission’s representative is unable to secure an acceptable conciliation agreement, the Director shall so inform the parties,advising them of the court enforcement alternatives available to aggrieved persons and the Commission." Basically, not even a slap on the wrist.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
liability 6y ago
Not surprising. Years ago one of my (gray haired) mentors opened my eyes to ageism in this industry by asking me to pay attention to how many programmers in the office have gray hair. Once you start looking for it, it becomes obvious that age discrimination is rampant. Some blame the young workforce on the industry being young, but the industry is decades old at this point so I don't think that excuse holds water.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Older workers have experience. Experience is expensive. You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. Age discrimination is rarely punished, and when it is, the penalties are minimal. Incentives matter.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Older workers have expectations of employers. Expectations are even more expensive than experience!
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      Who knew it's outrageous to expect work life balance and reasonable compensation for experience.
      - mikelyons 6y ago
        The incentive structure of unregulated capitalism is "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs." The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.
        mylons 6y ago
        you have my name, and my views. I don't know how to feel about this. there's some solace in knowing Mike Lyons is an extraordinarily popular name though.
        mikelyons 6y ago
        What's in a name?
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs" is also the incentive structure of workers.
        mitjak 6y ago
        in the context of capitalism, sure.
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        In the context of humanity. People do this even in non-capitalist countries. Or do you think that when a country is not capitalist the people suddenly stop doing things to benefit themselves?
  - ska 6y ago
    > You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. It's not at all clear that there a net gain here, so the situation is at best complex.
    - mikelyons 6y ago
      In what way is the net gain not clear here? It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.
      - randcraw 6y ago
        "A net gain" implies that savings in a youngster's salary exceeds the losses due to their inexperience. You're saying you know how all these add up in the neterprise? I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.
      - majormajor 6y ago
        The companies I've worked at have been very bad at measuring things like "this is how much that bug cost us in terms of people who tried the app once and then never came back." They're so focused on the data sources that are easy to collect that things like this are basically invisible. They know churn rate is an important thing to track, but look at it much more from a "what about this new feature, or changing the color of the icons" perspective, than from a "what if our software was less of a dumpster fire?" perspective. If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.
      - mcguire 6y ago
        Timescale. An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved. So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built. Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.
  - x87678r 6y ago
    > Older workers have experience. Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. > Experience is expensive. Fang Graduate roles pay > $200k. Lots of experienced people would love that but would never get hired.
    - nucleardog 6y ago
      > Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. Or the old "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience ten times".
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Some of the best people I've worked with are those who've been with the company for a long time. IME, the dead weight tends to be phased out over the years, so there's a bit of survivorship bias with the remaining ones. However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs. The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company. I got the hell out of Dodge after that.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    That's not ageism though. Getting pushed out because they lost the shelter of their patron(s) or because they were on the losing side of a political battle, which is a common cause of the departure of people like that, is a different thing entirely.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  I've worked at companies where older people are rarely seen, but I've also worked at companies where older developers are the norm. In fact, I started my career at a company where I was one of the few people under the age of 40. I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level. Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Consulting is infamous for being a "greybeard accumulator" where the stereotypical career path is that they either to to management or consulting. Client expectations seem to play a part in it that they at times seem to feel dissatisfied at a younger consultant who don't prove themself to be an all solving savant while tolerating a broader range of outcomes from an elder one. I know one attempt to have a sub visibly middle aged programmer local talent maximia who know the local language didn't work out as well compared to a former technician consultant who operated a bit more rote standards familarity. There may have been conflating other skillsets including social. To put it crudely the programmer was slightly jerkish, the former technician apparently always wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Regardless the bias seemed to reinforce itself from clients.
- tylerFowler 6y ago
  It's also regional, I started my career at a startup in Kansas City, where the situation is completely the opposite. The average age of the company was 40 or so, particularly in engineering.
  - HumblyTossed 6y ago
    Also industry specific as well. I'm in the transportation technology industry and age isn't really an issue.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  Still, one needs to consider the demographics of programmers in general. Even ignoring issues like moving to management, health, etc, there simply weren't many programmers that started in the 1980's.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- triceratops 6y ago
