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Intel Faces Age Discrimination Allegations Following Layoffs (engadget.com)
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.
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.
...they just weren't young and vibrant.
--
"Wish you were here" -- Pink Floyd
I've heard Intel tells their employees at hiring that the company likes young blood.
Captcha: unfair. Baw.
It is likely, old-time employees are paid better than the new ones, despite doing the same jobs. Intel may be able to explain the age disparity by that.
Of course, this Libertarian thinks, there should be no laws against discrimination — of any kind — at all...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I had heard they were closing down some factories in the past few years. Could it just be that they had a lot of older line workers?
How many young people fired does it take to prove this allegation wrong?
Older departments and projects got cut? Or older people across the board?
Either way, better to move to management or sales after 45 because agism is one more vibrant 'ism in Silicon Valley.
We can draw no conclusions merely from knowing the median age. The older employees probably probably made more money and received more benefits. Money is certainly part of the calculations for layoffs. There is also a greater chance that they were out-of-date making their cost/benefit ratio lower. Counterbalance that with the fact that companies often prefer to layoff younger workers to reward years of service. So the determination of who to layoff is quite complex, but it certainly involves many factors that are only 1 hamming distance away from age. So even if there is age discrimination going on, it will be really tough to isolate that from the other parameters.
MSMash will cheer-lead Intel for these layoffs and even attack Intel for not murdering them in their own cubicles if Intel can just come up with some accusations that these employees weren't woke.
After all, median age of 49? I'm willing to bet that a majority of them were WHITE* and MALE. Hell, I doubt that any of them were properly transgendered enough to count.
Not woke? Firing your ass is fine.
* And yes, Asian == white here.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I got laid off last year by a very large and nameless company that had just bought us out.
One of the things in my packet was a list, by age, of the people laid off (titles but no names, of course) to show that they hadn't discriminated. I guess it did. This company is known (internally) for not promoting past a certain age, so they probably wanted to be proactive.
I was tired of the job and the terms were surprisingly good (an even more nameless member of management once commented that they are your standard soulless corporate bastards, but at least they're upfront about it), so no complaints.
At my advanced age, it took 6 months to find a new (and better) gig, a few weeks before UI ran out. Finding new jobs (except for short term contracts that charge thousands / month for insurance) are definitely harder the last ten years.
Maybe Intel is an evil company that likes to cast off older workers, just to make them suffer.
Or, maybe Intel was merely closing down some older and no-longer-profitable business units from the 1980s that happen to have been staffed with workers that hired on in the 80s.
Or, maybe Intel was merely flattening their management structure, laying off managers and keeping the engineers, thus disproportionally impacting manager who also happen to be older, on average.
Or, maybe there was some combination of the above.
The fact is, we don't have any information on the issue. That the EEOC does not like Intel tells us nothing, unfortunately. In a better world, the EEOC would be an unbiased and objective adjudicator of these matters and a source of reliable information, but any rational observer knows that it not the case, at least not lately.
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.
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.
So, maybe it was discrimination, maybe not. However, just an average age doesn't tell you enough. What if they cut out a lot of management bloat, and those workers tended to be older?
TRUMP IS COMPLICIT. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/arkady-babchenko-dead_us_5b0da892e4b0fdb2aa5771c8
into paying for somebody else's healthcare? When you're young you don't need much. Maybe a little pre-natal care. It's not until you're in your 50s that most people really need the stuff. And those folks don't want to pay.
More importantly, while there are plenty of arguments to be made in favor of single payer healthcare any time it comes up the insurance companies spend half a billion dollars or more shooting it down. I still get people who tell me they don't want it because of "death panels". I ask them about "Wallet Biopsies" and that shuts them up, but I can't compete with the lobbying and advertising budgets of big phrama and big insurance.
I wish we could get a national referendum. Take out the deep south and the rural parts of Texas and Arizona and you've got over 60% in favor of medicare for all.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
All the big companies are doing this. All of them. Recall that any of these same tech companies were complicit it in not hiring away from each other, tanking salaries and affecting career progress. We suspected that was happening before that behavior was exposed. Trust your instincts. And yes, all you youngsters, this can and will happen to you. Unless Skynet takes over in the meantime, in which case we are all fcuked.
