
Cutting ‘Old Heads’ at IBM - mwexler
http://features.propublica.org/ibm/ibm-age-discrimination-american-workers/
======
buro9
The important bit:

 _How did IBM get around the legal requirement for the disclosures? With a
move that even critics acknowledge is ingenious._

 _The company’s pre-2014 layoff documents required employees receiving
severance to waive all bias claims based on “race, national origin, ancestry,
color, creed, religion, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy, marital status,
age... disability, medical condition, or veteran status.” The new documents
deleted “age” from the waiver list. In fact, they specifically said employees
were not waiving their right when it came to age and could pursue age
discrimination cases against the company._

 _But, the new documents added, employees had to waive the right to take their
age cases to court. Instead, they had to pursue them through private
arbitration. What’s more, they had to keep them confidential and pursue them
alone. They couldn’t join with other workers to make a case._

Forced arbitration continues to be an awful thing that companies foist on
employees to strip them of their rights.

~~~
Joeri
What's especially clever here is that most people will sign to get the
severance package (it's better than nothing), leaving the group who refuses to
sign too small to mount an effective legal defense against age discrimination
(the company can just outspend them in court). Meanwhile the company can just
say "we offered people a choice, and they chose" and pretend like they did
nothing wrong.

This is exactly the sort of thing unions are supposed to protect people from.
If something like this happened in my country there would be a general strike
and the country would be at a standstill.

~~~
s73v3r_
That's why there should never, ever be any conditions on a severance package.

~~~
rhombocombus
My spouse gave up an entire severance package because of the ludicrous terms
outlined in the agreement. She could have been sued for any comments she made
about her employer in perpetuity if she took her severance, which was neither
generous nor fair. Our lawyer advised us to walk away and didn't charge us for
his time to look at it either.

~~~
naveen99
Couldn't she be sued even after declining severance ?

~~~
rhombocombus
No, signing the draconian contract was a condition of receiving the severance,
so (as explained by our attorney) by not signing she was not bound by that
contract. It didn't amount to much money wise, not even a whole paycheck, and
we were fortunate enough to be able to pass it up.

~~~
naveen99
the natural state of things is anyone can sue anyone. So unless she got them
to sign a contract to not sue, they can sue her.

~~~
saratogacx
Sure. They could sue but they cannot sue for a slam dunk "breach of contract"
suit. They would actually have to prove damages which makes any case much more
expensive for the company.

------
scarface74
_The dislocation caused by IBM’s cuts has been especially great because until
recently the company encouraged its employees to think of themselves as
“IBMers” and many operated under the assumption that they had career-long
employment._

I tell everyone -- don't drink the Kool-Aid. Never believe that a company has
any loyalty and always keep an eye on the market. Even if you are paid well
now and see that your job isn't gaining you marketable skills -- leave. At the
end of the day, as a person in technology, your major resources are your
technical skills.

I will leave a company in a heartbeat if I see that the company's technical
direction isn't in line with what the market wants. I'm in my 40s and biggest
fear is being unemployable -- not being unemployed.

I haven't had to do it yet, but hopefully, I would have the discipline to
leave a job where I'm overpaid with respect to the market to take a job that
pays a little less that keeps me competitive.

~~~
archagon
I was surprised when I visited the Computer History Museum recently and
discovered that IBM actually had its own rally song:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU)

~~~
drdeadringer
I was surprised to visit the Computer History Museum and see VAX computers I
had to work with on my first job right out of college... in 2005, for a
defence firm. 1MB of RAM was a square foot of circuit board. I had a lot of
questions about my future.

~~~
chasil
Our plant still runs mission critical VAX VMS TDMS applications.

We junked our VAX 7000s about a decade ago and moved to the Charon emulator.
Played with VAX VMS on Simh, but everyone was too scared to put any real data
on it.

------
tyingq
_" IBM has eliminated more than 20,000 American employees ages 40 and over,
about 60 percent of its estimated total U.S. job cuts during those years"_

Combine this with the _" new tech leaders"_[1] affinity for hiring only young
people and it's getting tough out there.

