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.

Comments

Someone at IBM

[war4peace]

Someone at IBM is very, very stupid for having fired that dude, if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.

Re:Someone at IBM

[lgw]

Clearly, the penalties for age discrimination aren't scary enough, for IBM to be so blatant. I'm guessing corporations currently don't fear juries as long as the victim is an older white male.

Re:Someone at IBM

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Someone at IBM is very, very stupid for having fired that dude, if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.

FTFA:

In August, 2016, IBM Marketing Manager Erika Riehle stereotyped Boomer employees as contributing to five workplace “dysfunctions.” Boomers were allegedly less trusting of their coworkers, less collaborative, less committed, less accountable and less attentive to results. Compared to younger employees, IBM found that Boomers were the least likely to understand IBM’s business strategy, least likely to understand their manager’s expectations of them, least likely to understand what customers wanted, and the least likely to understand IBM’s brand.

Now if THAT statement can be verified . . . then someone is in trouble . . . just replace "Boomer" with any other gender, religious, race or age group to see what I mean.

My guess is the Erika Riehle will claim she was "misquoted out of context" or "misspoke."

Re:Someone at IBM

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

While I agree with your statement, one doesn't need to do any replacement. This statement is actually, from a legal standpoint, violating several laws on it's own:
Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967
Older Americans Amendments of 1975
Executive Order 11478
Executive Order 8802
These are just a few federal laws and orders. There are also numerous state-level laws, and IBM may even fall under other country's laws (depending on the division inside of IBM) due to contractual obligations they have signed on various support contracts. Many contracts have clauses that have signatories agree to "Follow all laws and regulations" of the jurisdiction they are operating in.

Re:Someone at IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

more and more evidence is emerging that boomers are a generation rife with sociopathy

Oh, bullshit. Interesting how you make that assertion and neglect to provide any confirmation other than your paranoid assumptions.

Re:Someone at IBM

[voss]

Its not white or male. Old is an image thing even though the research doesnt bear it out. They'll discriminate against an older woman just as easily

Re:Someone at IBM

[fahrbot-bot]

Someone at IBM is very, very stupid for having fired that dude, if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.

Most people can get fired/laid-off for any reason, the best (for the company) being "no reason", at any time - especially if you're in a Right to Work state. If his performance bonus was tied to his salary, that could have made him even more expensive to retain than others. The company could simply say that they're happy with less. The disparity between his apparently high bonus and low performance score in Jan 2017 might have to do with a discrepancy between his sales numbers and his personality... 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.

That HR marked him "resigned/retired" was probably because he was eligible for retirement and he didn't say anything otherwise (even if he had thought to) and he was categorized by default so he would start getting his retirement pay.

Re: Someone at IBM

[ChrisMaple]

The name of his boss, Kim, gives no clue as to sex.

Re:Someone at IBM

[fahrbot-bot]

We do know that boomers are - with exceptions obviously - entitled jackasses who expect the world to revolve around them, refuse to learn new technologies, and who complain endlessly about everyone else being the problem.

Perhaps, although I'm a 55 year old senior software engineer and senior systems administrator and (a) am not like that and (b) do not know *any* Baby Boomers like that at work. I will offer that I've known several Millennials in the work force that could be described as above, though it really seems to apply more to Generation Z ...

Overall, generic labels like that above aren't necessarily helpful. There's a wide range of (in short) productive and useless people in every generation.

Re:Someone at IBM

[Julz]

Stupid is the new Smart!

Re:Someone at IBM

[war4peace]

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).

Re:Someone at IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

legality of talking about why one might discriminate is much more uncertain

This ostensibly was a manager stating her reasons for discrimination, not speculation by the janitor of "why one might". A jury can probably tell the difference.

believe that IBM let go of a profitable salesguy because he was 60

It's localized management and HR acting on IBM's behalf - and yes they'll let go of anyone they don't like for whatever reason. You think this never happens?

Re:Someone at IBM

[fahrbot-bot]

Yup and nice anecdote. In truth, there are a variety of reasons companies "green the workforce". Some are simply monetary - younger employees are often (much) less expensive in salary and benefits costs and the company simply doesn't care about them having less experience. Some are cultural. While I don't condone either, I take more offense at the latter.

Re:Someone at IBM

[BlazeMiskulin]

Do you know anyone who owns a store, restaurant, deli, or the like?

Yes. I do. And have for over 35 years.

Ask them who are their most troublesome, high-maintainence, rudest, and most difficult to satisfy customers. You'll find it's the old people every time.

No. You won't. Old people are more particular, but if you accept that they know what they like to eat, and don't want whatever "new thing" you're trying to push on them, it's easy: Give them what they ask for, and they're happy. The worst customers are 18-25 with rich parents. Second are 25-35 with fat bank accounts and no life experience.

