
IBM purged ‘gray hairs’ and ‘old heads’ as it launched Millennial Corps: lawsuit - hanging
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/27/ibm-purged-gray-hairs-and-old-heads-as-it-launched-millennial-corps-lawsuit/
======
throwaway6497
Age discrimination for older software engineers is real. It gets enforced in
subtle ways. It is up or out culture at the end.

Age discrimination doesn't get the same coverage as gender, race or sexual
orientation discrimination. I wish companies also added age in the diversity
reports, and if they did talk about why there are such a few percentage of
older folks in engineering. If we wish to make engineering career to span
several decades, we should all actively try to get o address this.

~~~
freyir
> _" why there are such a few percentage of older folks in engineering"_

No, there's a small percentage of older folks in _software engineering_. In
almost any other engineering discipline, you'll find many older engineers who
enjoy long careers, and whose perceived value often grows with age. That's
because actual engineering principles change very slowly.

Most software jobs do not involve much engineering in the traditional sense;
most of the effort is keeping up with the constant churn of flavor-of-the-week
libraries and frameworks, information that will be often be outdated and
useless in a few years.

~~~
gambler
_> will be often be outdated and useless in a few years._

Often it's "useless now and outdated in a few years". It's amazing how much
software today justifies its existence through a weird self-referential loop
that isn't connected to solving any problems outside of itself. Complex tools
to manage complexity and so on.

~~~
jacobush
MSBuild... _cough_

~~~
Pxtl
Msbuild, MSdeploy, and SqlPackage are those kinds of techs where I profoundly
resent the man-hours I've spent learning to work around their quirks.

------
luckydata
I know I will be downvoted to hell by the young folks that don't know how
things work, but the only way to fix the absurd power imbalance and worker
hostile laws we have in the USA is through strong unions.

It is such an obvious thing that you can even spot when union-busting laws
were passed in the trends for inflation adjusted wages.

Software engineers think they are irreplaceable and our current conditions
will last forever but it's a lie.

Good news is it seems we have a new generation of politicians worried about it
but we as workers have to do our part or we will progressively lose more and
more of our hard earned "privilege" and make sure more can benefit from it.

~~~
scarface74
I’m 45 and the last thing I want is a union. Unions tend to make all workers
equal even those who work harder/smarter. If I am 50, staying current with
technology, kept my resume up to date, and kept my network strong, why would I
want to be lumped in with someone who has done none of those things?

~~~
loteck
What an odd thing to say in a thread about discrimination.

"The last thing I want is someone to protect me from widespread
discrimination, after all, why would I? Look at all my merits!"

The point of age discrimination is that none of your merits matter, the only
thing that matters is that someone doesnt like your age, and you're out.

~~~
scarface74
I’ve also said that I think ageism is overblown in software engineering. Yes,
this is a clear cut case of discrimination what happened with IBM. But, IBM is
far from being a software engineering focused company.

I also don’t live in a fantasy land where the world is fair. I’ve learned a
long time ago not to depend on a _job_ for my livelihood, but my _career_. For
software engineers who have kept their skills current, live in a major
metropolitan area in the US, and have kept their network strong, in 2019, I
know for a fact that companies are falling all over themselves to hire us. How
many people at IBM fall in that category?

Given the choice between unionizing and taking the tact I recommend - changing
jobs anytime you see that your skills are falling behind the market, keeping
your resume up to date, keeping in touch with former managers and coworkers
and just really not being complacent- I would prefer keeping my future in my
own hands.

I said in another post that I’m 45, Black, with a mild disability that only
allows me to type with one hand. If anyone theoretically should have to worry
about discrimination it’s me.

~~~
mkane848
>I also don’t live in a fantasy land where the world is fair

So we just settle for how things are? Why not at least to try to cut out some
of the bullshit that absolutely doesn't need to be there?

~~~
scarface74
Because I have bills to pay right now.

But the alternative that is being proposed - unions - aren’t about fairness if
your definition of fair is that people who work harder should be awarded more.

