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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.
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.
...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'm 44, and I'm far more technically and socially skilled than I was 10-20 years ago. I'm also a salaried employee, and I try to match my "amount of work" to the norm of what my peers do. I also work very hard at keeping my skill set up, probably far more than any "young engineer". I've got a rack full of enterprise-level equipment that I practice on constantly.
The biggest plus for someone my age is that I have seen across a very wide technical landscape, from Windows 3.1, NT, 2000, the birth of Linux, analog phone systems, all the way to Server 2016, cloud deployments, virtual networking, etc. I grok, for example, how a GPO setting could potentially interfere with various legacy settings in ways that someone younger just couldn't. I know WHY specific "best practices" are the way they are, knowing were they came from and how they evolved first hand.
He will have to prove that IBM got rid of him specifically because of his age, which will be difficult for him unless someone at IBM was dumb enough to put it in writing somewhere or said it in front of a few, still happily employed, people who will be willing to testify to that.
Actually it's relatively easy to get to the bottom of this, in theory. In practice, it would take some time.
But what needs to happen is compare his data (position, salary, bonuses, revenue brought by him directly and indirectly, for how long was he employed by the company) with his peers' data. Assign a weight to each data point (e.g. salary weight is 30% of total) and you get a general score. Apply same methodology to his peers and check whether his younger peers were retained with the company even though they had a lower aggregate score. Play with the data point weights to obtain best/worst possible situation and compare again with his peers' results.
I know of a case (resolved internally) when an older employee was told to resign and he fought back. HR said he was "redundant" because he had too few projects, and eventually it turned out his millennial manager kept assigning bigger projects to his millennial team members and left the older employee with fewer, mostly irrelevant projects. It also turned out the older employee actively requested projects and helped his younger peers where they got stuck but it wasn't recorded in the projects themselves. The story ends with the millennial manager being let go. The older employee was my uncle (he's 61 now and no longer working for that company, he left shortly after).
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
True, but the image on her linkedin page answers the question.