Cutting 'Old Heads' at IBM (propublica.org)

An anonymous reader shares a report: As the world's dominant technology firm, payrolls at International Business Machines swelled to nearly a quarter-million U.S. white-collar workers in the 1980s. Its profits helped underwrite a broad agenda of racial equality, equal pay for women and an unbeatable offer of great wages and something close to lifetime employment, all in return for unswerving loyalty. But when high tech suddenly started shifting and companies went global, IBM faced the changing landscape with a distinction most of its fiercest competitors didn't have: a large number of experienced and aging U.S. employees.

The company reacted with a strategy that, in the words of one confidential planning document, would "correct seniority mix." It slashed IBM's U.S. workforce by as much as three-quarters from its 1980s peak, replacing a substantial share with younger, less-experienced and lower-paid workers and sending many positions overseas. ProPublica estimates that in the past five years alone, 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. In making these cuts, IBM has flouted or outflanked U.S. laws and regulations intended to protect later-career workers from age discrimination, according to a ProPublica review of internal company documents, legal filings and public records, as well as information provided via interviews and questionnaires filled out by more than 1,000 former IBM employees.

Comments

Institutional memory down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

How much money could they have saved if the 40+ folks were still around to point out the historical mistakes they were making?

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[mbourgon]

You assume they would have listened and learned.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[PolygamousRanchKid]

You assume they would have listened and learned.

Those who listened and learned . . . have been sacked.

Those responsible for the sacking . . . have also been sacked.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[skids]

Who knows. It does strike me that the authentication bypass in the AMT management processor might have been just the sort of thing a seasoned C coder might have spotted.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[rickb928]

You need several head-down coders to make stuff work.

You need a lot fewer old hands to look things over and point out the problems.

When Fat Lou Gerstner took over he essentially put everyone at IBM that didn't touch a product, deliver it, or face a customer on notice. Fortunately he spared the payroll department, but many mid managers disappeared. And so did many very capable people, some of whom went on to become IBM customers elsewhere.

Now the work has changed dramatically over the 8-10 years, and the employees have to change also, and to whine that they have to be 'allowed to change' doesn't work. IBM is in the midst of a lot of changes, GS being one, and they are playing a dangerous game by ditching experience and embracing offshoring in the name of cost reduction. It's not fair, but little in life is fair.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[0100010001010011]

How much of it is dead weight promoting and developing stillborn technologies like ClearCase, JazzSCM, DOORS, etc?

IBM has a massive catalog of terrible software that they like to shove down the throats of businesses. Business are realizing that stuff like Git is a lot cheaper in the long run.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Exactly, typical shortsightedness of MBA folks who have zero respect for experience.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

"... Business are realizing that stuff like Git is a lot cheaper in the long run."

Exactly! That's what companies are telling their older workers..."Git!"

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[ebh]

IBM shot themselves in the foot with ClearCase. It (the entire product line) is so insanely expensive that it really is cheaper to replace it all with FOSS and pay extra people to glue it all together. Worse, you still have to deal with IBM when buying it--their sales "force" would make me want to die of cancer before buying the cure from them.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[rickb928]

Then proving the discrimination leads to the cure.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is in the midst of a lot of changes, GS being one, and they are playing a dangerous game by ditching experience and embracing offshoring in the name of cost reduction.

I keep hearing people preach cost reductions in relation to off-shoring but I've never seen it in real life. You usually have to spend much more money in managing the remote resources and repeatedly sending stuff back for reworks.

There's massive value in having your product managers, designers and developers all sitting in the same space where they can talk to each other directly to nut things out.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[rickb928]

This is becoming true, but was not always. As the offshore resources rise in cost they become less competitive.

In call centers you've seen this, as India has lost its preeminent position as the preferred English-speaking call center region, both to the Philippines and to rural USA. This is not a problem for India as they focus on higher-value opportunities, and the Philippines will follow suit soon enough. Rural America is in a different spot, and will face competition from urban regions as opportunities dwindle there.

Where I work we've groomed offshore providers to deliver value, in part by cycling managers on and off to deliver a consistent production experience. But we've also farmed more work out to onshore teams and code factories, and taken more in house, as we expand our software work at the 'expense' of what I'll call 'people-work'.

How that is done is proprietary, and key to our profitability, so details are not forthcoming. But we see oncoming forces demanding more and more, and automation will be key to survival.

It's no longer an axiom here that offshore is either less productive or more cost-effective. Either condition can be avoided with proper management.

Re: Institutional memory down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the way I have seen it go down every time over my 38 yr career. If it is a big layoff and you as a manager have bee told to RIF 10+ staff in your group, you will be next.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a client like this. One of his employees had a beef and managed to get most of the office fired. Then the boss found out and fired that guy. Then the Feds found some really uncouth stuff in that office and shut them all down.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[lsatenstein]

You need several head-down coders to make stuff work.

You need a lot fewer old hands to look things over and point out the problems.

When Fat Lou Gerstner took over he essentially put everyone at IBM that didn't touch a product, deliver it, or face a customer on notice. Fortunately he spared the payroll department, but many mid managers disappeared. And so did many very capable people, some of whom went on to become IBM customers elsewhere.

Now the work has changed dramatically over the 8-10 years, and the employees have to change also, and to whine that they have to be 'allowed to change' doesn't work. IBM is in the midst of a lot of changes, GS being one, and they are playing a dangerous game by ditching experience and embracing offshoring in the name of cost reduction. It's not fair, but little in life is fair.

Is off shore where IBM and other companies are finding business growth. The USA market is saturated and is highly competitive. Foreign lands offer better opportunity than the domestic European/American market places.

The rules is: Go where your customers are located.

Re:Institutional memory down the drain

[eric_harris_76]

A moose once bit my sister.

The UBI fanboys are enablers

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

The tech industry doesn't want to face the fact that its pro-immigration, pro-outsourcing, pro-get-it-done-no-matter-who-gets-fucked culture makes this necessary. Most of the clamoring for a UBI is essentially this if you read between the lines:

I'm not going to change how I do business, so you better change the welfare system to not inconvenience me.

If we punished outsourcing, H1B use, etc. with hefty FICA taxes levied on their users, we could not only create more domestic jobs, but help reduce the deficits in our welfare system.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[postbigbang]

You mean the corporate welfare system, where corporations stash profits overseas, and find ways to pay not one cent of US Federal taxes? The one that so vastly underpays its employees that the employees have to get government assistance for basics like food and housing-- not to mention the screaming costs of health care?

BizAmericaInc has been playing both sides of the issue for decades. Corporations are mandated to provide a maximized return for shareholders, and can be sued if they don't. The very phrase "Corporate Citizen" has become an excuse to flaunt the law, and kill the very idea of seniority as a base of pay. They'll make it up by spending face-saving PR to give themselves the make-over of goodness, then bribe a politician to get the legislation or taxpayer-funded growth bonds needed to continue to screw the system. Bah.

Re: The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Anonymous Coward]

The US tech senior execs, serial entrepreneurs, VC, angel investors and the rest assume if you're too old to work 100 hours per week, sleep in your office regularly, and aren't content letting nannies raise your kids, then you won't be any use in making them richer. It's an exploitive caste system.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[DNS-and-BIND]

The problem is that unless they pay their workers shit and have endless layoffs, they can't make money. These companies shouldn't exist in the first place. They only exist to pay executive salaries and exploit workers. Look at me, Jesus I sound like a Marxist. But here we are.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[TheDarkMaster]

I doubt the UBI has any relation with this case... The problem is that the famous 1% are very determined to profit even more regardless of the consequences, and the UBI is just one of the attempts to mitigate these consequences to avoid a social disaster that may, among other things, wipe out the country itself.

I would have gone to the root of the problem and killed the 1%.

