Slashdot Mirror
IBM Fired Me Because I'm Not a Millennial, Alleges Axed Cloud Sales Star in Age Discrim Court Row (theregister.co.uk)
A laid-off IBM cloud sales ace is suing the IT giant for age discrimination, alleging he was forced out for being too old. From a report: Jonathan Langley joined Big Blue in 1993, and worked his way up the ranks over the next 24 years. Then, in 2017, as worldwide program director and sales lead of the Bluemix software-as-a-service, he was let go. According to his lawsuit paperwork, Langley, 60, "was a successful employee and his performance met or exceeded IBM's expectations." Had he "been younger, and especially if he had been a millennial, IBM would not have fired him," his filing claimed.
Langley, of Texas, USA, was seemingly doing very well for himself within Big Blue. For instance, he netted a $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, the largest such windfall within his team in Austin, we're told. His annual performance scores put him at the top or near the top of his group. Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss -- Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software -- that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June. Langley was unable to get a role elsewhere within IBM, and its HR system marked him as having "resigned," it is claimed. In early July, days after he left the business, Langley got a letter congratulating him on his "retirement." IBM management told the US government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Langley was laid off after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team, despite him bagging the biggest bonus that quarter, and earlier meeting or exceeding performance expectations, according to the lawsuit.
Langley, of Texas, USA, was seemingly doing very well for himself within Big Blue. For instance, he netted a $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, the largest such windfall within his team in Austin, we're told. His annual performance scores put him at the top or near the top of his group. Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss -- Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software -- that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June. Langley was unable to get a role elsewhere within IBM, and its HR system marked him as having "resigned," it is claimed. In early July, days after he left the business, Langley got a letter congratulating him on his "retirement." IBM management told the US government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Langley was laid off after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team, despite him bagging the biggest bonus that quarter, and earlier meeting or exceeding performance expectations, according to the lawsuit.
Kill yourself, troll
Someone at IBM is very, very stupid for having fired that dude, if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Just invite one of your helicopter parents to join you on your next employee performance review.
Trust me, your manager will consider you to be a defacto millennial.
Beyond that, keeping current with technology, including fads, also helps. Even if something current sucks in a particular context, you need to fully understand it, so that you can explain why it sucks in detail, and what alternatives would be better.
Usually know a lot more, and have grown up. The usual management tricks no longer work on them - fake crises, OMG you gotta work extra hours or no promotion/pay raise. or we'll all lose our jobs, and so on - we won't be pushed around as easily as the kids.
What we lack in intensity we make up for in ability to just get it done quickly with what we already know, and wisdom to not fool around doing the old fire drills. But MBAs - who should realize they're the incompetent ones - think seeing all that bustle is what makes a bottom line, so...
All the other older guys I know are now consultants if they're any good at anything, and charge commensurately. They don't need to work full time to get the same amount of work done as a youngster, or make enough money.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Just wait. It will happen to you! At least most of us old timers have reasonable retirements, on average millennials wont.
He cost them $20,000!
I'd rather work at a place where my performance matters, not bullshit superficial appearances.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
...after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team, despite him bagging the biggest bonus that quarter, and earlier meeting or exceeding performance expectations...
Now let's put the shoe on the other foot, shall we? If this had happened in say, Russia or any of those [other] countries, we would be saying: -
"Ohh! what do you expect?" "It's those people again....In Putin's Russia of course." "We're lucky to live in the west where we have our democracy and the `rule of law.`
Am I wrong?
This is why we hate millennial.
Iâ(TM)ll gladly retire at 55 if you foot the bills so I can continue living the standard at which I do.
being old at a company like that usually also means you have gotten a raise too many times and cost as much as 6 millennials >_> aint saying that's ethical or anything but that seems to be... well... happy murika day.
eyond that, keeping current with technology, including fads, also helps.
This guy was a "cloud" salesman, and a very effective one. Clearly he was keeping up with fads!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Say these words: Class Action Lawsuit.
About time.
IBM hires outside advertising and marketing agencies to handle both their internal and external sales and marketing materials, including some of the research and the entirety of their branding. Their leading agency partner since the mid-1960's has been Ogilvy & Mather. This means that IBM's "outside counsel" is gravely complicit with enabling IBM to push forward these violations. (For more chronology, see http://adage.com/article/adage...)
P.S. Ogilvy & Mather personnel have previously been held responsible/guilty for things like embezzlement, misappropriation of funds from federal contracts, and various grey legal area misdeeds.
I've dealt with IBM on various projects for the past 20 years and what I see is they aren't retaining people any more, unlike 10-15 years ago. Each time I meet with someone from there now for even a similar piece of hardware it seems half the team I dealt with has moved on and now it's a couple of new kids in suits fresh out of college who I probably won't ever see again after this transaction. Other people I've spoken to report the same in other lines of IBM's business.
IBM is a pale shadow of their former selves, now a software and hardware reseller/consulting firm run by beancounters chasing the next quarter's numbers, institutional knowledge, experience and dependable products be damned.
The lesson here is stop this bullshit of being loyal to your employer, because they sure as fuck aren't going to be loyal to you.
