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IBM Fired Me Because I'm Not a Millennial, Alleges Axed Cloud Sales Star in Age Discrim Court Row (theregister.co.uk)
A laid-off IBM cloud sales ace is suing the IT giant for age discrimination, alleging he was forced out for being too old. From a report: Jonathan Langley joined Big Blue in 1993, and worked his way up the ranks over the next 24 years. Then, in 2017, as worldwide program director and sales lead of the Bluemix software-as-a-service, he was let go. According to his lawsuit paperwork, Langley, 60, "was a successful employee and his performance met or exceeded IBM's expectations." Had he "been younger, and especially if he had been a millennial, IBM would not have fired him," his filing claimed.
Langley, of Texas, USA, was seemingly doing very well for himself within Big Blue. For instance, he netted a $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, the largest such windfall within his team in Austin, we're told. His annual performance scores put him at the top or near the top of his group. Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss -- Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software -- that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June. Langley was unable to get a role elsewhere within IBM, and its HR system marked him as having "resigned," it is claimed. In early July, days after he left the business, Langley got a letter congratulating him on his "retirement." IBM management told the US government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Langley was laid off after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team, despite him bagging the biggest bonus that quarter, and earlier meeting or exceeding performance expectations, according to the lawsuit.
Langley, of Texas, USA, was seemingly doing very well for himself within Big Blue. For instance, he netted a $20,000 performance bonus in January 2017, the largest such windfall within his team in Austin, we're told. His annual performance scores put him at the top or near the top of his group. Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss -- Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software -- that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June. Langley was unable to get a role elsewhere within IBM, and its HR system marked him as having "resigned," it is claimed. In early July, days after he left the business, Langley got a letter congratulating him on his "retirement." IBM management told the US government's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Langley was laid off after his supervisor Kim Overbay ranked him, in January 2017, as the worst performing person on his team, despite him bagging the biggest bonus that quarter, and earlier meeting or exceeding performance expectations, according to the lawsuit.
Someone at IBM is very, very stupid for having fired that dude, if data he used as evidence can be confirmed.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Usually know a lot more, and have grown up. The usual management tricks no longer work on them - fake crises, OMG you gotta work extra hours or no promotion/pay raise. or we'll all lose our jobs, and so on - we won't be pushed around as easily as the kids.
What we lack in intensity we make up for in ability to just get it done quickly with what we already know, and wisdom to not fool around doing the old fire drills. But MBAs - who should realize they're the incompetent ones - think seeing all that bustle is what makes a bottom line, so...
All the other older guys I know are now consultants if they're any good at anything, and charge commensurately. They don't need to work full time to get the same amount of work done as a youngster, or make enough money.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
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.
IBM hires outside advertising and marketing agencies to handle both their internal and external sales and marketing materials, including some of the research and the entirety of their branding. Their leading agency partner since the mid-1960's has been Ogilvy & Mather. This means that IBM's "outside counsel" is gravely complicit with enabling IBM to push forward these violations. (For more chronology, see http://adage.com/article/adage...)
P.S. Ogilvy & Mather personnel have previously been held responsible/guilty for things like embezzlement, misappropriation of funds from federal contracts, and various grey legal area misdeeds.
I've dealt with IBM on various projects for the past 20 years and what I see is they aren't retaining people any more, unlike 10-15 years ago. Each time I meet with someone from there now for even a similar piece of hardware it seems half the team I dealt with has moved on and now it's a couple of new kids in suits fresh out of college who I probably won't ever see again after this transaction. Other people I've spoken to report the same in other lines of IBM's business.
IBM is a pale shadow of their former selves, now a software and hardware reseller/consulting firm run by beancounters chasing the next quarter's numbers, institutional knowledge, experience and dependable products be damned.
The lesson here is stop this bullshit of being loyal to your employer, because they sure as fuck aren't going to be loyal to you.
Stop drinking the kool-aid and thinking your company gives a shit about you.
Yes, in this case it sounds like the reasons they gave are pretty flimsy, and in this case I agree he should be going to court.
But, in general, I've pretty much decided that any form of loyalty your company is a stupid thing, because they'll drop you without a second thought.
Fuck 'em, they'll get as much loyalty from me as they've demonstrated quite clearly around me ... which is to say I'll do the work, collect the pay check, but don't ask me to be a corporate cheerleader or work free overtime for the privilege of working for your company.
The bigger the company, the more you should not give a fuck and be prepared to leave if something better comes along.
I stopped attending the quarterly "aren't we awesome, but there's still no money for raises" meetings a decade ago. Sorry, it was lies and bullshit last quarter, it's lies and bullshit this quarter, and it will be lies and bullshit next quarter. I don't need to attend to know this.
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.
Sometimes it's hard to tell a really good troll from a really stupid serious post, especially in the age of MAGA. Funny how someone would claim that we should not have labor standards rules but would probably want rules against a union strong-arming employers;
The reason for these rules is (a) basic fairness (b) economic stability. Nobody would buy a house or car if they were not so confident that they could have a steady job long enough to make the payments. (We already have this problem creeping in with the gig economy, more and more workers on temp and contract status). Some jobs it's just not safe to work 16 or 24 hours straight. (Truck drivers, airline pilots, nurses...) If there were no stability in jobs, fewer and fewer people will do the extended training needed to fill those jobs. If my engineering job pays no more than a truck driver, why bother? At the extreme, the song 16 Tons says "I owe my soul to the company store". Coal miners would be paid in company chits redeemable only at the company store and always behind on what they owed, before laws required payment in cash. The standard in the days of no labour laws was 60-plus hour weeks, subsistence wages, and an incredibly rich elite ("robber barons") who treated the average worker so badly that unions were an excellent alternative.
The rules only "raise wages" because in any time when there is more workers than jobs, the employer absent unions and rules could hold over the heads of their workers "I can replace you if you won't work for less". Most labor law recognizes the imbalance, that the employer holds all the cards unless the worker is extraordinarily talented and in demand. The USA is unusual among civilized nations in allowing an employer to dump employees at will; in most civilized countries, it will cost the employer something to dump an employee over the side of the boat.
I think it was Robert Heinlein who said "if you want to see what people were in the habit of doing, see what they have laws against."
I'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.