  I'm not denying that ageism exists, but this proves nothing. There are many reasons why young people outnumber over-40s in programming roles: 1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years. 2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on. 3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.
- kls 6y ago
  While I don't disagree with you, there are other nuanced facets to this as well. I am 45 soon to be 46, and I have watched this industry chew up and spit out many of my friends and colleagues along the way. Burnout is a real thing. I have a friend who one day said F'it and bought a worm farm, he is literally a worm farmer now. Others took the elevator to management, one became a DJ, one opened a party store etc. etc. We loose a lot of the old timers to attrition, not many people can do the software grind for 20-30 years straight. The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry. None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.
  - RickJWagner 6y ago
    I'm in my middle 50s myself, been programming for 30 years. I like the story about the worm farming. It'd be appealing, except there's a slightly creepy feel to it when you're this close to senior citizenship. :)
paxys 6y ago
While serious, this is still an accusation, and will be ultimately decided by the courts not EEOC.
- rsj_hn 6y ago
  I would rate this as "partly true". We don't have a rabid pro-worker EEOC, we have an EEOC that is notoriously hard to convince of anything and that process itself requires production of evidence, so when the EEOC makes a determination, that is not just "an accusation", it is the result of a fact-finding process by a third party expert. It is true that an EEOC finding of fact is not the same as a judicial process and it will be ultimately decided by courts, but let's not minimize what has been accomplished here.
- mcguire 6y ago
  This accusation has been apparent inside IBM since the early '90s.
- imglorp 6y ago
  Speaking of which, highly relevant: the EEOC just got defanged. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/09/08/an-era-of-eeoc-activism-ends-with-a-whimper/#11f9df77506c https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/09/08/an-e...
  - vonmoltke 6y ago
    From that article it seems the EEOC hasn't cared about the particular type of discrimination being discussed here in a long time anyway.
starkred 6y ago
I've seen it spun as a move away from the legacy stack into the new modern architecture. Of course the legacy stack programmers have a suspicious common element. Also, of course, 2-3-5 years later the legacy stack is still what keeps the business running while all the new shiny toys have come and gone. I had a boss who came over, asked me what was working on and then looked me in the eye and said, firmly and deliberately, "So you are working on transitioning to the new architecture". I shrugged, said "I guess", and he left. Only later did I realize that he was saving my hide.
- chromedev 6y ago
  It is incredibly unfair to associate older people with legacy stack. Many older people are actually contributors and work on defining and implementing newer (modern) architecture like containerization and automation solutions. I think often younger developers and engineers are often taught on old paradigms and solutions, and then often get out into a position to ignore modern solutions and get vendor kickbacks to maintain long-term contracts utilizing antiquated solutions.
- joe33433 6y ago
  This is the one of the most important reason i love work from home(aka remote work). Remote work makes it a bit harder to discriminate against age
heisenbit 6y ago
Fast growing industries tend to hire like there is no tomorrow. Eventually they hit a growth barrier. After a while the age structure of the company is a problem. Could not happen in the social media industry...
pm90 6y ago
The actual letter from EEOC https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7206573/2020-09-02-IBM-LOD-Amended-Final-1-003.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7206573/2020-09-0...
tyingq 6y ago
Propublica did some research on this a couple of years ago and posted a pretty in-depth story on it: https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/ https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...
ThatOneThere 6y ago
This is still going on. In the last half of 2019, IBM in NY got rid of a number of older workers, only to replace them with younger workers. In some cases, a younger worker that was recently let go was rehired to replace an older worker.
socrates1998 6y ago
The big tech giants have used this marketing ploy that "older workers don't understand new tech" to undercut them at almost every opportunity. I honestly have no idea why they are allowed to get away with this in the media and public opinion. Maybe because older people don't know new tech, so they think older programmers don't know it either? It's insane to me that an older programmer with decades of experience and multiple language fluency is somehow "worse" than a 25 year old who has been programming professionally for a few years at best and probably knows fewer languages. Tech companies think they can get away with it because they do exactly what IBM did, fire all the old hats, then hire back the ones they really do need at cheaper, contractor rates. It's pretty revolting to me. Sure there are old people at these large tech companies just collecting a paycheck and really aren't better than the younger guys, but it's clearly not to the extent that IBM would make you think. Another reason why I won't ever work for a large company again.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > cheaper, contractor rates. Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite - that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.
  - mc32 6y ago
    It depends... if you need someone for a year a contractor is cheaper even at a higher prorated rate. You can terminate them at will as well.
  - hellisothers 6y ago
    The literal dollars per hour worked is often higher For a contract employee but the company isn’t paying into PTO or other benefits especially healthcare and I think (?) an employer has to pay higher costs in healthcare is their workers are expected to cost more (or older). So hiring older workers back as contractors can save $$$
  - crmd 6y ago
duxup 6y ago