Re: The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids? Kids? If you were supposed to have kids and family we would have issued them to you.

Why do you think Amazon HQ has an extensive dogs-at-work policy but no day care facilities? Why do you think GLBT people are way over-represented in these companies? Why do you think they are happy to pay for egg freezing (if you can't unfreeze the eggs at 43... not our problem)?

In the bifurcated economy, the knowledge worker in the 85th-95th percentiles is supposed to be a worker-bee 80-hour-week drone. Meanwhile, the majority of American kids are born to a mother enrolled in Medicaid and the majority of K-12 students qualify for free or reduced lunches.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[umghhh]

1% can do what they do only because we let them. This is of course oversimplification - the 1% is a group in normal sense of the word exactly as much as we i.e. the rest 99% are. It seems to me that competitive systems are what nature has in store for us. Most of them suck at being just to old folks. This his dire consequences for me and you only if we are silly enough to work for living. This was always like this and chances, quite big ones in fact, are that this will prevail in the future.
Throughout eons the systems that were broken enough for folks to be fired for age on large scale (or left to die of starvation in far enough in the past times) were from time to time suffering either from internal turmoil, revolutions etc or from war with external enemies.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Applehu Akbar]

If we punished outsourcing, H1B use, etc. with hefty FICA taxes levied on their users, we could not only create more domestic jobs, but help reduce the deficits in our welfare system.

Like the hedge fund bro tax, wasn't this another campaign promise that went nowhere?

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Immerman]

The biggest threat UBI addresses is automation, and nobody has yet proposed an effective way to tax that. There's a persistent myth that automation will always simply open new opportunities, new kinds of jobs, while eliminating the old ones, but that ignores exactly what is being automated.

Consider: the industrial revolution with its rapid advancement in mechanized labor largely eliminated those whose place in the workforce was providing brute strength. Humans have a lot more to offer than that, but the labor market for horses and mules never recovered, contributing heavily to the US population crashing from around 22 million in 1900 to only 3 million by 1960.

Today, increasingly dexterous robots are pushing humans into ever-smaller roles on the assembly line, it won't be long before their dexterity exceeds our own, and the only role for humans there will be in roles exercising judgment. Meanwhile AI is rapidly catching up with us in terms of domain specific judgement - we already have AI beginning to outperform lawyers, pathologists, etc. in specific contexts. And there's just not really a whole lot of demand for broad-spectrum good judgement within the economy - and frankly, there's not a lot of humans that possess it anyway. That pretty much leaves what, art and receptionists?

And everyone working those service and luxury jobs will still need to buy all the staples - food, housing, durable goods, so the flow of wealth from the population to the production industries will continue unabated despite automation, but there will no longer be a reciprocal flow of wealth from the production industries to the general population (the former blue-collar employees), which is completely unsustainable. It only takes a handful of people to maintain and manage a fully automated factory or farm, and they can't hope to buy enough service and entertainment to transfer enough wealth to the general population to allow them to purchase all the goods being produced.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Rob Y.]

Well, not that they did it for the right reasons, but the fact that the new tax bill makes it less beneficial to stash corporate profits overseas, at least that will be less of an issue in the future. Of course, no attempt was made to make up for the reduced corporate tax rates - and in fact, the expected one time windfall from repatriated foreign profits was used to portray the cost of the bill as lower than it really is (no dishonest rationale went unused).

Deficits be damned - or used as a reason to cut Social Security, etc., because Republican ideologues have no shame. They also have no genuine ideology - and what they have is merely a fig leaf to maximize the benefits to their donors. Sure, maybe some of them are stupid enough to believe that trickle-down economics works. But if you're smart enough to get elected based on lies, I'm gonna assume you're also smart enough to know you're lying. Not all of them are flat out psychopaths.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[barc0001]

> Most of the clamoring for a UBI is essentially this if you read between the lines

Bullshit. Most of the UBI clamoring is instead directed at addressing massive poverty even with "full time" workers. Look no further than one of the country's largest employers - Walmart. Most 'full time' work there is 31 hours a week at minimum wage and many of those full time workers are also on the food stamp program because they make so little they qualify. The same story can be told for millions of workers in similar positions in the service industry. And automation is going to make that problem worse.

I agree with cutting or eliminating H1B use but it's not going to have the effect you think it will on the economy as a whole, only a modest chunk of the tech sector.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Hognoxious]

The very phrase "Corporate Citizen" has become an excuse to flaunt the law

They wave it around in a boastful manner?

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[jafac]

It's not that the 1% want to be richer.

It's that they want to wipe out the middle class. If there is no middle class to donate to politicians, then buying politicians becomes cheaper because they don't have to be in a bidding war with socialist-leaning workers, in order to buy Policy. (which includes tax cuts, deregulation, and immunity from the justice system that the rest of us must obey).

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[jasenj1]

If you live in the USA, you are the 1% - globally speaking.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Anonymous Coward]

Senseless rhetorical crap. The US has the highest Corporate Tax Rate in the Industrial World. Companies get a break to move that rate down from almost %50 to something less obscene in return for what ever hoops the Feds want them to jump through and YOU CALL THAT IT WELFARE. All the while, Earned Income Tax Credit, (EITC), where poor Americans get more money back on their taxes than they paid in is called a Tax Refund. Bull... getting a gift of money from the Federal Budget is Welfare. Paying money into the Federal Budget is taxes. The rest is spin, Comrade.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[i286NiNJA]

Corporations are mandated to provide a maximized return for shareholders, and can be sued if they don't.

This is a popular meme but it was invented to absolve psychopath decision makers of responsibility. The reality is that this rarely actually happens and though I am not a lawyer I it seems to me that CxOs regularly engage in even more negligent behavior in pursuit of short term profits.

There is only the weakest of mandates that they maximize shareholder value, I am fuzzy on the details but it's along the lines that they actually do their job.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[i286NiNJA]

Oh the day I agree with DNS-and-BIND!

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[fluffernutter]

So the nations of the world should just participate in a race to the bottom until corporations are the only ones with money?

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[i286NiNJA]

I don't think it's happening this time. Did offshoring create new offshoring jobs for displaced workers? No. What's the difference between an API that makes a work ticket in a 3rd world country and an API that creates a task to be carried out by an AI?

What about the bottom that fell out of "unskilled labor" ages ago? janitors, office gophers, etc.

These used to be middle class jobs that would hopefully get filled for life by some competent nobody. Now turnover is completely expected. It doesn't matter if you have a complete set of handyman skills and make everything shine like new. The market rates for your labor as a janitor are so low that nobody is going to try to keep you around even if you're saving your employer a small fortune in repairs and maintenance every year.
Did the unskilled labor market ever recover? No.

The days when you could be slow in the head but show up on time and do what your told are over. The people who need these jobs to live will be dogfood. Tell me stories about the buggy whip to defend your position all day but I'm not changing my mind until you tell me what happened to the horse. Technology has replaced most beasts of burden and dumb humans will be next.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Immerman]

Always? It hasn't even been an issue but for a couple centuries. Centuries during which the myth of perpetual growth was also in ascendancy thanks to effectively unlimited resources, which are now also reaching their limit.

And in case you haven't noticed, the quality of replacement jobs has been declining for some time now.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[dgatwood]

The USA is around 5% of the population of the planet. We can't be 1% unless you do some very strange math involving all the dead people on Earth who ever lived.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[gestalt_n_pepper]

And someday, it will be you. Much, much sooner than you think.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, a lot of that is cultural indoctrination. Too many of us think that we're temporarily broke millionaires who will soon strike it rich. Or believe that there's a meaningful connection between how much one makes and how hard one works.

There was a period of time where there was a meaningful correlation between how well one worked and how one was rewarded for said work. But that hasn't been the case in my lifetime due to Reagan and his merry band of morons destroying the economy.