Remember, you're not let go because of your age. It's just your productivity dropped because of things related to your age. Shouldn't be a problem. If you worked at Intel you're probably extremely good at your job and will be able to find something else with a salary more in line with your current performance.
that's nice and all but it's not that big a deal when a stay at the hospital is $20k. You're probably thinking of tax credits, e.g. when the amount paid is given to you as cash. I've heard that suggested in the past and it's silly. It's basically a round about way to do single payer healthcare. We keep all the disadvantages of insurance companies: high cost and substandard care. The 'substandard care' comes from the inevitable caps on the credit.
The only real fix is a single insurer; e.g. a single payer. That's because health care isn't something that should be left to the free market. Neither is food, which is why we do the farm bill every year. Some things you don't leave up to the invisible hand.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
However, an Intel spokesperson categorically denied that age played a role.
"We didn't discriminate against older employees," said Cody McYoungling, 27.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The layoffs came with money. They money was a function of length of service. For older staff, the money was simply better than staying until retirement. A whole age group of employees within 2 years of retirements took the money and ran because it was worth more to them than staying and working. This was a problem for those who remained when the most senior brains walked out the door.
Younger people got the boot using the same criteria as older people, but there was optionality to volunteer and that is what biased the distribution.
Posting anon for obvious reasons.
I'm really surprised at the lack of floating point unit jokes when dealing with Intel math here.
Seriously, numbers tend not to lie. If the mean age of the fired workers is statistically significant over those retained then Intel has some 'splaining to do. Yes the jobs these people were in will show as a factor but overall the public view will be that they culled out their workforce to get rid of older, more expensive employees to bring in cheaper hires.
False correlation. I'd bet dollars to donuts, those older folks were pulling down larger wages on average then the younger ones.
Salary tends to be higher as one ages, and they can pay younger hires much less.
Much
Much
Less.
Oh, wait, that's age discrimination on both sides.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So true.
As a contract employee at age 45 - a number of years ago) for a major public utility, my supervisor commented after signing off on a monthly routine paper shuffle relating to agency contract employees, most working in situ for years, of the extremely high cost of my ever increasing insurancr premiums.
I did not inquire as to the specifics. I didn't care. If they wanted my services, they would adhere to their procedures. Otherwise, adios amigo.
Much of my time was spent training recent college grads with all of the proper credentials, but with attention spans of an ephemerom, many of whom exiting after wasting a few weeks of everyone's time.
I, however, without any degree, but buying my own equipment and other resources as a matter of routine to ride the wave of ongoing hatdware/software development, just kept plugging along because those to whom i reported had to have someone competent to keep their system functioning, and they appreciated my work in development and implementation while conforming to their corporate culture (without being married to them), while they themselves fought for their own positions in the never ending rat race of musical chairs (so called jobs).
My point: I had/have not ever been hospitalized, and had last seen a doctor decades earlier for antiobiotic treatment for tonsilitis (the doctor wanted to know how i knew i had tonsilitis. Ha!
But i wll not get started on that, as i believe that industry is largely a scam, and should be avoided as much as possible (speaking as one who worked for a few years as a medical claims inspector.
End of rant.
I worked at Intel in 2016. I luckily walked away before the big layoff, but I know several people who remained. When they blanket offer everyone over a certain age a lump sum of money in order to "retire early" (the sum wasn't nearly enough to allow someone to retire early, unless they were already planning to retire in the coming months), you really can't claim that age was merely a circumstantial correlation. After the chips fell with who did/didn't accept the "retirement package", THEN they commenced laying off the rest of the workers. Not sure if the EEOC is considering those people to be part of the layoff, or if those numbers only represent the involuntary ones.
the h1b was willing to work 80+ hours for 70K!
we don't have single payer health care so some where deemed to cost to much to keep on.
The millenials claim they can't get jobs while the companies are laying off only the older employees.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The big tech firms keep telling the federal government that there is a terrible, severe, industry-hampering shortage of tech workers that is so very bad that America must allow them to import an unlimited number of tech workers from abroad in order to prevent an economic meltdown. If the tech worker shortage is so severe, then SURELY the mast basic law of economics (Supply and Demand) would mean the value of tech workers would skyrocket and firms like Intel would do everything they possibly could (including raises, increased benefits, etc) to RETAIN every single tech worker.
