IBM sued for age discrimination by former global software director

https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/13/kyndryl_ibm_sued_discrimination/

by belter • 3 years ago

201 148 3 years ago

clnq7• 3 years ago

Age discrimination is all over tech. But what's the argument for age discrimination after 40? What's the mindset that someone who is for this discrimination would have, no matter how immoral or unethical? Is there a defensible view that supports discrimination at all?

EDIT: Sorry for creating a downvote hole for some of you who respond. There are good responses immediately downvoted. It is important for us to understand the arguments behind these biases to effectively fight them. It is not productive to silence this discussion.

Thank you for those who responded seriously and helped me understand the situation better.

belter3• 3 years ago

Getting rid of expensive employees.

rightbyte2• 3 years ago

No I think it is more due to implied seniority due to age. The older the engineer the less BS he eats from management.

d0mine• 3 years ago

Is it really that value/price becomes worse with age or the companies are just being short-sighted?

yaseer2• 3 years ago

I think the way you've phrased your question will invite negative responses.

Perhaps a better way would be "I'd like to understand why age discrimination exists in tech. What motivates companies to do this?"

clnq7• 3 years ago

My earlier words weren't liked and got downvotes fast. But, we need to look at all sides of tough topics to really understand them. This includes the best reasons people give for discrimination, even if they go against what's moral, ethical, or legal. We can only substantially argue against these views if we first understand them.

Even though age discrimination is very often illegal and probably always (maybe depends on the culture) unjust, there might be some sense to it from a managers point of view. For example, people with more experience often demand higher salaries. This is something we can't overlook when we're trying to reason about the ageism bias. And we can't really combat it substantially and directly if we ignore the strongest arguments for it — steel-manning is a very powerful tool in changing minds.

I probably could have phrased it better.

xtiansimon• 3 years ago

“I think the way you've phrased your question will invite negative responses.”

And?

If you see nuance, and rephrasing the OP can help make your response on point, then please share. Otherwise I find this browbeating and condescending. You’re just telling us how you want to hear the argument framed. Geez.

christophilus• 3 years ago

Yeah. I’m over 40, and I expect a high salary due to my productivity and experience. You could replace me with 3 folks from around the world, and it’s arguably a reasonable business decision.

cmrdporcupine4• 3 years ago

It's maybe only a "good" business decision if you have very short-termist thinking.

skylanh• 3 years ago

We're dealing with extensive loss of localized institutional knowledge in my workplace. The specific area I work in has one technically astute resource with experience dating back further than six years. There are other resources with that time-frame--but their knowledge is limited.

This has been compounding the normal, expected resource churn.

It's a qualitative stance, but a Big Brain with 10 years in an established area is worth more than three "fast brains" with 1 year of local, institutional knowledge.

I might take the "fast brains" (especially if they have limited commitments) if we were in a different situation such as starting up.

cmrdporcupine4• 3 years ago

I honestly think it's mostly a set of connected biases along the lines of:

a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick adoption of new things, along with

b) A bias that believes that that the older you are the less likely that you have engaged with new novel tech.

c) A bias that believes that if you're still "just" an engineer and not management, there must be something wrong with you. Younger staff will accept "grey hairs" at the executive level but sometimes be bewildered by it at the individual contributor level.

d) A bias against more expensive talent generally.

e) A bias (among some) against talent that cannot be easily manipulated

f) A bias (among some) against people with children/families/mortgages/elderly parents, etc. that might "slow things down." (This one is maybe the trickiest because it can express itself in ways that are not at all intended to be malicious but end up with bad effects. E.g. organizing team offsites and gatherings which are hard for parents or committed spouses to engage with because of their obligations. And the older we get the more likely we are to have such obligations)

Most people who hold these biases hold them unconsciously. I personally look (or sometimes act) younger than I am, and get "surprise" from people when I tell them my age. Likely because they have bias about what that age should/could imply.

Age bias is mostly "correctable" in most decent human beings. Where it gets malicious is when it gets in the hands of management who have a cost focus.

clnq7• 3 years ago

Thank you for taking my question seriously. These are all illuminating points.

To continue on point e... I also think that older people tend to be more difficult to manipulate with long work hours, unreasonable deadlines, or incompetent management. With enough experience, we learn to recognise these things and we set some boundaries. Someone might dislike that and say that the more experienced people don't fit into the corporate hustle culture, without examining the reasons in-depth.

rightbyte2• 3 years ago

a) "Progressivism", a bias towards thinking of "good tech" as the "novel/new tech". Or believing that success rides on quick adoption of new things, along with

So much this. However, "progressivism" is hopefully getting out of fashions as things have got worse due to cheapification the last 20 years, I feel.

op00to• 3 years ago

Old people are more expensive. That’s it.

tyingq• 3 years ago

They are also less likely to cave into pressure to work long hours. Or to buy into silly kool-aid movements.

wongarsu• 3 years ago

They will also push back on your plan to replace the existing system with a microservice data-lake using event sourcing with Kafka, using a service-mesh on a Kubernetes cluster on the distributed cloud. Either because they haven't kept up with the latest tech, or because they have the experience to tell beforehand that your vanity project may sound cooler but increases complexity for no real technical advantage.

belter3• 3 years ago

The above post should not be down voted. Although as others mentioned, it could have been phrased differently, it was clear the post was about understanding the reasons behind age discrimination, not about endorsing or justifying it.

