Even if you don't count the pathetically small sample size the whole study falls apart as soon a you scrutinize it even a little bit.
First of all only 20% of all the comments in their dataset were negative and of that 20% half was clearly identified as disappointed fans. Of the remaining 10% about 2/3 were dismissed as coming from "politically motivated" accounts and when you finally reduced it down to the "Russian trolls" they only made up about 1.6% of the total dataset. Worse yet, these trolls were "identified" trough things like generic user names, grammatical errors in their posts (as if everyone who saw the movie spoke perfect English) and no pictures (as if everybody on twitter who isn't a troll has one).
If this and how widely it's been reported without as much as a glance towards the fundamentally flawed underpinnings tells us anything it's that the country is in the grip of another political hysteria much like the one whipped up by McCarthy's & Co in the 1940s and 50s.
Considering how the reason why companies that use white box hardware is that said products cost them nothing or next to nothing to develop I'm not so sure they will start limiting themselves to properly secured white box hardware.
When car makers make sure all of their U.S cars are compliant with the more stringent California Air Resource Board standards they've spend billions developing them and obviously need to sell a lot of them to recoup the development costs. Companies that sell white box hardware with just their logo slapped on have no sunk capital that needs to be recouped and can easily afford to ignore California, particularly when the market for that specific product is pretty much the rest of the world.
It depends on the context and how you do it... Tim Hunt joked about it before saying it wasn't true and spent the rest of the (unprepared) toast calling for more women to enter the field. We all know how well that ended for him and how little attention everything else he said in that same toast ever got.
Thankfully at least the scientific community in question knows about it and the person why caused the fake uproar by spreading that part of the speech and claimed that part was his speech in full is now apparently a persona non grata at similar events.
What people use to paint an overly negative picture of his rants is chopped up sentences from that one genuinely bad rant from 2003 (IIRC) made to look like multiple rants over the years. However since then he's not really gone beyond calling people "morons", "retarded" or "idiots" in rants that explain why he thinks that way.
You'd have a point about "ripping people a new one" if Linux kernel development had a more conventional development structure. However the way Linux kernel development works is by having responsibility go up the chain in such a way that lead maintainers are personally responsible for catching clear bugs regardless if they were the ones who caused them. The system is set up very specifically in a way where junior developers are expected to make mistakes and their seniors expected to catch them all the way to the lead subsystem maintainer who is ultimately responsible for catching the mistakes of everyone underneath them.
In other words the only people who have anything to fear from his anger are senior maintainers and when he does get angry with them, it's pretty much always with good reason. A system like there where you shield junior developers should actually encourage junior developers to get involved, not discourage them. However the media in general doesn't understand how the Linux kernel development works and how responsibility is assigned in it, instead believing and making other people believe that Linus will chew out anyone making for their mistakes when the only people who are chewed out for mistakes made are the ones best equipped to respond to it.
As for the "personal attacks", Linus actually stopped doing those over a decade ago and these days limits himself to calling out the work and methods used by people in a way where he explains why their solutions are "stupid" or why their methods "idiotic".
I'm not sure this is going to cause anything other than a bunch of insecure devices disappearing off store shelves in California specifically. Don't get me wrong, this is progress, but it's not the kind of really fast progress that is actually needed seeing how really badly secured devices being sold today are going to be causing us issues decades from now.
The fundamental issue is that most IOT gear is really just really cheaply made and designed white box devices from obscure Chinese vendors consumers have never heard of and which the companies under whose name the devices are sold to consumers just order them from the vendor with their name and logos slapped on at the vendor's factory. Until you can force the white box vendors to properly secure their cheaply made and designed hardware, we're just not going to be able to make a dent in the problem.
Well the fact that they've been doing it for this long would suggest that it does work and the cost savings outweigh any issues by the loss of experience. If it wasn't working it would have been noticeable and even stopped or reversed by now, but it hasn't been. Additionally, you also see a lot of laid off older workers being re-hired as contractors with worse benefits and pay so it's clearly about the cost rather than the age of the affected workers.
We are also talking about IBM getting rid of people with around 30 years experience or more and the focus of "age discrimination" being on people in their 50s and older, not the "Getting rid of anyone who isn't just out of college" straw man people keep pushing. My personal suspicion is that they're just getting rid of workers in their 50s and 60s to give their positions to workers in their 40s, giving their positions to workers in their 30s, then their positions to workers in their 20s and then finally the lowest end positions to H1Bs and shipping them offshore.
