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

[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]

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

[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

[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

[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".

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

[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: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

[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: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.

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!

[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.

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.

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: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: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.

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: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: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 ...

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.

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.

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.