A fellow older classmate of mine and I were looking for work after changing careers. We were talking about his recent interview when he got a call from the recruiter and put her on speakerphone. She told them they were going with someone else because they thought the other person "fit the culture" better. He asked if she could give some feedback on what that meant and she flat out said "Some people thought you were too old." Shocked he asked again and she repeated it. I don't think it even occurred to the recruiter that it was wrong. My buddy chose not to do anything, both of us looking for work and etc really didn't want to get into some legal situation and looking for work.
- flowerlad 6y ago
  What would happen if you lied about your age (eliminate the first 10 years from your resume), both at the time of applying for the job and after joining the company? How much trouble can you get in for that? It doesn't seem unethical at all.
  - duxup 6y ago
    I wonder. For my buddy, he'd get found out in the interview, for me ... I might be able to pass, maybe...
  - Causality1 6y ago
    Every job I've ever gotten I had to provide ID.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - detaro 6y ago
      At a stage where a recruiter makes a decision to make you an offer or not? Directly lying is a problem still (don't tell them a wrong age), but if they come to the wrong conclusions due to fuzzy data?
    - yardie 6y ago
Dork1234 6y ago
So what is the punishment going to be for IBM? Pizza for all laid off employees and a free resuming writing class?
x87678r 6y ago
Median age at Facebook is 28? Wow. https://www.businessinsider.com/median-tech-employee-age-chart-2017-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/median-tech-employee-age-cha...
- racl101 6y ago
  I'd be a dinosaur there at 35 years old. That is one hip and happening company I tell you hwhat.
- jedberg 6y ago
  It's interesting to me that Netflix isn't on that list. Maybe because it ruins their stats. Totally anecdotal but I wouldn't be surprised if it were up there in the mid-high 30s. I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I knew there under 30 that wasn't in HR, recruiting, support, or facilities. There were just a few engineers under 30, and definitely a bunch over 50. And of course management was almost all 35+.
  - filoleg 6y ago
    Netflix will definitely skew higher for one very obvious reason: back when i was looking into them a few years ago (not sure if anything has changed since then), they had no internship programs or entry-level postings. They were only hiring seniors and higher, and it was very explicit on their end, not just that i looked at them during a time period when they have already filled all of their entry-level roles. I just googled and verified that, sounds like it still holds. With that in mind, of course they will skew higher, since they don't hire any new grads.
    - xeromal 6y ago
      It makes sense. The problem they solve is not simple enough to onboard tons of jrs. You need pretty experiences devs to handle what they do.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Zuck is on record saying he doesn't trust 30+ to write code.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
It appears that IBM executives specifically told managers to direct layoffs at older workers to make room for younger hires. And apparently they did so in recorded communications: > The investigation uncovered top-down messaging from Respondent’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires.
logicslave 6y ago
Leetcode is veiled ageism where those who pass have inordinate amounts of free time to study nonsense
- errantspark 6y ago
  Not exactly, but ageism is probably a welcome externality. The value of leetcode is mostly in helping hiring-people wash their hands of some responsibility.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Another externality - if not an intended effect - is that it selects for people who are willing to accept an abusive relationship with their employer. Why do I call it abusive? "Study this stuff, that isn't actually related to your job, on your own time, for free, for months, and we might give you a job." Even if you do get a job, they still abused you.
    - Nasrudith 6y ago
      Isn't that "abuse" fundamentally how the whole job selection labor market works? You must attempt to ferret out vocational demands to fuffill to get paid and junp through all "selling" hoops. I can see only a few otber broad alternatives. 1. Gatekeeping "Do you have the credential for X from the system? If so first come first served for defined pay bracket.". While lower friction once done it is an informational organizing nightmare even before dealing with perverse incentives in who can work as what. Choice of credentials vs demand would still be an issue. 2. Defacto Corveé system of "You work at X and live at Y or else." Obvious issues with lack of freedom and inefficient use of human potential. 3. Agent Dynastic: Less formalized gatekeeping where the sales must be handled by an intermediary to seperate non-job relevant skills. If you can sell your own labor then it is just labor market capitalism essentially as the non-relevant skills are tautologically now job related. I get how it sucks but I am not sure how to improve upon it without leading to the problems of the other approaches.
    - vkou 6y ago
jeffrallen 6y ago
Duh, of course they did.
patwolf 6y ago
I'm not surprised. A few years back IBM started a "back to the lab" initiative to dissuade workers from working remotely. Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company. My impression is that this disproportionately affected older workers. It seemed like soon after the dust had settled they no longer enforced the requirement. Note, this was after I left the company, so it's all second-hand knowledge. I do also recall that they were sued for ageism years ago after a round of layoffs. Afterward they preemptively sent out a list of the ages and titles of all workers prior to layoffs in order to be more transparent. The funny thing is that it was possible in some cases to tell ahead of time who was being laid off based on the age and title. Not a good way to find out about being let go.
- johnward 6y ago
  > Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company. I was at IBM during this time. As a consultant, my boss fought to keep us remote. In some cases people were told to go back to the office but physically couldn't unless they packed up and moved. They were hired remote, so they lived in an area that had no office.
holidayacct 6y ago
