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HP Hit With Age-Discrimination Suit Claiming Old Workers Purged (mercurynews.com)
Hewlett-Packard started laying off workers in 2012, before it separated into HP Inc. and HP Enterprise last year. The company has continued to cut thousands of jobs since. As a result of the "restructuring," an age discrimination lawsuit has been filed by four former employees of HP alleging they were ousted amid a purge of older workers. The Mercury News reports: "The goal 'was to make the company younger,' said the complain filed Aug. 18 in U.S. District Court in San Jose. 'In order to get younger, HP intentionally discriminated against its older employees by targeting them for termination [...] and then systematically replacing them with younger employees. HP has hired a disproportionately large number of new employees under the age of 40 to replace employees aged 40 and older who were terminated.' Arun Vatturi, a 15-year Palo Alto employee at HP who was a director in process improvement until he was laid off in January at age 52, and Sidney Staton, in sales at HP in Palo Alto for 16 months until his layoff in April 2015 at age 54, have joined in the lawsuit with a former employee from Washington, removed at age 62, and one from Texas, out at age 63. The group is seeking class-action status for the court action and claims HP broke state and federal laws against age discrimination." The lawsuit also alleges that written guidelines issued by HP's human resources department mandated that 75 percent of all hires outside of the company be fresh from school or "early career" applicants.
Being expensive describes all the executives as well, who do less work than most employees. If parts are too expensive and are replaced with inexpensive ones, then you end up with poorer quality. For workers this is even more true, cutting costs on employees will always lead to worse quality. Of course a lot of companies just don't care about quality, they want a profit in the short run only.
A company is not just a day care center for adults. There are real products being built and services being sold. If you have cheap ass workers then you end up with a cheap ass company. The leaders of these companies probably don't even care that they have a lousy company and a lousy product, as they'll destroy company after company while collecting huge incomes along the way.
Even making them less expensive doesn't seem to help. Young people have "upward potential", whereas an older person who is applying for a job that much younger people also applied for clearly is a "loser" with a dead end career... Never mind the years of experience that he brings. And young people "exciting new ideas and insights to the company", whereas old guys are "change-averse". True to some extent, but sometimes that is the benefit of experience as well. I worked in an organisation with a great mix of old and young, and every now and then some young manager would come up with a brilliant new way of doing things. To which the old guys often responded: "yeah, we tried that before, in '86, '95, 2001 and 2007, and it didn't work. How are we going to try this differently this time?"
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
More experienced employees usually have far better dollar-per-result ratios than inexperienced employees. That's why they make more.
I charge $250 an hour yet have more work than I can handle because it is 1/4 the price that companies pay for a large team to get a similar amount of work done. Am I expensive? NO.
Experience is NOT an asset when no one has experience with the latest and greatest technology.
Experience ensures fewer mistakes are made no matter how "old" or "new" the technology in use. I would pass up five young inexperienced engineers in favor of a known good senior architect and senior project manager EVERY time and easily justify the decision to management. Same cost.
Me? I'm just an old bum who's outlived my usefulness.
Sincere question - why do you say that? Experience is supposed to bring value to the table. Are you not able to bring value to the table with your experience? This isn't a personal attack - genuinely curious.
Myself as AC - I'm the cog that helps other cogs work faster. When I'm off on vacation - work still gets done but at a 33-50% slower pace. That translates to millions of dollars saved per year by keeping me around. That's the value I bring to the table with experience.