Fortunately, non-technical fortune 500 companies seem still open to us grey
hairs in their IT orgs.

[1] Google, FB, Twitter, Uber, etc.

~~~
mipmap04
The company I'm at has been hiring these ex-big blue individuals in droves and
it's been awesome. Tons of talent combined with some truly remarkable
experience.

~~~
at-fates-hands
The group I work with at my current gig just hired two older devs to work with
us. One guy came from Lockheed Martin, the other spent most of his career in
finance at various banks and investment companies. Both have ungodly amounts
of experience with .Net, Java and Javascript.

Just being able to have them around has given our team an ocean of knowledge
to draw from. I know I'm a better developer just from asking for help and
bouncing stuff off of them. You can't put a price on stuff like this.

~~~
tyingq
That's exactly the value I was alluding to. Is paying these folks, say, 20%
more than someone in their 30's really a boat anchor, or is it an asset?

~~~
volkl48
Realistically speaking, the answer to that question depends on the current
makeup of your employees.

If most of your workforce is 50+, you probably don't need more highly
experienced people and are probably overpaying for some of the more basic
tasks some are doing. It's also not great for continuity if you're set to have
large segments of your workforce retiring in a small window of time.

On the other hand, if your workforce skews young and inexperienced, bringing
in some people with much more experience is probably going to be a valuable
resource for them that'll help everyone perform better, and will help you
avoid costly mistakes.

~~~
tyingq
That's a good observation. Managers should be maintaining a reasonable
balance.

------
ScottAS
IBM is an embarrassing company. They are not culling based on age, they are
culling based on severe lack of skills and dated values. IBM is saturated with
tech people who threw in their technical chops 20 years ago to become a
salesperson.

Everything they do, from their blockchain efforts to Watson, is so
embarrassingly driven by oldschool sales/marketing people that they can't be
taken seriously by technical decision makers at their customer companies. They
no longer have the ability to lead their customers in technical decisions.

~~~
mrj
Well, they let go of a lot of people with actual skills and knowledge because
they made too much money. People with the know-how (my Dad being one of them)
saw the writing on the wall decades ago and hit the door even before being
pushed out due to age.

They're absolutely embarrassing now. They've lost too many good people and
everybody knows what IBM's about now. They can focus on hiring Millenials all
they want, but which early-stage workers would really want to go to IBM? They
know what it'll be like. Lots of outsourcing, bureaucracy and bad decisions.
Not many would choose IBM over another offer.

Screwing over the workforce has consequences.

~~~
drdeadringer
> everybody knows what IBM's about now

I don't work for, nor have I applied to work for, IBM so maybe I'm more dense
than my question illustrates... but what is IBM about these days as you
mention? Please help me get rid of the rock over my head on this topic.

~~~
rhizome
_but what is IBM about these days as you mention?_

Since they sold off their consumer hardware businesses, it's all about their
Global Services consulting and a little bit of big iron
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer)).

------
1290cc
I'll offer a counter point to this, we hired a senior SVP from IBM about 2
years ago (he spent his entire career at IBM). IBM also tried to sue him when
he left. My company is a "born in the cloud" company so we have values and an
attitude that I would consider in alignment with modern, inclusive, customer
positive values, etc. He passed interviews and all the numbers showed he was a
high performer etc.

We brought him on hoping he would use his experience to grow our cloud
business into "the enterprise". What we found was we had hired a guy that
scoffed at ideas like UX, frequently bullied his team and the extended team in
calls. Would often go off on monologues and was extremely rigid in his top
down approach to management. It was a complete culture shock to the team and
customers. We understood that some of these things were part of the deal but
what we didnt expect was a near zero openness to ideas.

He had classic double speak of stating his door was always open to differing
opinions or ideas but a week later he would be telling the company on
conference calls that if people didn't like it there was the door. He brought
in his entire exec team from IBM and things continued to go down hill from
there. Some of his own team would make fun of our sales leaders until one of
them called these guys out and discovered they had little to no understanding
of how cloud pricing and subscription worked. It was a big moment.