~~~
save_ferris
Can you provide some concrete evidence to back up your claim that unions treat
everyone the same? Unions exist in hundreds of occupations in the US that have
clear career progression. Police, teachers, pro athletes, pilots,
manufacturing, and many many more utilize unions for labor negotiations.

I don’t buy this sweeping generalization argument at all.

~~~
scarface74
"Denver teachers strike in bid to dismantle pay-for-performance system"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/02/11/denver-t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/02/11/denver-
teachers-strike-bid-dismantle-pay-for-performance-
system/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2e6dffacb736)

Police Unions: "Why We Fight Against Performance Based Pay"

[http://www.mesampa.com/why-we-fight-against-performance-
pay/](http://www.mesampa.com/why-we-fight-against-performance-pay/)

"Merit Pay for Police Officers Is Overruled by Labor Board"

[https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/03/nyregion/merit-pay-for-
po...](https://www.nytimes.com/1999/03/03/nyregion/merit-pay-for-police-
officers-is-overruled-by-labor-board.html)

"Why It Can Take Six Years to Fire an Inappropriate or Ineffective Teacher"

[https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/why-it-can-take-
six-...](https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/why-it-can-take-six-years-to-
fire-an-inappropriate-or-ineffective-teacher)

~~~
luckydata
Wow, that sounds really bad... until you read why. Have you tried to see if
"pay for performance" schemes are weasel words by conservative politicians to
institute damaging policies?

The brainwashing runs deep in this country, a couple generations was taught to
fight against their own interests in support of oligarchs and corporations and
was sold as "democracy". We're witnessing the terminal phase of that, where it
goes from here is up to us but you're killing all faith I have that we will
have better lives in my lifetime.

Some are born to be willing slaves and some are born to break the chains.

~~~
scarface74
From the NYT - the favorite magazine of the right:

 _Even though the pay plan meant more money for many of its members, the
Patrolmen 's Benevolent Association filed an improper practice petition
against the city, arguing that any changes in pay rates must be negotiated
through collective bargaining._

Tell me again why I would want this?

------
ChuckMcM
I don't know if the suit has merit but I was pretty amazed at the stuff IBM
wanted me to sign when I left. There is a saying that every clause in a
contract tells a story, well there were a _lot_ of stories in my separation
agreement :-). Comparing it to the agreement I signed when I left Google it
was clear that over its lifetime, IBM has been sued a _lot._ :-)

~~~
scarface74
I'm usually down voted a lot on threads like these because I usually say that
ageism is overblown (I'm 45). But when you have smoking guns like:

 _One in-house presentation showed that this posture meant doubling the
proportion of workers receiving negative performance evaluations, so 3,000
employees could be laid off and replaced with “early professionals,” according
to the suit...

IBM made presentations to its senior executives calling for IBM to evaluate
its long-term employees more harshly, to use those negative evaluations to
justify selecting long-term employees for lay-off, and to replace these
employees with ‘EPs’— IBM management short-hand for ‘early professionals.'” _

It's pretty obvious.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I tend to agree with you that ageism is over blown but that statement isn't a
"simple" statement because ageism is complex.

There are institutional issues, where a single job can take 5 years to learn
do do efficiently but company policy is to give raises every year to people
who meet expectations (called a "salary ratchet"). In such a situation, if
someone has been doing the same job for 15 years they probably have 10 years
of raises that were "seniority" based rather than "skill" based.

The discrepancy between what it costs to get the 'skill' to do a job versus
keeping someone on who has a lot of history can easily reach a breaking point.
Is that ageism? Or is it a failed compensation policy? Would it be better if a
company said "The max we are going to pay for this position is $X" and once
you get to $X you won't be getting any more raises in this job."? That might
work for some jobs, it sounds a bit like forced attrition in others.

There is also skills movement, which is to say that an engineer that has
developed skills and understanding in a particular "stack" may find that when
that stack is no longer current, their skill level on the new "stack" is
functionally identical to a new hire, with a bonus of additional wisdom. But
is that pay the same as their current pay?