Stop drinking the kool-aid and thinking your company gives a shit about you.
Yes, in this case it sounds like the reasons they gave are pretty flimsy, and in this case I agree he should be going to court.
But, in general, I've pretty much decided that any form of loyalty your company is a stupid thing, because they'll drop you without a second thought.
Fuck 'em, they'll get as much loyalty from me as they've demonstrated quite clearly around me ... which is to say I'll do the work, collect the pay check, but don't ask me to be a corporate cheerleader or work free overtime for the privilege of working for your company.
The bigger the company, the more you should not give a fuck and be prepared to leave if something better comes along.
I stopped attending the quarterly "aren't we awesome, but there's still no money for raises" meetings a decade ago. Sorry, it was lies and bullshit last quarter, it's lies and bullshit this quarter, and it will be lies and bullshit next quarter. I don't need to attend to know this.
He was a "cloud" salesman, so it looks like he did adapt to changes. This being said, experienced/old people often know what actually works for their customers. Sometimes on-premise solutions are best from a security, reliability, and privacy standpoint instead of airy-fairy "cloud" solutions.
You do not want to work at a place where your performance matters, or they WILL take advantage of you.
Discrimination due to your age is unacceptable. Based on the article, it looks like he really was performing well even better than the average. Instead of firing him they should rather give him more money and teach other to improve their performance or let him do his job. And even if IBM is right and the guy's performance was below average. Well some must be below average. That is the nature of an average. It is stupid to fire people who bring in more money than they cost. And as long as they are inside the gain estimate you should not fire him. Do you guys not have some sort of protective laws for employees?
He is only 60 not 80. Also you need money to retire and there are not enough qualified people in many businesses. Pushing out older people is also stupid.
Posting as AC for obvious reasons. I joined IBM in 1993, my first job. I dedicated my life for the company, so much that I didn't even see it coming. I was an exceptional employee. Couple of weeks before my boss gave me a hint that I was being fired. If you are +40 be advised, we are too expensive, we will be let go. I hope the best for the company, but everyone with experience is being fired. It used to be that our culture made the company great, and the culture is dying. I don't know, it really makes me sad... I was loyal and commited, just as I learned from the guy who hired me and later retired. "We changed the world twice already" he used to say.
That is total BS. Why do you hate women? Was your mother not nice to you or was there no girl interested in you or other issues? See a shrink.
Companies lie all the time. Recent events include Facebook/Zuckerberg before the jury, any carrier TV-commercial, every time they say "there will be no layoffs" etc.
And how much do you want to wager that those rankings are highly subjective.
That's because older men sexually harass them.
This sounds like it is a legit case. You don't get a whooping bonus and then fired without good reasons in the same year.
For instance, he netted a $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, the largest such windfall within his team in Austin, we're told. His annual performance scores put him at the top or near the top of his group. Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss -- Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software -- that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June.
That statement says a lot about the case. Having had to put up with too many worthless programmers who only wanted to do what they wanted to do, and who couldn't perform safe-coding I gave up on hiring anyone below the age of 45. Their mommies told them a few too many times how special they are. Well, they're not but companies like IBM don't have a choice if it wants to have a workforce. They are stuck hiring these people or move the jobs overseas, which is really the best move. I hate to say it but this generation of American's is pretty much in the category of drying up panty liners.
...because I answered the manager's anonymous evaluation survey with what I really thought about my boss. He was only managing four people so he spotted me very quickly. He was very angry with me because he didn't get a money bonus because of that survey, and he even told me that in my face.
I'd rather work at a place where my performance matters, not bullshit superficial appearances.
Agreed. Wondering if this will have any measurable repercussions? Less than two decades ago, I remember coming across the old adage "nobody ever got fired for picking big blue". Is any backlash relevant? (With the sale of client/server to Lenovo what seems like ages ago). As a GenX IT consultant, IBM just rose to the top of my sh!t list. Odds are they aren't the only one doing this, they just got caught and made El Reg. Would like to know the outcome of this case. Seems like a David vs. Goliath. It'd be nice to do more than just send good wishes to Jonathan Langley. Like a KickStarter for his legal team, or a GoFundMe for his (inevitable) side-gig (not mentioned in TFA).
IBM sucks, which was apparent nearly a century ago. How is this not a modern-day twist on Dehomag, 45 notwithstanding?
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety
Bingo, spotted the Union worker. What do I win?
I recently had the same experience with one employee - decades of great performance reviews and promotions until I stepped in and saw they were full of themselves and had been bullshitting their managers and themselves for at least a decade. Since nobody knew exactly what they were doing or supposed to be doing and they were very good at talking themselves out of situations, there were some that had hunches but no concrete evidence. Trying to fire them now is hard because 'age discrimination' claims.
This guy was a "cloud sales star", not necessarily technologically adept, just good at talking.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I don't know. Why does she hate men enough to fire him? I mean, if we're going to make irrational gross assumptions, lets apply it both ways..
You are powerless. You signed a pre-dispute arbitration clause shoved in your face under the threat of "sign or be fired" a couple of years ago.
and I'm one myself. I'm not as good as I was 10/20 years ago. My experience might compensate but I also don't work 60 hours a week for 40 hours pay like a kid fresh out of college.