My experience of him and his team makes me wonder if IBM is doing the right
thing, if that experience is common across IBM they are going to struggle to
compete with firms like my own and even worse attract talent that has no
interest in being bullied for decades before a promotion.

~~~
hitekker
The article describes the rank-and-file employees being fired, not the middle-
to-upper management behind the layoffs, a piece of which your company
unfortunately hired.

~~~
varjag
Not saying it's different for engineers, but most of the examples in the
article seem to be sales and marketing.

~~~
hitekker
You are correct. I have amended my comment.

------
justin66
If you're old enough to remember IBM being a real tech (evil) empire, the
striking thing is how much the swapping out of old career employees with young
people and contractors has correlated with IBM floundering and the cool parts
of the company being gradually replaced with services and... more services.

~~~
Paperweight
"""Services as a Service" as a Service" as a Service" (TM)

------
oldslowcorp
Could it be a case of correlation vs causation?

Age discrimination is bad. Firing employees because of their age, or maybe
more cynically, because if their elevated salaries, is a shit thing to do.

But what about getting rid of the employees who hold the company back? The
ones who drag their feet. The ones who are more concerned about protecting
their political standing than accomplishing good work. The ones who try to
avoid change, sometimes literally defended by "Well that's the way we've
always done it."

That breed of employee tends to have been at the company for a long time.
Often that means they're older in age, too. Making a clean sweep of folks like
that could appear to be age discrimination while actually being due to
performance.

~~~
cableshaft
These people don't have to be very old at all, actually. I've seen plenty of
young people start acting like this at a company after working there only a
year or two.

That being said, if it is an older person doing this, then it can be difficult
to let them go without it appearing to be due to age discrimination.

But I've seen enough layoffs to know that for a lot of companies, it's all
about saving money by getting rid of these people, not about their
performance, at least every time I've seen it happen.

I've even been told directly in a layoff it was because I was one of the
higher paid people in the company (it was a game studio, so I still wasn't
being paid all that much). I guess I was old for someone in the game industry,
since most people start fresh out of school and burn out of the industry in
less than five years.

My manager got laid off as well, who was in his 60s, did excellent at his job,
and had tons of amazing experience (I wish I worked on even just one of the
cool games he was lead on), but it was definitely because he was one of the
highest paid people there (if not the highest), not because of anything else.

~~~
mixmastamyk
> These people don't have to be very old at all, actually. I've seen plenty of
> young people start acting like this at a company after working there only a
> year or two.

I do remember a guy hired when we were in our twenties basically say something
like "we're not paid to think/above pay grade," when trying to come up with
solutions to problems. I was young enough to be surprised. :D

------
arcanearts
This is nothing new for them. My father started at IBM in 1968, and was forced
into "voluntary" early retirement in 1993. He at least got to keep his
pension, but if he hadn't gone voluntarily and opted to stick it out like some
of his colleagues, he would have been let go in the following months and lost
everything.

~~~
speby
How would he have lost everything? The pension would stay no matter what.

~~~
drdeadringer
> The pension would stay no matter what.

I have a doubt, because "business in America".

------
mankash666
Among professional jobs, software is the only one where you go out of demand
as you age. Doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, architects routinely peak in
their 50s, but in tech if you haven't transitioned into management by 40,
you're not valued anymore.

How did this even come to be?

~~~
rankam
Software developers aren't considered in the same league as doctors, lawyers,
civil engineers, or architects. Software developers are viewed as construction
workers by most people and businesses.

~~~
acdha
This is going to upset a lot of developers who expect the boom to last
forever. A ton of people think they’re on the same side as senior management
because they get paid better than average and have been able to get better
working conditions; very few people in management share this view.

The brilliant thing was getting so many to buy into libertarian propaganda and
actively fight against things like unionization or labor laws which would
reduce the power imbalance.

------
TomMasz
I just participated in a "Voluntary Reduction In Force" at (company I can't
mention for legal reasons). It was applied across all of R&D but only people
with 15 years or more of service were allowed to apply. We're being paid a
week of salary and healthcare for each year worked so it's not too bad. But
even so it was abundantly clear who they were targeting.

~~~
maxxxxx
One week of salary per year served is actually pretty bad. That money is gone
quickly. In my company it used to be 4 weeks per year. Now it's two.