This happens repeatedly and isn't anything new. This happens because there are a bunch of mentally ill people running tech companies that want jobs to be about "belief". They don't want older people in tech because they want to empire build with the latest and greatest insecure technology. They want to create frustration engines with poor engineering practices they older tech workers won't put up with it. The goal is to make technology more difficult so they can slowly re-train you to go to other people and hate all technology. This is a real thing and has burned out so many software engineers you'd be shocked at how many of them don't know their manager was the person who purposely made their job difficult to burn out another software engineer. They want strange conspiracies about what the software actually does that older workers don't need to put up with (because some of it is illegal). If you're good at reading source code and figure out what they are actually doing in the source code, in some cases companies blatantly selling software that doesn't do anything they are selling their customers on. In some cases people inject code into a repository when no one is looking, so they can run side businesses using the company infrastructure. There are a ton of older tech workers who read every line of the source code and when they start asking too many questions people freak out and fire them to maintain a conspiracy. This happens for all sorts of reasons.
- jnwatson 6y ago
  Also, it is far easier to pay young folks in lottery tickets. Most of us older folks understand the actual value of stock options having been through the process a few times.
- horns4lyfe 6y ago
  This is fascinating, do you have any particular examples of the last paragraph especially? Not saying I don't believe you, but I'm very curious.
  - holidayacct 6y ago
    I'd love to but I've signed NDAs for the companies I've worked for. If you like advertising that will put on the right path.
  - 6y ago
xrd 6y ago
I get it. I understand that it is hard for a big company to avoid thinking and optimizing for all the costs associated with older employees versus a younger employee, especially H1Bs. But, why not use the pulpit that comes with tech prestige (is it now all gone?) to lobby for universal healthcare, and other ways to socialize those costs? If things like healthcare and a sane social security system were in place, wouldn't that even the playing field and be a win for everyone? I'm surprised I don't see more US companies arguing for changes that would help them.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  I read recently that a survey showed most people don't want companies to get into politics. Not sure how true is what I read, but the numbers were around 82% of the respondents being against political activism from companies. Others can argue that socialized healthcare is not as good as one may believe, knowing the problems in Quebec region, UK or other Western Europe countries where access to the services is free, but highly unavailable (wait times measured in many months).
pjdemers 6y ago
Health care. The actuarial cost of gold or platinum health plan for a 25 year old single man is about $600 per month. The cost for a couple in their 50's, with two college age children, is about $3,000 per month.
- BrainlingPdx 6y ago
  It's almost like a for profit health care system creates a bunch of really bad downstream effects that are a net negative to the total long term economy.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Could add "... to the surprise of absolutely no one." to that headline :-). Blekko was acquired by IBM, and as a result I worked there for 18 months as we transitioned from company to being part of IBM. That they were trying to aggressively move the "old guard" out was not much of a secret. In their particular case I actually felt some sympathy for them because, as a 100+ year old company, a lot of long time veterans had a comfort zone around what used to work but no longer worked. I had a long, largely one-sided, conversation with a senior leader in their "Cloud" organization to try to explain how companies like Google and Facebook use and deploy data centers as essentially very large computers. But this person was so comfortable and confident in the 'enterprise data center' concepts that died with Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems they just couldn't wrap their heads around it. I get that, I struggle with it as well, when the world changes as fast as it does, your have to actively re-evaluate what is "canon" and what isn't. If you cannot do that, then it doesn't help you to stay in a leadership position because you will drive right into the iceberg confident in all your decisions.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  > But this person was so comfortable and confident in the 'enterprise data center' concepts that died with Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems they just couldn't wrap their heads around it. It doesn't help that IBM business leadership signs off on core IBM Cloud product/service attributes that are essentially old-style IBM remote enterprise data center contracts dressed up in new marketing language. Sign up with a variety of IBM cloud products, and you'll find some still have planned outages. In fact, the IBMid infrastructure sometimes still experiences outages. The notion of a "dial-tone service" is recognized by the IBM Cloud organization as necessary to compete, but that consistent lack across the board is one of many reasons they're a distant runner-up in cloud providers.
baxtr 6y ago
I’m pretty sure that this is in its core not about people being older but people being more expensive.
RobbieHacks 6y ago
no shit sherlock
victor106 6y ago
This is another form of discrimination that should have stricter laws against. IBM is so morally bankrupt I c\don't even know where to start. All their products are geared towards having IBM professional services make money. They purposefully do this by making sure the manuals they provide leave out important steps on how to install and configure their software. Also while they discriminate they should start with their CEO who is 58 years old and their ex ceo who is 63 years old.
draw_down 6y ago
These threads always fill up with people banging on about how they’re 82 years old and still get plenty of work. But I still think you’re better off trying like hell to make your money before you’re old, before you even have to engage with these jackals. Our work is not dignified work, our line of work does not have status in the organization nor in the society. Ignore this reality at your peril.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 6y ago
IBM's (and other tech company) lawyers have been holding this decision off for some 40 years. Late coming; too bad there's no punitive damages chargeable against upper management bonuses.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