As for screw-ups with projects that can't meet deadlines, budgets or quality standards, those have pretty always been a problem for every big company out there and IBM is no different in this regard. Hugely excessive overheads is something IBM has been struggling with since at least the 1970s when they conducted a study and found it would take them 9 months just to ship an empty box.
He doesn't just write a single "rant" every day, he writes at least one into the comments to practically every single new article and he's usually one of the first people in the comments.
The fact that you actually take issue with things as tiny as Linus calling patches he's explained how they've been badly done "garbage" and what they do "insane" or using the expression of drinking the cool-aid when people refuse to see legitimate problems.
It's one thing to go on one of his really early rants about how he's amazed someone hasn't gotten themselves decapitated by a door and the hypersensitive language policing you're doing. If you really can't stand something as tiny as the slightly harsh language relating to a very serious set of issues then I recommend you get off the internet for a few weeks and try to put your life into perspective because if something as tiny as that irks you, then your priorities could use some re-organizing or you've got a really easy life.
Seriously, do you really have so much extra time on your hands that it's actually worth spending at least an hour every day of the week writing these really low effort troll posts? Because I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who feels sorry for you and the meaningless life you seem to live judging by how much of it you're spending on being bad at trolling.
Sounds to me like IBM figured out that younger workers can do the job they used to delegate to older and better paid workers and decided not to bother with the more expensive workers.
It sucks for more expensive workers, but it does make sense when the first and foremost goal of any company is to create as much value for it's shareholders trough profits and an increase in the share price.
You may have had a point if this wasn't about trying to avoid making Americans of African decent feel uncomfortable, but there are no African-Americans alive that have been the victims of slavery since the very last one died way back in 1971 at an age of well over 100. That's almost 50 years ago at this point.
As it stands, this is just one of those cases where somebody wants to tell everyone they're "not racist" by doing something completely pointless...
The only one who truly "peddled" his views, which were based in well established scientific work and backed with source references, were the idiots who wanted to shame him for wrongthink. He went trough a mandatory workshop on representation in the workplace and was asked to provide feedback, which he did in the shape of the memo.
Oh and judging by your visceral reaction to him being brought up I assume you're one of the people who bought into the misinformation that he wrote in his memo that women aren't capable of being programmers and engineers? Because the closest thing he did was suggest that women being less interested in the kind of work programmers and engineers do is the reason why Google's diversity efforts have been so ineffective and suggested that changing the work done to better fit with the interests of women might be a better idea.
I'm personally more than a bit suspicious of the whole idea that the responsibilities of professionals trained to perform a specific set of tasks should be changed just because it may attract more applicants from previously less interested groups. We're for some reason fine with very high female representation in certain jobs and male representations in others, which leads me to believe that a gender-skew shouldn't be an issue in itself. Only if there's something wrong with the reason why it exists.
As you speculated, it's not the percentage losses that make this crash a bigger deal than the previous ones, it's the actual "value" lost in the crash together with the much greater awareness. When something where the total "value" of all tokens in circulation is a few million crashes by 80% that's a few million of "value" lost, but if the total value of all tokens is in the billions that's quite a lot more "value" lost. The former is just what a typical FTSE 100 company can gain or lose in a single day of normal trading, but with the latter we're "value" losses comparable to when Enron crashed and burned (well minus the hearings and criminal charges).
Still looks kind of bad seeing how the U.K wants to stay in the common market and to do so has to continue ratifying EU laws like this.
Sure, the U.K could leave the common market, but that's pretty much economic suicide for Britain. Not only is 40% of the U.K's exports into the common market, the common market is so much bigger and thus has so much more leverage than the U.K that any trade deals it has or is going to make will be much better than anything the U.K could negotiate on it's own.
It's not just stuff the U.K has ratified pre-Brexit, because the U.K wants to stay in the EU common market they have to keep ratifying EU laws like this even after leaving the EU itself. Brexit with staying in the common market really is one of those things where there's little practical change apart from no longer having much of a say in what laws the EU passes apart from trying to lobby other member states and members of the EU parliament to vote one way or the other.
As for leaving the common market, that's practically economic suicide as not only is about 40% of the U.K's exports to other common market countries, that have to negotiate as a single common market block, the common market block has way more leverage and can thus negotiate way better trade deals than the U.K can ever hope to negotiate on it's own.
A doubling in energy density since the first ones to be mass produced is still a big leap in the first few years of those 30 years and then a pretty unimpressive improvement over the next quarter of a century. That works out at an average year-on-year improvement of only about 2.5%.