Dalewyn• 3 years ago

Age is an undeniable factor when it comes to learning new things[1], whether any of us like it or not.

Ultimately, the question to you as an employee is whether you can do the work demanded of you. While it would be nice for everyone to be judged on an individual basis, I can understand there needs to be some level of generalization to maintain a certain level of efficiency within an organization.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35595846

belter3• 3 years ago

You are providing a case of airline pilot training. It's hard to believe a experienced and high quality software engineer with 20 year of experiences, will not learn a new programming language faster and better, than a freshly graduated 22 year old child :-)

HPsquared• 3 years ago

Neuroplasticity is supposedly on a constant decline after childhood. Also processing speed, working memory, long-term memory. Offset by increased experience, of course.

nibbleshifter• 3 years ago

That can be somewhat fixed.

Not if your employer does drug tests though...

BossingAround• 3 years ago

While true that neuroplasticity is probably declining after reaching age of 20-21 (?), that doesn't mean much. People can learn new things during their lifetime. It's not like when you have a 21-year old, they are learning at the speed of light, whereas a 40-year old takes ages to learn the same tech.

serial_dev2• 3 years ago

One argument (though, very cynical) for getting rid of 40+ yo people in tech: they cannot be so easily manipulated into blindly following company directives, and they are more likely to actually push back against bs rules/guidelines, whereas young people either don't know better, or they are more agreeable.

walterbell• 3 years ago

1000+ comments on age discrimination in tech, https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

ncphil• 3 years ago

Think about the level of executive stupid you're dealing with when a spinoff continues using the same literal playbook -- with identical terminology and resources (linking to former parent company servers) -- in executing a painfully obvious employment discrimination strategy. Well, either stupid or lazy. Either way, it's a situation that screams out for punitive damages. Here's hoping these cases send at least some of IBM's top management to an early retirement themselves.

Going to say it again: feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business. Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops. If you're not an owner with a real decision-making vote, you're on the menu for these guys.

cmrdporcupine4• 3 years ago

Worker-coops would be great, but at a minimum I feel like we need, as a profession, a dues-funded professional association which can do things like:

Analyze and fight bad IP assignment, non-compete agreements, etc.

Hire lawyers to write alternative agreements that employees can suggest as a "standard" alternatives during negotiations.

Collect salary data for the profession across all regions and open it in a transparent un-biased way for members to use during negotiation.

Provide legal resources for people involved in mass layoffs. Analyze the severance packages and give advice.

Help connect people in our profession with good employer / position reviews. E.g. glassdoor without the bullshit, and for professional association members only.

And, yeah, staying on topic with this thread: analyze for age etc. discrimination and provide resources to deal with this.

(I would stop short of using the "u" word, and stop short of full collective bargaining and strike powers only because those are far more controversial.)

I lack the ability to organize such a thing, but would gladly pay a monthly fee into such an organization.

avidphantasm• 3 years ago

But without the ability to withhold labor en masse, workers don’t have much leverage. I’m afraid some form of union with collective bargaining and the ability to coordinate strikes are unavoidable to achieve the laudable goals you lay out. Otherwise you are at the mercy of the good graces of employers, which employees may occasionally benefit from. However, when the rubber meets the road, the coercive law of competition will … coerce employers into favoring their own interests.

jasode5• 3 years ago

Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops.

The issue isn't philosophy. The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money and capital.

Picture a Venn Diagram of 2 circles:

(1) the circle of founders with some money (or don't have much money themselves but have the ability to get funds from investors) -- are not interested in forming worker co-ops. The founders want to own the business and hire employees to pay them wages.

(2) the circle of workers who want to share the ownership in a co-op don't have the money to fund the business.

Those 2 circles do not intersect for the most part. There isn't any alignment between the founders-with-money who want employees -- and -- the workers-without-money who want co-ops.

This is why you don't see those with some money and/or access to money (e.g. ex-Google ex-Facebook employees creating new startups) creating co-ops.

Likewise, examples of disappointed workers (e.g. tech layoffs, etc) who wished for a different corporate structure that gave them more ownership, are also not forming co-ops because they don't have the money. They're just trying to land the next job to pay the upcoming bills.

That's why the repeated advice and lectures to workers about "form co-ops" don't seem to make any progress. The reality is the workers just don't have the money.

