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Intel Faces Age Discrimination Allegations Following Layoffs (engadget.com)

Posted by msmash on from the facing-the-music dept.

Intel is under investigation for potential age discrimination in its approach to layoffs initiated in 2016, according to a report. Engadget: The Wall Street Journal has learned that the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating claims that Intel's large-scale layoffs discriminated against older employees. In a May 2016 round that cut 2,300 workers, for instance, the median age of those let go was 49 -- seven years older than those who remained. The EEOC hasn't decided whether or not it will file a class-action lawsuit against Intel, but the affected people will be free to pursue civil lawsuits if the regulator doesn't find enough evidence to pursue its own case. The EEOC isn't allowed to confirm or deny investigations. However, an Intel spokesperson categorically denied that age played a role.

15 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. They weren't old.. by Arzaboa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...they just weren't young and vibrant.

    --
    "Wish you were here" -- Pink Floyd

    1. Re:They weren't old.. by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      All it takes is allowing people to fully deduct the cost of their own healthcare. As it is now, it's a tax benefit for consumers to have healthcare paid for by their employers. Change it so consumers can deduct the cost of health insurance/healthcare and there will be zero reason to stay with the existing approach. And a side benefit is they employee will now be in direct control of the expenditure on their own healthcare, most likely resulting in reduced expenditures on healthcare.

      --
      Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
    2. Re:They weren't old.. by Nidi62 · · Score: 1, Insightful

      All it takes is allowing people to fully deduct the cost of their own healthcare. As it is now, it's a tax benefit for consumers to have healthcare paid for by their employers. Change it so consumers can deduct the cost of health insurance/healthcare and there will be zero reason to stay with the existing approach. And a side benefit is they employee will now be in direct control of the expenditure on their own healthcare, most likely resulting in reduced expenditures on healthcare.

      How about just taking the middlemen out of healthcare? Get rid of the insurance companies and private insurance. Sure, the government might not be as efficient as private companies, but single payer still has to be cheaper when you realize that right now you are paying for the overhead/profit for the insurance companies, profits for the insurance company stockholders, the overhead/profit for local brokers and plan administrators, etc. You have at least 3 layers of people making money off your healthcare dollars before you even see a doctor! Add countless other layers of profit out of your healthcare dollars once you actually see the doctor and it gets even worse(can you say "chargemaster"?)

      The point is, take out multiple layers of middlemen and costs will already go down, regardless of any loss of efficiency (which may not even occur).

      --
      The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
    3. Re:They weren't old.. by Maxo-Texas · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actual hard data shows other countries pay 50% to 33% of our cost and have better adult and infant mortality ratings.

      Our insurance is *great* if you are one of the "winners". It's bad for the other 80%. Insurance companies delayed coverage for a friend of mine until it was too late and she died of a curable form of cancer. They do this. All the time. That's why the ACA was passed in the first place. Insurance companies were literally canceling coverage after people had paid premiums for years as soon as they got sick. People who lost their jobs couldn't get coverage and died.

      We need something that's fair to everyone. You never know when you may not be in the "Winners" group any more. It happens all the time. Chronic illness being a leading reason.

      --
      She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
    4. Re:They weren't old.. by ChatHuant · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How is removing insurance companies and inserting Government going to be cheaper or more efficient?

      Because insurance companies have exactly the opposite motivation that we want in a health provider. What we want is to maximize health. What they want is to maximize profit. For insurance companies, actually treating people is a *cost*, which they will try to avoid. On the contrary, extracting more money in any kinds of ways is a benefit, and they'll try to maximize it. They have no motivation to reduce the customer's cost - on the contrary, the worse they treat the insured, and the more they bill them, the better.

      The government has no such perverse incentives; moreover, a large single payer system, such as Medicare, could use it's bulk purchasing power to negotiate great reductions in prices (as any reasonable business does). In the USA there are however LAWS forbidding Medicare to negotiate, which is just crazy.

      This is not just idle banter - look at this study, provided by the NIH. Private insurers have an average overhead of 18%, while public insurers (Medicare and Medicaid) have an average overhead of 3.1% (table 1 in the study). As another point of interest, the overhead of the Canadian single payer system is 1.8%. The study concludes that removing the insurance companies overhead would save a staggering 350 billion dollars a year - which would be enough to cover the cost of treating all uninsured people in the USA, and leave enough over to improve everybody's current health care.

       

  2. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sometimes keeping up with the latest tech is irrelevant. My dad worked with COBOL for 20+ years and lost his job in a round of layoffs where he had to train his replacement, a younger dude that knew nothing of COBOL.

    Besides, asshat, this is Intel. Knowledge of the latest JS hotness probably isn't going to help anyone there.

  3. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by halofan_sd · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I got my degree 20 years ago, I took classes in Java and Python, what's been new in the last 20 years?

  4. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Were these 50 somethings dinosaurs who never kept up with the latest tech and still coded in Fortran?

    Stay with the times or go extinct. I have a feeling this has nothing to do with age discrimination.

    You're talking out of your ass. And it's the excuse that is used - along with "they don't have the skills" or "they don't fit in".

    Total bullshit. 100% bullshit. And it's just an excuse to to get around the EEOC laws with impunity.

    As my retired CIO supervisor at my volunteer IT job says, "It's not right, but when candidates of similar skills are presented, we will go with the younger one." (And this VOLUNTEER job means NOTHING to recruiters!!)