~~~
cableshaft
Wow 4 weeks? I didn't know there was companies like that out there, especially
now.

Our company reduced it to 1 week per year (claimed it was the 'standard', and
it would save them money so they could spend it on being so innovative
elsewhere), then reduced 401k matching from them paying once per quarter to
you have to be employed on December 31 of that year or they don't have to
match for the entire year (crazy, I know), and then after they got those two
things in place started axing tens of thousands of people's jobs, and saved
tons of money in the process, I'm sure. These policy changes also lead to
people voluntarily resigning and thus giving them lower layoff numbers too.

I'm probably not sticking around much longer myself, but I had a few too many
life changes (like buying a house) that kept me from leaving earlier.

~~~
maxxxxx
I am sure the top guys in your company took a significant amount of the
savings as bonus.

------
pjdemers
Pay off your mortgage. When you get pushed out of the workforce because of age
(and you will), having no rent and no mortgage puts the situation in a
different perspective. It becomes more of a beginning than an end.

~~~
gowld
Paying a mortgage is simply moving numbers from one column to another, and
usually into a less tax-favorable column with a worse risk-return profile.
_accumulating wealth_ is the way to thrive in unemployment.

~~~
nitwit005
Reducing debt is equivalent to accumulating wealth. Your wealth increases as
the debt goes down.

~~~
gowld
Reducing debt by _spending your wealth_ cancels out the wealth increase from
reducing debt.

~~~
nitwit005
The interest payments on debt are almost always going to be larger than a
"safe" investment would provide in returns, because the lenders need to make
money somehow.

------
seymour333
And they probably saved millions in wages while they were at it.

Coming out of college as a mature student I saw so many of my younger
classmates absolutely throwing themselves at the worst offers the local job
pool presented.

I kept telling them just don't accept, wait for a better offer, look
elsewhere. The problem is, at least in the market I'm in, there seems to be a
practice of wage fixing. It's the same bad offer everywhere. I talked to a few
recruiters at those companies, asked some pointed questions about compensation
that more experienced employees tend to ask, and watched them just shut down.
It was less about the "millennial advantage" and more about the benefits of
naivety on their bottom line.

I get that having more work/life experience in general qualifies me for a
slightly higher starting wage, but I held out and refused any offers from low
ball employers and started $10k higher than most of my colleagues who
graduated at the same time.

It's horrible that this older demographic is being discriminated against and
forced out of their jobs, but this isn't only about age discrimination. The
goal isn't to acquire "digitally native" employees (not entirely). The goal is
to save money on wages and lower the wage expectations of an entire generation
of people.

...unless I'm wrong and everyone who replaced someone who was forced out is
doing great and all those boomers were just becoming stagnant dead weight and
deserved what they got.

~~~
politips
boomers? The baby boom generation was born between the mid-1940s and 1960s.
They're all in their late 60s and 70s now and most have long retired. The age-
out demography we are talking about now generally are their children currently
in their early-40s to early 50s. The dial-up generation.

~~~
seymour333
fair enough, don't know why I lump all the "olds" together like that. There
has to be a better name for them than the dial-up generation. I grew up with
dial-up and I'm not that old.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Gen X, while I'm not fond of it, is usually the term here. Grew up with
Commodore 64, saw the birth of the web and built it up, now considered too
expensive, etc.

------
shineymetal
This is exactly why I would never consider a full time job here. I was an
intern and watched my entire team get laid off regardless of performance.
Older workers were most definitely targeted.

------
FlyingSideKick
I wonder if Amazon, Facebook and Google are using similar performance
management tactics to drive the attrition of older workers?

“A slide from a similar presentation prepared last spring for the same leaders
called for “re-profiling current talent” to “create room for new talent.”
Presentations for 2015 and 2016 for the 50,000-employee software group also
included plans for “aggressive performance management” and emphasized the need
to “maintain steady attrition to offset hiring.””

------
qserpent
If it's all about the money, companies should offer voluntary pay cuts. I know
a few folks who'd take that over "voluntary" retirement any day.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It’s harder to hide the age bias if you cut pay.