We need to get money completely out of politics and ideally the legal system as well.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Anonymous Coward]

AI will also replace most of the "drudge-coders" and grunt-work-in-IT sooner than you believe.

Soon you will have AI machines coding in languages they invented that no human understands (4-5 years) and automated manufacturing and supply-chains that require no human intervention (10 years.) Machines designing, manufacturing, and distributing other machines.

Then what? AI and automation is already beginning to do everything from growing your food to harvesting it to processing, packaging, shipping, distributing, preparing and delivering it to you. You only exist to consume it. AI and automation then take your waste and process and roll it back into the system as fertilizer to grow more and start the entire process over again.
The same thing will happen very quickly in industries as diverse as the Building Trades, Manufacturing (duh!), and Design and Testing. Even areas like Law Enforcement, The Court Systems, and Finance will be wastelands of former Human activity.

IT workers may be a thing of the past in 10 years. AI will quickly surpass the cleverest/most experienced programmers and system architects.
It WILL be the "Industrial Revolution" only this time everybody will be obsolete.
What happens when the Global Finance AI algorithms decide that they are spending too much resources on the Agricultural Systems to feed the useless and non-productive Humans who make up the majority of the world?
Skynet indeed.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations, you fallen for their con.

To be in the 1% in the US you need to be earning $400k a year.

The middle class is roughly $42k to $125k.

No, the 1% aren't the upper middle class, they are well above it.

And how do they preserve their privilege? By convincing people like you that they really aren't rich, by conning people into thinking they are part of the middle class they they are working to kill off.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[i286NiNJA]

AI will also replace most of the "drudge-coders" and grunt-work-in-IT sooner than you believe.

It certainly feels like that's the case but I will defer to my education that has taught me that coding is one of the hardest problems to solve with a computer.

But how do we know the experts are right? After all it's hard to deny times are changing.
From my perspective Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools are becoming better but unless I am not looking in the right places I don't see a lot of new features. I see CASE products adding all the features that were introduced in competing products 10 years ago. So despite obvious recent advancements in AI reaching consumer markets in fantastic ways (medical advancements, self-driving cars, etc) we haven't seen even boring advancements in the state of CASE products. This is counter to the naive impression that code-monkey work should be easily automated and in line with the expert consensus that computer programming is a hard problem in both the mathematical sense and the practical sense.

The truth is that software development was already automated a long time ago and now days we don't notice or even consider it automation. Code-monkey development doubly so.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Immerman]

The population of horses and mules - laborers who had little to offer beyond brute strength.

Re:The UBI fanboys are enablers

[Rob Y.]

Well, it seems the race to the bottom as far as corporate tax rates goes is on - like it or not. Of course, that leaves personal income taxes to make up the difference, and to me, as long as you capture the revenue you need somewhere, it doesn't much matter where (other than fairness considerations). Personally, I'd like to see progressive tax rates that apply to all income. If you want to 'encourage' investment by people who wouldn't invest otherwise, then okay, allow some amount of capital gains and dividends to get modestly preferential treatment. But over that limit, you can pretty much assume that capital gains and dividends are that individual's primary source of income - and should be taxed like anybody else's income. And then there's the estate tax - the easiest way to 'keep it fair' for the next generation is to make them work for it. This idea of rich kids just living off of the dynasty is just un-American. Plus - we need the money. So a bottom-line 'you can't take it with you' tax removes a lot of distortion and political wrangling from the tax system. It's going to get taxed anyway. Live it up while you can, and get your kids a good education...

Sounds Like Blatant Discrimination

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace "over 40" with "people of a certain skin color" and you have an obvious case.

Re:Sounds Like Blatant Discrimination

[Applehu Akbar]

Replace "over 40" with "people of a certain skin color" and you have an obvious case.

No, the way to get action today would be to find patterns of sexual harassment on people over 40, and that doesn't happen. Actual harassment is more typically by men over 40, who have died and risen into upper management, the corporate afterlife.

This approach worked so well

[bobstreo]

for Circuit City. Get rid of all the experienced older employees replace them with employees that had no reason to care about their jobs, then go bankrupt.

Re: This approach worked so well

[Anonymous Coward]

Loyal workers are hard to find these days because most of them realized long ago that thereâ(TM)s zero loyalty from your employer.

Companies no longer invest in their staff or offer training. The expectation is that you prime, learn and master your trade âoeoff the jobâ in your own time. Thatâ(TM)s a problem though because youâ(TM)re salaried at 150K so theyâ(TM)re crunching to get 100 hours a week out of you. Try and find time to read one book with that time commitment. Meanwhile your salary is cut more than half since 150K is calculated on a 40hr week - in reality your salary is closer to 60K with forced overtime paid at normal rate. Supermarket baggers get a better deal than that.

The âoediversityâ push going on in the industry right now is nothing more than a smokescreen to drive down salaries further while treating employees with even worse conditions. In the end it creates hackathons and hysteria to drive open source projects - these cloud companies then mine the open source as a replacement for their R&D department. Now they can lay off their researchers.

Next theyâ(TM)ll take the sea of CS grads flowing out of every college and replace everyone with interns and junior staff at $80K, but theyâ(TM)ll still be working 100hr weeks. Theyâ(TM)re also living in the most crowded city in the US so theyâ(TM)ll have to live in one of these company towns these tech companies are eyeing up. The end point of this design is something like Foxconn, where you live at work, work like a slave, and get paid a pittance. Youâ(TM)ll like it though because at least you donâ(TM)t have to pay $5M for a studio sized home.

The future looks bright otherwise.

Re: This approach worked so well

[cyber-vandal]

Please turn off smart quotes in your keyboard settings. That was really hard to read.

Enforce the H1B laws and up the H1B min wage

[Joe_Dragon]

Enforce the H1B laws and up the H1B min wage to at least 80-150K based on COL.

Re:Enforce the H1B laws and up the H1B min wage

[martinfb]

How about making it cheaper to re-educate and re-purpose those older employees that to hire H1B creeps.

Simple economics

[jimbolauski]

If your cost out weighs your production you are expendable, if you are on the other side of the ratio get a raise of find someone who will pay you your market value. Cut throat policies can cut both ways.

Re:Simple economics

[ominoor]

Two reasons the workers cost out weigh production: 1) Workers in Brazil and India don't require health benefits. In Brazil and India they have universal health care. B) the management structure is really, really top heavy. I personally had 4 managers for the one job I would do. It was like something out of "Office Space". And yet, I did read the memo about the new cover sheet for the TPS reports.

Re:Simple economics

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that's not what's been going on. Gerstner fired thousands because years of mismanagement left the company bleeding red ink so he cut off an arm to save the body. Palmisano fired thousands because he managed to an unrealistic P/E ratio to please Wall Street instead of products and customers. Rommety fired thousands more because Palmisano's mismanagement left the company with an obsolete portfolio, upset customers and no coherent strategy. It's not that the employees had no value, the fact that they got the raises to make them expensive is a pretty good indicator they were producing. "Simple economics" is rarely so simple.

Re: Simple economics

[alvinrod]

I don't see what's so hard about it. Everything at the grocery store has a price. If you don't like yours you're free to go and find a better one, just as you can choose to shop at a different store. The price is always what someone else is willing to pay, which is a product of demand and availability. Human labor is as much a commodity as anything else in a market economy.

Re:Simple economics

[micahraleigh]

You're only looking on the surface.

Those countries have free health insurance because they are vacuuming up all the currency in their borders.

Not business friendly at all.

Re:Simple economics

[ahodgson]

The US government pays more per capita for health care than any other country.

The only problem is with all that money you only manage to deliver health care to old people, the military, and some poor people.

You're doing it wrong.