Here's the thing, if older folks are so valuable why do we need laws against age discrimination? Wouldn't the free market shake things out when a company that hires these more experienced laborers out competes the one that fired them?
Reality is that if I'm running a business I need 1 experienced old guy to manage 10-20 young engineers. The reason we ban age discrimination is the same reason we have (had?) a 40 hour work week, unemployment insurance and minimum wage. They're regulations used to artificially raise wages because in their absence wages collapse. We've been pulling back on those regulations for 40 years now and wages have been steadily declining while productivity goes up every year.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
chase the same dragon Sun Microsystems did? Cheap Chinese hardware and cheap Linux boxes made their old model obsolete. Cheap IT labor from India and a lack of worker protections gave them no reason to invest in employees outside of the top level math majors. In that environment what were they supposed to do?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Langley just doesn't understand. It's because he got paid the biggest bonus, that he is the worst performer. The bonus is the metric! It's an inverse correlation metric.
The trap was in taking the bonus.
My mom experienced something similar. In her case, she had documented her employer discriminating her, and in the company settled out of court for a large sum of money.
Still, she didn't continue her employment there. She has since moved to another job where she continues to be perhaps the best employee there (or at least that is what all the notes and emails she gets from the owner indicate).
Just because you are older doesn't mean you can't do the job.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Are you sure that is why you hate Millennials? It's not because you need a convenient scape goat?
That's what a lot of people tend to do. Dumb progressives blame conservatives, guns, Russia, and so forth. Dumb conservatives blame progressives, immigrants, video games, and so forth. Of course Millennials do it too. After all, depending on your definition there's millions in the US or billions around the globe. But I suppose boomers are just different. It's not like they came up with that weird hippie movement and also created 'drug culture'.
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
The next supreme court justice will definitely be pro-corporation.
Corporations will have increasing power over individuals for the rest of our lives.
The current ruling that they are artificial people with all the rights of humans but who can't be imprisoned is already bad enough.
I don't see anyway to stop it so prepare to suffer.
This case seems pretty blatant but age discrimination in the technical field was going on already in 1988. I saw a 45 year old programmer laid off as too old and he couldn't get back into the field then. I decided I needed to be ready to retire by 45. It meant less luxury cars and so on and I missed my goal by 6 years but I was able to retire at 51.
And I was literally laid off one day before I was going to retire.
I was going to retire on january 1 for the five weeks vacation benefits money and had trained two of my team to replace me as manager. In September, the company laid off 90% of programming staff as of december 31st to replace them with Infosys after they had been our "partner" for about five years.
My director never knew why I was so happy to be laid off. I told her I couldn't tell her for legal reasons. She was let go too a few months later.
Some of the people laid off with me have never found a job again and have fallen on very hard times. They were mostly 55+.
I also have another friend who was a manager and being courted by other companies. But once he was laid off, no one was interested in him. He can't even get an interview unless he lies about his age. After six months he tested that. When he lowers his age to the 30s he gets call backs. When he's 40 or older he gets no call backs.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It says he was a sales lead, meaning he was likely responsible for the results of his team rather than his own sales. He very well could have bagged the biggest bonus for being a manager of a team that exceeded target/quota, which can often happen entirely based on market or product conditions.
It's entirely plausible that he had a great team or they were selling the right product at the right time, but that he was drastically underserving them as a leader.
As always with these kinds of articles it's impossible to make a determination from the outside given all of the critical missing pieces.
IBM has been circling the drain for a long time, the company has been thoroughly hollowed out and the only real value left in it is the brand name, which for now is still enough to convince customers to give them money. But that situation can only last for so long. It's not a sustainable business model to charge gold-plated hourly rates for cheap H1B labor delivering shit that doesn't work.
Just invite one of your helicopter parents to join you on your next employee performance review.
Trust me, your manager will consider you to be a defacto millennial.
The guy is 60. His parents likely aren't alive anymore, or if they are, suffering dementia.
Beyond that, keeping current with technology, including fads, also helps.
The guy was in cloud sales. A "technology" so current, the hipsters haven't moved on yet. A "technology" so hypey and buzzwordy you could win a game of Bullshit Bingo by listening to this guy for 10 minutes. Being current was not the problem.
In this particular case, it was just the world coming full circle, to IBM. They've been selling people on other people's servers (theirs) since their inception. Cloud is tailor made for IBM. And this guy knew it, exploited it, and made the company millions in sales. They fired him because IBM has a policy of not rewarding successful employees. Nobody is ever supposed to hit that bonus level and make the company actually pay out. It's supposed to be aspirational, like winning the lottery, to make the proles slave away just a little bit harder. It's supposed to be the carrot dangling in front of the donkey. The donkey is not ever supposed to get the carrot. He might stop moving forward if he does.
IBM could actually weasel out of the age discrimination suit, if they were wiling to admit in writing their real company policy, which is to fire all high achievers regardless of age, because they don't want to pay those bonuses. IBM is just stupid enough to do it, but their lawyers will prevent it.
