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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

• 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
    What IBM really cares about is limiting the older employees’ defined-benefit pension liabilities. That is why it was so important to IBM that these folks were made to no longer be IBM employees. Lower salary was icing on the cake.
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The wrong assumptions behind those defined benefit pension liabilities ended up being quite costly, this zero interest rate environment for the previous decade and foreseeable future will wreak havoc on them. I'm surprised they didn't freeze and terminate the plan years ago.
  • josho 6y ago
    Many companies hire contractors because they are seen as a capital expenditure on the finances. While employees are classified as an operational expense. This has several accounting benefits, and in some jurisdictions makes it easier to dismiss the employee/contractor.
  • x87678r 6y ago
    Roles I've seen pay the same, but FTs benefits of healthcare/401k/vacation are worth 50k/yr.
    • Consultant32452 6y ago
      I found this helpful rule of thumb to estimate the cost of benefits: https://beebole.com/blog/how-to-calculate-the-real-cost-of-an-employee/ https://beebole.com/blog/how-to-calculate-the-real-cost-of-a... >...the real salary of an employee ends up “being 18% to 26% more than a worker’s base salary.
      • greenyoda 6y ago
        Also, for an on-site employee, the company would need to add the cost of office space, equipment, IT support services, etc.
  • xienze 6y ago
    > Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite Absolutely. Consider that the average salaried employee’s real cost per hour is around 2 * (annual_salary / hours_in_work_year). So if you get a contractor for less than that per hour, you win. > 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. Ah, generally speaking no. Yes, contract to full time conversions happen but not terribly often. “Contract to hire” is most of the time just baiting someone to hop into a less desirable circumstance (contract versus full time), with the “promise” of being converted. After six months, oh dear, we couldn’t get funding for that full time position. Would you like to renew your contract? Not saying there are companies that do a true “probation period” via contract to hire, but most of the time it’s BS.
  • JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    I've taken a cut each time I sign on vs contracting. Only done it when equity or length of engagement make it attractive.
  • johnward 6y ago
    I left IBM by choice to become an IBM sub-contractor. I was paid better and had better benefits. I don't really see how IBM is saving money here.
    • kls 6y ago
      If you are still subbing for them, raise you rate. IBM was one of my best paying contracts, but I hated the work. I kept raising my rate to make them go away, Finally I had to say you guys are eating up all my consultancy time, I can't take contracts from you, because I am becoming too dependent financially on a single source of revenue. It was a hard financial pill to swallow, given that I was making 4x my rate of any other contracts. We parted ways amicably but I had to make the break, as I was just becoming a satellite around IBM.
  • Avicebron 6y ago
    I think it depends on the nature of the work, in biotech, contractors are generally seen as extendible, cheap, and easy to find. "consultants" are usually more expensive and they come on with more experience and more options, so they are more expensive. I think for both roles the flexibility works in different ways.
  • dyeje 6y ago
    No, contractors are significantly cheaper because no payroll taxes, benefits, time off, etc. Contract to hire is typically through staffing agencies. The company can go through various contractors and hire the ones they like full time.
• Nasrudith 6y ago
  Individual perception of fairness being mutually exclusive in aggregate probably have to do with it. To the old being paid the same as the young can be viewed as unfair because they do a better job. Younger workers can see older programmers getting paid more but don't neccesarily see much "better" from them (who is right varies by individual and field of course). It can come across as gatekeeping in "paying their dues" instead of actual capabilities or lack of them holding them back which breeds resentment. Of course at large there are configurations every which way in practice across varied workforces: underpaying older hires in bias of new, overpaying old in bias, putting arbitrary caps on promption to upper management regardless of prior successes for being too young, refusal to promote elders for fear of their retitement disrupting despite the project being short term and all sorts of dysfunctions at scales small to titanic.
• kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The math is simple: Replace a senior salary with 2 H1Bs for (hopefully) 1.5x productivity. 2 weeks vacation, no family, and no health issues makes for the ideal servant.
  • maerF0x0 6y ago
    Incoming rant. Plus the government is in on it. They're effectively handing a subsidy to coporations who can jump the hoops versus those who hire and then train locals. The pitch goes like this: give the immigrant the promise of America if they just serve the masters for ~10 years (or forever if you're the wrong race of immigrant[1]), keep them subservient by continuously threatening deportation at the loss of employment (short window to rehire). Limit the max number of H1B years to ensure increasing dire circumstance. Don't give them representation (despite taxation) so they can't feedback on the system. Now, an H1B doesn't have always have all the features of a millenial, such as they usually don't have student debt, but the student visa can fix that. [1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/the-employment-green-card-backlog-tops-800000-most-of-them-indian-a-solution-is-elusive/2019/12/17/55def1da-072f-11ea-8292-c46ee8cb3dce_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/the-employment-gr...