~~~
jjnoakes
This only matters if it isn't about the money...

------
smoll
I'm not sure this is just IBM lacking the vision to see their older employees
for the value that they truly hold, rather, they're just following the path of
least resistance. I see this same sort of scenario playing out in other
companies across the globe too; why should any company be innovative enough to
value and empower older workers when they can just exploit young, naive
talent?

How do we prevent this exact same vicious cycle from playing out all over
again in 25-30 years when Millennials are the grey-haired ones with an
inability to "innovate" or "connect" with the younger generation? If anything,
with the rapid pace of technology only accelerating over time, future
generations will become irrelevant "old heads" on an even shorter timeline.

~~~
AstralStorm
Either that or the cycle stops due to being unsustainable. So instead of gray
heads it will be most paid workers. Usually most paid for a reason that's
correlated with achievement or experience.

------
lasermike026
This speaks to me.

[https://youtu.be/yL7X3DTyS2Q](https://youtu.be/yL7X3DTyS2Q)

------
bitmapbrother
It's kind of ironic that it's the old heads at the top, like Ginni Rometty,
that are the very ones responsible for the position IBM is in.

------
graycat
IBM has one main problem: They are a sick culture. One consequence is that
they are a sick company. Their sickness causes them to do self-destructive
things which makes them an even sicker company.

Here are some parts of the sick IBM culture:

(1) Marketing.

"You might think that IBM is a technology company or a computer company, but
you would be wrong. IBM is a marketing company: They look for opportunities to
sell. They might get into grocery stores tomorrow if they thought that there
was money to be made there." \-- IIRC from a manager of a large IBM branch
office. Same guy, IIRC: "You might think that IBM research comes up with
powerful new technology. IBM development turns this technology into good, new
products. Then IBM marketing sells these products and makes money. That's
exactly backwards: Instead, IBM marketing comes up with what new products can
be sold at a profit. IBM development builds these products and gets them ready
for the market. If development has trouble, they may go to IBM research for
solutions. What IBM charges for the products has nothing to do with what IBM's
costs are: Instead, IBM sells the products for what the customers are willing
to pay."

Consequences: (A) IBM respects people who do well managing marketing efforts.
(B) IBM does not much respect technical people or people not in management.
(C) The decision makers in IBM are marketing people who are not very
technical. So, these people are slow to see the market and marketing potential
of new technology. (D) Long IBM's approach to what to sell was that their main
customers, large banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, would
grab their IBM marketing representatives and scream about problems they had.
With enough screaming with clearly enough market potential, finally IBM would
develop and sell a solution.

(2) IBM Management

In this way, part of the IBM culture was the primacy of the middle and upper
managers. High stability was valued. Innovation was not. The higher managers
had staffs to thoroughly study each decision. Then the manager had plenty of
cover for the decisions they did make.

IIRC, an early remark of IBM CEO Lou Gerstner was that "IBM is the most
arrogant, inwardly directed, process oriented company I've ever seen, and I've
seen a lot of companies.".

(3) Stuck with Mainframes

So, these attitudes caused IBM to miss out on essentially everything past 3270
terminals connected to CICS (customer information control system -- for
building and running interactive applications, e.g., for order entry) on an
IBM 370 family _mainframe_.

So, sure, can see this situation as a case of "The Innovator's Dilemma". I.e.,
IBM was slow to get into lines of business that would compete, under sell,
undercut, beat IBM's mainframe, cash cow business.

(4) IBM Missed out

Long a standard attitude in IBM was that IBM needed only high margin
businesses and should not try to compete in low margin businesses. So, with
this thinking, IBM passed on the businesses of Intel, Microsoft, Cisco,
Oracle, Google, Qualcomm, Apple, etc.

So, IBM missed out on the growth of TCP/IP, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, the
Internet, Web browsers, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.

With high irony, IBM long made the crucial, core chips used in the high end
routers of Cisco and Juniper. Why? IBM had a microelectronics division, and
they saw those chips as a business opportunity. But IBM did not pick up that
ball and run with it to compete against Cisco or Juniper in high end routers.
Due to J. Cocke and his 801 computer, IBM Research was early in RISC. There
was some usage of RISC in some IBM mainframe I/O subsystems and in IBM's AIX