Yes, confirming this means doing a little legwork of your own.

I've been doing that legwork for over 35 years.

Re:Someone at IBM

[youngone]

IBM found that Boomers were the least likely...to understand IBM’s brand.

I suspect that boomers were the least likely to admit that they have any idea what that means.

As people get older, they are less likely to put up with stupid marketing nonsense. At least in my experience.

Re:Someone at IBM

[EllisDees]

>Most people can get fired/laid-off for any reason, the best (for the company) being "no reason", at any time - especially if you're in a Right to Work state.

I think you mean "At Will Employment" state.

Re: Someone at IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but the image on her linkedin page answers the question.

Re:Someone at IBM

[jeremyp]

Also

IBM found that Boomers were the least likely to understand IBM’s business strategy

Or more likely to understand that IBM's business strategy is bollocks.

Re:Someone at IBM

[Darinbob]

There may also be a tendency to confuse "they think my ideas are dumb" with "not understanding our strategy".

Re:Someone at IBM

[Darinbob]

Although you are not allowed to fire someone who makes more money because they're older. You are allowed to cap their pay though, probably even decrease it (though that's amazingly rare if you don't screw up).

I was in a candidate review once and the recruiter, the one person who *should* have known better and known all the rules, said "he seems to have kept up with his skills despite his age". And this was in a company with a higher than average worker age. If that had been recorded and the person had not got the job, it would have been an open and shut lawsuit win, even though the recruiter was a contractor. (also a moron going by the general attitude about everyone towards that recruiter)

It did point out that age discrimination absolutely was a real thing and not just rumors.

Re:Someone at IBM

[Darinbob]

Even then, it doesn't literally mean "any reason". The reason still has to be a legal reason, and you cannot violate other state or federal laws. At-will means you don't need to provide a valid reason first or show that performance was not acceptable first.

For example, California has anti discrimination employment laws, and is also an at-will employment state. Meaning you can be laid and they don't have to be given a reason, but they will often hand out a list of what types of employees were fired along with their ages as proof that they weren't only laying off older workers.

Re:Someone at IBM

[youngone]

Ha! Yes, I should have thought of that.

Re:Someone at IBM

[lgw]

What does that have to do with what juries are sympathetic towards? Juries are more sympathetic to women (including older women), so I suspect corps are more hesitant to unfairly fire them.

Re:Someone at IBM

[The Cynical Critic]

if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.

While people and companies who focus staff reductions on older workers are typically portrayed as mustache twirling evil or stupid here in /., I'm pretty sure IBM isn't stupid enough to have actually done what they're being accused of doing.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why he in particular was singled out for firing they probably either normalized performance for salary or then implemented a cost savings program that was aiming to maximize retained headcount. In both scenarios he's obviously going to be at a clear disadvantage compared to his younger peers with his obviously higher-than-average salary. If you look at previous cases of IBM getting rid of older workers you can find plenty of cases where they still offer to retain the workers as outside contractors, but with lower salaries suggesting that it's not about them not wanting older workers, but rather that they think older workers are just overpaid.

I've previously been met with some pretty hostile responses when suggesting the reason why so many older workers find themselves on the chopping block specifically because management thinks they're not worth the extra salary compared to their younger peers. Usually this just devolves into a straw man where commenters just start shittalking 20-somethings rather than actually discussing what I suggested so if you are just going to start sittalking 20-somethings, just don't even bother.

Re:Someone at IBM

[war4peace]

While I agree that "management thinks they're not worth the extra salary compared to their younger peers", I still challenge the sanity of said management's conclusion. After all, that large salary is supposed to reflect the employee's performance. So what went wrong? Was the salary increase not justified?

Because otherwise it's the classic problem of "I am performing the best I can and still get fired for reasons other than my own performance or company critical troubles". And that's really horrible.

Re:Someone at IBM

[The Cynical Critic]

It could also be that the industry-level issue like standard practices for salary increases with years of experience just don't match the additional value a more experience employee provides to the company, particularly when you go beyond 50 and learning new things has become much harder than for a 20 or 30-something. Actually, considering how many new things you have to constantly be learning in the tech sector it's probably no wonder you start seeing an increasing rift between salary and employee value, along management behavior reflecting this, when people start getting to the kind of age where learning new things is genuinely harder than when you were still in your 30s.

My gut feeling is still that the guy who's suing IBM for age discrimination may have performed the best in his sales team, but when compared to his peers and normalized for salary his performance wasn't all that great anymore.