Maybe you're impressed by an average year-on-year improvement of about 2.5% over a quarter of a century, but I sure as hell am not.
You do know that nobody even tried to make a mass market electric car before Tesla did? Sure, GM had the EV1 as a technology demonstrator available to the public in very limited quantity, but that's about it when it comes to mass market cars that ever got off the drawing board.
As for the use of older battery types in uses like power and gardening tools, there's a good reason for that and it's the inherent instability of lithium ion batteries, particularly when well charged. This is also the reason why car manufacturers, and airplane manufacturers as well for that matter, have been so hesitant in using lithium-ion batteries before Tesla spent years and millions of dollars proving they could be made to vent in a safe-ish manner when they catch fire. To be specific about the gardening tools, there's the fact that manufacturers have obviously invested in their gasoline powered tools and the manufacture of pre lithium-ion batteries for their electrical tools so they're obviously not going to throw out this investment at the drop of a hat.
In actuality there really hasn't been that much actual technology development going, just improvements to various products by applying pre-existing battery technology to them.
The main problem with UBI programs that I've seen is that they're just not financially viable without a major external source of funding or a massive growth in the productivity of labor. All of the UBI schemes that I've come across actively incentivize people to work less or not at all, thus significantly increasing the share of net recipients and as a result necessitating significantly reduced payouts or increased taxation of net payers, which in turn further incentivizes net payers to work less and thus pay less tax.
In other words the only UBI system that I can think would actually be financially viable is one where payouts are not even close to being enough to support someone, particularly not when they've got a family, or ones where there's a very large tax surplus due to something like a massive increase in worker productivity with a proportionate increase in average incomes and taxable corporate profit.
Only problem with that argument about how far we've come in the last 30 years in terms of battery technology is that we made the leap from NiCd and NiMH to Li-ion in the first few years and we've since then been pretty much stuck. The first mass produced Li-ion batteries came on to the market in 1991 and that's 27 years ago already, but we still haven't seen any new technology that improves upon it despite talk about it for at least the last 20 or so years.
Thus the "look at how far we've come in the last 30 years"-argument is kind of bung considering all the real advances were made in the first few years of that.
In my experience the managers who decide which applicant(s) they're going hire are the technical managers and thus are the ones that understand the actual job the best. The involvement of HR or recruiters is mostly to put up the job listings and help narrow down the applicant pool so that managers can still spend most of their time actually working on the product(s) while recruitment is going on.
Oh and before you ask, I've interviewed for everything from dozen person startups to 10k+ employee multinationals with offices on every continent.
If there really are 5x improvements to be had to the efficiency of a particular task, then those should be something any qualified person will know or figure out. Hence I'm highly skeptical of your claim.
As for the tests that a lot of tech jobs put workers trough, those are there to easily weed out the truly incompetent applicants with minimum effort from the people in charge of the recruitment. After you pass those you then get to the real assessment of your suitability to for the job and it gets a bit less "Do they think I'm stupid or something".
The plain sense answer is just one of "No" for the very simple reason that companies have limited resources and have to get as much work done with what they have. There simply is no such thing as a manager who doesn't have to consider money when deciding who to hire and fire the same way they have to consider money when considering other things that can cost or save them money.
When you consider that, managers who are actually trying to do their jobs and looking out for the interests of their employer will obviously try to maximize what they can achieve with their allotted budgets. This is the fundamental reason why so many companies are going for H1B workers and avoiding over-qualified workers
You do realize that the article may in fact be just plain wrong? The whole age discrimination thing suggests just that and the direction this particular discussion is heading in is clearly one of the article just being plain wrong.
As for the point I'm trying to make; Older engineers too expensive compared to younger engineers and I'm pretty sure we all know that there hasn't actually been a lack of actual engineers (i.e not H1B workers), particularly software ones, ever since the dot.com bubble burst.
Sounds a bit like my previous job... Thou there the noise was mostly a system test rig with an old, not-currently-in-production-use, version of a system we were in the process of re-engineering running a stability test in case a customer wanted our system on site in an expedited manner running in the "engineer room" with me and 3 co-workers. I tried asking my boss, whose idea it was to have the old system running a 24/7 stability test and to have all the engineers in this room, if this was absolutely necessary and he insisted it was, but refused when I suggested we move it to his personal office or another office used as storage space (until a new marketing guy got hired and we had to empty it out for him).