MathMonkeyMan3• 3 years ago

People with money would like to control what they buy with that money? Interesting...

The issue could be organizational, though. You, Bob, Mary, and I form a company legally. Then we work to get capital for that company, however anybody does that. But we decide beforehand that we are equal part owners, and when we need to find more people to help with the work, we sign them up as part owners instead of as conventional wage employees.

I think that technically, stock options are a version of this, but the disparity in ownership between "founder" and "twentieth employee" might be so stark that the latter is better off taking a wage. Maybe the founders _could_ decide to give everybody a bigger piece of the pie, so to speak, with proportional increases in responsibility to those hired and difficulty in finding people. It would be a different kind of company.

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

Tech is most primed for it thanks to open source and other things that make it easier for workers to afford automation and distribution with sometimes up to near 100% margins / zero unit cost. So the most challenging cost becomes free time. Which wage labor does make challenging to find, but that's not as hard as also not being able to afford the means of production at all as in other fields/industries

I’d like to start writing playbooks from experience on how to optimize this approach vs big capital up front style. I’m bootstrapping off b2c+b2b app revenue and spinning up worker coop structures a lil to start scaling up as fast as I can give at least livable share of revenue in addition to equity share for help to grow the businesses. I bought indiedevstack.com to blog and productive this approach but haven’t set it up just yet

jraby32• 3 years ago

It just seems like a huge risk. Basically it seems like if you lose, you lose, if you win, everyone shares in your winnings.

Stock options that allow the founder to keep control and to receive more significant profit for the extraordinary risk they take makes much more sense imo.

goodpoint2• 3 years ago

You are missing a massive blockers. Coops are often ostracized by private corporations. To the point that coops have to build coop networks to resist.

indigochill2• 3 years ago

As I understand, you don't really need money to make a co-op, but what you need is cash flow. The most plausible route I've heard is freelancers forming a co-op where they pitch in some portion of what they make to a shared pot to even out the lean time in any particular freelancer's stream of gigs, as well as potentially sharing work if a client asks for more than an individual can do.

Of course, that requires the participants know and trust each other, but it seems a plausible way for individuals without a bunch of money to start a co-op.

maerF0x09• 3 years ago

Why cant the workers pool their available capital, and if they're sufficiently productive why cant they do some to generate more?

Tech workers are considered to be highly paid, so if anyone could accumulate capital it's them.

WalterBright5• 3 years ago

Unions have the money.

robocat4• 3 years ago

People start businesses because they want to make money. Co-ops and charities are usually set up for other purposes, and have other constraints.

People also start businesses because that is the simpler default that you will be pushed towards: by your clients, your accountant, your suppliers, your lawyers, your mother, your bank, and most everybody else.

The roadblocks to worker-owned co-ops taking off are money and capital.

That cliché just doesn’t apply much to many professionals, because the biggest expense is salaries. Watch a new business form, and professionals can often afford to self-finance during the initial period. A few professions need to rent, but say lawyers and some doctors have cheap chambers and clinics to service the market for individuals starting out.

And lawyers and accountants do form a type of co-op: they call them partnerships.

There are a huge number of self-funded software startups because so long as founders can pay their bills, they can afford their salary. Most self-funding software startups could just as easily be formed as co-ops, yet they are not. The reason is not because they are forced to become a business because they need capital. Note I am talking about self-funded startups - funded startups are obviously different.

Finally, co-ops are fundamentally unfair to the founders. Starting a business costs a lot more than money, and businesses are how we try to fairly repay that.

And the #1 reason why co-ops don’t exist? Because people have seen them and they don’t want to join them.

wahnfrieden2• 3 years ago

Any good way for worker coop interested (not necessarily job seeking but even aspirationally aligned) HNers to coordinate/share resources? The topic often gets shut down here as controversial topics that smell like Marxist Leninist communism even when they are anything but get flagged out here in my experience

easytiger• 3 years ago

Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops.

Go start one. Let us know how you get on

bell-cot• 3 years ago

...feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business.

Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems. Feudal power structures (whether or not a social anthropologist or medieval historian would officially certify them as "feudal") are so common because human nature very much favors such arrangements.

eternalban• 3 years ago

This empirical data was gathered in context of poor connectivity in society. So the 'default' that you propose, I assert, is a default for a specific societal regime.

As an abstract model, I propose hierarchies of patronage & loyalties, capital & force, and service as the fundamental organizing principle of 'feudal' systems.

We assume that there is -- it's an implicit in your stated view -- a natural system level emergent order that defaults to 'feudalism'. Looked at another way, we could ask the question as to why the substantial majority of people put up with crap all these centuries and in all these different places?

I think PL-CF-S order optimizes for (information/)control in the 'super-organism' for long term viability. (This is simply focusing on society as a system, disregarding the subjective experience of individual members.)