Re:Someone at IBM

[supercell]

Put me on that jury. He will own IBM

Re:Someone at IBM

[supercell]

My guess is Erika, is well with in the protected "class" at IBM, 30's, female & most likely non-white. She has the liberty to say whatever she pleases against other groups. I hope these discrimination lawsuits against older (primarily white men) are catastrophic to these Corporations, otherwise nothing will change. This should be a wake up call to all white males. Do NOT go to work for Corporate America. You are considered the most expendable employee, especially the older/more experienced you are.

Re:Someone at IBM

[war4peace]

It could also be that the industry-level issue like standard practices for salary increases with years of experience just don't match the additional value a more experience employee provides to the company, particularly when you go beyond 50 and learning new things has become much harder than for a 20 or 30-something. Actually, considering how many new things you have to constantly be learning in the tech sector it's probably no wonder you start seeing an increasing rift between salary and employee value, along management behavior reflecting this, when people start getting to the kind of age where learning new things is genuinely harder than when you were still in your 30s.

My gut feeling is still that the guy who's suing IBM for age discrimination may have performed the best in his sales team, but when compared to his peers and normalized for salary his performance wasn't all that great anymore.

Again, I understand all that, I just don't agree with the practice of "you're fired even though you did nothing wrong and are a great performer". This can be rephrased as "someone else overvalued your work and you take the blame". It sucks and shouldn't happen. Is his performance/salary ratio a bit worse that his younger peers? That might just as well be, and there's plenty valid reasons why, the question is: do we fire such a person, even though they've been with the company for so long? Do we REALLY need that money we're paying him extra compared to a younger peer?

This is the problem with most faceless behemoths of companies out there, they never balance the effect of such decision upon a human being versus the effect of keeping him towards the company itself. It's horrible behavior.

Re:Someone at IBM

[terrycarlino]

I suspect in this case (as in many cases) this decision was not made at a very high level. Some mid level manager with hire/fire authority and HR put this together. It looks like his ex-boss no longer works there either. Funny how creating conditions for a potential age discrimination lawsuit and the associated bad publicity can result in you being asked to move along yourself.

Re:Someone at IBM

[delt0r]

Not really. It just gets lost in the paper work. So one dickwad (perhaps just didn't like him) can do things that end up being very expensive for the company. Not just in talent loss, but raw cash and law suits.

Oldies

[DCFusor]

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.

Re:Oldies

[AmiMoJo]

Thing is, I'm Gen X, and I'm finding that there is more opportunity than when I was younger. My skills and experience are in demand, even at higher salaries.

Re:Oldies

[PopeRatzo]

Too bad your also

After we win the Second Civil War, we're going to force all the red hats in the Trump Army to learn how to use apostrophes. If the re-education camps do nothing else but that, they will have been a great success.

Re:Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just a worn out keyboard? Why so negative? You needed more hugs as a child.

Re:Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure beats all the (TM) iphone 'apostrophes' from the socjus iphone users.

Re: Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

and they live far far away

Dude, that's an advantage for them. They're spread out across the countryside so it's difficult to find them all and defeat them. Meanwhile, your cities and roads and infrastructure are big easy targets for them to harass and wage guerrilla warfare.

and couldn't afford the gas to come out. Not scared. Not at all.

In the event of the war, simply stealing your gas and other resources become a valid strategy. Do remember they're the ones with guns.

Even in the event they can't steal your gas, the fact they can't afford the gas now implies they're used to surviving without it. So instead of stealing, they just blow it up and destroy other infrastructure so you don't get gas either. You would have more to lose than they do.

Basically a repeat of the Revolutionary War.

Re:Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the 1940s, we fought an army that was better trained and equipped.

"We" did. As in, they were part of it too.

And I wager their side played a bigger part than your side did, what with them supplying country boys who were exposed to guns from a young age as soldiers, and the blue collar workers who manned (or should I say "womanned") the factories producing the Arsenal of Democracy.

We beat the Nazis that time, and we'll do it again.

Except you wouldn't be fighting Nazis this time. You'd be fighting Americans. Like Americans who beat back the government forces of the British to gain independence. Even if you see them as the Confederates, realize that the first Civil War was the bloodiest conflict in American history, with more casualties suffered than fighting the Nazis (or pretty much any other conflict the US was involved in)

It should also be mentioned that the Nazis were vastly outnumbered. That won't be the case in an American Civil War. The ideological divide here is close to 50/50.

Re:Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

Trump supporters have proven you can be both.

Missing the point. The point is the people you would be fighting aren't going to be as easy as the German Nazis.

Quote unquote easy. The Nazis fucked up a lot of the world before being stopped. The Confederates also made a lot of trouble and a lot of people were killed on both sides before the conflict ended.

If you look at any of the white nationalist or Proud Boy or Southern Heritage rallies, they are always outnumbered 100 to 1 by counter protesters. You are badly outnumbered.

Except "Trump supporters" don't just consist of those groups who show up at rallies. This is just you painting Trump supporters with a broad brush based on select worst examples.