The really annoying thing about the test rig, generating a constant hum at about 68db, was that it turned out to be completely pointless as we were able to get the new system production ready by the time the next customer was ready for us to come on-site and install our equipment. The other 3 people weren't even that big of an issue as we all knew it was mostly to save space in a small office as we were running on a shoestring budget until we got external funding, which never came as our parent company had a few years prior been in charge of a pretty badly failed project and ruined it's reputation in the process.
Thankfully after that employer went belly-up this spring I quickly found a new job where I have better pay and an actual office for myself (thou I had to put up with just a small corner for the first month until we moved to a larger office in the same building). I don't even have enough stuff in my office to fill even half of it and only put together a single shelf as I didn't even have enough stuff to fill that single shelf. Put in a 40" flat screen TV as a monitor for the small git server on the shelf and data visualization when I'm showing off my work to multiple co-workers just to make the room feel less empty (and find use for a TV that had lying in the corner after we emptied an unused office at a nearby site).
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you don't count the pathetically small sample size the whole study falls apart as soon a you scrutinize it even a little bit.
First of all only 20% of all the comments in their dataset were negative and of that 20% half was clearly identified as disappointed fans. Of the remaining 10% about 2/3 were dismissed as coming from "politically motivated" accounts and when you finally reduced it down to the "Russian trolls" they only made up about 1.6% of the total dataset. Worse yet, these trolls were "identified" trough things like generic user names, grammatical errors in their posts (as if everyone who saw the movie spoke perfect English) and no pictures (as if everybody on twitter who isn't a troll has one).
If this and how widely it's been reported without as much as a glance towards the fundamentally flawed underpinnings tells us anything it's that the country is in the grip of another political hysteria much like the one whipped up by McCarthy's & Co in the 1940s and 50s.
Considering how the reason why companies that use white box hardware is that said products cost them nothing or next to nothing to develop I'm not so sure they will start limiting themselves to properly secured white box hardware.
When car makers make sure all of their U.S cars are compliant with the more stringent California Air Resource Board standards they've spend billions developing them and obviously need to sell a lot of them to recoup the development costs. Companies that sell white box hardware with just their logo slapped on have no sunk capital that needs to be recouped and can easily afford to ignore California, particularly when the market for that specific product is pretty much the rest of the world.
It depends on the context and how you do it... Tim Hunt joked about it before saying it wasn't true and spent the rest of the (unprepared) toast calling for more women to enter the field. We all know how well that ended for him and how little attention everything else he said in that same toast ever got.
Thankfully at least the scientific community in question knows about it and the person why caused the fake uproar by spreading that part of the speech and claimed that part was his speech in full is now apparently a persona non grata at similar events.
What people use to paint an overly negative picture of his rants is chopped up sentences from that one genuinely bad rant from 2003 (IIRC) made to look like multiple rants over the years. However since then he's not really gone beyond calling people "morons", "retarded" or "idiots" in rants that explain why he thinks that way.
You'd have a point about "ripping people a new one" if Linux kernel development had a more conventional development structure. However the way Linux kernel development works is by having responsibility go up the chain in such a way that lead maintainers are personally responsible for catching clear bugs regardless if they were the ones who caused them. The system is set up very specifically in a way where junior developers are expected to make mistakes and their seniors expected to catch them all the way to the lead subsystem maintainer who is ultimately responsible for catching the mistakes of everyone underneath them.
In other words the only people who have anything to fear from his anger are senior maintainers and when he does get angry with them, it's pretty much always with good reason. A system like there where you shield junior developers should actually encourage junior developers to get involved, not discourage them. However the media in general doesn't understand how the Linux kernel development works and how responsibility is assigned in it, instead believing and making other people believe that Linus will chew out anyone making for their mistakes when the only people who are chewed out for mistakes made are the ones best equipped to respond to it.
As for the "personal attacks", Linus actually stopped doing those over a decade ago and these days limits himself to calling out the work and methods used by people in a way where he explains why their solutions are "stupid" or why their methods "idiotic".
I'm not sure this is going to cause anything other than a bunch of insecure devices disappearing off store shelves in California specifically. Don't get me wrong, this is progress, but it's not the kind of really fast progress that is actually needed seeing how really badly secured devices being sold today are going to be causing us issues decades from now.
The fundamental issue is that most IOT gear is really just really cheaply made and designed white box devices from obscure Chinese vendors consumers have never heard of and which the companies under whose name the devices are sold to consumers just order them from the vendor with their name and logos slapped on at the vendor's factory. Until you can force the white box vendors to properly secure their cheaply made and designed hardware, we're just not going to be able to make a dent in the problem.