Why was hierarchical 'control' (think command and control) so fundamentally important to human societies (to date)? Per above sketch, I assert it has to do with marshalling of resources in a 'poor' energy, tech and i/o environments.

You need a hierarchy if any significant action requires high level control of a huge mass of people. You need a huge mass of people if your making and killing tech requires 'hordes' of peasants, workers, and soldiers.

You do -not- need a strict (and non-delegating) control hierarchy if significant societal action requires minimal human resources (the 'S' in PL-CF-S model), and operates in an environment of 'abundant' energy and amplifying technology.

Two trends are now opposing each other in that model. Certain technologies seem to require centralization (thus the 'old' model will apply) and other tech is getting in the hand of the plebes (aka the people history ignores or forgets that is almost all of us). Now the 'old' order is resisting getting tech to the 'edge' of society. It is deemed "dangerous" and it fairly is that.

IFF we assume that the hierarchical model is in fact a relic of a capability poor past of humanity, and that a new sort of 'human history' should begin, then we need to address the issue of technologies that tend to centralization. Possibly a combination of socialist ownership of those sectors and market enterprise at the 'distributed edge' could work.

the_only_law• 3 years ago

Sadly - if you are organizing humans, at non-trivial scales, over time - the alternatives all have profound problems.

How come our societies haven’t reverted to a feudal structure then. I’m sure most countries are organizing people at a much larger scale than most businesses

rajin444• 3 years ago

feudal power structures are no way to organize 21st century business

The efficiency gains and - more importantly - resiliency gained by having a single leader with a strong vision are enormous and the reason a single ruler is so prominent among humans. Democracy is weak to balkanization and demagoguery.

That being said the real issue here is corrupt elites - which no system can fix. The blast radius from a bad ruler is much worse than bad actors amongst a democratic system, but the potential gains from a single ruler are much higher.

BazookaMusic• 3 years ago

Any citations for this broad statement?

Perhaps it has been easier historically to converge to the single ruler model due to the available knowledge and resources. Is there any research concluding that one ruler systems offer higher gains in modern societies?

kevingadd• 3 years ago

I think there's a degree of survivorship bias here. Single-leader feudal power structures are common in business because they're the standard model for businesses here, so you have plenty of examples of them being wildly successful. But there are also lots of examples of failed feudally-structured businesses!

Personally I can think of multiple examples of successful co-ops in one of the two industries I work in (games), in part because there is less of a stigma against less-traditional business structures there. Co-ops have successfully built and released wildly successful projects in a repeatable way. I think we simply don't have enough data to decide at scale whether co-ops are inferior to the way we run corporations in the West.

maerF0x09• 3 years ago

and Single leadership is weak to overfitting to a broken model. example: Look how china efficiently built empty cities.

Thousands of CEOs each at the helm of a small business is a good model though because though its centralized command and control at the business level, it's also distributed and experimental in aggregate.

Aunche2• 3 years ago

Even if you solve the problems that other people mentioned, there is simply very little incentive for a successful co-op to hire extra workers to share their prosperity. For example, say a co-op has ten people and sells 100 widgets at $100 a piece for a $20 profit. However, their widgets are constantly out of stock. If they hire 5 more workers and sell twice as many widgets at the same price assuming economies of scale, now each worker may make $30 of profit. However, it would be much easier and more profitable for them to simply raise their prices to $120, and make $40 of profit.

bombcar• 3 years ago

coops work best in cases where the product is relatively easy for competitors to start their own coops; things like farming, building, etc.

indigochill2• 3 years ago

How's that a problem? Co-ops' purpose isn't job creation.

jdasdf• 3 years ago

Good thing there is nothing stopping you from starting up such companies. If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm.

If they aren't, the only one harmed is you.

wizzwizz4• 3 years ago

If they truly are a better way of organizing businesses, they will soon become the norm.

What do you mean by “better”?

wesapien• 3 years ago

When I read people on reddit say stupid shit like eat the rich, I always get downvoted for going against those coommie/anti-work types. But sometimes like now maybe they are right even if I know its wrong.

ravenstine• 3 years ago

Time for people (_especially_ young people) to consider alternative arrangements like worker co-ops.

Are there any known businesses that have engineering teams and work this way? I'm just curious. It's not something I've really thought about before.

jlokier• 3 years ago

Igalia comes to mind. They do quite a lot of work on all the big three browser engines, Blink, WebKit and Gecko, among other things.

https://www.igalia.com/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igalia

tasubotadas2• 3 years ago

How many coops have you started?

blastonico• 3 years ago

IBM accused of age discrimination sounds like a home for elderly accused of age discrimination. Absurd.

FredPret3• 3 years ago

Something to keep in mind when deciding how much of yourself to invest into a corporate job. Every employee is expendable.

Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.