People change jobs to get an increase in pay, which works until it doesn't.
People rarely accept a reduction in pay when they transfer within a company.
It's hard to internalize how you are "worth" $X in one role, but only worth
$0.8X in a different role. So that transaction has the person leaving and
someone getting hired who currently only makes $0.75X and they get a bump up
to $0.8X and they are happy to come on board.

The "new" thing in HR would appear to be that salary ratchets are dead and
variable pay on a fixed base is the thing. This is a fairly common situation
at big tech companies these days, base pay plus some variable modifier, either
additional pay bonuses or stock 'units' that convert to a variable number of
shares based on contribution.

My guess is that today's new engineers will find that 10 to 15 years from now
their pay is no longer growing and their bonuses and RSUs never seem to quite
be all that much better than they were the previous year. Is that a good
thing? Bad thing? I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but as a
career, engineering is becoming a lot more 'standardized' than it was.

The way I see this expressing itself is that older engineers who are up front
about being ok with more median salaries tend to get hired. Ones who insist on
their 'top of the tech ladder' salary from the previous place where they
worked for a decade or more, have a much harder time of it.

I know from being both an engineer, a manager, and an executive that they
equations usually have nothing to do with age and more to do with work product
per unit $ applied. It is easier to hire someone below their optimum value and
give them a pay raise than it is to hire someone at a premium and ask them to
take a pay cut to bring them in line. I also know that Google tried to do this
with their 'slotting' system and it had a lot of issues (mostly negative), and
that the stack ranking type systems that Microsoft used to have were similarly
designed to prune toward the optimum value. Bottom line is that there isn't a
good system that I know of for having this kind of salary discussion that
works.

~~~
biztos
I see a lot of software folks, myself included, not “solving for compensation”
because we make pretty good money compared to other professions, find the work
stimulating, and don’t want the stress of job hopping.

But it’s also import to remember that any year your “merit increase” is lower
than inflation, you are actually getting a pay _reduction_ (and official
inflation usually lags behind rent and some other expenses).

~~~
hopler
In SV, engineer pay raises are what cause rent inflation, ironically.

~~~
scarface74
And that’s also why I have no interest in SV. I like my nice, big, cheap house
in the burbs that I could get with an FHA loan by putting less than $12K
down....

------
btown
This appears to be the initial complaint, from 2018:
[https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/09/17/ibmdiscriminationsuit917.p...](https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/09/17/ibmdiscriminationsuit917.pdf)

On the surface, allowing recent hires to be exempt from performance-based
layoff programs isn't particularly unethical, as they may still be ramping up.
It certainly seems like there's substance here, though, beyond just "think
_like_ a millennial" or "give recent hires a chance" rhetoric. Will be
interesting to follow. It's essential to our entire industry that lawsuits
like this draw lines in the sand - we're all in danger as we age if big tech
can get away with age discrimination.

~~~
around_here
It's generally very difficult to get younger STEM people on board with this.
They often believe themselves to be different or just straight up better than
their predecessors. For them, it doesn't matter because they're clearing not
going to be ousted, or are so short sighted that they believe it won't matter
if/when it happens to them.

------
cleandreams
I am 63 and I'm having an amazing career right now. I am levels and levels
above where I ever thought I'd be. It's too stimulating to retire. I've always
been attracted to the hardest problems I could find and that paid off, but it
took a long time. I don't know how people do that quickly, unless it's partly
luck. I'm not Ivy League so I had to earn every opportunity.

~~~
redact207
Yours sounds like an incredible career. I've never worked with any developer
who was past their 40s. What did you do throughout your career? Did you
experience ageism or any hurdles based on your age? I saw in your comments you
worked for MS, was working for a large corporate easier than getting involved
in a startup or small business?

------
around_here
Never trust anyone who attempts to get you to waive your right to collective
action, or attempts to force you in to binding arbitration. This is especially
true when it comes to employment.

There is _never_ any benefit for you, and it means that they will, one day,
try to screw you.

