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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.
And they had higher health care costs.
We really need to remove health care as an incentive to lay off older people and an anchor on business profits that prevent them from competing with companies in countries where business doesn't pay for health care.
It's so funny because *everyone* gets old. It's in *everyone's* interest to prevent age discrimination.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
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.
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.
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.