Even tho the 2009 supreme court ruling gutted our age discrimination protection, I think government stings could go a long way.
Essentially, do what they do in housing and credit. Conduct sting operations.
Send identical resumes with different ages and if the company consistently schedules an interview for the young but not the older people then fine the company. Make the company submit a record of all job applicants. If they hire young vs old at disproportionate rates, then fine the company.
I'm thinking on the order of $10,000 per occurrence level fines.
If you cut people over 50 off from working, then they will become a burden on the state and that means higher taxes.
They might even go off and shoot a dozen people.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The company I used to work for here in Norway was bought by a UK "equity firm", i.e. corporate raiders who got famous for netting UKP 2B by (in a totally legal manner) stealing the pension funds from about 6000 workers. When they bought us the writing was on the wall, but it was only after I had to take over the job of being the union representative for our typically very senior MSEE people that I realized how bad it was:
Pretty much everyone over the age of 58 were told they were redundant, supposedly for cause (i.e. did not know enough about the currently most relevant technologies), but that was in most cases clearly bogus. In the end most of them gave up anyway and accepted as many or few months of severance pay I could negotiate for them.
At the end of this process I accepted an offer to become the CTO of another company.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I remember as a new manager, I needed to convince a senior employee to move on. The whole process sucked. The employee was a "star" two decades before and his high salary reflected his past success, but by the time I took over the team he refused to do real work because he thought ideas were all that mattered. He would regularly hijack meetings and because he refused to code, his ideas were half baked or just plain wrong as his experience atrophied. Worst of all, the guy needed emotional therapy. Thankfully, as the child of a narcissist, I knew how to convince this guy to move on: tell him that he was "awesome" but that the company "had changed" and was "too conservative for his ideas now".
I hope that this IBM guy is in the right, but if I had to wager, I'd bet that a series of lazy managers simply didn't have the heart to give him honest feedback about his performance until the company started needing to think seriously about cost cutting.
I don't have numbers, of course, but I have to suspect Langley's situation has more to do with his seniority than his chronological age. He's probably right at the top of the salary range for his position, and he's also earning these huge performance bonuses.
So some bean counter in HR or Finance probably figured they could replace him with two or three millennials for about the same price, pay out zero bonuses, and not have sales suffer all that much.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
"Age discrimination" is merely an excuse, an legally aggressive way to describe something that really has absolutely nothing to do with age.
I have no doubt that he was a great performer -- experience, age, and the bonus indicate that pretty well. But "performance" in a business context has absolutely nothing to do with "performance" in a production context.
It's easy to be the "worst performing person on the team", when you get paid the biggest bonus. Production / Paycheque. Raise the salary, and the employee quickly becomes the worst on the team.
It's not unusual to fire the most expensive employees, and it's not unusual to fire the most experienced employees. Quite frankly, it's typical. Ideally, most companies want employees who don't demand high salaries, and who do what they're told.
Yes, this is in-line with hiring younger people, and firing older people. But it absolutely nothing to do with their ages, and everything to do with the realities of their value as employees.
Companies will be trimming the fat of any employees without a six pack...
Spotted the abuser of the "code" tag. What do I win?
#DeleteFacebook
we fired you because you made too much money. here's your severance check. have a nice day. /caseclosed
___
please ignore the fact that a high salary based in-part on long tenure means you're old as fuck, expensive to insure, and probably close to retirement age
'different direction' of course means h1b visa holders and/or young recent college graduates.
Sure, but if they shitcan him now they're not on the hook for his pension.
You do realize its worse if a company doesn't take advantage of what you have to offer? It's not very rewarding to have a job where you sit on your hands all day.
Yes, it's really bad that most seniors can't retire, and things are going to get worse.
It's not very rewarding to have a job where you sit on your hands all day.
Bullshit. When you are seriously applying yourself at work there is no energy or drive left when you get home. When "you sit on your hands all day" your paycheck does not decrease, you can train for newer, better, more lucrative or more fulfilling opportunities, and you go home well rested and ready for more of what life has to offer.
In every way it's better to have less working demands, but that situation does require you to be self-motivated to do more if you have an emotional need for more.
I hope Langley wins his lawsuit. But getting laid off from IBM is a blessing in disguise. IBM is by far the worst, most incompetent tech company I have seen. It wasn't always that way. But as time went on, I saw good employees being forced out and bad employees being promoted.
A woman on my team would ask me really basic questions, which seemed to indicate she did not know what she was doing. After I would sit down with her and walk her through step-by-step how to do something, she would come back a day or two later still not knowing the first thing to do. Instead of digging underneath the raised floor to pull up another power drop, she came up with the bright idea of daisy-chaining power strips! Then when the test machines would spontaneously power off, she blamed the contractor on our team. She was caught red-handed lying about test results. This woman marked a testcase as passing on our platform, but it mysteriously failed on every other platform it was run. Then when we ran the same testcase over again on our platform, it failed. Did she get fired, or demoted, or even reprimanded for lying about her work? No. She got promoted!
Long after I was out, I saw all the competent people I worked with get laid off. Last I saw this incompetent, lying, train-wreck of an employee was still working there!