~~~
m4x
There was a direct benefit to waiving their rights:

> Employees were offered severance worth a month’s salary, continuing health
> and life insurance coverage for a period depending on time with the firm,
> free career counseling, and up to $2,500 for skills training

~~~
C1sc0cat
That's a lot less than the statutory minimum in the UK - I got 9 Months from
BT on Voluntary Redundancy 15+ years ago.

Some Higher grades got 100,000 k and 6 years extra pension.

------
tomohawk
I worked on a team that had a lot of amazing talent (many members of the team
had 20+ years of experience in the field). Got a new manager who wanted to
reduce cost and bring in "new ideas". Funny thing was: those experienced
engineers had been promoting many of those new ideas for quite a while to no
avail. End result was the green team that was brought in ended up taking way
too long to redo everything and missed the market opportunity. They also
missed the boat on the new ideas, confusing different techniques and tech for
new product features that would be useful for customers. The whole thing died.

------
asfarley
I think the appropriate market response is to start pricing this behavior into
our salary asks as younger engineers.

Rather than assuming a long career with increasing pay, point to cases like
this in salary negotiations. Your highest income generating years maybe be
30-40.

~~~
chaosbutters
That is my plan, invest like I will be forced to retire by 50. I mean, I'll
probably pick up some 'fun' min wage job in my 50s to get social interaction.
But I save heavily assuming the worst

~~~
ozzyman700
I feel like beavis constantly thinking "FIRE FIRE FIRE" at work

------
mathattack
IBM is in a bind. They were so behind for so many years that anyone talented
left. The ones who stayed were around were there because of tenure, not
talent. What do you do when your best employees are gone and your best days
are past? Share buybacks, overmarketing, and aggressive pursuit of license
audits. But none of those require a large senior employee base. So they took
the most aggressive policy possible while still plausibly remaining inside the
law.

------
wallflower
In case you missed the deep discussion on this “wake up” call from 2 months
ago.

“64 and unemployed: One man’s struggle to be taken seriously as a job
applicant”

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022000](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19022000)

[https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-
edition...](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-
january-27-2019-1.4989313/64-and-unemployed-one-man-s-struggle-to-be-taken-
seriously-as-a-job-applicant-1.4991626)

------
sp527
I’m in my late 20s and I’ve already learned not to trust our society/economy
to ensure that I’ll have a stable financial future. You need to have a plan
and be doubly hedged against shittiness. Keep costs low. Save and invest. Job
hop as much as necessary to boost your income. Try to build a business that
can generate wealth (but don’t depend on that outcome).

Above all trust no one to care for you. Not your government. Not a company
offering options. Not even FAANG. Be ruthless and look out for yourself and
those you love first and foremost. No one else will.

~~~
readhn
Not sure i buy this.

Life is not about accumulating the most amount of wealth.

Its about building meaningful relationships that last a life time.

Why would someone "job hob" if they really like the team/company? Yes you may
make "more" at the next Co. but chances are your team/management will suck big
time.

Find what you love/who you love and stick with it.

~~~
scarface74
This has to be the worse piece of advice I’ve read in a long time and I read
r/cscareerquestions.

If you stay at a job you love one of two things will happen.

\- you will get cost of living wages while people doing your same job will
come in and get market wages.

\- you will “love” your job and your job won’t reciprocate and you will find
yourself unable to find a new one because you haven’t kept your network
strong, your resume up to date, or your skillset current and you will be
crying “ageism” while people who have done all of the above won’t have the
same issue.

~~~
readhn
im not talking about situations where you love your job and your job "does not
love you back". Im talking about situations where its mutual. in those very
rare situations you stay and dont move around because:

\- you do get your salary bumped every year with consistent raises \- you get
promoted and grow along with the company.

Its rare but it happens. when it happens you stick with the company and build
something great.

~~~
scarface74
I bet the people at IBM thought the love was mutual too....

~~~
readhn
Its hard to find these days a decent company that is run properly and that
really cares for its employees.

i just finished a cycle of interviews and hiring managers viewed long stay at
a company as a definite positive. They in fact disliked job hoppers (every 2-3
years new job) as it damages companies in the long run according to them.

~~~
scarface74
If the companies want people to stay they can have compensation policies that
base raises on a combination of market rates and the extra value they add to
the company. The company is just as interested in maximizing their profits as
the employee is in maximizing their income.

Both parties need to understand that employment is purely transactional. It’s
that way for all companies. Netflix was honest about it. The famous
presentation that “we are like a professional sports team not a family.”

------
jmpman
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to force arbitration on protected classes.
Employees shouldn’t even be allowed to sign over that right. If IBM is found
innocent, the laws need to change.