workstation lines, but RISC became a big thing (e.g., the current Hennessy,
Patterson Turing award that claims that now 99% of processors are RISC) but
apparently not for IBM. IBM was ahead in magnetic recording with giant magneto
resistance disk heads, but Western Digital, etc. were successful with disks
but not IBM. IBM had high end research on architecture, algorithms, and
software for high end disk clusters, but, IIRC, EMC made the big bucks there,
not IBM. IBM Research was early into "wearable" computers, but Apple got rich
with the iPhone, etc., not IBM. At one time, IBM actually ran all of the
Internet, but they never saw the opportunity there until too late. IBM had an
early Web browser but let others get big leverage in the browser wars. At one
time, IBM had the TCP/IP stack in chip hardware, but they failed to make big
bucks with that. At one time, maybe still, much of the backbone of the
Internet needs an IBM-invented amplifier that amplifies the optical signals on
the optical fibers without converting back to digital; that was great leverage
over the backbone of the Internet, but IBM didn't take that opportunity. The
chip manufacturers are only just now moving to extreme UV for their light
sources, but parts of IBM saw the point back in the 1980s or so and built a
cyclotron as an X-ray source for a microelectronics lithography light source.
Today there are lots of chip companies -- Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, etc. -- and
several high end chip foundries but apparently IBM is not a major player
there. IBM was early into social computing, with Prodigy, etc., but AOL and
later Facebook did well. Prodigy was also with Sears and for on-line selling,
but Amazon made the big bucks there. IBM was early into really good work in
virtual machines, e.g., the 360/67 of 1967 and its CP/67 virtual machine
software. But VMware made the big bucks with virtual machines. IBM was a
leader in relational database, with System R and DB/2 and the software on the
System/38, etc., but Oracle, SQL Server, etc. are the database success stories
now. IBM had object oriented software in firmware in 1970 or so, but
apparently IBM never became a leader in object oriented computing. PCs? IBM
was essentially the leader, but Microsoft and Intel made the big bucks from
PCs, not IBM. Cloud computing? I've heard of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google but
much less about IBM. Laser printers? Same song, next verse.

(5) Defeat from Jaws of Victory

It goes on this way: In plain terms, from 1980 to 1990, IBM was essentially
the technology leader in essentially everything in computing, but the IBM top
managers never saw how to make money with that technology. So, 1990 computer
and Internet technology, the open door for likely the biggest step up in
technology, economic productivity, and more in all of human history, and IBM
was determined to ignore it.

It appears that generally IBM is a massive case of organizational behavior
goal subordination: The middle and upper managers want to crush anything new;
they are not successful in this effort outside IBM but quite successful inside
IBM.

For many years, the IBM division managers would meet at the Armonk HQ, give
their financial results, nicely ahead of projections, and project even better
results for the next year. But near 1990, somehow the results were commonly
less good than the projections. The consensus was that "God had ceased to
smile on IBM".

(6) For Individuals

For a worker in the US economy, for a good job, income, and financial
security, it is their responsibility to get that done. A very common approach
is to start and run a successful business. An electrician who has a truck and
an assistant and who stays busy can do better financially than 80% of the US
IBM employees. Same for a guy who has several crews mowing grass and plowing
snow; same for a guy doing well running several McDonald's, Burger Kings, or
Wendy's. Same for a dentist. A K-12 school teacher or a nurse has a more
stable career than nearly anyone in IBM.

(7) Firing People

IBM fires lots of people because IBM management doesn't know how to organize
work for those people in ways that make money. IBM likes to fire older people
so that they can blame the failures on the older people being "behind" in
technology. Also the managers don't like the older, technical people as
subordinates because the older people know too much and can challenge the
manager. In particular, the managers don't like technical people and don't
want any technical people who know more about technology than the managers.
Since the managers with respect are marketing people with poor technical
qualifications, those marketing managers like to fire to older experts in
technology. It's dysfunctional organizational behavior goal subordination,
arrogant, inwardly directed, process oriented, etc.

(8) Future of IBM

The solution? Sure, Darwin is on the case: Slowly IBM will shrink and
disappear. Maybe near the end, Bill Gates will buy all of it and put what is
left of it in a museum.