IBM is in a long, slow decline. Be grateful to not have to work there anymore.
Public sector even has programs where someone can retire work 5 more years deferring their pension
and then collect a lump sum plus their pension.
This guy was a "cloud" salesman
Maybe he was yelling too much .
but again, I need 1 of you to watch 20 code monkeys. Heck if we're talking Best Practices docs that's more like 200 to 1. You only need 1 of those docs for an entire arm of an Org.
Also I can make those 20 somethings work overtime to replace aging Win NT/2k/Linux systems with the latest tech. I can work them without fear of burnout because, well, when they're your age I'm going to replace them.
Also, you're implying that guys in their 20s don't have your skill set. For raw skills a lot of them do. They don't necessarily know all the "gotchas". But that's not always a good thing. I've been through multiple re-orgs and I know how to avoid doing extra work for less than nothing in return. A kid in their 20s doesn't.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Or he could have been shilling IBM ClearCase and IBM DOORS / DOORS NG. Based on how terrible it is to use it has to be extremely expensive. Our salesmen pushing IBM Jazz SCM didn't know how to add a file to version control in his demo of IBM Jazz. But my idiot management bought it anyway.
The older the manager the harder it was to convince them that this fancy thing called "Git" was starting to get used everywhere in industry. IBM salesmen would *never* lie to us.
So he could have been 'worst performing' per some new metric on how many new services they were selling and earn the 'biggest bonus' off of some outdated commission structure where pushing a shitty tool onto poor developers. /No, not bitter at all.
and into modern stack based computing (what everyone likes to call the "Cloud" while ignoring the most important trend going on: modularity). They're doing this because labor's cheap (thanks to India) so they can just throw engineers at custom solutions and because Open Source means they don't have to build from scratch. Nobody worries about getting fired because they didn't buy IBM because nobody stays at a job that long anymore. So the teething problems from switching tech aren't as much of an issue anymore. In short, IBM's purpose is gone.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I'd rather work at a place where my performance matters, not bullshit superficial appearances.
Neither of those actually matter. It's only the company that matters and it will get rid of you in a second if it makes the next minute better for them. The line about "employees being our most valuable asset" is *complete* bullshit and if you hear it, or any other rah-rah slogans being bantered about by Management, start looking for job elsewhere. Just my $0.02 earned over my 30+ years of experience ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I remember the IBM "IQ Test" in the early 1990s.
They offered early retirement and lots of the old guys took it. And since IBM had a policy of letting them accrue vacation since they started work, many of them effectively had a year vacation to use.
The offer and go on vacation happened quickly. I was working a few projects where the "old guys" left for 11 months of vacation effectively stopping all work. When they returned, we hit them with all the questions, and they were "retired" a month later.
Then, management realized nobody had the required skills and they got some of the more critical guys back, as contractors - at 2x the pay. Plus, they came back with their on companies and IBM has a policy against mixing companies in the same office/room, so they each got an office normally used for 2 or 4 people to themselves. All the while, IBM was paying their monthly retirement and healthcare at 100%. Most of them worked there another 5-10 yrs before re-retiring.
Anyways, old sales guys work best with old companies and older managers. But finding people like that who want cloud anything is hard, because cloud is only good for things where real security isn't needed.
I'm gen-x. Never been busier than I am now, consulting. Every day I'm amazed at what passed for technical skills from 90% of the people under 20. It really is sad.
...and by their rules. I don't see the problem here.
He was not fired for not being a millennial. He was fired for not being Indian.
Article says he was in Bluemix, which is IBM's offering to compete with AWS/App Engine/Azure, he wasn't selling old services.
Disclaimer: I'm a former IBMer who worked in cloud
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Dude, you're old enough to remember Bob Cringely writing about this crap at IBM incessantly for a decade. But you weren't so old then, were you?
Go work for an American company who will value your skills and pay you more.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Don't feed the trolls.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Is Kimberly Overbay. A woman. That probably explains it all. She needed to get rid of the old white guy in order to promote diversity.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Don't feed the troll.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I'm about as far left as you can get and I agree with that quote. Regulations exist for a reason. There was a problem that needed to be solved.
And we're at full employment and wages aren't rising. Look it up. There's tons of articles from "confused" economists who just can't seem to figure out the cause. Mostly because they're not allowed to talk about why 40 years of supply side (aka trickle down) economics failed when we already knew it didn't work. Hell, Trump's tax cuts were uses almost entirely to do stock buy backs and mergers. Exactly what everyone on the left (including myself) said would happen. This matters because now the Federal Reserve is talking about raising interest rates to slow inflation caused by all the stock buybacks and those raises are going to eat up what little the working class got from the tax cuts and then some...
These rules had nothing to do with fairness. Wages were below what people needed to live (as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said "Too Poor to Live"). That's what drove the changes when the rules were put in place. The wealthy didn't care if you could afford to buy their stuff because in the robber baron era they already owned pretty much everything. Expansion was fueling economic growth. When we ran out of land that stopped and the country stagnated. WWI & II fixed that by blowing up Europe and after that Eisenhower created the military industrial complex and fear of getting you factory seized kept outsourcing from killing wages.