Cynical? Maybe, but I don't think so. Effective? Definitely. The free market only works if all the people in it continually chase their own best interest.

GalenErso• 3 years ago

Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.

This works in tech but not necessarily in other white collar fields like finance. In finance, there is an unwritten rule that you are supposed to settle with a firm by ~30-35 and stay there for the rest of your career. Many firms don't hire laterally unless they have no other choice. Professionals like investment bankers and CFAs are recruited straight out of university and groomed to assume leadership positions in the long term.

FredPret3• 3 years ago

Very interesting, I didn't know that.

If you're determined to stay in finance, you'll probably have to stick to this model. But for a finance professional, there are many opportunities in other lines of business.

fakedang• 3 years ago

In finance, there is an unwritten rule that you are supposed to settle with a firm by ~30-35 and stay there for the rest of your career. Many firms don't hire laterally unless they have no other choice.

Eh, I would say it depends... Investment banking and hedge funds, sure, you better join early and stay for the long term. But for private equity and other investment management (notably family office, fund of funds and endowment management), you can still be recruited laterally. I've even seen veteran MD level guys being regularly hired at my previous PE firm.

In fact, with leadership at the top not yet retiring at the biggest and mid-tier firms, it's becoming increasingly hard to justify staying around for that promotion. In my personal experience, I have yet to see anyone make anything beyond Principal (the tier below partner/MD) at the large PE shops before their 40s. Most instead go down a notch to mid tier firms, go to an emerging market office, or start their own. Not to mention the number of seats higher up is also on the decline.

jraby32• 3 years ago

It’s not cynical. But it is a two way street. Most people feel that any job is expendable as well, don’t they?

Very few people wouldn’t take more money and better hours/benefits if offered to them.

FredPret3• 3 years ago

The reason I advocate hopping is that more responsibility, cooler work, more money, and better hours are never offered on a platter. It is available, but you have to go looking for it. So go looking for it!

I've seen so many engineers and managers spend 0.5 - 2.5 decades at a job, getting gradually more stagnant, adding a fraction of the value they could if fully utilized.

For these people, a minor shakeup would do a world of good. The companies that employ these people have grown complacent and assume these people are part of the furniture; it's bad for them too.

I remember one engineer and his manager who worked together for thirty years. The manager took 100% of the credit, and the engineer put up with this for the entire time. Eventually the engineer retires, and the manager is now screwed. A couple of months later it's obvious he hasn't used his brain in decades, and gets fired right before retirement. That manager was once really smart too.

Both of these people would have done themselves and the world a favour by job-hopping many times in that period.

geodel• 3 years ago

Well thats one way of doing thing. It only works when some and not everyone do it. There is simply no additional rewards waiting for hoppers if 80% of tech workers just keep changing job every year or so.

Further lot of tech work is nowadays done by external contractors in enterprises so workers anyway have to hop even if they don't want to.

SoftTalker• 3 years ago

As you get older, job hopping starts to come with a lot more costs. It's easy when you're young and have nothing more to hold you in one place than the cost of breaking your apartment lease.

Once you have a family you'll find that they are not excited about moving every few years and having to pack up, abandon all their friends, go to a new school, spouse find a new job, find a new house, find new childcare, unpack, etc. Can still work if you live in an area with a lot of jobs, but not very practical if you're in areas where job-hopping implies moving.

People used to be more willing to do this, but that was at a time when most households had one working partner and one at home taking care of the house and kids. Most people's lives are more complicated now, and moving is a lot more hassle.

clnq7• 3 years ago

Once you have a family you'll find that they are not excited about moving every few years and having to pack up, abandon all their friends, go to a new school, spouse find a new job, find a new house, find new childcare, unpack, etc.

This is the reason tech professionals worldwide are resisting the Return-To-Office (RTO) mandate. The vision is an industry free of this unnecessary hindrance. It's not solely a hurdle for older individuals seeking a career switch, but it extends to anyone committed to their families and communities. It's also a significant concern for individuals with disabilities, who have tailored their homes to accommodate their needs, and students who cannot continue their education from overseas.

Regardless, relocation is always stressful and costly. In essence, job transitions come with this hefty toll, which employers sometimes exploit to exert additional pressure on employees before they resign. This is particularly true in towns where the industry's potential employers are scarce — sectors like robotics, space, automotive, and similar are prime examples.

A person can endure considerable work hardships before deciding to uproot their family and relocate to a foreign country, starting from scratch. Imagine grappling with no credit history, a lack of local language proficiency, no familiar community, no personal vehicle, no trusted family doctors — essentially, nothing. For those working in sectors like aerospace, opportunities in most countries are restricted to one or possibly two employers. This keeps employees locked into toxic workplaces and helps neither the worker nor the company which can become complacent and feels no pressure to act right.

The remedy is remote work. Global, ideally. But regional is enough.

serial_dev2• 3 years ago

The things you mentioned are only relevant if you relocate.