281 points by pmcollins 6y ago

No1 6y ago

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

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

liability 6y ago

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

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Older workers have experience. Experience is expensive. You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. Age discrimination is rarely punished, and when it is, the penalties are minimal. Incentives matter.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Older workers have expectations of employers. Expectations are even more expensive than experience!
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Who knew it's outrageous to expect work life balance and reasonable compensation for experience.
    - mikelyons 6y ago
      The incentive structure of unregulated capitalism is "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs." The things to extract value from: employees, environment, government policy, tax code, if I was smarter I'd think of a few others.
      - mylons 6y ago
        you have my name, and my views. I don't know how to feel about this. there's some solace in knowing Mike Lyons is an extraordinarily popular name though.
        mikelyons 6y ago
        What's in a name?
      - ChrisLomont 6y ago
        "Extract maximum value with minimum expense. As much as possible externalize the costs" is also the incentive structure of workers.
        mitjak 6y ago
        in the context of capitalism, sure.
        ChrisLomont 6y ago
        In the context of humanity. People do this even in non-capitalist countries. Or do you think that when a country is not capitalist the people suddenly stop doing things to benefit themselves?
- ska 6y ago
  > You can generate a lot of revenue with workers with less experience, even factoring in mistakes, lower productivity and output, etc. It's not at all clear that there a net gain here, so the situation is at best complex.
  - mikelyons 6y ago
    In what way is the net gain not clear here? It seems clear to me that "even factoring in" means that there is a net gain for the employer, at a net loss to employees.
    - randcraw 6y ago
      "A net gain" implies that savings in a youngster's salary exceeds the losses due to their inexperience. You're saying you know how all these add up in the neterprise? I sure don't. I doubt most employers do either, since IT productivity is notoriously hard to quantify. Generally, it's more important to know what not to do. And that's something that only comes with time -- making mistakes and learning from them.
    - majormajor 6y ago
      The companies I've worked at have been very bad at measuring things like "this is how much that bug cost us in terms of people who tried the app once and then never came back." They're so focused on the data sources that are easy to collect that things like this are basically invisible. They know churn rate is an important thing to track, but look at it much more from a "what about this new feature, or changing the color of the icons" perspective, than from a "what if our software was less of a dumpster fire?" perspective. If you want to build quickly AND have flexibility AND have some reliability, you're gonna need some experienced employees, but if that's not a thing you've ever seen cause you've only ever worked with people fresh out of school... you're not gonna know what you're missing.
    - mcguire 6y ago
      Timescale. An older employee with experience can often see and avoid problems before they occur. A younger, inexperienced employee will not and will have to find the problem and attempt to fix it, usually three or four times before the problem is actually solved. So, for six or twelve months, the employer can sail along gloriously, enjoying the benefits of cheaper employees. Until the bill comes due. And at that time no one can really help them except their current employees, who are the only ones who understand the history-dependent system they've built. Fortunately, the time scales that most employers operate at rarely exceeds six to twelve months.
- x87678r 6y ago
  > Older workers have experience. Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. > Experience is expensive. Fang Graduate roles pay > $200k. Lots of experienced people would love that but would never get hired.
  - nucleardog 6y ago
    > Not always. older workers might be moving into coding from other areas. Or have no relevent experience in modern tech stack. Or the old "ten years of experience" versus "one year of experience ten times".
mywittyname 6y ago
