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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.
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)
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!
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...
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.
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.
This guy was a "cloud sales star", not necessarily technologically adept, just good at talking.
Which should make this an open and shut case, and slap IBM with a huge fine. There is no question about whether or not he was good at some obscure, difficult technical job. He was a sales droid, selling suckers IBM shit they didn't want, and he was very very good at it. His bonuses were tied to how good he was at it, and he pulled in a whopping $20,000 bonus. He got that money as a direct result of the sales he closed. He probably booked tens of millions of dollars of business for IBM to get it.
This story is a posterchild for why Libertarians are living in a dream world. In a rational world, you don't fire your fucking star sales guy! He was making the company millions, and since the cloud is the sale that keeps on billing, it could snowball into billions over the course of the next decade or two. But IBM did, because rewarding a high performing employee is against company policy. Literally. That's how fucked up this world is, and that's why government regulations are both necessary and proper.
Never answer those surveys. They aren't anonymous and they won't listen to you and only want to ferret out the non-team players who don't drink that coolaid. Just ignore the surveys - you are too busy working.
Sometimes it's hard to tell a really good troll from a really stupid serious post, especially in the age of MAGA. Funny how someone would claim that we should not have labor standards rules but would probably want rules against a union strong-arming employers;
The reason for these rules is (a) basic fairness (b) economic stability. Nobody would buy a house or car if they were not so confident that they could have a steady job long enough to make the payments. (We already have this problem creeping in with the gig economy, more and more workers on temp and contract status). Some jobs it's just not safe to work 16 or 24 hours straight. (Truck drivers, airline pilots, nurses...) If there were no stability in jobs, fewer and fewer people will do the extended training needed to fill those jobs. If my engineering job pays no more than a truck driver, why bother? At the extreme, the song 16 Tons says "I owe my soul to the company store". Coal miners would be paid in company chits redeemable only at the company store and always behind on what they owed, before laws required payment in cash. The standard in the days of no labour laws was 60-plus hour weeks, subsistence wages, and an incredibly rich elite ("robber barons") who treated the average worker so badly that unions were an excellent alternative.
The rules only "raise wages" because in any time when there is more workers than jobs, the employer absent unions and rules could hold over the heads of their workers "I can replace you if you won't work for less". Most labor law recognizes the imbalance, that the employer holds all the cards unless the worker is extraordinarily talented and in demand. The USA is unusual among civilized nations in allowing an employer to dump employees at will; in most civilized countries, it will cost the employer something to dump an employee over the side of the boat.
I think it was Robert Heinlein who said "if you want to see what people were in the habit of doing, see what they have laws against."
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.
IBM are pretty much the only place to get mainframes. Mainframes are used a LOT in banks, mostly because of COBOL and how stable they are. Getting rid of people with a lot of knowledge etc. will help with the bottom line the next quarter, but after that you are going to get a lot of unhappy customers, and in the next budget decision they may not decide to go IBM but move to the cloud etc. So the years after that are going to get mighty lean.
I worked for a bank for a while, and they decided to go on a "cost cutting" initiative. We used to get free biscuits during team meetings, they stopped the biscuits. How much money that saved is VERY debatable, but you can bet there were a lot of people who were unhappy about the new "savings" of a couple bucks a week.
That is a prime example of trying to cut costs and just pissing people off for no real savings made. ie. a decision made by bean counters.
I also worked for a settlement and clearing house, I was summoned to a meeting by one of the major banks who had outsourced most of their IT stuff to India. They insisted we sent them a file twice a day with transactions in it. I told them, we don't send files to anyone, we send SWIFT messages, if they end up in a file then something on your side is putting them there. They didn't believe me and summoned my manager, who told them the same thing. They had lost so much institutional knowledge with all the retrenchments no one left behind understood how their own systems worked. That's a fuck up waiting to happen, all due to a decision made by bean counters. The first thing I would do is make sure that the bonus the bean counters get is not based on how much profit they can squeeze out of the company, and the second would be to make sure that any decision made to cut costs is not going to put the company in a precarious position in the near future. The bank that didn't know how their own systems worked, tried to get some key players back who had the institutional knowledge, they had all moved on and gotten other jobs (obviously) and every single one told them to go fuck themselves. It wasn't long after when more and more system outages and incorrect xyz started plaguing the bank. I'm not saying someone is not replaceable, what I am saying is that getting rid of everyone who knows how things fit together in the broader picture is a shit decision.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
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.
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. . . .
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