Even in the 2016 elections, you were outnumbered by 3 MILLION.

ONLY 3 million. The Nazis were outnumbered by a much larger margin. Again I remind you the cost for winning against them was great even with those margins.

You guys do great against unarmed high school kids or people eating peacefully in a Waffle House, but you wouldn't know what to do against someone who can shoot back.

Once again you stereotype Trump supporters based on the worst examples you could fine... ironically much in the same way rightwing nutjobs would paint blacks or Muslims with broad brushes.

Re:Oldies

[antdude]

Finally, the year of Linux with Red Hat! ;)

Re:Oldies

[darth.hunterix]

While I have no intention of taking sides in your inter-American quarrel, I feel the need to correct you, that if it wasn't for American help through lend-lease, Italian's screw-up in Africa, severe winter, Hitler's foolish decisions (mostly regarding logistics), and, most importantly, operation Overlord USSR would lose. Hell, they almost did regardless of the aforementioned factors. WW2 was a joint effort, nobody really "saved" anyone.

Also, you Americans did most of the work against Japan - if it wasn't for you, it is conceivable that sooner or later USSR would be fighting on two fronts and I doubt it would end up well. For that I tip my hat to you.

Re:Oldies

[Talderas]

Also, you Americans did most of the work against Japan - if it wasn't for you, it is conceivable that sooner or later USSR would be fighting on two fronts and I doubt it would end up well. For that I tip my hat to you.

Kind of. It really depends on how you define "most of the work". The United States was unquestionably key to victory in the Pacific with regard to naval and air capacity. China served the same role in the Pacific that the Soviets served in Europe. 3.8 million Chinese died fighting Japan. Japan had more soldiers die in China [455,700] than the United States suffered as casualties [injury & death] in the Pacific [426,000]. We could have discussions on how valuable keeping the Japanese army tied up in China was to reducing Japan's war machine as well as making it easier for the United States' island hopping.

Re:Oldies

[wyHunter]

Interesting. As many of the Trump supporters went to school when teaching English and grammar was considered appropriate, I daresay more Trump supporters know how to use punctuation than Hillary supporters do.

Re:Oldies

[micahraleigh]

Think of the current day progressives you know.

Are they athletic? Are they motivated? Are they independent-minded? Are they willing to deal with their peers to accomplish things?

Think of that Christmas day guy who tried to bring down an airplane by lodging a device in his underwear. Is this guy going to be of any military significance?

Most of the current day shooters are HRC contributers and/or progressives and they often fail to take down unarmed people. The Colorado Batman movie guy succeeded here, and the Las Vegas shooter, but then those are just sucker punch victories.

I think the progressives should steer clear of this path. It is in their best interest.

The overall public certainly gains little from civil war.

Re:Oldies

[PopeRatzo]

I think the progressives should steer clear of this path. It is in their best interest.

Pardon me if I don't believe you really have the best interest of progressives in mind.

Re:Oldies

[micahraleigh]

Ah, right. It would mean diverting welfare funds to war efforts.

Good point.

Re:Oldies

[micahraleigh]

Pardoned ... but to really make your case can you tell me about how people who voted for HRC and Obama are likely to achieve military victories against their opponents?

Do you find them to be strong, motivated people or people who want to wait for an organization to clear the path for them before they do anything?

I wasn't making an assertion about how to find out what progressives need. I was making a case and summarizing it.

Re:Oldies

[darth.hunterix]

That's true, though a lot of Chinese casualties were result of infighting between different fractions. Nevertheless you're right, I failed to appreciate their effort. Once again, war against Japan was a joint effort and neither Chinese alone nor Americans alone would have succeeded.

Re:Oldies

[PopeRatzo]

Pardoned ... but to really make your case can you tell me about how people who voted for HRC and Obama are likely to achieve military victories against their opponents?

Ask Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi.

Re:Oldies

[PopeRatzo]

Those two were done in by the US military. Military folks have been leaning more and more Republican in recent decades.

I thought the Deep State was anti-Trump. Were you lying about that all along?

It's clear IBM should have let him go

[Anonymous Coward]

He cost them $20,000!

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[JaredOfEuropa]

I'd rather work at a place where my performance matters, not bullshit superficial appearances.

probably more like cost too much

[bobmagicii]

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.

Re:probably more like cost too much

[b0s0z0ku]

If he was in sales, he was probably mostly on commission. And apparently, he did bring in the sales, so he was earning IBM more than he was costing them.

Re:probably more like cost too much

[kenai_alpenglow]

This. If you've got to slash costs, easy way to do it is kill off the older guy$ and gal$ who are making more buck$ then the younger folks. Better yet, ease them into retirement or buy them off so they don't raise a fuss like this guy. Govt has done this quite a bit. Bonuses for getting out/early retirement. The military even had "selective early retirement" boards. You can even get rid of some useless folks (ever try to fire someone from the Gov?). The problem is you lose a lot of expertise, too.