  • asdasfasdfasdf 6y ago
    Yeah this is it in my experience. It looks like they're optimizing for age, but they're really optimizing for cost and ageism is a side-effect. I've seen this happen at almost every job I've had: Senior engineer with 10+ years experience works 40-50 hours a week and gets laid off. Senior engineer is opinionated about how things are implemented and can come across as "difficult." Two junior engineers are hired for about the same cost and are pushed to 60+ hours a week. They'll do literally anything you tell them to. Non-engineer management sees a win but then eventually gets mad about codebase issues like it's unrelated, and end up churning through juniors trying to fix it. Another alternative is outsourcing of course, in which you can end up with a small team for the short-term cost of one senior engineer... and a lot of the same problems with the junior route. It feels like one of those risk problems where people are happy about the short-term gain but fail to look far enough ahead to see the long-term issues.
• olalonde 6y ago
  > 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. If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well? It would be even easier to make up justifications (e.g. lack of experience). To me, it seems plausible that you would find a correlation between people laid off and their age, absent of systematic ageism. And if there really was systematic ageism, IBM is just shooting itself in the foot. It's possible but not a given.
  • LostTrackHowM 6y ago
    If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well? Because the young workers are already cheaper. Hard to out-cheap them. (Obviously not their fault.)
  • wolco 6y ago
    To hire back young people on contract would cost more than the entry level salaries they hold.
  • xienze 6y ago
    > If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well? Two things. First, there’s a lot more money to be saved cutting older employees (more senior positions, much higher pay, almost certainly grandfathered into either a pension [particularly in the case of IBM] or a higher 401k match, more vacation days). Second, the industry has been trying its damndest to offshore as much as possible. This hits younger employees mostly in the form of “there just aren’t enough viable candidates in the US!” keeping wages down. It’s only through the grace of India being many many time zones away and persistently not-so-great code quality that younger employees aren’t as bad off as they could be. > To me, it seems plausible that you would find a correlation between people laid off and their age, absent of systematic ageism. Yes, it’s aaaallll just a coincidence until it happens to you and your friends. Patience, young one.
    • olalonde 6y ago
• freetanga 6y ago
  I think you are spot on. I run a medium sized IT Team (400 employees plus 600 external contractors) and I like to go against the grain: In the past 12 months I have hired 15 people, and 13 are over 52 years old. Most have been laid off, got a juicy check that translates into a good nest egg, but not enough to make it their only source of income until retirement. A good job with a steady (but lower than before) income makes them very happy, and provides us with very senior people for key positions. However, it was hell to get it past HR, as they all saw it meant we were not a “agile” IT department. Facepalm.
  • tluyben2 6y ago
    Yep, my experience is also good with programmers over 50; usually (because of the ageist market) very humble but they understand things just faster. I myself am approaching 50 and I know more and am quicker (which surprises me) than I was when I was 25 (but maybe I was just really slow). I found a 55 year old firmware developer who is simply better (fast arm assembly/c dev shipping with no p1 bugs; this is not stuff you can update once shipped) than anyone I ever met; he was fired from his job a bit into covid and no-one wanted to hire him. It is strange. Even if he retires in 10 years, or worse, young people leave faster for a few bucks/hr more...
    • geerlingguy 6y ago
      > I know more and am quicker (which surprises me) than I was when I was 25 (but maybe I was just really slow). I think the difference isn't raw speed, it's efficiency. I know every year I'm better able to stop before I go down too far on the wrong path to solving some problem, because I learned many times in previous projects how that type of solution would end up hurting me in the end. So less time spent on fruitless efforts, more time spent on fruitful efforts, and in the end usually a better, more maintainable solution, to boot!
  • greenyoda 6y ago
    Two things surprised me here: 1. What does HR know about running an agile IT department? Why would they second-guess your decision on who to hire? 2. One of HR's biggest responsibilities is to protect the company from lawsuits. If HR itself has a bias against older employees, that would indicate that they're not even qualified to perform their own job, let alone tell the IT department how to do theirs.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > 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. Simple: the experienced older programmers will call out management for bullshit because they recognize bullshit when they see it. Fresh, new ones won't object when management says "we're on the NoSQL train now, so that we can attract more fresh talent (and funding sources)!!!", which makes the managers happy, but by the time that the failure modes of new fancy tech (e.g. no ACID compliance, bazillions of edge cases, insecure defaults like MongoDB had) become apparent, the managers have already made their millions in bonuses and went off to ruin another company. It's all about keeping us programmers as replaceable cogs - and to prevent as many of us as possible from rising in the "chain of command". Simply put, the supply of programmers is way bigger than there is a demand for managers or higher-level programmers. This will bite the whole industry in the ass when all those 20-somethings who make decent careers now after some coding bootcamp suddenly find out that there won't be any pay rises or opportunities... edit: also, new programmers won't complain if you push them past everything legally allowed - many don't know the laws or don't care, so 80 hour work weeks with no paid overtime (=40 "free" hours of work!) can be done on young people, but as soon as they hit ~30 and want to settle down a bit (especially if they want children) companies get in trouble.
• Spooky23 6y ago
  Most of these workers aren't programmers. They are in various technology roles, especially at a place like IBM often aligned with some IBM-specific corner of tech. Definitely happens with other companies too. HP used to have an "up or out" policy where they would fire SMEs systematically for some stupid reason. I remember laughing my ass off when they flew some guy in to tell me that they were firing 8 people on one of my teams, which I replaced with the same people employed at a smaller company for 50% of the cost. The employees got a 25% raise in that case. HP lost 100% of the revenue, which probably earned some bureaucrat a bonus somewhere.