Some of the best people I've worked with are those who've been with the company for a long time. IME, the dead weight tends to be phased out over the years, so there's a bit of survivorship bias with the remaining ones. However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs. The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company. I got the hell out of Dodge after that.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  That's not ageism though. Getting pushed out because they lost the shelter of their patron(s) or because they were on the losing side of a political battle, which is a common cause of the departure of people like that, is a different thing entirely.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
I've worked at companies where older people are rarely seen, but I've also worked at companies where older developers are the norm. In fact, I started my career at a company where I was one of the few people under the age of 40. I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level. Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Consulting is infamous for being a "greybeard accumulator" where the stereotypical career path is that they either to to management or consulting. Client expectations seem to play a part in it that they at times seem to feel dissatisfied at a younger consultant who don't prove themself to be an all solving savant while tolerating a broader range of outcomes from an elder one. I know one attempt to have a sub visibly middle aged programmer local talent maximia who know the local language didn't work out as well compared to a former technician consultant who operated a bit more rote standards familarity. There may have been conflating other skillsets including social. To put it crudely the programmer was slightly jerkish, the former technician apparently always wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. Regardless the bias seemed to reinforce itself from clients.
tylerFowler 6y ago
It's also regional, I started my career at a startup in Kansas City, where the situation is completely the opposite. The average age of the company was 40 or so, particularly in engineering.
- HumblyTossed 6y ago
  Also industry specific as well. I'm in the transportation technology industry and age isn't really an issue.
jnwatson 6y ago
Still, one needs to consider the demographics of programmers in general. Even ignoring issues like moving to management, health, etc, there simply weren't many programmers that started in the 1980's.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
triceratops 6y ago
I'm not denying that ageism exists, but this proves nothing. There are many reasons why young people outnumber over-40s in programming roles: 1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years. 2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on. 3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.
kls 6y ago
While I don't disagree with you, there are other nuanced facets to this as well. I am 45 soon to be 46, and I have watched this industry chew up and spit out many of my friends and colleagues along the way. Burnout is a real thing. I have a friend who one day said F'it and bought a worm farm, he is literally a worm farmer now. Others took the elevator to management, one became a DJ, one opened a party store etc. etc. We loose a lot of the old timers to attrition, not many people can do the software grind for 20-30 years straight. The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry. None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.
- RickJWagner 6y ago
  I'm in my middle 50s myself, been programming for 30 years. I like the story about the worm farming. It'd be appealing, except there's a slightly creepy feel to it when you're this close to senior citizenship. :)

paxys 6y ago

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

rsj_hn 6y ago
I would rate this as "partly true". We don't have a rabid pro-worker EEOC, we have an EEOC that is notoriously hard to convince of anything and that process itself requires production of evidence, so when the EEOC makes a determination, that is not just "an accusation", it is the result of a fact-finding process by a third party expert. It is true that an EEOC finding of fact is not the same as a judicial process and it will be ultimately decided by courts, but let's not minimize what has been accomplished here.
mcguire 6y ago
This accusation has been apparent inside IBM since the early '90s.
imglorp 6y ago
Speaking of which, highly relevant: the EEOC just got defanged. https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/09/08/an-era-of-eeoc-activism-ends-with-a-whimper/#11f9df77506c https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/09/08/an-e...
- vonmoltke 6y ago
  From that article it seems the EEOC hasn't cared about the particular type of discrimination being discussed here in a long time anyway.