Re:probably more like cost too much

[DCFusor]

I'm sure this was an issue in the days of regular raises and real bennies...but see the poster below - salespeople are usually on mostly-commission already. Now the ratio between what he brought in and what he cost IBM - no one's giving out that data. In the olden days, an older salesman with lots of connections who brought in endless repeat business was super valuable. Maybe that market is going away, and IBM (and others) are hoping to hit something with a shotgun approach, sheer number of tries?

Re:probably more like cost too much

[AvitarX]

Is that Unicode on /.
?

Re:probably more like cost too much

[0100010001010011]

Maybe he was selling old tools that IBM was trying to retire / migrate from.

Based on how many places I've seen it in industry he could have been shilling for IBM ClearCase, or "IBM Jazz" (who the hell came up with that platform name?).

I can see how commission for them easily adds up while being a technical debt burden on everyone.

Re:probably more like cost too much

[jrumney]

In my experience, you don't get to be too expensive by staying at the same company for 24 years. The annual increment for staying in a big company like IBM is generally slightly lower than the increment in the external market rate. Hence the other article today about people jumping jobs quicker than ever, and getting 30% more than those who stick around.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[lgw]

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!

Their ad marketing agency also takes blame

[atom1c]

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.

This is how IBM now cuts costs on staffing.

[barc0001]

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.

Re:This is how IBM now cuts costs on staffing.

[LordWabbit2]

institutional knowledge, experience and dependable products be damned.

That's because the bean counters don't understand the industry, they think they can just get a cheaper and younger workforce and things will continue as they were. If they can replace a bean counter with any other bean counter, why can't they do that with everyone? Idiots, the lot of them, and it's going to end badly for IBM. Can't say I am too sad about it, since they charge and arm and a leg for EVERYTHING! I was writing front end screens to interact with COBOL on our mainframe, to increase capacity when we needed it for testing some tech would come out, flip a dipswitch (or something) on the mainframe and magically we got double the performance out of the thing. But we paid for every second the switch was flipped. When we were done with parallel production testing he would flip the switch again. AFAIK there was no other changes made, so half the mainframe was idling the entire time. You don't want to know what the cost was - something to the tune of half a million a week, I forget exactly now, I just remember being outraged by the whole thing. Oh, and don't get me started on their mess of a website, it's faster and easier to use google to search their site than it is to actually use their built in search engine.

Re:This is how IBM now cuts costs on staffing.

[jezwel]

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.

IBM as a company is persona no grata in our state now, as decreed by state government. If you want to utilise IBM services you need approval from the ministers office. If you're currently using IBM products or services you need to have a transition plan, and anything that's not planned for decommission in the near future also needs approval. Everything IBM must go.. The cost to transition is reviewed now against how much they have cost the state overall (9 figures so far) in failed projects.

Don't be loyal to companies ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sucks to be you!

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Fight age discrimination

[prefec2]

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?

Re:Fight age discrimination

[silentbozo]

Age discrimination in the US is pretty much legal (at a Federal level at least) until you hit the magic age of 40. Some states may have different laws.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/type...

Re:Sucks to be you!

[prefec2]

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.

Same happened to me

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Same happened to me

[Anonymous Coward]

High Performer with 34 years with the company (IBM, multiple awards, Chief programmer on major project).. The original article sounds like the same story. only difference is it seems he has some evidence that he can use in court. Usually they are better at covering their tracks.

Re:Probably just his woman manager.

[prefec2]

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.

Re:So, in sum, companies in the USA lie too, I gue

[prefec2]

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.

Re:So, in sum, companies in the USA lie too, I gue

[kilodelta]

And how much do you want to wager that those rankings are highly subjective.

Sounds legit.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

IBM Fired Me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re: IBM Fired Me...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[martums]

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?

Re: You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo, spotted the Union worker. What do I win?

On the other hand

[guruevi]

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.

Re:On the other hand

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

Re:On the other hand

[alexgieg]

In a rational world, you don't fire your fucking star sales guy!

I have an example of that happening, and it isn't even age related. Years ago a young friend of mine was hired to do telemarketing. The first months he sold within the average. The second month he beat expectations, received a bonus, and was named employee of the month. The third month he was fired.

The reason he was fired? He noticed the script telemarketers were provided and had to read aloud was BS and could in no way convince anyone to purchase the company's products. So he threw it away and began doing it his way. That caused his sales to skyrocket. But it was company policy that entry level telemarketing drones must follow the script. And so he was fired for not following that rule.