~~~
Gibbon1
Given the power imbalance that exists between employers and employees
arbitration should be illegal in employment contracts.

------
a-dub
"let's fire all the people who will actually do the horrifically boring work
our company actually does that makes a lot of money so that young people who
would never work here can replace them!". brilliant!!!

~~~
reustle
I've found that a lot of that horrifically boring work could easily be
optimized or automated, but the old pensioners have little inventive to budge.

------
lame88
I wonder how much age bias is to blame for the constant reinvention of the
wheel and hype-tech in the industry

------
yborg
And the strategy works!
[https://imgur.com/a/hpeFTyP](https://imgur.com/a/hpeFTyP)

~~~
cryptonector
For some definition of "works", indeed.

------
ben_jones
I think the hard truth here is that there will always be clever ways to get
around anti-age discrimination laws and companies will always optimize to pay
employees less even if they project a culture antithetical to that.

I wonder what the graph would look like at i.e. FANG in terms of average age
per employee over time. My understanding is that they've been hiring
undergrads very aggressively in the past few years such that the trend would
be similar to more brazen companies such as IBM in terms of declining age of
employees. It's happening everywhere in very subtle ways. LPT: don't get old?
\s.

~~~
banku_brougham
I disagree. This attitude is analogous to the US approach to healthcare, which
is a compelling story until you examine one, then a few, then dozens of other
industrialized countries’ implementation of health care policy.

------
jamjribm
Age discrimination in technology is alive and well, flourishing under the
veils of "over qualified" and "culture fit" and "no experience with the xyz
product". I have had many great phone interviews. On site, in the presence of
hiring decision makers, while I look like a typical white corporate employee,
the gray hairs blending in with brown are visible enough for the comments such
as, "this role may not be challenging enough for you", and the end result is
being over qualified. Not too old for them, just too qualified. Makes everyone
feel better. If and when I need surgery, I hope my surgeon is overqualified!
But thecreal focus is on tools. "Do you have x years experience with the xyz
software product?" I spent at least a decade of my career evaluating new
technology...And implementing some of it. A tool is a tool. But what is the
process? What is the purpose of the tool? A person says they have 5 years
experience with a Milwaukee hammer. That's what the job req says is required.
This person gets hired because the person with 7 years weilding a Craftsman
hammer doesn't have the Milwaukee hammer experience. But what is the purpose?
In the end, the 5 year Milwaukee experience person gets the job but still
can't hammer in a nail without bending the nail. And places nails with no
regard for rhe building code. Experience is not about the tool, but that is
not what today's HR hiring/vetting process is about. ISAM, VTAM, DB2, Paradox,
Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, nosql, hadoop... tools. Third Normal Form? Data
dictionary? Index optimization? Processes not addressed by a specific tool.
Similarly, does memory management enhancements make the C coding language that
much different? But I digress. Hire the experience with the process, not
necessarily with a tool. Especially the "flavour of the year" tools.

------
_bxg1
Forced arbitration is a racket and needs to be outlawed.

------
PorterDuff
I've always wondered why you don't see self-funded startups that just hire old
people. The customers don't care.

------
neilv
I don't know the merits of this particular suit, but I'd say everyone working
at the company, or considering it, should see how it plays out.

There's a bit of a general rule that applies to a lot of situations, and can
be phrased many ways. One way is: someone who is mean to others, but nice to
you, will be mean to you.

------
aryehof
It would seem that "experience" is of little value in information technology,
while knowledge of the latest technologies is all that is valued.

It says something about the industry that (it appears) there are few lessons
to learn over time. Perhaps the term software "engineering" is a total
misnomer.

------
tyingq
_The suit took aim at a 2006 IBM internal report on employee demographics that
purportedly called older workers “gray hairs” and “old heads,” and concluded
that younger workers were “generally much more innovative and receptive to
technology than baby boomers.”_

Ouch. That seems pretty damning.

------
lloydde
_> IBM appeared to be winding down the Millennial Corps, cited in several
legal actions as evidence the firm was biased against younger workers._

Pretty awkward typo in the article. Should be “bias towards younger” or
“discriminate against older”

------
TheSpiciestDev
Just reading some of the comments here makes me want to ask: is there an
opportunity to disrupt the whole interviewing / hiring process with something
along the lines of the show The Dating Game?.. where employers know a limited
amount of data to make a hire?

Could some private company vet candidates for skills, culture and level of
experience and provide clients profiles of candidates without name, race, age,
etc... essentially scrubbed?

Would this solve problems, or make more?

