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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.
...they just weren't young and vibrant.
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"Wish you were here" -- Pink Floyd
I got my degree 20 years ago, I took classes in Java and Python, what's been new in the last 20 years?
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!
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.
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.
Being one of those affected by this action, I have a little insight to this topic. Sure, I also have a little bit of a bias.
This was not a case of closing a factory, nor of flattening management structures. Intel has gone through those multiple times, and as painful as they were, they were not like what happened in 2015 and 2016. In the recent disputed cases, managers were told from upper management to fire that one and that one and that one, with no choice or input from the direct or 2nd or even 3rd line of management. In my experience, these targeted folks came from many different divisions, and the prevailing similarities were that we were all older white males. Our managers were extremely unhappy that they had to let us go, and if it were merely a cost issue, would love to have traded out for other employees.
To respond to one of the earlier comments above: most of these positions had absolutely nothing to do with Java or Python, thank you very much.
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.
Why keep paying these guys high salaries when fresh college grads will do the work for a fraction?
Because they have more experience.
Despite their many virtues, fresh college grads still need adult supervision and mentoring.
Real-life example. We had three software products to deliver to the Government every quarter - Solaris SPARC, X86 and Firmware patches. Each took a week to research, generate and package manually and was usually done by the newest, youngest, cheapest, and least experience team member. I worked with him one cycle (I was his mentor) and wrote a Perl script that automated almost the entire process enough to produce all three products in one afternoon.
Guess who they laid off?
Of course, they laid off their most experience Perl programmer, so I'm not sure who's maintaining my script, but it's not my problem anymore.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"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.