There is simply NO WAY any of the silicon valley firms could possibly let og of a single tech worker with such a severe shortage.
Nope.
Story cannot possible be true.
[end sarc]
I was so happy that I was given the buy-out that I danced like a ballerina in the hallways of Intel's Jones Farm Campus as I left and started my retirement to Bellingham, Washington.
Here is the link to a video re-enactment of my behavior during my last days at Intel's Jones Farm Campus in Hillsboro, Oregon Mark Allyn as a Plastic Wrapped Ballerina Auditioning For The Nutcracker At Intel
So happy to dance and sing in front of Slashdot's community!
Most Respectfully Yours Mark Allyn Bellingham, Washington
billing / codeing is a big mess in us healthcare!
Some dockets need to spend a lot of time on billing to just get paid.
well single payer stops balance billing and network BS.
I remember listening to a co-worker argue with the insurance company over the phone. She had been to the doctor for some sort of "well-baby" pregnancy checkup. The office had coded it wrong so insurance denied the claim, even though it was clearly a covered visit. She was asking the insurance person how it should be have been coded, and the insurance person was accusing her of trying to commit "fraud" by getting it coded right so it would be covered. It was absolutely insane... "guess the code to get paid... no, that's not it, try again..."
No, they can't. Individual arbitration is almost certainly part of the Intel employment agreement, like at nearly every other modern country. So if the EEOC decides not to go ahead (which in the current Administration would be a good bet), the ones laid off are screwed. Plus, they would lose any severance benefits they might have gotten if they challenge anything.
I think you'll find this is Wage not Age discrimination.
Typically in these huge companies, when they decide to make a round of layoffs there's no analysis done on who is meat and fat in the company (trimming only the fat). The process goes usually....
Big exec goes.... hmmm I need to cut half a billion from the payroll? Easy !
Ring ring...
Exec: hey DBguy (in the payroll office) can you do a quick query for me?
DBguy: Sure....
Exec: if you take the highest paying employee in every department excluding top execs and sum their wages what do you get?
Dbguy..ummm... ....... ... 100M....
Exec: ok how about the top 3....
DbGuy: 350M...
Exec: hmmm with the top 4....
DbGuy: 490M....
Exec: Bingo! Thanks DBguy! (hangs up)....
DBguy thinks: hmmmm... yikes... better give myself a paycut for a month or two.
You really are thick if thats what you took away from his post.
Your government already spends a Trillion then 'someone' has to pay even more, but your outcomes are worse than the countries that do it properly and pay less.
I assume an analysis would show that the workers kept also earn less than those laid off.
Age is probably less of a factor vs malleability and compensation.
Younger managers don't want older workers, and everyone responsible for a budget understands the desire to get more for less money.
so adjusting my gross doesn't really make that big a difference. It doesn't 'pay' for my healthcare. At best it's just a discount. One that even at my income level (above median) I already get to write off.
I'm sorry, but you are wrong. Increasing tax deductions for medical expenses isn't going to solve the health care crisis. It doesn't make healthcare affordable for the ever shrinking middle class, let alone the lower castes.
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Who in their right mind would lay off the people who have demonstrated the greatest sagacity and experience in a company? Especially for a bunch of kids who don't have sufficient character to be honest on the resumes?
Then again, based on what mallyn ( 136041 ) said, maybe not.
I used to work for another big Silicon Valley megacorp, and they had a big layoff. A few months before the layoff, they had a Very Generous "Early Retirement" offer, which I had been working there just two months short of being able to take advantage of. (That sounds kind of like what mallyn described.)
The layoff, for those of us of a certain age, came with about an inch-think document of statistics of the ages of those laid off, a pretty nice severance package considerably better than industry standard, with a Very Generous super-duper severance package if you signed the "I will not sue for age discrimination" agreement. The enclosed statistics making it clear that they were well prepared to defend themselves from any such suits.
Since I already had calls from one of the company's competitors looking to hire someone to do pretty much what I was already doing, I took the money and ran.
It certainly doesn't keep people healthy. https://science.slashdot.org/s... It just keeps them alive longer at the end so they can vote Republican and take everyone's money.