If you job hop somewhere close to where you live, or you are job hopping into remote work, all the hassle of moving your family is not an issue.

There are still some downsides, for example, you might get X% higher salary (something you know upfront), but instead of having 4-5 hours of work with autonomy, few meetings easy-going colleagues, you might get annoying people, boring work, micromanagement, and endless meeting (which is something you can usually only know for sure after switching)...

seattle_spring2• 3 years ago

It also seems like you need to "cram" for the university-final-like interviews most companies seem to employ. "Ooh you don't remember how to code a dynamic programming algorithm that you haven't used in 15 years to solve this contrived scenario of a person hopping on frogs? That's gonna be a no from us dawg!"

Fun fact is that I didn't even make up that scenario, I literally didn't get an offer at Zillow because of it.

datavirtue• 3 years ago

Typical large American corporation.

cde-v• 3 years ago

64 year old believes they are the exception to aging.

qgin• 3 years ago

Would love to hear this line of thinking continued

dreamcompiler• 3 years ago

I cannot imagine why a new engineer or CS grad would want to go to work for IBM. Their reputation is that of a company that was great before you were born but forgot how to innovate long ago, except for a brief foray into AI that made them famous on a game show but was useless for everything else. Then they bought a Linux company but it's been subjected to the same capricious layoffs as the rest of the company so there's no job security. Most of their revenue seems to come from sending C-grade "consultants" to other big low-tech businesses to keep their computers running, which makes the customer's CIO happy but screws up the computers for everybody who actually works there.

I don't get it.

quadrifoliate• 3 years ago

I cannot imagine why a new engineer or CS grad would want to go to work for IBM.

I might have submitted a resume to IBM back in the day, when you still used paper ones at college career fairs (maybe you still do?).

In retrospect, I'm glad I never heard back from them; but people need money to pay off bills and loans, and so did I. It had nothing to do with me sharing IBM's vision or strategy for "innovation" in any way.

ryandrake• 3 years ago

Yea, If you are actually choosing where you work, you are one of the lucky few. Probably 99% of us don’t get a dozen offers to choose our passion from when job hunting. We get one offer after a lot of searching and take it because we like to have a roof over our heads. Sure, we vaguely “choose” where we work by deciding where to send our resumes, but a vanishingly small number wake up and say “my passion is to work at Apple” and then walk through the front door.

somenameforme• 3 years ago

While this is somewhat dated knowledge, I expect it carries over at least somewhat. IBM recruited hyper-aggressively at my university for internships. And at the internship you had minimal obligations and a quite comfortable salary which carried over into full-time employment. Why they were grabbing every warm body just to have them sit around is probably just the left hand not knowing what the right was doing, but it created a pretty nice opportunity for people whose main motivation was freedom.

Of course I expect those departments/divisions may well have eventually been "slimmed down", so everything comes full circle.

Barrin92• 3 years ago

I don't get it.

Because reputation and reality are two different things. IBM still produces significant amounts of research, for example in semiconductors. It's usually the top or among the top companies in terms of patents per year, which is a decent measure.

It's the same with Oracle. Has a bad reputation among the hipster internet crowd, but researchers or engineers generally earn good salaries and have significant freedom and problems to work on for probably any domain of CS you're interested in.

HeyLaughingBoy• 3 years ago

At least IBM has a reputation. The overwhelming majority of CS graduates will go to work at companies that have no reputation outside their fields because no one's heard of them.

This is just how work is for most people.

remeq• 3 years ago

They can resurrect themselves with Quantum computing. Big, fat,extremely specialized, room-sized machines was always something IBM was good at.

wmf• 3 years ago

Quantum computing isn't real though.

dangwhy3• 3 years ago

They seem to be getting on the AI bandwagon with their watson stuff again.

jonfw• 3 years ago

I enjoy working for IBM, I’ve been there my whole (relatively short) career and it’s been a great mix of interesting work, opportunity to advance my career, mentorship, and work life balance.

It’s a big company and every team is different so YMMV.

paxys• 3 years ago

Not every new CS grad has offers from Google and Meta waiting for them when they graduate. If you exclusively follow online discussion about the tech space you'd think that all engineers naturally go to the FAANGs or some well-funded startup, but in reality 99% are employed by consulting companies, small regional shops, BPOs, IT divisions of non-tech companies and others who are way worse than "old tech" employers like IBM.

_zoltan_2• 3 years ago

I immensely enjoy my work at IBM Research and have been here 10+ years. Most of the people I interact with are top notch experts in their respective fields.

jzb2• 3 years ago

Maybe they didn’t get an offer from one of their first choices? Maybe they could live where they want working for IBM instead of having to live in SV for a FAANG? (Less of a thing now, but seems to be making a comeback…) Maybe they did get an offer from a FAANG or something but didn’t like the culture. Lots of reasons people want to work for IBM or at least feel like it’s better than alternatives.