Re:On the other hand

[jrumney]

It's pretty easy to measure the productivity of sales staff. The sales they close is what matters, not how much they go out and talk, and pretty much any business rewards them directly based on that. In other positions, it may be easy to cover up poor performance by bullshitting, but not sales.

Re:On the other hand

[guruevi]

Not necessarily. In these big business sales, especially cloud-infrastructure types, there can be months or even years between when a company gets a sales pitch and when they actually commit and it's often not very visible who or what in the end was responsible for the decision. We're not talking about selling a piece of clothing, we're talking about "hey, let's move your mainframe" or "we sell end-to-end datacenter management".

This is why sales and marketing in companies gets such a huge budget even though in the end they're dollar-for-dollar not really a huge contributing factor. You get much better sales and marketing by simply providing a better product.

Re:On the other hand

[jrumney]

If salespeople are dropping the ball during a long sales process and letting others step in and take the credit for the sale, then they have no one to blame but themselves. The sales person who rescued the deal and closes it deserves the credit, because without them following up, the sale would have been lost. If this guy has been fired because young millenials with the attention span of a gnat are complaining about him stealing credit for rescuing their lost sales, then IBM is going to end up feeling this in their bottom line.

Re:On the other hand

[waibati]

Libertarianism only exists in an egalitarian society, anywhere else it's just a euphemism for feudalism.

Re:Probably just his woman manager.

[epyT-R]

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..

Juries? What juries?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Juries? What juries?

[Alypius]

So...he can't sue or he'll be fired?

I've been around plenty of Oldies

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:I've been around plenty of Oldies

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Re:I've been around plenty of Oldies

[l0n3s0m3phr34k]

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.

Re:I've been around plenty of Oldies

[fahrbot-bot]

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?

Not really. Younger people get hired for a variety of positions, including management, and they often (a) have the cultural perception that older people are worse than younger ones and (b) want to hire people like themselves. The laws are there to prevent discrimination based simply on perceptions of age.

Reality is that if I'm running a business I need 1 experienced old guy to manage 10-20 young engineers.

That's fine. But if you simply get rid of an older, more expensive, employee and re-fill that position with a younger, less expensive, one then that's age discrimination - and this actually happens.

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.

That's incoherent and simply wrong.

Re:I've been around plenty of Oldies

[jeremyp]

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?

Change "older folks" to "black people" and "age" to "racial" and then tell me that anti-discrimination laws imply that the people who are discriminated against are less valuable employees.

Also try it with "women" and "gender".

So what were they supposed to do?

[rsilvergun]

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?

Re:So what were they supposed to do?

[LordWabbit2]

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.

Re:So what were they supposed to do?

[barc0001]

> Cheap Chinese hardware and cheap Linux boxes made their old model obsolete.

Actually, no that did not. Them selling off their Xserver and PC/laptop lines did that. Part of the issue is quality, the same problem HP now has because of the disastrous tenure of Carly Fiorina. Companies were willing to pay more for IBM servers because of the high quality, durability and prompt/proactive service they provided on the equipment. That was their competitive advantage. You'd buy a rack of IBM boxes and you knew they'd work. When they sold off those lines to Lenovo, Lenovo cheaped out on components and now their failure rates are as high or higher than cheaper products from competitors. At this point I'd actually rate Supermicro servers from Taiwan as being superior in reliability to Lenovo Xservers, and at a fraction of the cost.

The same story went for their laptops. Thinkpads were ubiquitous with execs at the companies I worked at because they'd practically stop a bullet and keep going for years. Lenovo takes over and things get crappy, the laptops that used to last 5-7 years now last 2-4 and are flimsy in construction by comparison, despite the premium price. Then to muddy the waters further Lenovo introduces a cheaply priced line of Thinkpads which are cheap crap. The Thinkpad = quality equation no longer applies and people take their business elsewhere.

IBM had a lock in on a large chunk of the higher end server and laptop markets until their beancounters decided that a quick sale would make the year's numbers look way better. And now IBM has 2 less things going for it. At the rate they're going I wouldn't be surprised if they sell off their mainframe and Watson businesses to someone in the next couple of years. And then at that point they'll be no different from a dozen other software/consulting firms.

Re:So what were they supposed to do?

[DarthVain]

"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."

I figured that out a few years ago. I'd also add, that while anyone is replaceable, the replacement may not be really all that effective for a period of time, say 5 years, during which time the business is going to suffer. Also the broader picture is not always something the manager is really all concerned about, more about there here and now bonus, and move on.

Unfortunately those are long term impacts. I've found that most managers are older, and most are either at the end of their careers and close to retirement, or moving onward and upward to their next management gig within a few years anyway... They they get the savings and the bonus, move on, and if the business is screwed for 5-10 years afterwards, well that is someone else's problem...