Re:Simple economics

[m00sh]

If your cost out weighs your production you are expendable, if you are on the other side of the ratio get a raise of find someone who will pay you your market value. Cut throat policies can cut both ways.

Exactly. They can lay off whoever they want and workers can choose to work for whichever employer they want.

IBM's stock has been performing appallingly. Obviously laying off older employees didn't work.

They're still at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a contractor at IBM ten years ago. I wasn't hard to find accounts from IBM FTEs about how it was nearly impossible for an experienced IBMer (i.e., the older people) to be considered for open positions---all those jobs were getting filled by IBM India, IBM Argentina, etc. Even contractors were feeling the bite: frequent furloughs (four times during the last year I was working with them), no rate increases from year to year. Unless you're a Ph.D. in a field IBM is doing basic research in or maybe a bean counter, I cannot imagine that anyone would consider Big Blue as a career option. I certainly laugh after I get off the phone with recruiters looking to fill contracting positions with them.

Re:They're still at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked for several compaines, here's what I leaned.
Be a team player, be loyal, work ovetime without pay, show up no mater the weather, on-time.
As soon as your pay gets closer to being fair, your job is history.
Loyal employee works in one direction only, the company doen't care about us, they care about the cash.
Don't be a fool and believe you are special, have unreplacable talent or whatever, they will get rid anyone to save a buck.
Seen it happen to many fantastic people, soon as they found a cheaper employee.

I feel you

[Anonymous Coward]

Got laid off at 58. HR made me sign a statement that my termination was not related to my age and was required to show me a list of all those terminated that day to prove it. Most were 55+ with a few younger sacrificial lambs tossed in for show. Sign or don't get the package. Not a hard choice but a coerced signature. Came right in the middle of us hiring many new - younger - workers I was training.

Re:I feel you

[umghhh]

Same here although I am still holding on and the company seems to value few remaining greybeards enough to put them in 'unaffected' departments during layoffs so that there is no misunderstanding as to who is wanted to leave and who is not protected species. They tolerate my no PC comments only because I do not care enough about my health to dig in and deliver no matter what. I am not afraid because I am so old I do not give a f. and on top of that I am still better that the monkeys I am training - most of them are intelligent but not willing to dig or not capable of digging. The air is getting thinner here too.

Re: I feel you

[bill_mcgonigle]

Yeah, our system only works if people aren't willing to get paid off for fraud. But that's not the ethics most people have.

Re:I feel you

[b0s0z0ku]

Assuming you were in a one-party consent state, you should have recorded the exchange and held it over them in court the next month.

No shit Sherlock!

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Pro publica is the Sherlock, investigating Watson?

Re:No shit Sherlock!

[bluefoxlucid]

This report sounds legit, although I'm automatically-skeptical because every article I've read by ProPublica (except the one where they mentioned my Congressional campaign in a favorable light) has been deceptive and misleading, arranging facts in such a way as to draw incorrect conclusions and create unfair attacks on organizations people trust.

With the American Red Cross, they've repeatedly published the organization's leaked Lessons Learned--memos which state where they encountered difficulties and problems, and what to do about it in the future (or what to have further discussions over)--and claimed Red Cross is hiding and ignoring serious operating problems and generally wasting money. With Amazon, they went as far as claiming Amazon's offer being the cheapest was a lie because Amazon's offer has free shipping and "let's suppose shipping costs $6--now the competitor is cheaper!" Both of these roll off into bigger discussions that get heavily face-palmy, but let's avoid that here.

The first thing that sticks out here is IBM's memo, shown in part in the article:

Just as importantly, businesses need the gray hairs just as much as the old heads need and want the work. What businesses can't afford to do is simply rehire their experienced workers and put them back into their old jobs. Businesses have to think smarter than that. They need to leverage the experienced and practical intelligence of mature people, and get them to work with younger colleagues and reinvest their experience back into the business.

ProPublica adds:

While recognizing that older workers were important to high-tech employers such as IBM, it concluded that “successor generations are generally much more innovative and receptive to technology than baby boomers.”

These are not mutually-exclusive facts. They can both be true. That doesn't seem to get in the way of a good story:

The message was clear. To succeed at the new technologies, the company must, in the words of the presentation, “become one with the Millennial mindset.” Similar language found its way into a variety of IBM presentations in subsequent years.

I'm not saying IBM did nothing wrong--I need more facts for this--but the tone of the ProPublica article is one centered around generating a certain bias, a way of thinking about statements. "We need to appeal to a younger crowd"? "We need to bring in newer college graduates and their familiarity with new technologies"? Are these discriminatory? Well, okay, yes. So is selling youth baseball bats. Are they discriminatory in a manner of attack, or a manner of trying to extend business to meet modern trends?

I see here IBM making an up-front statement that the future is not throwing out the old and bringing in the new, but rather that the world is changing and that they must bring in the new and adapt to that change without making the mistake of discarding their experienced and important engineers. Yes, they're saying, "Hey, we specifically need to hire younger people to draw what they know and how they think into our corporate culture and organizational knowledge." That's a valid technical concern, although some old folks do behave as outliers and keep up on technology while also having that mindset common among the younger--and they should be hired if qualified.

None of that excuses abuses like this:

Paul Henry, a 61-year-old IBM sales and technical specialist who loved being on the road, had just returned to his Columbus home from a business trip in August 2016 when he learned he’d been let go. When he asked why, he said an executive told him to “keep your mouth shut and go quietly.”

Or especially like this:

Encouraged employees targeted for layof

Re:No shit Sherlock!

[imrahilj]

The prime problem with unions in the US is that US labor laws, unlike European labor laws, encourage "monopolistic" union practices. Once a union has been formed, workers are essentially obligated to join and there isn't competition between unions within a single workplace. In europe, the competition between unions, and the freedom of workers to join them or not (pay dues or not) means that unions stay truly interested in worker rights. If the US had EU style unions, I bet that they would be a lot more popular with the tech crowd. As it is, I don't want a US mafia style union in my workplace. I'd rather just go it alone.

Re:No shit Sherlock!

[bluefoxlucid]

In europe, the competition between unions, and the freedom of workers to join them or not (pay dues or not) means that unions stay truly interested in worker rights.

In the US, we have a number of such laws, called "right-to-work" laws, although the only thing required to establish a right to work is to prohibit union security contracts from denying or terminating employment if a worker is willing to join the union and pay dues.

These laws have lead to reduced payment of union dues by workers who enjoy union tenure, union collective bargaining, and union grievance processing: the worker pays nothing, yet when his manager tries to discipline him he calls the union and demands representation--for free. To cover the costs, union dues have skyrocketed, so much so that while UAW workers (who all work in union shops where everyone joins and pays at least the core dues, but not necessarily strike fund dues or political fund dues) take 1.4% of your paycheck as dues (half an hour per week), some communications workers pay more than 20% (8 full hours) of their paycheck as dues.

In effect, it's like opting out of the union.

I don't want a US mafia style union in my workplace. I'd rather just go it alone

With union tenure clauses, all covered by the union are granted tenure after (usually) 60 days, and have a right to recall and protection from lay-offs. If we stop supporting freeriders, then freeriders will be the first to lose their jobs when lay-offs come--which is actually quite frequently. That would ensure that non-union workers have trouble holding their jobs for more than a year or so, while receiving lower wages, less-robust benefits, and a complete lack of representation in grievance. Union members, on the other hand, would enjoy high wages and long tenures--as well as 401(k) vesting, since the revolving door only applies to non-union workers and those workers never make the 3 years for 401(k) vesting period (and never get off the 60-hour vacation plan, while union members get 5 weeks per year once they're around for maybe 5 years).

Do you really want to play this game? Because you'll lose.

Re:No shit Sherlock!