~~~
biztos
Didn’t California forbid employers from asking about salary history?

I think it’s ripe for disruption, maybe more so outside the US. Many otherwise
progressive countries still expect a headshot with your CV.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Its very surprising that Places like Germany get away with this.

------
_robbywashere
This is always so weird to me because I feel like older software engineers
would have so much wisdom and be able to see through the hype and fads

------
jijji
I think the more experience a person has with software engineering, the more
they write efficient and secure software, and quickly. With junior developers,
it takes longer to produce working code and it is buggier and less efficient.
Same with construction work. Alot of this work is complicated. People who have
decades of experience generally perform better.

------
segmondy
Holberger has noticed that there is almost no one in the basement involved in
CPU design who is over 35. What happens to old CPU engineers? Holberger is 26
now, and though not exactly on his deathbed, he is curious about what a
computer engineer does "afterward."

This was written in 1981 about late 70's in "Soul of a new Machine" Nothing
new.

~~~
yborg
Not exactly the same thing. A 35 year old in 1981 would have entered college
in 1964; "computer designer" would not have been a career path most people
would have been familiar with. The entire field was relatively new, so it of
course tended to trend younger. We tend to forget that virtually the entire
history of our industry fits in one human lifetime.

------
Mikeb85
Millenials are the largest and most educated generation ever. Also the first
to grow up using computers from a young age. And, incidentally, the first
generation with less purchasing power than the previous generation.

Why the fuck wouldn't a company opt to hire the most educated, computer savvy
workers for less money?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Millenials are [...] the first to grow up using computers from a young age.

No, they aren't.

\-- Generation Xer who grew up using computers from a young age, and was not
at all alone in that.

~~~
Mikeb85
You're in the minority, or are a very young Gen Xer.

------
martin1975
This depends on the company - where I work I regularly see people retire after
25-30 years of tenure, and it is a large, publicly traded company. The
CEO/board sets the tone. It is possible to meet a company's bottom line AND
treat your employees at the same footing as your clients/customers.

------
beastman82
This is 100% cost reduction, not age discrimination. Correlation != Causation

------
axaxs
Unpopular opinion: most 'gray hairs' I've worked with absolutely deserved to
be let go. Keep in mind this is a sample size of 1 company, however.

I'm 100 percent against age discrimination, and some of my mentors fall in
this age range. That said, I've also worked for a big corp full of
'distinguished engineers', which essentially in our company meant they did
something really interesting in the 80s or 90s. Many rested on some one
accomplishment, and found ways to interject themselves onto new projects while
giving extremely vague or extremely outdated advice.

Our industry is ageless, if you keep up to date and keep learning. If you're
relying on tenure, you're going to have a bad time.

------
banku_brougham
Management at IBM is so damaged and disfunctional that this is a primary
strategic intiative that consumed their top level planning. I dont see great
product coming from all this.

------
sidcool
This scares me a lot at 35 years old. Is my tech job going to put me out of
work in a few years? Should I be looking for something else? It's scary
honestly.

------
40acres
I think age discrimination is really hard to prove because the plausible
deniability is so strong. For one, older workers make more -- so
discrimination can be masked as reducing costs.

Secondly, management is usually older, so if you're reshuffling divisions and
reducing management overhead that also disproportionately affects older
workers.