• api 6y ago
  It depends on what you mean by new tech. If you mean having a deep understanding of how this stuff works and an ability to solve very hard problems, older programmers are usually better. If you mean knowing the latest fad language or framework, then no. That's because older programmers have seen fads come and go and have learned to recognize one, and they don't waste their time learning or using them.
• acruns 6y ago
  I am months from being 50 and I am a cloud architect/eng/admin. I am a former Microsoft MVP (rMVP) in System Center, I have co-authored books on the subject, spoke at conferences, blah, blah, I was a pretty big deal in the space, so much so that competitors would routinely try to hire me. I can still recall the moment when I thought 'I need to get out of this space and into cloud' At the time I was part of a sales team for a gold partner standing in an AMEX building talking to a developer who needed to secure Azure bc there was nothing more than a network and VM functionality and 'some VP had decided all new dev work was going to be done in the cloud'. This was the tipping point, not some revelation, I had been thinking about it for about a year. So I started spending my weekends learning cloud, eventually transitioned to a new job that was 50/50 cloud and system center. Did that again in the hopes of moving to 100% cloud, but it's hard when you have a huge reputation to not be utilized for that skill. Eventually I landed with a small firm that worked exclusively with the Azure team at MSFT on difficult customer use cases the MCS couldn't handle. 10 years later....I have tons of peers/friends who still do system center and I have talked to a lot of them about moving to cloud and almost all of them give me push back on it. These are ppl with ~20 years left working. And not that their skills are irrelevant, system center does Windows 10 deployments, patching, config management, inventory, so on. But it is going away as far as a need. They of course disagree, maybe it will always be around but it's not going to be adding features. I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud. My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.
• KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
  > Another reason why I won't ever work for a large company again. Sounds like you're claiming there is less discrimination at startups?
  • socrates1998 6y ago
    No, I wouldn't know. I haven't worked for a company in a long time, big or small. I would imagine there are similar problems at start-ups, but the smaller scale would at least give you the chance at a fair shake. For me, the bigger an organization is, the more these problems arise.
• EliRivers 6y ago
  We just hired, for what we thought was something of a bargain price, a chap who spent the last thirty years working in a variety of software and hardware development positions. The aerospace industry is shedding people like there's no tomorrow (because for some of the industry, there isn't a tomorrow) so we got a good deal. I'm not ashamed to admit it; I had the budget for a mid-experience software engineer but got a bargain. I've just had people from other departments compliment me on this new hire's first ticket. Had to check for sarcasm, but they were genuinely SO happy they sought me out to tell me what a great job he did. The ticket was simple, the programming trivial and could have been done by a fresh grad (everyone's first ticket is deliberately simple so they can concentrate on the process and how to build and test and everything else), but the way he handled all the stakeholders and went beyond the bare ticket betrayed decades of experience. Like some kind of holistic software engineer.
  • driverdan 6y ago
    Get them a raise ASAP and pay them what they're worth.
  • tolbish 6y ago
    What are you going to do with all the extra cash he's making you?
• biztos 6y ago
  > just collecting a paycheck... If anybody thinks there aren't a lot of young people at large tech companies just collecting a paycheck, I have some bad news for them...
  • znpy 6y ago
    I've seen this, and can confirm that.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Grimm1 6y ago
  Yeah this entire statement was also incredibly ageist and painting with broad strokes. If your litmus test for good programmer is "number of languages known" you aren't a good programmer. I'm 25, I've been programming for 15 years now and professionally I have more than half a decade of experience and professionally have a senior title. If you want to play that game most older programmers absolutely do not keep up with me and I've worked with a few that should have absolutely clocked out a while ago. IBM is also a joke, just like Oracle. Edit: Now that the vein has stopped bulging on my forehead, I agree with your point that experience is valuable. However it comes in many packages and dismissing someone because they're 50 or 25 is equally wrong and you just did the same thing you're ranting at IBM about.
  • reaperducer 6y ago
    IBM is also a joke, just like Oracle. A 100-year-old company with $80,000,000,000 in annual revenue operating in 177 countries is "a joke?" I don't even know what to say, other than you're simply proving the points the graybeards in this discussion are making.
    • Grimm1 6y ago
      Every time I've interacted with someone from IBM I've found myself questioning how they've managed to continue being a company. Have you looked at their public facing offerings lately? Watson is garbage, IBM cloud is garbage. They're losing ground on pretty much everything that is a modern revenue driver and they're best offering is their IT services. Their strategy and execution are quite poor.
      • reaperducer 6y ago
        Every time I've interacted with someone from IBM What percentage of IBM's 362,000 employees have you interacted with that is statistically meaningful? Have you looked at their public facing offerings lately? Only two of them. They were impressive. But you and I are looking at different offerings, probably in different market segments. They're losing ground on pretty much everything that is a modern revenue driver And yet, its income was up almost ten billion dollars last year. Seems like IBM knows very well how to drive revenue. IBM has hundreds of products. I suggest you expand your view beyond the very few that are critiqued on HN.