[mikael]

Then you end up with other European practises. Such as "you can operate as a sole trader, but so long as you only earn less that Euro 40K year". Or if you want to set up a startup company, you have to put down an insurance deposit of Euro 120K, just in case your software injures someone. Other countries have restrictions that entry level graduates must earn less than half of someone with several years experience. This is what a lot of Spanish engineers who had left would complain about.

With a union workplace, we would have fixed times for coffeebreaks. In a non-union place,you could go up and get a coffee any time.

It is working well.

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM has been doing this for 30 years now and it is working quite well - unfortunately. So, don't kid yourself or let anyone tell you that they are failing at it.

When you're tech worker who's thrown on the street in your 40s, you're out of the game.

Retraining is a fairy tale - I have thousands in debt to prove it. A retired manager confided to me, "The reality is if we have a choice between two candidates with similar skills, we're going to go for the younger one."

Notice the word "similar".

And the adage that if you have the skills, you'll get a job is just a feel good phrase that gives comfort to the folks who still have jobs and allows them to delude themselves into thinking it won't happen to them.

Tech is a shit field if you want to work in for the rest of your life.

Re:It is working well.

[tehcyder]

"The reality is if we have a choice between two candidates with similar skills, we're going to go for the younger one."

Younger people can be paid less to start with, and if slashdot is anything to go by they are happy to do huge amounts of unpaid overtime on top.

Re:It is working well.

[b0s0z0ku]

Solution: Government or public university work. Job security and 4-5 wks of vaca are features, not bugs.

Re:It is working well.

[dev-in-seattle]

When you're tech worker who's thrown on the street in your 40s, you're out of the game.

Why can't these 'tech workers' who are 40+ practice, study, learn, get a new job? I'm a tech worker in my 50s. I'm a principal engineer with some lead experience. In my last job search, I interviewed 4 times and got 4 job offers. I'm in seattle, and I'm a middle aged white guy, so how come I can get a job? Because I study, learn the new variants of c++. I also picked a few 'test interviews' with companies I had no interest in to practice on (uber was one). You do the interview on the phone with a computer. Do this until you have current market skills? I have been working on infrastructure software my whole career, so I have a lot of experience.

I can see that there could be age discrimination. The new kids coming from college have only programmed in stupid lamdas. Is it that you can't even get interviews, or aren't in a place that is hiring, or what? If you don't have tech skills (in hacker new yesterday there was a guy who said he hadn't learned anything since 2001 and was looking for a job). I think it's because these folks are putting other packages together to solve problems, and aren't "bespoke software engineers".

I know I am lucky to be in a place with good job opportunities, but in the last 5 years I've done 3 jobs searches and found lots of jobs each time. Practice, do some remote interviews, you can do it!

Re:It is working well.

[Attila Dimedici]

It is rather questionable to say that it has been working quite well for IBM. When they started this, they were one of the biggest businesses in the world. The biggest reason they are still in business is because when IBM started this process they owned a huge amount of extremely valuable real estate. I have not been tracking their real estate holdings, but I am pretty sure they have sold off a large chunk of it as part of this same process. Management would claim that the real estate they sold was because they no longer had employees to sit in that office space, but to some degree it is more the other way around: They got rid of the employees who sat in that office space in order to be able to sell the real estate (and disguise how badly their revenue was shrinking).

Re:It is working well.

[swillden]

Solution: Government or public university work. Job security and 4-5 wks of vaca are features, not bugs.

It should also be pointed out that "tech" is a very broad swath of job categories. Tech support, operations support and software development are all very different kinds of jobs, and very different job markets.

Re:It is working well.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just turned 70. Making decent money. Quit whining and learn a couple of new techs every year on your own time. To be fair, I've been in the gig economy for 30 years. There are no /jobs/ out there. But there are /gigs/. Longest so far was 9 years.

With Politicians in their pockets...

[ominoor]

Ginny having public grandstands with the president... is it surprising that they can get away with flouting the laws? She's lorded over how many straight quarters of losses? And yet get's paid bonuses? By paying off investors who don't really care what is going on as long as they get paid. "Retirement Actions" constantly target the workers approaching or older than 55. Then they started changing the retirement packages. Used to be one month for every year of work. Now... One month pay, a coaching company to help you find a new job, and a "Laurel and Hardy Handshake" as they kick the workers out the door. Bitter? yup. Worst run company in the US. New name should be India/Brazil Machines.

IBM Hates the Old

[Only Time Will Tell]

This shouldn't be news. IBM has been laying off older workers for a while now. My dad was a senior DBA in his group and was used as a model for some of the DB/2 certifications, but was released by IBM due to age. He never had any performance issues and was well liked. As a further blow, IBM laid him off a few days before Christmas. Thankfully he found another job quickly, but not until the new year and a very stressful holiday for the family. Any IBMer approaching middle age should worry about their longevity with the company.

Re:IBM Hates the Old

[jafac]

There are many companies that are flushing out the old; or eschewing them.

There's a mistaken impression among management that it is not possible to teach "old engineers" new technologies. This may be true, but not among the older workers I have known. I do see a lot of resistance to the recent (last 2-3 years) move to cloud-based devops automation technologies. But I just got out of a 10 year stint at a company where this was a problem. A resistance to change: It was NOT driven by the older engineers. It was driven by customers who didn't understand the new model. It was driven by customers with tight security requirements who trust isolated air-gapped networks - not cloud deployment. It was especially driven by upper management who wanted a physical asset they could own in the data center, not a cloud instance that could evaporate in seconds. "Older" engineers spent weeks and months of their own time learning new technologies - while management insisted they keep doing projects the old way.

The layoffs were brutal - but I guarantee, they did not touch upper management, and they did not change the failed ways they tried to persuade customers to migrate. (I don't know the ending of this story for them - because I left. But I am pretty certain they're going to suffer a great deal more pain).

My extended time looking for a new job shows that almost every tech company out there is in the middle of this migration, and they're looking to overturn their old workforce (at least in IT/OPS) who refuse to play along. My advice to those workers: Learn the new skills. Get out. Your old management will not change, they will fight every effort for you to migrate your skills to keep up with the younger workforce, and they will leave you aimless and spinning off in every direction unless you take charge of your own career direction. And they will make you the scapegoat.

No, I mean the official welfare system

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

You mean the corporate welfare system, where corporations stash profits overseas, and find ways to pay not one cent of US Federal taxes? The one that so vastly underpays its employees that the employees have to get government assistance for basics like food and housing-- not to mention the screaming costs of health care?

No, I mean Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are going bankrupt because companies can send all of those taxable positions overseas without facing any consequences. Employers should be given a good set of choices:

1. Be part of society, participate in the safety net and pay very low corporate income taxes.
2. Exist on the margins to hedge your bets and pay through the nose.

If IBM had another 50k American workers tomorrow, all of those employees would be paying income and FICA taxes. IBM would be paying employer share FICA. IBM would then be justified in demanding a 5-10% tax rate and not a 25%+ rate because they're putting a lot of people to work and funding the safety net which is the lion's share of the budget.

Re:No, I mean the official welfare system

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true. Social Security and Medicare taxes are based on wages that the employee earns, not how much the companies are making. I pay in half of those taxes, the employer pays the other tax and how much money the company parks off shore is largely irrelevant. If they don't pay their half, the IRS can come in and seize whatever they need to seize to collect on that tax.

The place where that kind of thing may have some impact is that the Republicans have been borrowing from the trust for years in order to "balance" the budget, and at some point that's going to have to be paid back. All this bullshit about cutting benefits, is just that bullshit. If the feds default or fail to pay what's promised, it would create a depression the likes we haven't seen in nearly a century.

Age and treachery

[RogueWarrior65]

Will always overcome youth and skill. Beware, millenials, you won't know what hit you.