Lawsuit

[ericdano]

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.

2009 ruling made age discrimination hard to mean

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

Part of the answer is stings and fines

[Maxo-Texas]

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.

Re:Part of the answer is stings and fines

[hyades1]

"They might even go off and shoot a dozen people."

If it was the right dozen...for example some of those who have helped make "externalizing" corporate costs a way of life...I might not have a problem with that.

This happens in other countries as well

[Terje Mathisen]

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

There's another explanation

[hyades1]

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.

Re:There's another explanation

[nadass]

...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.

Their performance would be proportional to their own salary range; the higher the salary, the more challenging the performance metrics. ALSO, the dispensation of a huge performance bonus in the same quarter as poorest performer ranking is incongruent.

Alternatively, maybe the huge performance bonus was a back-handed severance package! But that doesn't add up with "resignation" and "retirement" actions within the IBM HR systems -- retirement accolades after voluntary resignation after receiving a pink slip?? None of that adds up.

Re:There's another explanation

[hyades1]

Totally agree. There's something about this situation that smacks of an incompetent HR department trying to cover up misconduct. For one thing, we all know undeserved bonuses get handed out, but that's not usually the case in sales. Dollars and cents is the bottom line in sales...how much money did you bring into the company last quarter, and how do your figures compare to everybody else/s. Top performers get rewarded. Less productive sales staff get lectured, or let go.

I also took the trouble to Google Langley's boss and IBM's Marketing Manager, Erika Riehle. They've both got that "shiny happy people" look I associate with cult members and business drones who are more concerned about what their briefcase looks like than what's in it.

Re:There's another explanation

[nadass]

They've both got that "shiny happy people" look I associate with cult members and business drones who are more concerned about what their briefcase looks like than what's in it.

I'm gonna borrow that metaphor. =)

New excuses for old solutions

[holophrastic]

"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.

Re:New excuses for old solutions

[holophrastic]

Software companies don't make money on quality anymore. In fact, most companies don't make money on quality anymore.

And most successful businessmen don't make money on company longevity either. Certainly not if they are actually making a product or performing a service (as opposed to reselling someone else's product or connecting someone else's service).

Modern profit is made by corner-cutting, corporate losses that create personal profit, and up-charging someone else's product and service.

The best way to profit today is actually exactly that -- let the product/service source company (even if you started it) operate at a loss, get all of the tax breaks and eventually go bankrupt without paying anyone, up-charge your customer to connect them with said product/service that you purchased at a discount from a "failing" company. Flex your own tax breaks in a region that seems to be forever failing to keep those source companies. Ta da!

Re:New excuses for old solutions

[holophrastic]

I'm probably way too old to be tasty. I don't think ketchup would help.

Re:New excuses for old solutions

[joe_frisch]

Depends on the type of work. I find that the good engineers are a LOT better than the average ones and I'd be happy to pay them more to keep them.

I haven't seen a strong correlation either direction with age, except for the obvious that older engineers generally have broader knowledge and the younger ones are more up on the latest technology. The combination works really well.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[DontBeAMoran]

Spotted the abuser of the "code" tag. What do I win?

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[jwymanm]

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.

Nothing wrong with early retirement bonuses

[voss]

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.

Re:Sucks to be you!

[0100010001010011]

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.

Banks are moving away from old Mainframes

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[fahrbot-bot]

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 ...

IBM did this multiple times previously

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Not that

[Anubis350]

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

Wow, 2000 called.

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Sucks to be you!

[apoc.famine]

Don't feed the trolls.

Kim Overbay

[Vinegar Joe]

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.

Re:Kim Overbay

[supercell]

Bingo, I friend of mine, was let go recently, along with several hundred others, at a large home improvement chain that starts with an L. Almost all were white men middle aged men. Meanwhile, in the previous 36 months, he and his colleagues noticed a large number of hires of females and non-whites. It was plain as day, they was a directive to get rid of white men in the Corporate structure to be replaced by females and others.

Re:Kim Overbay

[judoguy]

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.

She sure looks like a woman, but these days...

Re:Sucks to be you!

[apoc.famine]

Don't feed the troll.

Yeah but I don't care if one out of 100 fail

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Yeah but I don't care if one out of 100 fail

[barc0001]

> if they're redundant. That's what killed mainframes.

When did that happen? My company and a ton of others that I know of still have mainframes and have zero desire to replace them with anything but another mainframe because of how entrenched the mainframes are to certain business processes. Mainframes still have an advantage in certain areas, plus in many niche applications are the only things that run 2-3 decades worth of custom business logic that would cost more in recoding and testing than just buying more mainframes.