I’ve known lots of folks who worked for IBM who enjoyed it. (And plenty who didn’t, or did and then didn’t…)

badrabbit• 3 years ago

I hear/see this type if stuff but what are you supposed to do if you're not litiguous? Companies calculate cost and take risk aware decisions like this with no ethics or moralit y considered. It's like they corner people and expect them not to fight back or to accept what little fighting back they do. I feel like to avoid extreme measures, individuals should be sued ar least instead of companies.

I wanna see a lineup of low level and executive managers alike all on the hook personally for 10s of millions of dollars with no financial assistance from the company. I want to see HR, legal and direcr manager of this lady owing her 10mil+. You can fine IBM $10B and they'll just add it to their risk calculation over time. It is individuals that make these decisions, are they really protected from a civil suit?

theGnuMe• 3 years ago

This country is literally run by lawyers so litigation is basically how you move forward. All of these systems are setup by lawyers to generate income for lawyers.

jossclimb• 3 years ago

I don't think its right, but I understand their view of why they perhaps wanted to do it.

I had contact with quite few folks from IBM when I was at Red Hat and met Distinguished Engineers and Fellows and all they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings. Literally powerpoint would be used for everything, Architecture? do it in powerpoint? Documentation, do it in powerpoint. Do it in powerpoint, and then invite lots of people to a meeting to share your slides, get as many people on the meeting as you can. These would be endless meetings scheduled into eternity, where the goal of the meeting was 'alignment', the same people going around and around not really getting much done, apart from agreeing on some things, and disagreeing on others. I stopped turning up, as it was a waste of time, so it was 'escalated' to my boss 'why is jossclimb' not coming to our alignment meetings?!?'

They were also clueless about how to deal with us. Had folks 'escalate' as we would not agree to something that first required it be accepted upstream in a community. Would have to say to them 'my word is not worth much, we need to get consensus in the community', this was read as us being difficult and not following some VPs wants to the letter. "This is very important to Arvind"

I will get shit for saying this, but half of them could disappear into the ether and you would not notice anything (apart from SWEs having more time outside of perpetual meetings around powerpoint to put their heads down and build some software).

dangwhy3• 3 years ago

so what you are saying is that i need to get really good at powerpoint presentations if i need to get anywhere in my career.

clnq7• 3 years ago

That might be an IBM-specific quirk, but to get C-suite roles in large tech companies, one definitely needs to re-specialise from SWE/SDE roles to sales. All deep technical knowledge is not necessary for those roles (it's a nice-to-have).

lisasays• 3 years ago

All they seemed to do was make slides and go on meetings ... They were also clueless about how to deal with us ... Endless meetings scheduled into eternity ... the same people going around and around not really getting much done

So you're saying that on the basis of the above, you "understand" IBM's point of view that the way to fix this was to start firing the older workers?

Because that's, like, obviously the root cause of this malaise, right?

mixmastamyk• 3 years ago

You’ve described a company culture problem, not specifically an age one. I saw similar (sans powerpoint) in the past at Disney. It was mostly fixed through a reverse merger/brain-transplant from Pixar.

Basically, management that needs to be replaced not all older workers. This is where Blue Hat could shine.

maerF0x09• 3 years ago

People reject claims of ageism in tech for lack of evidence, and when the evidence comes around they no true scotsman the evidence.

Ageism is real in our space. Older people are not slow, out of touch, or overly grumpy (to counter some common cliches).

Young people please wise up because I know you feel exceptionalism, but in truth you will gain a competitive advantage by leveraging the experience of older people (even if you think the experience irrelevant). And one day you will also be old, do unto others etc.

SheinhardtWigCo• 3 years ago

There is no evidence of age discrimination mentioned in the article.

The complaint asserts that not only is Kyndryl using IBM terminology like "Resource Action," but it is providing affected employees with the same information resources to do so, right down to the letter.

Unless I’m missing something, the argument here seems to be: IBM discriminated against older employees during layoffs, and the IBM spinoff company hasn’t changed their layoff terminology or resources, therefore they must still be discriminating against older employees.

Not a lawyer, but it sounds like they have nothing substantive to work with here.

maerF0x09• 3 years ago

Precedent was set that the past behavior is ageism. New company is repeating the precedented past behavior. Seems obvious to me?

trashface• 3 years ago

I suspect there will be a lot more attention to ageism in about 10 years when the current of cohort of tech workers starts getting replaced by younger new college grads. Right now the population affected by ageism is just not big enough. It mostly affects Gen-X, which isn't that big and didn't have that much tech presence in the first place, most went into more traditional fields. When it starts to hit the mid-millenials, it will be too big to ignore.