It's not hard to outflank somebody

[rsilvergun]

when they're actively exposing your flank. At least in America we've been putting right wing pro-corporate politicians in charge since Reagan. At the moment one party controls all branches of government except a few state legislatures and that party has deregulation and free competition as a central plank of the party. Like it or not age discrimination is a regulation.

If you buy into the theory that regulation stifles business and kills jobs then it follows that age discrimination is both harmful and unnecessary. It's unnecessary because if the businesses without that experienced staff should under perform the ones that do. It's harmful because the market decides best who should be in each job and optimizes for efficiency. Meaning older, experienced workers would naturally end up in the jobs best suited for them.

Long story short, 40 years of this narrative and politics means IBM and most tech companies can discriminate with impunity. If you want regulations to protect you you need to support regulations that protect everybody else. Once worker solidarity breaks down everything goes south.

I'm not a survivor

[Hasaf]

But then, maybe I am a survivor. I got laid off and never seemed to bounce back. I saw some of my friends languish and eventually become unemployable.

I decided to "retrain." I now teach at a middle school. Depending on the students or the class, I teach Word, Photoshop and Excel, which substitutes for a High School class that teaches the same. In another class I each robotics, starting with the Lego EV-3 and expanding into the Arduino boards. no, it isn't exciting; but it is keeping me from unemployment.

All that being said, there needs to be a reworking of the labour relationship in the US. The Social Security retirement age is unrealistically high and private pensions have evaporated. At the same time people are seen as "used up" at earlier ages with each passing decade. Someone will inevitably chime in with some small exception; but the reality is that the labour potential of people 50-70 is being unrealized at the same time that they are treated as being too young for most forms of retirement safety nets.

Re:I'm not a survivor

[mikael]

That is a better off position than having the stress of a senior management position trapped between the CEO and shareholders wanting costs kept down, constant project reports, worrying about whether your engineers are going to leave for a startup. Robotics is an in demand field, especially with animatronics and autonomous vehicles. When I see something like this, I wonder how easy it is to make:

http://www.kwaddle.com/program...

With every software position I've had, the company would advertise for the position that I want, there's a match, then over the next year or two, there is a gradual slide or job drift away from what was advertised. Then the only choice is to leave.

Re:I'm not a survivor

[micahraleigh]

Thanks for the info. This 36 year old is always looking to see what the investiment potential / pitfalls of working in tech are. This helps.

I quit IBM in 2007, best thing I ever did

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked as a contractor for 10 years and an employee for 12 years. I had 5 different careers inside the Software division. When I started, things were great. Good pay, interesting projects, Blue Chip stock was making decent gains. Then everything went downhill. Changed the pension plan. Budgets cut to the bone. Layoffs without notice. Stock tanked then stagnated. I moved to where I wanted to finish my working career, worked remotely for a year and quit. Very few non-management people I knew back then are still there.

Just change the sorting algorithm.

[jeff4747]

H1Bs are currently handed out by a lottery. Instead, hand them out based on the salary of the employee, highest-paid first.

Really need an H1B employee? Gonna have to pay more.

Re:Just change the sorting algorithm.

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it a step further. Do a salary auction.

Re:Just change the sorting algorithm.

[m00sh]

H1Bs are currently handed out by a lottery. Instead, hand them out based on the salary of the employee, highest-paid first.

Really need an H1B employee? Gonna have to pay more.

This will heavily bias H1B towards the east and west coast.

Lottery unfortunately is the most fair way to do it.

Re:Just change the sorting algorithm.

[swillden]

H1Bs are currently handed out by a lottery. Instead, hand them out based on the salary of the employee, highest-paid first.

Really need an H1B employee? Gonna have to pay more.

This will heavily bias H1B towards the east and west coast.

Lottery unfortunately is the most fair way to do it.

You could apply regional adjustments. Relative cost of living is well-known and there are standard adjustment tables that big corporations use when they move employees around. Just apply those to normalize the salaries, then sort.

Re:Just change the sorting algorithm.

[jeff4747]

Cost of living adjustments exist.

It's about what you can do!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not about what you need.

If you can't imagine new tasks with a literal army of experienced pros behind you, but all you can come up with, is to fire them, then I'm sorry, but you're the epitome of management failure.

It is one of the few cases where failure might literally be epic!

Hell, let *them* come up with new ideas, ventures, hell, you could create entire new fields, take over whole industries, and still have 100k people to do more!

You don't want them?
Give them to me!
Five years and I will buy your entire damn company, fire you, and give the entire newer workforce jobs *on top of that*, to achieve even more!

How about a damn Dyson swarm of space robots of all kinds, harvesting resources and creating things that will create so much wealth, nobody even *needs* a job anymore! (Not that anyone would be blocked from pursuing their dreams!)
With that amount of people it could be done!

Re:It's about what you can do!

[mikael]

UK companies did that - they were safe slow growth established products type companies. The profit margins weren't high but they were safe and guaranteed. That was good for pension fund managers who invested in 20 year time scales. But that wasn't good enough for the shareholders who wanted these companies to be young, dynamic, taking risks, all-or-nothing type bets, so they got the executive boards to sell off those safe product lines and reassign their engineering teams into the high-risk new markets. If something didn't make the expected profits they closed that division and fired the engineers. Basically turning corporations back into startups. They ended up disappearing.

Other companies had an internal job board that allows people to move around on their choice. They are still around.

IBM fell for the "getting rid of the deadwood" policy that Wall Street loved. Whenever job losses were announced, the stock price would rise, just because. Only years later, they realized they had lost all their institutional knowledge.

Re:It's about what you can do!

[ISoldat53]

I can't wait for AI to take over Wall Street and put the traders out of business.

Re:It's about what you can do!

[Daemonik]

Absolutely none of this is about product however. Perfectly profitable products with decades of guaranteed revenue ahead of them get cut every day because they're seen as dead ends. Everything IBM is doing is about their stock portfolio.

Re:It's about what you can do!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the traders? How about AI putting Wall Street's managers out of business?

Re:It's about what you can do!

[mikael]

Speed-of-light trading. Electronic systems automatically make PUT and CALL options on share prices. If the price doesn't rose or fall as expected, the trade is cancelled. These are done so fast that the ordinary home investor would never notice. The banks profit from the quantum fluctations of the stock market.

Re:It's about what you can do!

[niks42]

The Design Authority lead I used to work for in IBM pinged me on Sametime one sunny morning. Hi, says he, as anon, another young architect was invited to join the chat .. I've decided to make anon the lead architect on the next release of CRM .. OK?

I ran round to his office and barged in - why would you sidestep me for the role? I do all the work, I have proved myself on this programme etc etc. And how DARE you tell me in that way? Well, he says, this is an excellent career opportunity for anon, and let's face it at the age of 44 your career is over .. So glad to be an ex-IBMer. It's been 13 years since I left them, after 27 years of employment. I don't miss them one bit. Except the big, wonderful AIX machines.

I find it ironic...

[TomGreenhaw]

that when IBM started getting rid of experienced workers that their heyday was over. About the only big innovation I can think of from IBM since the 80's is Watson, and I think the core of that the core of many of their R&D teams are largely made up of "experienced" researchers.

Agism is just plan stupid. The idea that older people aren't good in tech is a dangerous fallacy.

Re:I find it ironic...

[mikael]

I've looked at unversity courses, and the world is moving to cloud and mobile. Cloud for the vast processing capability. Mobile for the ability to visualize data anywhere, acquire sensor data and then visualize it locally using AR/VR.

Small wonder

[nospam007]

IBM sucked then, it sucks now and it will suck in the future.
I just don't know who the old farts are that still give them their business.

seniside

[4wdloop]

Lower retirement age? Like this is going to happen given the politics of today.
Yes I am there too and I am not behind in tech (love it and learn anything I can everyday) but I did experience 'friction' whenever I try to interview.