    What's similar? Well those laundry list of skills are just a distraction.

    So, Mr. Fellow AC, you keep telling yourself that those old losers are just inept and keep sleeping at night.

    How do I know? I was once like you at IBM in the early 1990s when Gerstner was cleaning house.

    We - young punks - laughed at all those mainframe losers from NY who were sent down to Boca to work on OS/2 Warp. Hummpf! Old timer losers!

    They busted their ass. And they laughed at our memory problems saying, "Uh, we solved this in 360. Look at IBM's patents."

    But no.....we (I) were cocking young assholes who thought WE were beyond such things. We had the SKILZ! and we'd ALWAYS keep up!

    And we did! I spent quite a few thousand dollars a year on books, class, and courses to stay ahead.

    It makes no difference. I even had one asshole say that, "If you didn't go to Stanford, then you are no good - old man."

    So, punk - shove it! Your day is coming!

  5. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by forkfail · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You're missing the point completely.

    For example, my read of this statement:

    They busted their ass. And they laughed at our memory problems saying, "Uh, we solved this in 360. Look at IBM's patents."

    is that the old timers were saying, "We already solved this - go and look. Make it easy on yourself."

    And as far as "studying the latest technologies" - who, exactly, do you think is building the new technologies that you cut your teeth on?

    --
    Check your premises.
  6. It will happen to every techie someday by ErichTheRed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The entire tech industry is built on an endless supply of cheap, young fresh grads who are easily convinced that low salaries and grueling work weeks are the norm. As those grads gain experience, they demand more salary and a more flexible life and will reach a point where employers will find a way to get rid of them.

    It's not fair to paint everyone over a certain age as a dinosaur. I've seen many freshly minted MBAs explicitly say they don't want resumes of anyone who "looks over 40." This is due to a widely held stereotype that the only people who understand technology subjects are in their 20s, and the 30s are the time to start planning retirements. Everyone in the first stages of their career deriding older workers should bear in mind that this problem will eventually claim them unless they're very lucky and stay on the cutting edge every day of their lives.

    Losing a job in your 50s in tech usually means you won't be working in the field again, so I'm not surprised that these workers are trying to get an age discrimination settlement. Imagine you're 53 and can't access your retirement accounts until you're 59.5, and can't get Social Security until you're 62. If no one will hire you, you're dead. I've seen this happen to many people since our company tends to skew older.

  7. No Country For Graybeards by forkfail · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Software is viewed as a disposable product with a limited lifespan. Therefore, building it poorly is OK, because it's gonna be replaced in a few years anyway. Therefore, hiring a young person for cheap to build it is fine; it just has to work well enough to ship.

    Except, of course, the above premises are almost never true. That backfill script you wrote for the one-off run to add data? It will morph into a nightly task. That snippet of code where you hard coded a few strings? It will become the primary limiter to your entire pipeline architecture.

    I'd have thought that after all the study and work done over the years that folks would have figured this out, at least to some extent.

    But what baffles me the most is how the software discipline is the only one that truly reviles age and experience. In every other math, logic, and scientific discipline, it is a known that experience almost always means better results, and the ability to teach and mentor those who come after. In this discipline, it is not unusual to be considered over the hill at 30.

    It boggles the mind.

    --
    Check your premises.
  8. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by sycodon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't think there really is any, "Latest Technologies".

    There is the latest regurgitation of technologies, Rearranged, Renamed, and Refactored, but it's always the same stuff, just in different costumes.

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
  9. Re:Sounds liek an investigation, no evidence yet by swb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Experienced workers are more likely to be resistant to "culture and process change" because they've been down that road before and seldom seen it actually result in meaningful changes. At best its a workable rearrangement of existing process, at worst its a distortion of the process that makes it worse.

    Younger and less experienced workers are more likely to fall for a charismatic sales pitch, not knowing that the changes will probably be a net zero change at best, or believe they have something to gain by attaching themselves to a "change agent" and their agenda.

    These days these process changes seem even worse than in the past because they so often seem to be tied to just generating more data for managers vs. any actual improvement in work product or work process.

  10. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by forkfail · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Your ignorance of the value of experience is stunning.

    I hope that you yourself are not a developer. Because if you aren't, then said ignorance is forgivable; if you are, however, then you are certainly a part of the problem.

    Grow up. Learn to do the right thing. Teach others to do the same. It actually can lead to a rewarding, successful, and lucrative career.

    Or not. In which case, you'll probably be replaced in the next few years by a younger version of yourself who is gung ho to generate copious amounts of garbage that will implode under the weight of its own inherent flaws, poor design, and bad implementation, leading to the continuation of replacement of one second rate, spineless developer with the next, and a lack of progress in the actual engineering component of software development.

    --
    Check your premises.
  11. Re:Or did they not keep up with technology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Bob, we need you to rewrite the payroll system in the latest advancements in Java."

    "You fucking morons don't realize that :
    A. It will take 5 times longer to process.
    B. It won't be compatible with our accounting software.
    C. It probably won't comply with regulatory requirements.

    Oh, and BTW, when 10,000 people get fucked up paychecks or no paychecks at all, I'll tell the board it was because you wanted to have the latest and greatest stuff."

    "...Bob, umm...never mind."

    Seriously, fucking with shit that works and replacing it with unproven stuff, is a waste of time and irresponsible. Shit like that can bring a company down.