~~~
HillaryBriss
item 4 is particularly interesting. it sounds like IBM's greatest missed
opportunities -- really huge ones -- were caused by failures in
business/marketing/management, not engineering and technology.

~~~
graycat
Right: With high irony, top management believed that their special abilities
were in marketing and not technology, but, except for marketing cash cow
mainframes to big customers locked in due to their unique applications
software, the marketing was awful while the technology was terrific. As I
started with, IBM was a sick culture.

------
yuhong
I dislike anti-discrimination laws for anything other than manual labor
anyway. I think they are probably fundamentally flawed.

------
ScottAS
IBM is an embarrassing company. They are not culling based on age, they are
culling based on severe lack of skills and dated values. IBM is saturated with
tech people who threw in their technical chops 20 years ago to become a
salesperson.

Everything they do, from their blockchain efforts to Watson, is so
embarrassingly driven by oldschool sales/marketing people that they can't be
taken seriously by technical decision makers at their customer companies.

------
rb808
I dont know about this. Its clear that IBM's products aren't as good as
Amazon/Google, is this because their workforce? I can see AWS & Google has
much younger devs who are fluent in more modern systems.

I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good.

~~~
Cthulhu_
> I really have to retire before 50 because it doesn't look good.

I'll make a killing as an old fashioned java developer at that age, probably.

~~~
kls
COBOL developers did just fine, you may not get to work in the new hot tech
but there is a huge market for aging entrenched technologies. You average Java
developer is late 30's to 40's and it's not uncommon to see whole teams of 40
something developers in a java shop. There is life outside the valley.

~~~
twunde
I'll mention that COBOL devs are no longer doing just fine. I had an ex-
coworker that had trouble finding well-paying COBOL jobs. A lot of it has been
offshored or outsourced to low-paid consulting companies like Tata and the
like.

~~~
le-mark
I have anecdotal evidence of this as well. A local company that formerly
employed thousands of cobol devs has had aggressive layoffs and offshoring
over the past 10 years. Lots and lots of unemployed cobol devs here.

------
draw_down
We all know how it works in our industry. I do find it bitterly ironic that
all our diversity efforts (which I otherwise fully support) rarely or never
even touch on this issue. The one form of discrimination everyone will face
unless they die or leave tech.

But, you know, labor costs.

------
jorblumesea
Completely anecdotal, but I've interviewed a few IBM lifers and veterans for
positions outside IBM. Their skills were lacking, to say the least. It's
unclear why. Perhaps when you joined IBM "back in the day" a CS degree was
less important? Or maybe the business itself stressed other skills over
technical proficiency?

While ageism is a serious problem in the industry, I also don't think it's
fair to equate seniority with competence. There are many wizard old heads, but
not every old head is a wizard.

~~~
mancerayder
A CS degree, you say? What in the world use is that other than jumpstarting
the first couple of years of employment? And getting filtered past people who
believe it is important?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I've always seen some of these older companies as being
big on hiring people from academia (and also military for some reason - it
seems many of these folks have military backgrounds).

~~~
jorblumesea
Joining the industry in the 90s wasn't anything like joining it now, at least
for entry level positions. Just saying, the industry was different back then
and knowing fundamentals seemed less important than slinging code.

------
mistermann
On one hand, while harsh, laying off older workers (even the ones who _have_
kept up to date on technology) makes good economic sense. On the other hand,
not all global companies are limited by the type of worker's rights
legislation noted in the article.

While this survival of the fittest, hyper-capitalism approach will optimize
return on investment and technological innovation, I suspect it is also
~destroying the careers of many high achievers who would likely have
outperformed in other fields without having their careers derailed.

Does anyone see a way to reconcile this?