So, push all elderly workers over the cliff is the current 'market regulation'... ...wait...WAIT! stop pushing me.....aaaa...thump!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:good

[retchdog]

looks like some mods can't handle a little disruption. hahahahahaha, plebs.

Re:In the early 1980's

[Hognoxious]

Not too long after that, an IBM team (pinstriped suits, etc.) was on site to try to sell us a mainframe (along with their services, natch) and I talked to them about

what I thought was "THE" existential threat to their business model: the small independent "intelligent" workstation (ie what we now call a PC).

Ah, those were the days.

# Windows, Windows on my 386, all my applications are running at once!

It's fashionable to get off my lawn

[Tablizer]

Let's face it, the tech industry just does not like us oldbies. We have to come to terms with it. IT is highly driven by fads, and it takes a suspension of common sense and reason to fake enthusiasm for silly fads. Microservices for non-web-scale projects that bloats the app by 300%, no-sql for medium projects, Node.js, flat UI's where you cannot tell what a button is, "responsive" Bootstrap that wastes screen space AND still doesn't shrink right on mobile devices without 93.28 hours of fiddling per screen on 7 brands.

Nobody uses mobile for our software anyhow: it's for office work. The user even complains about the wasted space, and the youngie says, "But that's the new thing! See, it can reformat on smart-phones! Isn't that neeto!?" The user then says, "nice, kid, but we use desktops here. We intentionally purchased big monitors so we don't have to scroll. Your bloated rewrite makes us have to scroll." The kid ponders a few days, and then says, "We'll, we can toss Bootstrap and start all over again learning the latest UI Javascript gizmo that wastes 3% less space than Bootstrap. Rinse, repeat when a new one comes that wastes 6% less space..."

Old people can spot BS and waste better, but PHB's don't like their BS being exposed. They want kissup, not logic. Trumpish egos and attention-spans are the rule, not the exception in management. He got rich by following, dishing, and catering to bullshit and architecture/redecoration fads. It's why he watches so much TV. The PHB's want young naive snot-nosed kids who think every dumb fad is the greatest invention, which to them it is because it's all they know: they haven't seen the other 27 fads that got dumped on the trash pile or squirmed into tiny niche corners where they belong.

It would be more satisfying having a career where long-time knowledge and experience is actually valued. Although doctors have to face new medicines and treatments, the human body hasn't changed in 150,000 years. Per lawyers, the laws don't change that much either, roughly 1% or less a year.

Our eyes and fingers get slower with time, we cannot realistically keep up with ever changing IT fads like younglings do. Young people seem to have a Fad Lobe in their brain that older people have lost over time.

Re:It's fashionable to get off my lawn

[Locke2005]

Yeah, when I worked for Sharp Labs, one manager spent $100,000 to license another company's HTTP server. It had several bugs written against it, so I spent Christmas break writing a much simpler HTTP server from scratch that fixed all the bugs... which really pissed my new manager off, how DARE I fix things without review (everybody else was on vacation) and make their purchase decisions look stupid?

Re:It's fashionable to get off my lawn

[Tablizer]

The fact is that the salary/wage expectations of older workers is unrealistic, unsustainable and not internationally competitive.

Co's often toss out existing old employees. The context is not about hiring for new positions. If the co. paid older (experienced) workers too much, that is the org's fault, not the worker's.

As far as their "real" worth, that depends on what an org values. If they value having the latest eye-candy UI, then young people are probably a better deal. If they want to make tools that solve real problems efficiently, then experienced workers are worth every penny.

Re:It's fashionable to get off my lawn

[Memnos]

This post is to notify you that I am appropriating the term Fad Lobe as my own.

Yes, get rid of old thinking

[Locke2005]

My friend worked as a software developer for IBM at one point. They were literally forced to leave the building at 5pm, not allowed to stick around and finish what they were doing. As a software developer that at times worked 12 hours straight, that seemed incredibly nonproductive.

Re:Yes, get rid of old thinking

[grumpy-cowboy]

If you need 12 hours to do what other can do in 7-8 hours, maybe you should question yourself. And you probably don't have children and a wife because at this rate (12 hours a day), this is a divorce you will have to deal with and maybe a burn-out.

Re:Yes, get rid of old thinking

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody is talking about people who need 12 hours to do 8 hours of work. You misunderstood what he said: "at times worked 12 hours straight" means one normally works 7-8 hours, but when a goal is within reach and the moving parts are all in your head, it's way more productive to continue on to a logical stopping point even if that takes a few hours. Way more satisfying, too.

If you are the type who just drops what you're doing because the timeclock says it's time to go home, and can pick it up again the next day without effort, then you're doing the easy work and someone else is doing the heavy lifting. I much prefer to hire and work with goal-oriented people.

Re:In the early 1980's

[mikael]

IBM depends on patents and lawsuits to deal with any competitors. They have enough cash reserves that they could afford to pay for a division of lawyers to keep working until the heat-death of the universe in order to settle a court case. Even funding new university departments, chip fabrication plants, and new fields of quantum astro-economics if necessary. Look at the SCO vs. Linux lawsuit.

There was story about Sun Microsystems, who had developed a new speedup for workstations. They received a visit from IBM lawyers in black suits and with briefcases. One of the founders did a whiteboard talk explaining how all the technology was in the public domain and there was no patent violations. Lawyers sat there with glazed look, and then said "Sure. We'll contact you when we find something." then left the building.

You're completely missing the point

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

Not true. Social Security and Medicare taxes are based on wages that the employee earns, not how much the companies are making

I didn't suggest anything to the contrary. You just missed my point which is that every foreign worker doing an American market-related job is a) not paying FICA taxes (employee or employer) and b) not contributing to the welfare of our national community.

The more a company that does business in the US chooses to export to the US instead of creating jobs in our market, the more they should face in taxes. The more they provide services to our market, the more their native clients should pay in FICA-related taxes. Specifically, I am saying that offshored work should incur punitive FICA excise taxes. A company that sacrifices $5m worth of native worker jobs to offshore to a $800k team supporting them should incur bare minimum a 100% FICA excise tax on the value of the contract. Plus the year end percentage of the company's total workforce based abroad who support the American market should factor into the overall tax rates of the company.

In other words, a company like IBM should be largely treated like a foreign company because it's about 75% foreign employees (citizenship + location) and heavily supports the domestic American market. Accordingly, it should be taxed in a way that privileges companies that have a higher ratio of American citizens to foreign employees.

Re:You're completely missing the point

[postbigbang]

The multi-nationals aren't going to agree with you, because they're enslaved to Wall Street. Less labor costs mean higher profits, in a pure and simple way. They're not motivated to do so, and in the current anti-regulatory climate, tax gifts to big business (small business didn't do very well) have made fundings even worse.

It's the "gig economy" that's the problem, where up to 20% of us don't actually have FICA withholdings from any employer at all. It keeps personnel counts down for the corporations, and means there's less pesky litigation from employees, because contractors can be largely fired at will, for any and all kinds of reasons, really anything at all.

But this isn't just IBM's problem, but keeping IBM in focus, all of their costs drop if they move jobs out of the USA, and kill senior employment to reduce their most expensive, tenured employees. It doesn't even really keep IBM "fresh" with younger people, just cuts costs. After all, like contractors, employees aren't people, they're just cogs in the money machine.

Re:You're completely missing the point

[Megane]

It's the "gig economy" that's the problem, where up to 20% of us don't actually have FICA withholdings from any employer at all.

You've never been self-employed in the USA, have you? The FICA being "from the employer" is just an accounting trick, either way the employer is still paying both halves of it to the IRS. If you're self-employed, YOU are the employer, and not only do you have to pay it, you have to pay it before you earn it. Even if you weren't going to have any work in the next three months, you are still required to pay the "estimated" amount on what you would have made.