Welp, we're out of land, we're out of wars (the ruling class has stiffled the last few that could have lead to WWIII) and the profits from the industrial complex are filtering up to the top almost entirely. So what now? I'm guessing dystopia. A very small number of humans will enjoy modern civilization (even by today's standards) and the rest, the 99.999% will live in squalor. There's plenty of solutions but I don't know how to get folks to buy into them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I"m not trolling. I want other Oldies to stop patting themselves on the back about how amazing their skills are and realize they're just as expendable as everyone else. Once they realize that they can get out of the "Got Mine, Fuck You" mindset and join me in fixing the problems we've got. Until then they're just lambs to the slaughter who're hoping they're far enough in the back of the line to die of old age before they get to the butcher.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I worked for a company for almost 10 years. The owner very much liked me and the job I was doing. I was totally dependable and available to drive/fly anywhere on a seconds notice to take care of business. He hired a somewhat churlish operations manager who didn't get along with anyone, but I managed to maintain a workable relationship with him. He even became more civil towards others after a couple of years. The company owner then sold the company. Soon afterwards, the churlish operations manager cut me off from work. You never know what you are going to fall into when it comes to companies. I did move on to a better position.
if they're redundant. That's what killed mainframes. Instead of 1 ultra high performance and ultra high uptime sever you throw a bunch of cheap commodity hardware at your problems.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
R&D was seen as too much of a cost. They are unable to obtain R&D through industrial espionage, in a way that is financially viable. Instead, as a large company that is too large to innovate, they buy small companies that have something that looks valuable (buzz-worthy) and gets rid of the staff in a few years. Then the sales/marketing team takes over to generate profit. Any maintenance work can be out-sourced and quality can ride on its brand-name.
Seems like a David vs. Goliath.
And we all know how _that_ ended.
Anon Coward here. My wife's sister is a nurse in her mid 50s, has plenty of experience and expertise. Nursing schools are still cranking out girls eager to take any nursing position. Management at the hospital where my sister in law works has reminded her many times over the past few years that she'll need to work xmas, thanksgiving or New Years. Otherwise, she'll get replaced by one of these girls with less experience, less years under their belt and therefore lower compensation. Note that nurses are paid by seniority. So my sister in law is quite expensive. Hospitals look at the nurses like disposable drones, no more than IT managers see software engineers as replaceable coders.
Why are you equating your experience with that of the OP? What are the grounds for claiming they are the same? You could be right about your experience and the OP could be right about their experience, and they could be completely different lessons just the same.
I'd normally have let this comment slide, but sales is normally a commissions business. If the sales guys don't make the sales then they don't get a commission. It's pretty cut-and-dried.
Therefore you prioritizing "technologically adept" and throwing shade at "cloud sales star" seems way off base to me. I'm a tech guy and not normally on the sales and marketing team's side, but even I know that "just good at talking" is the core competency of marketing folks. You need them exactly because they are "good at talking".
Why on Earth would you volunteer your age to a potential employer? Or a recruiter? If they ask, why on Earth would you continue working with them because at that point you know they are unscrupulous and have no problem breaking the law. Would you want a recruiter that has no qualms about breaking the law representing you to a potential employer? I have actually had a recruiter ask for my age. When I called them on it I was told that their client (never got so far as to know who it was) wanted that information from candidates. Since I never found out who the company was, I can't make a decision to never work for them. But I was at least able to place the recruiter in my spam filter.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Was he, though? In my field, a salesman earning a $20k bonus one month isn't anything special.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Has that amount been adjusted for inflation?
200 hour weeks? What industry do you work, in time travel? You are a lazy bum. I replaced eight trillion people and work eighty trillion hour weeks. Blah blah blah
-Topper
Doors is bad? Is this like SharePoint where you only find bad implementations so you just assume the tech is bad?
Doors is fucking amazing for compliance. What do you suggest instead?
you're also probably on old, pre-economic crash pay scales. Wages have plummeted since 2008. I know guys earning 30% less than people doing the same job as them just because of when they were hired.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Has it not occurred to you that older managers having seen it all, don't rate git because it is mediocre at best?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
As someone starting a business I'm highly interested to learn how you succeed without sales.
In his defense, I've subcontracted for a company where some employee were billing over 168 hours per week. They were lawyers.
And of course, I AM posting anonymously.
I'm 47. I'm at a point in my career though were most engineers I work with are older than me. I mostly work with American companies. Salaries are $150K/year to $250K/year and the job offers are plentiful.
Take your customer list and move them to a new company.
Are firings and layoffs the same or different? I always thought layoff meant no fault on employee, just business needs change and position no longer tenable. So you get benefits from company and government. But if you're fired for being shitty at your job, you're not entitled to either (unless you negotiated it or company was just nice).
Didn't the guy pay into a pension for 25 years and he's entitled to that investment?
Oh, so no social media startups then...
Well any parents showing up to their kids' job performance reviews probably has early onset dementia also.
I have found this to be generally true. But “in general” they are exceptions a lot of them.
A tech worker who started in the 1980s or 1990s who found that they had a niche where they excelled in may have stayed in that niche while technology moved on they then find themselves hopelessly out of date.