~~~
cornholio
> On one hand, while harsh, laying off older workers (even the ones who have
> kept up to date on technology) makes good economic sense

It's actually a completely irrational thing to do, you would not get rid of an
experienced, productive, loyal employee, unless you are forced into a
compensation plan that no longer makes sense and there is no way to diminish
that paycheck. In light of the large increase for IT compensation in the last
decades, this seems the exception.

In my 20s I worked with 60 year olds that were better than all of my
young/senior peers, with deep, multidisciplinary understanding of our product,
technology and market.

This is why I have serious reservations about the way the issue is presented
in the article, as purely a prejudice against old age. That would make sense
say in the airline industry, driven by the customer's prejudices, but in tech
it is simply self-defeating, you are not gaining anything, there is no motive,
quite the opposite. That is if, and only if, the employees keep up to date,
productive and motivated.

A large part of the article is bemoaning how IBM failed their expectations for
a job for life where they can retire from. That is a huge warning sign of an
employee who no longer competes in the market and sees his paycheck as an
earned right.

~~~
mistermann_2
Unfortunately, I screwed up the question. As downvotes will have me in the
penalty box until sometime later tonight, I made a new username in hopes of
salvaging some value from my incomplete original asking of the question as I
feel it is an important topic.

A hopefully improved asking of the same question:

Two employees, one 22 years old, one 50 years old. The younger employee makes
$46k, the older employee makes $127k.

While the older employee has slightly better useful to the company experience,
an _omniscient_ (this is an sincere attempt to stop people from avoiding the
question being asked) being would judge the younger employee to have
objectively superior cost/benefits to the company. In other words, _for the
context of this particular question only_ , the older work does NOT offer
experience-based value superior to the younger worker.

In some countries, such as the USA, the older employee would be protected by
age discrimination legislation. However, not all global companies are limited
by the type of worker's rights legislation noted in the article.

While this survival of the fittest, hyper-capitalism approach will optimize
return on investment and technological innovation, I suspect it is also
~destroying the careers of many high achievers who would likely have
outperformed in other fields without having their careers derailed.

As well, in a globalized free trade world, this would limit the
competitiveness of countries who have passed such legislation. (Once again,
our omniscient being above has confirmed this assertion.)

Does anyone see a way to reconcile this? Or in other words, how might one
explain how this is "no problem, _at all_ "?

~~~
cornholio
Having been through it myself (buried for voicing a perfectly legitimate and
reasoned, but politically unpopular position), I would say HN has a downvotes
problem and would benefit from some metamoderation facility or at least
significant reduction of available downvotes. They should be reserved for
disruption and trolling and not much else.

> Two employees, one 22 years old, one 50 years old. The younger employee
> makes $46k, the older employee makes $127k.

Good god, why is the older employee take home such a massive paycheck for
doing "slightly better" work than an entry level grunt? This is clearly a
payscale that favors seniority above everything else, that's your real
problem, not the aging workforce.

I would say the exact opposite is usually true in most corporations, an order
of magnitude productivity disparity is compressed in a 2:1, $50.000 to
$100.000 compensation band. So while the old timer with the $100.000 paycheck
might be somewhat less productive than a hotshot hire with the same advanced
salary expectations, they are still _many times_ more productive than the
fresh out of college girl expecting half their salary.

When you factor in the low friction, low risk, experience, loyalty and living
institutional memory the older employees represent, you quickly realize how
disruptive and stupid it is to simply throw them to the curve.

~~~
mistermann
Agreed, HN has a moderation problem. I think the culture here has changed
_significantly_ over the last decade (how time flies), but particularly in the
last year or two. The former open-mindedness has been replaced by a somewhat
militant leftist culture, at least in some respects. Strong opinions, with no
reasoning to back them up.

Anyways, the point I was trying to make is: older people are often drastically
overpaid (seniority, unions, bad contracts, legislative protection,
whatever......historic baggage). Countries (and in turn companies that
outsource to them) that do not have these issues have a distinct competitive
advantage in this respect.

So while it's fine to criticize short thinking, there is also a legitimate and
serious issue involved as well.