YetAnotherNick2• 3 years ago

Wouldn't it solved by market automatically very easily. Let's say older people are paid less or discriminated in some way for the same skill. Then the company which employs them are at financial advantage on average leading to more demand till return on investment becomes same for both old and young employees.

jzb2• 3 years ago

“Solved by market” is such a bullshit concept in this context. Firstly, the idea that the “market” is this self-correcting process that works out fairly is demonstrably bullshit.

Secondly - who gives a fuck if “the market” in the abstract solves a problem when you, personally, get fucked because of ageism? People need to stop spouting off abstract market theory bullshit in response to real people being harmed as if it’s any real consolation to the actual humans involved.

datathrow0007• 3 years ago

Not when you optimize for:

1. Paying less than what a worker is worth

2. Owning a serf rather than establishing an engagement with a professional

On #1, older, more experienced workers are not going to accept bottom-of-the-barrel compensation for the outsized impact they make relative to. Generally, this is just "free market economics" looking to maximize returns compared to costs. The easiest way to get costs down is to keep payroll down (in service-based businesses, as many tech and tech-reliant firms are, payroll is going to be your highest cost). It's low hanging fruit; and by the far the easiest way to increase the bottom-line (see: startups).

On #2, this is mostly more relevant in large, established companies. The main goal on everyone's mind is no longer to make money, but to climb the ladder. Yes, costs and profits are important, but only in times of "bad vibes." In better times, everyone is trying to justify why they're a part of the gravy train, and to get a bigger portion. Usually, this is achieved through utilizing "human resources" to work on "big projects" (that usually do not materialize anything of note -- but generate impact, i.e. intrigue ). In other cases, a newly-minted lord will not be given sufficient bodies or budget to expand his realm, so he'll need to squeeze as much as he can out of what he has in order to make do. Older workers are less tolerant of bullshit and being squeezed for no material reward to themselves.

Generally this means that older workers will not be the first-pick for startups (cost-conscious, "scrappy," i.e. #1) or well-established bigcos (reliant on transmuting human souls for the enrichment of the faux-nobility, as in #2). In either case, neither type of company is looking for great technical talent, but just a body to achieve an end. Any schmuck can fill either role -- because competence isn't necessary for the success of whoever controls the purse strings. Unfortunately, these two types of companies are the prevailing sort; thereby "ageism" can be seen in tech, the same way educational box-ticking has become en vogue: it is politically more advantageous.

Companies with sane leadership, and bodacious-yet-grounded vision, that are looking to actually offer something of substance will value competence over anything else (look at old SV startups for an example). But once again, they're an unfortunate minority, and they most likely will not be doing cold recruiting (as it is insane).

tasubotadas2• 3 years ago

Lots of old people refuse to learn. Actually, a lot of experienced employees refuse to learn because they mistake their experience with knowledge.

postalrat• 3 years ago

The hardest part of learning is realizing how wrong your comment is.

beerpls• 3 years ago

“Ageism is real in our space. Older people are not slow, out of touch, or overly grumpy (to counter some common cliches)”

Ageism is real. Also as people age their mental faculties decline. Plenty of “old” people (read: not actually that old, sometimes in their 40s) are in fact slow and out of touch. It’s very much a thing if you actually know what gen Z life is up to (i’m not them)

“Young people please wise up”

Like this. This is very out of touch and grumpy and is going to fall flat on most people under 40

Your post is actually a great example of why old people are struggling more and more to hang these days (granted I don’t blame them, times are just changing so fast)

maerF0x09• 3 years ago

being in touch doesn't mean catering to the younger quarter of the population (with far less than that % of the purchasing power btw).

Aged people are plenty in touch with reality as in the true consequences of choices integrated across time. For example startup founders' success trends with age.

https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/a-study-of-27-million-startup....

petercooper• 3 years ago

Interesting this came up around the same time as this story also about IBM getting sued for discrimination but under very different circumstances: https://www.neowin.net/news/inactive-ibm-employee-who-hasnt-... .. he's been off sick for 14 years and is suing IBM to get similar pay increases as other employees.

2b3a51• 3 years ago

UK: The employee described himself as 'medically retired' and has been on 75% pay since 2008 under the terms of an IBM health plan. The arrangement will finish when the employee reaches 65. I'm sort of wondering if his pension contributions are based on 75% or 100% of pay scale. This kind of arrangement is not by any means normal in UK, and I wonder if the plan is still available to new employees.

Most companies and public sector employers have a sickness policy that pays full wages for some months then declines steadily until employment is terminated, around a year in the case of my former employer.

nytesky• 3 years ago

As an executive, I wonder if she was aware of the Dinobabies policy?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/business/economy/ibm-age-...

nerdyadventurer• 3 years ago

While not directly related to the question, I wonder how things for universities for mature students, doing post grads? while there is non discriminator policies how they are in practice?

IBM sued for age discrimination by former global software director

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