starkred 6y ago

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

chromedev 6y ago
It is incredibly unfair to associate older people with legacy stack. Many older people are actually contributors and work on defining and implementing newer (modern) architecture like containerization and automation solutions. I think often younger developers and engineers are often taught on old paradigms and solutions, and then often get out into a position to ignore modern solutions and get vendor kickbacks to maintain long-term contracts utilizing antiquated solutions.
joe33433 6y ago
This is the one of the most important reason i love work from home(aka remote work). Remote work makes it a bit harder to discriminate against age

heisenbit 6y ago

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

pm90 6y ago

The actual letter from EEOC https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7206573/2020-09-02-IBM-LOD-Amended-Final-1-003.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/7206573/2020-09-0...

tyingq 6y ago

Propublica did some research on this a couple of years ago and posted a pretty in-depth story on it: https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/ https://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-a...

ThatOneThere 6y ago

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

socrates1998 6y ago

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

commandlinefan 6y ago
> cheaper, contractor rates. Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite - that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.
- mc32 6y ago
  It depends... if you need someone for a year a contractor is cheaper even at a higher prorated rate. You can terminate them at will as well.
- hellisothers 6y ago
  The literal dollars per hour worked is often higher For a contract employee but the company isn’t paying into PTO or other benefits especially healthcare and I think (?) an employer has to pay higher costs in healthcare is their workers are expected to cost more (or older). So hiring older workers back as contractors can save $$$
- crmd 6y ago

duxup 6y ago

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

flowerlad 6y ago
What would happen if you lied about your age (eliminate the first 10 years from your resume), both at the time of applying for the job and after joining the company? How much trouble can you get in for that? It doesn't seem unethical at all.
- duxup 6y ago
  I wonder. For my buddy, he'd get found out in the interview, for me ... I might be able to pass, maybe...
- Causality1 6y ago
  Every job I've ever gotten I had to provide ID.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - detaro 6y ago
    At a stage where a recruiter makes a decision to make you an offer or not? Directly lying is a problem still (don't tell them a wrong age), but if they come to the wrong conclusions due to fuzzy data?
  - yardie 6y ago

Dork1234 6y ago

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

x87678r 6y ago

Median age at Facebook is 28? Wow. https://www.businessinsider.com/median-tech-employee-age-chart-2017-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/median-tech-employee-age-cha...

racl101 6y ago
I'd be a dinosaur there at 35 years old. That is one hip and happening company I tell you hwhat.
jedberg 6y ago
It's interesting to me that Netflix isn't on that list. Maybe because it ruins their stats. Totally anecdotal but I wouldn't be surprised if it were up there in the mid-high 30s. I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I knew there under 30 that wasn't in HR, recruiting, support, or facilities. There were just a few engineers under 30, and definitely a bunch over 50. And of course management was almost all 35+.
- filoleg 6y ago
  Netflix will definitely skew higher for one very obvious reason: back when i was looking into them a few years ago (not sure if anything has changed since then), they had no internship programs or entry-level postings. They were only hiring seniors and higher, and it was very explicit on their end, not just that i looked at them during a time period when they have already filled all of their entry-level roles. I just googled and verified that, sounds like it still holds. With that in mind, of course they will skew higher, since they don't hire any new grads.
  - xeromal 6y ago
    It makes sense. The problem they solve is not simple enough to onboard tons of jrs. You need pretty experiences devs to handle what they do.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Zuck is on record saying he doesn't trust 30+ to write code.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