There are other tactics that I've seen used like holding those with higher pay
grades to stricter requirements, making it easier to get rid of them.

All and all, I can't really see I being found at fault. I'd bet on a
settlement being reached.

------
jiveturkey
[https://outline.com/bMsZxj](https://outline.com/bMsZxj)

------
rezeroed
Something for the younger generations to look forward to.

------
kazinator
When your generation has slogans like:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#%22Don%27t_trust...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Weinberg#%22Don%27t_trust_anyone_over_30%22)

what do you expect from the kids and grandkids.

~~~
groby_b
> my one sentence in history turns out to be something I said off the top of
> my head which became completely distorted and misunderstood

So yay on you for distorting it some more.

~~~
kazinator
It was distorted _at the time_ ; it became a popular slogan for throngs of
hippies.

~~~
groby_b
No, it really did not. It became popular for the media and right-wing figures
to _claim_ it became a popular slogan.

Quoth Wikipedia: "The saying then went viral, becoming a favorite for
reporters and columnists wishing to ridicule the young, the New Left, or the
hippie/Yippie movement"

It's still being used that way. You're a shining example.

------
Simple_Guy
What is the problem? If they are valuable, they can surely get another job. if
they are not, why should IBM keep them around?

------
feralhacker
Honestly looking for discussion: Why should we treat ages all the same? Age
does change a person, physically/ mentally/ emotionally. It would seem that
some companies and industries are better served by the young and some the old.
Why is there a problem with that?

Clearly these companies aren't firing the old out of spite, are there are
reasons?

~~~
lame88
What do you value? You can also make this argument to advocate ignoring web
accessibility because its not a cost benefit tradeoff that is worth a single
entity’s bottom line for the sake of the small percentage of people that are
disabled. Private actors in the capitalist economy regularly make very
shortsighted decisions. It’s up to us to establish the boundaries in which
those decisions get made, and to some extent, our laws are a reflection of our
values. What kind of world do you want your possibly disabled children to grow
up in? (Edit: and what kind of sentiment do you want to be established in
society and the industry when you are 50+ years old and looking for a job?)

------
avs733
I'll care when wage discrimination against younger works is made illegal.

~~~
scarejunba
Wouldn't it make sense for you to care now since you're guaranteed to get old
but you're not guaranteed to become any younger?

~~~
neilv
"A society grows great when old [people] plant trees in whose shade they know
they shall never sit."

------
jayalpha
No-one gave me a job when I was a young engineer. Now, why is it bad when your
swap young people for older folks that might just sit on their desk and
counting their days until retirement? If they have anything to offer I am sure
they can find a new job easily on the market. Seriously.

IBM, well done!

~~~
banku_brougham
One day you will be old and will remember these things you said.

~~~
jayalpha
Doubt it. After years of nightmarish struggling I feel well prepared to every
challenge that I may face in the future (this includes health challenges by
the way :-) ). In the end I realize it was always meant to be that way.

But this is your only argument why I should care about this older folks?

~~~
SolaceQuantum
You should care about older folks because discrimination against the elderly
is illegal and is a signal to your employees that they will not be valued at
your company based on their merits but instead valued for a quality they have
no control over and thus reduce morale in your workforce. Furthermore, as the
lifespan expectations of humanity grows, we can anticipate that the economic
view will also expand- more older people means more customers for products
regarding their needs, more jobs available to understand their needs.

~~~
jayalpha
Ah. So discriminating against young is okay?

I assume if they can perform they will find a new job in this job market very
quickly. Just on merits.

"reduce morale in your workforce" I don't know how old you are but this
sentence lacks wisdom. Companies are never grateful or anything. In fact, it
sounds to me like career advice from the last century. The time for employees
is over, you better get your own shit together. Pursuing a corporate career
can be a very dangerous thing. I remember a post from a MIT lawyer who
observed how his mid 50 peers were either making a shitload of money (MDs,
laywers) or struggling (engineers in their mid 50ies) and based on his
observations he said that when even MIT graduates are struggling later in live
this field then you should ask yourself if this is really a good field to
pursue.