However others at the same age and experience may have had their career more flexible they may not had been the star in the niche but good enough, however they would keep up on what is going on and being interested in what’s new. These people are actually valuable assets as their experience combined with the new stuff really has a value where mistakes that seem to reoccur with new tech can be caught and worked around.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Seriously if bagging a one time 20k bonus makes you a top performer and exceed expectation....
IBM must be doing really badly... like on verge of collapse bad....
Or he simply is deluded and that being his best or one of his best bonus probably mean he have been consistently bad...
Seriously most MNCs really just want profits... say what you will... but all they care about is $$$ and if you are bringing in the dough..... they will tolerate you even if you are an asshat.
Itâ(TM)s probably a combination of both.... company need to lay off and usually they pick the worse to let go.... however if you are in a niche area which is hard to replace they might let someone better go because replacing you is harder.
Of sometimes if they close the whole department then everyone goes in that department/team regardless of performance.
So yeah being laid off doesnâ(TM)t mean your performance is poor... but it can be implied in certain circumstances.
If you get laid off by a company who is well known for adopting Jack Welsh thinking..... then the hiring company will subtly scrutinise more closely why you got laid off since they codify laying off the âoelow potential, low performanceâ employees.
Suck my nuts, Zontar!
learn slower than whites or Asians. There's a pretty big body of research to show that as people age they learn slower. This is why kids can learn a language in no time but adults struggle.
Like it or not there's going to be an average age where people peak. Where their performance declines. The only question is where. In a strong labor market companies will push that age out. But in a weak one like we have now? Might as well take the young guys. They work an extra 20 hours/week. Whatever benefit the oldies have is at least negated by that save for a small number of managers you need (and maybe oddball cases like Walmart where they want old people because they show up to work on time).
Rather than focus on trying to hang onto jobs we can't I'd like to see more support for aging workers. Single payer healthcare would be a good start. Tuition free college for their kids would be the next step. And then maybe the same plus some subsidies for them to retrain. Also I'd like to see us start subsidizing housing again. There's a whole world of housing subsidies nobody talks about: land development. The government used to get land ready to build houses on (roads, power, gas, water, etc, etc). We stopped doing that because there's no money (40 years of tax cuts for the rich). That's why housing prices have skyrocketed. Housing developers don't do the difficult and expensive part (getting the land ready) they do the cheap part (throwing up a frame and connecting it to the grids).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Fuck you.
Sincerely,
Future BeauHD.
That's not the real BeauHD you're replying to
So he got the biggest bonus, which was probably based on a percentage of his annual wage. So he was one of the top income earners. It regularly happens in these companies that when they do a cull it's purely based on wages. Using that logic they maximise the amount of money saved per head of staff lost from the company. Also in a company like IBM there's bound to be people in his team ready to step up and do the same job he was doing as well or better and do it for much less pay.
Is this like SharePoint where you only find bad implementations so you just assume the tech is bad?
lolwut? You're implying that there's a good implementation of Sharepoint?
College graduation date.
And Infosys (and some other companies) require High School graduation date.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I wish you wouldn't feed the trolls. It just makes them indirectly more visible. Some of them just want the attention. Other are sincerely ignorant and proud of it. The worst are probably paid to fake whatever.
I also wish karma on Slashdot (and Reddit and Facebook and elsewhere) were improved to help the trolls render themselves even more invisible. I call the enhanced version of karma in the sky EPR.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As long as you don't fight back against the Agents Of Mao And Banksters, you will reap all the "benefits" of their ideology:
1.) You will go unemployed
2.) Your job is shipped to China
3.) Banksters earn a fat bonus on the process
4.) Alternatively, a "refugee" H1-B will replace you. His family lives in Calcutta and has a nice life on $500 a month.
Tell us more about your nice paymasters !
We should simply boycott these folks. Whatever quality their products and services have, find a reason to kick them out of a bidding process.
They should do business with the government of India, where most of their employees live or come from by now.
One more reason to do so are their $hills on this site.
Oh, and most of their products are quite shitty. Lotus Notes, any more questions ?
We are so much scared of you !
In the post Obama era and the brainwashing of the millennial generation, your skin color and your sex is more important than job performance.
There are reasons why you may still want to use clearcase. I've worked in companies developing medical software, and for regulatory purposes, clearcase has a lot of certifications that are important when the FDA comes visiting and demands audit trails etc.
Companies need to prove things like audit trail correctness and many other things. And with something like clearcase, you get the relevant documentation out of the box. If you have to prove all those things for your git repository, that is a fuckton of work. And you'd have to re-do wit with every upgrade, and even do an assessment of every single patch you install. I don't want to disparage git. It's a good tool. But in regulated environments, there are many more things to consider.
I work in pharma, and have written relatively simple applications that needed to be validated for GMP use (official data use for the manufacturing of drugs) and the amount of paperwork and process involved in validating even small applications is daunting. And with every change, you need to do an assessment, follow formal GMP compliant change control, and re-do a lot of testing and paperwork.
And in the face of that, it may very well be worthwhile to buy expensive clearcase licenses, instead of using git.