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

logicslave 6y ago

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

errantspark 6y ago
Not exactly, but ageism is probably a welcome externality. The value of leetcode is mostly in helping hiring-people wash their hands of some responsibility.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Another externality - if not an intended effect - is that it selects for people who are willing to accept an abusive relationship with their employer. Why do I call it abusive? "Study this stuff, that isn't actually related to your job, on your own time, for free, for months, and we might give you a job." Even if you do get a job, they still abused you.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    Isn't that "abuse" fundamentally how the whole job selection labor market works? You must attempt to ferret out vocational demands to fuffill to get paid and junp through all "selling" hoops. I can see only a few otber broad alternatives. 1. Gatekeeping "Do you have the credential for X from the system? If so first come first served for defined pay bracket.". While lower friction once done it is an informational organizing nightmare even before dealing with perverse incentives in who can work as what. Choice of credentials vs demand would still be an issue. 2. Defacto Corveé system of "You work at X and live at Y or else." Obvious issues with lack of freedom and inefficient use of human potential. 3. Agent Dynastic: Less formalized gatekeeping where the sales must be handled by an intermediary to seperate non-job relevant skills. If you can sell your own labor then it is just labor market capitalism essentially as the non-relevant skills are tautologically now job related. I get how it sucks but I am not sure how to improve upon it without leading to the problems of the other approaches.
  - vkou 6y ago

jeffrallen 6y ago

Duh, of course they did.

patwolf 6y ago

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

johnward 6y ago
> Workers that were unable to commute to a physical office were forced to leave the company. I was at IBM during this time. As a consultant, my boss fought to keep us remote. In some cases people were told to go back to the office but physically couldn't unless they packed up and moved. They were hired remote, so they lived in an area that had no office.

holidayacct 6y ago

This happens repeatedly and isn't anything new. This happens because there are a bunch of mentally ill people running tech companies that want jobs to be about "belief". They don't want older people in tech because they want to empire build with the latest and greatest insecure technology. They want to create frustration engines with poor engineering practices they older tech workers won't put up with it. The goal is to make technology more difficult so they can slowly re-train you to go to other people and hate all technology. This is a real thing and has burned out so many software engineers you'd be shocked at how many of them don't know their manager was the person who purposely made their job difficult to burn out another software engineer. They want strange conspiracies about what the software actually does that older workers don't need to put up with (because some of it is illegal). If you're good at reading source code and figure out what they are actually doing in the source code, in some cases companies blatantly selling software that doesn't do anything they are selling their customers on. In some cases people inject code into a repository when no one is looking, so they can run side businesses using the company infrastructure. There are a ton of older tech workers who read every line of the source code and when they start asking too many questions people freak out and fire them to maintain a conspiracy. This happens for all sorts of reasons.

jnwatson 6y ago
Also, it is far easier to pay young folks in lottery tickets. Most of us older folks understand the actual value of stock options having been through the process a few times.
horns4lyfe 6y ago
This is fascinating, do you have any particular examples of the last paragraph especially? Not saying I don't believe you, but I'm very curious.
- holidayacct 6y ago
  I'd love to but I've signed NDAs for the companies I've worked for. If you like advertising that will put on the right path.
- 6y ago

xrd 6y ago

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

AdrianB1 6y ago
I read recently that a survey showed most people don't want companies to get into politics. Not sure how true is what I read, but the numbers were around 82% of the respondents being against political activism from companies. Others can argue that socialized healthcare is not as good as one may believe, knowing the problems in Quebec region, UK or other Western Europe countries where access to the services is free, but highly unavailable (wait times measured in many months).

pjdemers 6y ago

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

BrainlingPdx 6y ago
It's almost like a for profit health care system creates a bunch of really bad downstream effects that are a net negative to the total long term economy.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

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

yourapostasy 6y ago
> But this person was so comfortable and confident in the 'enterprise data center' concepts that died with Digital Equipment and Sun Microsystems they just couldn't wrap their heads around it. It doesn't help that IBM business leadership signs off on core IBM Cloud product/service attributes that are essentially old-style IBM remote enterprise data center contracts dressed up in new marketing language. Sign up with a variety of IBM cloud products, and you'll find some still have planned outages. In fact, the IBMid infrastructure sometimes still experiences outages. The notion of a "dial-tone service" is recognized by the IBM Cloud organization as necessary to compete, but that consistent lack across the board is one of many reasons they're a distant runner-up in cloud providers.

baxtr 6y ago

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

RobbieHacks 6y ago

no shit sherlock

victor106 6y ago

This is another form of discrimination that should have stricter laws against. IBM is so morally bankrupt I c\don't even know where to start. All their products are geared towards having IBM professional services make money. They purposefully do this by making sure the manuals they provide leave out important steps on how to install and configure their software. Also while they discriminate they should start with their CEO who is 58 years old and their ex ceo who is 63 years old.

draw_down 6y ago

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

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 6y ago

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

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]