Re:You're completely missing the point

[postbigbang]

The effective employment cost of many federally covered employees is approximately another 12-54% in benefits and withholding matching (unemployment, SSmatching, and more).

You do the math. The gig/contractor/might-be-employee pays this as a contractor. No pesky NLRB to get in the way, no regulations about firing them, and more. It's a scam, and yet another cut at human dignity for the benefit of the corporate concept.

Re:between the lines

[Anonymous Coward]

Goddamn, is there nothing that can't be blamed on liberals? Please, give me an example of a "liberal agenda" at IBM. Blatant age-discrimination?

Evaluation Problem - I worked there

[FeelGood314]

IBM couldn't evaluate the value of it's workers. In a lot of places senior management really didn't understand what groups did so they came up with different metrics. Unfortunately the metrics often didn't make sense and were eventually gamed. One metric, the amount of time people spent on billable work got totally out of control. Secretaries were all fired because they never did work directly billable against a customer. Company meetings were held at lunch so they wouldn't count against total time. Training budgets were left unspent. IT was internally outsourced, sort of. IT became so incompetent each group had to maintain there computers on their own in spite of it. Older workers had more vacation time which would lower the billable percentage of a group. You could be the most amazing worker in the company but if you had 5 weeks of vacation you were toxic to your groups metrics.

I worked in a secure lab in Ottawa. We were screwed because we didn't fit in the metrics correctly. We billed up to $6000 USD an hour but lost money according to IBM accounting. We had to do our own sales but since we were classified as a delivery group had to give half our revenue to another sales group so that the sales could be counted by a sales group. When we made a sale in another geographic region we would give half the sale to a local sales group and half to the one in the other region. 4 guys, 1 weeks worth of work, bill the customer $250K and we are getting grilled for losing money. Oh, and the grilling counted against our billable hours.

Waiting for that inevitable poster

[Maxo-Texas]

Who posts there is no age discrimination.

There's always one. Probably from Google (currently being sued by over 200 people including one their automated software picked 4 times only to be rejected by young managers). You know, google employees have posted here in the past that old people wouldn't fit their culture.

Something familiar about that statement..

"Women won't fit our culture"
"Blacks won't fit our culture"
"Irish won't fit our culture"

We need to bust these companies. but also we need to move health care away from companies. A young employee costs the company much less than an old employee and it creates a perverse incentive to lay off older employees. There are other reasons, but that one would be easy to fix. National health care also helps older people, and younger people (who are sick), to start their own businesses.

Part of it is simply oncoming automation.

Part of it is simply much lower wages in other countries.

It is a complex situation. But I know a lot of *50* year olds who got laid off and never worked in the field again. Some still were not working 5 years later.

Listen up young folks- I started saving *hard* at 33. I lived on half of what I made after I saw this stuff happen and after i went thru a struggle with cancer. I retired at 51. My date was one day after my corporation laid off 500 people and went to Infosys. I kept it close to the vest and they had no idea why I was so happy (severance and unemployment free on top of my already sufficient retirement). Be in the same boat. Keep working on your skills but save hard.

I think age discrimination is going to get much worse as automation increases. And safetynets are already being cut by Republicans. I don't know why *anyone* who wasn't wealthy that was over 40 would vote republican for any reason outside of guns and abortion. It's like slitting your own throat. But I can respect people who vote republican because they are opposed to abortion (even tho I'm not opposed myself). The guns have gotten a bit more iffy. Gun enthusiasts are supporting weapons with killing power exceeding that of weapons we already ban or regulate heavily. If gun enthusiasts don't get reasonable, they are going to lose big after a few more massacres of children.

Re:Waiting for that inevitable poster

[Maxo-Texas]

An A.C. said: "A local politician (from a very rich and Republican district in an otherwise Democratic county) once said: "If you're under 30, you have no business being anything but a Democrat; over 40, and you have no business being anything but a Republican."

As a person who is (well) over 40, let me assure you that being a republican is almost suicidal for 95% of the population.

An increasing number of older people are committing suicide. Especially white males. But they keep voting Republican, god luv um.

Re:In the early 1980's

[gatkinso]

And yet IBM and mainframes are still around.

Re:Who knows what IBM is doing?

[gatkinso]

Watson, Cloud, mainframes.

The don't really target consumers.

Re:Elderly

[gatkinso]

That is a great way to eliminate older competition that you couldn't otherwise get the better of... ...until it applies to you.

Except in your case it will be a machine that takes you down.

Re:Pay Discrimination is Not Age Discrimination

[dgatwood]

The problem with your logic, and the place where all such arguments inevitably fall down, is that employees don't get to choose their pay level. If older employees could say, "I don't need this stress. Demote me to junior grade and reduce my pay accordingly," and then slack off, their experience would make them worth keeping. They can't, and their higher pay grade is basically tied to their age, which means canning the people because of their pay rate is age discrimination, just under a different name.

Here's how it works

[gestalt_n_pepper]

1) Do a really good job year after year.

2) Get good reviews and good raises and bonuses.

3) Newly hired 21 year old MBA decides that "those old people" make too much money.

4) Firing is done by salary and no other significant criteria, selectively cutting anybody who's been a consistently good performer.

5) What's left is... what's left. When the *real* mess finally comes home to roost, 21-year old MBA has already been promoted or moved to another job. No consequences.

The age laws, are of course, toothless. Companies can always gin up numbers to prove anything they want. Our "business friendly" government does what it does best for us. Nothing.

The gig economy is a symptom

[DeplorableCodeMonkey]

It's the "gig economy" that's the problem, where up to 20% of us don't actually have FICA withholdings from any employer at all. It keeps personnel counts down for the corporations, and means there's less pesky litigation from employees, because contractors can be largely fired at will, for any and all kinds of reasons, really anything at all.

The gig economy didn't create the problem. The outsourcing and free trade cult is the source of the problem. Read an overview of Ricardo's "famous arguments" that are parroted by every smug free trader on the Internet and laugh hysterically at how out of touch with reality they are. FFS they didn't even survive the 19th century when banks began to accept remote money transfers.

Re:The gig economy is a symptom

[postbigbang]

I agree that the gig economy didn't produce the problem, rather, it's a side effect. Lots of tax revenue isn't captured, and overall effective employment costs are stanched by larger corporations that allow this to happen.

Everyone from the person that delivers the paper to you (if such a thing still happens) to freelancers of every stripe are part of the gig economy, and the overall economy suffers because real employment costs are shifted to individuals and when they can't get enough gigs, the government and charitable organizations who then foot the bills.

Big Miss

[SuperKendall]

So the nations of the world should just participate in a race to the bottom until corporations are the only ones with money?

The corporations and all the people working for them, yes.

Far better companies paying for real work have money than governments hoarding money for an elite group of people that cannot be fired or have any legal competition.

Re:Big Miss

[fluffernutter]

Well there goes the American way of life... Companies already hire where the workers are cheapest, and will be relying heavily on AI so very few people working in the US. Corporations better start to pick up the tab for social services and other government functions because there won't be enough income tax to afford it all.

Re:In the early 1980's

[Megane]

So is tuberculosis.

Re:between the lines

[micahraleigh]

The article alludes to it. There is a ton of inclusiveness, eco-research, earth sensitivity, X awareness, etc. IBM has made this their brand for the last 10 years or so.

Plausible Deniability

[DarthVain]

While only half joking, Intel might fall into this business model.

If no one is around to warn them of issues, they can ignore them in favor of risky business decisions that are more profitable. When feet put to fire as to why they decided to make such decisions they can feign ignorance rather then willful ignorance based on business decisions designed for short term gains.

Re:In the early 1980's

[micahraleigh]

Do you see a person wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for them. Prov 26:12