But that's sort of apples to oranges, I was more concerned with the Xserver line where the failure rate I've observed is more like 1 in 10 over a disturbingly short timeframe of a couple of years. I shouldn't be paying more to get less reliable hardware than a whitebox server builder like Supermicro. And that's why I'll not be buying any more Lenovo Xservers.

Re:Yeah but I don't care if one out of 100 fail

[LordWabbit2]

Disagree, you have clearly never ever worked on or with mainframes. The physical architecture is different, IBM uses big endian, most other hardware uses little endian, and it used a RISC instruction set, just trying to emulate that will make your little cpu in your phone burst into flames. A high end AS/400 had 32768 MB of RAM, yes - that's 32GB don't see many cell phones with that much RAM, disk space was up to 18 TB, CPU was 64bit but could address anything up to 128bit. High speed IO switching with fiber optics between. About the only thing that a cell phone will beat is the cpu clock speed, but hey, it's 30 years old - remember Moore's law? What did you expect? Although the total number of CPU's would vastly exceed a cellphones, can't find any concrete numbers on that since they tailored the number depending on clients requirements.

Re:Yeah but I don't care if one out of 100 fail

[barc0001]

Why be sorry? I'm just saying you definitely didn't get all of them. We have a mainframe here that sends data on a daily basis to some of my processes and there's no plan to get rid of it in the next decade. So yes, some mainframes were retired, but there are still a large number of them out there quietly chugging along.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[gnasher719]

Seems like a David vs. Goliath.

And we all know how _that_ ended.

Re:2009 ruling made age discrimination hard to mea

[rnturn]

``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.''

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.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[whoever57]

This guy was a "cloud" salesman, and a very effective one. Clearly he was keeping up with fads!

Was he, though? In my field, a salesman earning a $20k bonus one month isn't anything special.

Not just a raise too many

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Sucks to be you!

[jeremyp]

Has it not occurred to you that older managers having seen it all, don't rate git because it is mediocre at best?

Can we get some counter examples

[FeelGood314]

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.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[Darinbob]

Oh, so no social media startups then...

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[Darinbob]

Well any parents showing up to their kids' job performance reviews probably has early onset dementia also.

Re:Sucks to be you!

[jellomizer]

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.

There's no research to show blacks or women

[rsilvergun]

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).

Re:Pretty Big Assumption There

[guruevi]

If a company needs help selling their stuff, they're not having a great product. A good, well managed product sells itself, you provide a demo, you have a technical person interface with another technical person and then you figure out whether you are a good match.

Pushy sales people generally means shitty product. And these sorts of sales (cloud infrastructure from IBM) is not a decision you take overnight, individual sales people do not have much influence overall, these are products that involve hundreds of hours of teams on both sides discussing the needs and often a bunch of custom development to even get to a sale (and I know because I've been involved in some of those)

Wage not age discrimination

[Darkling-MHCN]

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.

Re:2009 ruling made age discrimination hard to mea

[Maxo-Texas]

College graduation date.

And Infosys (and some other companies) require High School graduation date.

Re:Sucks to be you!

[shanen]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Just Boycott IBM

[The Cynical Critic]

I have a hard time imagining they're going to be any better with the gophers... There's plenty of companies with considerably younger workforces that still output some really shoddy products.

Seriously thou, you're never actually entitled to your job and if an employer is able to come up with a legal justification for getting rid of you, they can do it and there's really nothing you can do about it. If you lose out in a cost-value analysis then you should simply expect to be fired, nothing more, nothing less.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[supercell]

In the post Obama era and the brainwashing of the millennial generation, your skin color and your sex is more important than job performance.

It's different in regulated environments

[Interfacer]

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 remember when "Ranking" was introduced

[AnalogDiehard]

Langley was laid off after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team

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.

Plonk, plonk, plonk, wiz

[ferro lad]

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.

Re:That's nice and all

[Altus]

Ive worked at place with a 1 : 20 skilled to code monkey ratio and its really not good. One person cannot make up for or even mitigate 20 shit developers who don't understand the impact of their decisions. That said, not everyone who is in their 20s is a code monkey either, maybe you could manage a 1:20 ratio if all your young developers were skilled enough but those people are valuable and they figure that out quickly. Before you know it you aren't saving that much money or you are loosing your skilled younger developers to firms that will pay them better.

Re:You don't need to be a millennial to keep your

[wyHunter]

I think you've hit the nail on the head. Why, in the 1960s "cloud" was called "Timesharing." What a concept!

Re: Sucks to be you!

[laie_techie]

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.

Re:Not just in High Tech

[micahraleigh]

It's in all fields. Nursing is the slightly worse one. Not many others are worse than tech. Not all nurses are paid by seniority.

I've Been Moved

[mencik]

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?

Over under

[h8sg8s]

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.

UK Pension costs rise with age

[eionmac]

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.