I worked at IBM as a subcontractor during the transition from the halcyon years to after the "ranking" system was introduced. My father was a manager there. When the "ranking" system was introduced in 1992, most of the managers refused to comply and they decided to retire, including my father. They did not want to subject their teams to the "ranking" system as it was vulnerable to exploitation and wrought with loopholes.
A friend my age was an IBM employee. He was the star engineer of his department and had just earned a promotion. What he didn't realize was that according to policy, the promotion was such that it lowered his ranking. Then business went sour and he got his layoff notice. Why? His promotion - thus his lowered ranking - put him in the "window". His department was shocked. His managers tried to reverse the decision, but such policy may well have been the law of the Persians and the Medes. Mind you, at the time my friend was under 30 years old - his case was not age related, but it did illustrate the ineffectiveness of the "ranking" system. And the people left behind were rightfully nervous.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
I enjoy watching IBM going down the toilet. They've alienated a whole generation of people that once worked for them, many of which have moved on to other companies that aren't corporate A-holes, and basically have become an Indian company. I , for one, will never hire IBM to do anything ever again, after their corporate malfeasance. Soon perhaps they'll learn that their management can be outsourced too, and then they can watch their stock price continue to sink on poor performance.
THIS is IBM.
Like 25% of the workforce in IT, we have all passed through IBM at some point (usually after being outsourced, Thanks Merrill Lynch).
Got glowing reviews for 4.9 years, saw the pool that was outsourced be dwindled from 110 of us to only a handful left, and I magically
got a bad review (Odd, as I am a one person team for my job duties, and have all the smoke tests to confirm 99% or better during the time).
My boss shows up the day after IBM announces a 10% Layoff (RIF is there preferred term).
Coincidentally, I was 3 weeks from turning 40, and they give you a list of all the ages of all the people affected in the RIF, and by age.
Ages 38-41 made up 85% of all terminations, and almost 95% were 35 and older.
Nothing to see here. This is how IBM operates. It is disgusting and blatant, but, they don't care as well as the government institutions.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Why, in the 1960s "cloud" was called "Timesharing." What a concept!
Are firings and layoffs the same or different? I always thought layoff meant no fault on employee, just business needs change and position no longer tenable. So you get benefits from company and government. But if you're fired for being shitty at your job, you're not entitled to either (unless you negotiated it or company was just nice).
Didn't the guy pay into a pension for 25 years and he's entitled to that investment?
Admittedly I'm from Gen-X, so terms might have changed slightly. My understanding lines up with yours. Fired generally means the employee was at fault. People laid off due to the economy generally get a severance package of some sorts.
Forty years ago IBM solved the problem of getting rid of people it didn't want anymore by moving them to another office, sometimes far from where they were currently located. Some people accepted this and ended up being moved to a new office every 2 or 3 years like a military brat. Many people refused and then were laid off for refusing the new assignment. In many circles working for IBM meant "I've Been Moved." I wonder why they forgot about that strategy?
I hope he get 100 Million Dollars.
Read the complaint... It's all in there: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/Langley_v_International_Business_Machines_Corporation_Docket_No_1?1527798903
You all are going to get old one day, too. This will be you in 20 or 30 years.
Also, as someone who has decades of experience myself, I can tell you that experienced older workers are actually worth the extra money they earn (except when they aren't, but that can be true of less experienced workers, too). If nothing else, older people understand the Dunning-Kruger effect.
For people who claim to be smarter than everyone else, you greedy Sillycon Valley sociopaths really are pretty stupid.
New IBM mantra: Screw enough customers by over-promising and under-delivering to inflate the stock price (meanwhile laying off everyone worthwhile) while the C-suite cashes in.
Organization? You must be joking..
You are all so silly.
When I entered the job market with a bachelors degree at the age of 26 I was often "too young" for anything I wasn't extremely overqualified for. I never cried about it though.
and in this case, I'd bet $1000 its not about age, its about wage.
Did they have to pay him more than a fresh higher, YES!!! that's your real answer.
When you go to the store, and you see two of the same thing but one costs less, which do you buy?
don't be stupid.
In UK, and it may be so in USA, the employer's total cost of an employee includes his gross salary (plus 13.8% National Employer's NIC National Insurance contribution to a limit) plus the employer's pension plan cost. Roughly makes 130% ~ 140% 'nominal salary. The last two are often a big cost and so laying off 'senior age' employees , [if work can be done by junior new hires] is cost effective in cash terms to employ new hires. However old knowledge and experience walk out of the door this is sometimes a long term much greater cost (liabilities for problems, solutions lost and customer problems) .
However there are specific age discrimination laws/regulations and tribunals which can impose penalties.
A cost of removal of elderly staff if made 'redundant' is a 'smallish' redundancy payment, but only if the 'job' actually disappears and is not shifted to a younger person. Very important 'the job disappears' not re-assigned.
Regards Eion MacDonald
"Discrim" was intentionally truncated, why?
Harder to search for?
...usually they pick the worse to let go...
So that is what happened to the Disney employees that were asked to train their replacements?
Be real, they often pick the most expensive to let go.