Well the fact that they've been doing it for this long would suggest that it does work and the cost savings outweigh any issues by the loss of experience. If it wasn't working it would have been noticeable and even stopped or reversed by now, but it hasn't been. Additionally, you also see a lot of laid off older workers being re-hired as contractors with worse benefits and pay so it's clearly about the cost rather than the age of the affected workers.
We are also talking about IBM getting rid of people with around 30 years experience or more and the focus of "age discrimination" being on people in their 50s and older, not the "Getting rid of anyone who isn't just out of college" straw man people keep pushing. My personal suspicion is that they're just getting rid of workers in their 50s and 60s to give their positions to workers in their 40s, giving their positions to workers in their 30s, then their positions to workers in their 20s and then finally the lowest end positions to H1Bs and shipping them offshore.
As for screw-ups with projects that can't meet deadlines, budgets or quality standards, those have pretty always been a problem for every big company out there and IBM is no different in this regard. Hugely excessive overheads is something IBM has been struggling with since at least the 1970s when they conducted a study and found it would take them 9 months just to ship an empty box.
He doesn't just write a single "rant" every day, he writes at least one into the comments to practically every single new article and he's usually one of the first people in the comments.
The fact that you actually take issue with things as tiny as Linus calling patches he's explained how they've been badly done "garbage" and what they do "insane" or using the expression of drinking the cool-aid when people refuse to see legitimate problems.
It's one thing to go on one of his really early rants about how he's amazed someone hasn't gotten themselves decapitated by a door and the hypersensitive language policing you're doing. If you really can't stand something as tiny as the slightly harsh language relating to a very serious set of issues then I recommend you get off the internet for a few weeks and try to put your life into perspective because if something as tiny as that irks you, then your priorities could use some re-organizing or you've got a really easy life.
Seriously, do you really have so much extra time on your hands that it's actually worth spending at least an hour every day of the week writing these really low effort troll posts? Because I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who feels sorry for you and the meaningless life you seem to live judging by how much of it you're spending on being bad at trolling.
Sounds to me like IBM figured out that younger workers can do the job they used to delegate to older and better paid workers and decided not to bother with the more expensive workers.
It sucks for more expensive workers, but it does make sense when the first and foremost goal of any company is to create as much value for it's shareholders trough profits and an increase in the share price.
You may have had a point if this wasn't about trying to avoid making Americans of African decent feel uncomfortable, but there are no African-Americans alive that have been the victims of slavery since the very last one died way back in 1971 at an age of well over 100. That's almost 50 years ago at this point.
As it stands, this is just one of those cases where somebody wants to tell everyone they're "not racist" by doing something completely pointless...
The only one who truly "peddled" his views, which were based in well established scientific work and backed with source references, were the idiots who wanted to shame him for wrongthink. He went trough a mandatory workshop on representation in the workplace and was asked to provide feedback, which he did in the shape of the memo.
Oh and judging by your visceral reaction to him being brought up I assume you're one of the people who bought into the misinformation that he wrote in his memo that women aren't capable of being programmers and engineers? Because the closest thing he did was suggest that women being less interested in the kind of work programmers and engineers do is the reason why Google's diversity efforts have been so ineffective and suggested that changing the work done to better fit with the interests of women might be a better idea.
I'm personally more than a bit suspicious of the whole idea that the responsibilities of professionals trained to perform a specific set of tasks should be changed just because it may attract more applicants from previously less interested groups. We're for some reason fine with very high female representation in certain jobs and male representations in others, which leads me to believe that a gender-skew shouldn't be an issue in itself. Only if there's something wrong with the reason why it exists.
As you speculated, it's not the percentage losses that make this crash a bigger deal than the previous ones, it's the actual "value" lost in the crash together with the much greater awareness. When something where the total "value" of all tokens in circulation is a few million crashes by 80% that's a few million of "value" lost, but if the total value of all tokens is in the billions that's quite a lot more "value" lost. The former is just what a typical FTSE 100 company can gain or lose in a single day of normal trading, but with the latter we're "value" losses comparable to when Enron crashed and burned (well minus the hearings and criminal charges).
Still looks kind of bad seeing how the U.K wants to stay in the common market and to do so has to continue ratifying EU laws like this.
Sure, the U.K could leave the common market, but that's pretty much economic suicide for Britain. Not only is 40% of the U.K's exports into the common market, the common market is so much bigger and thus has so much more leverage than the U.K that any trade deals it has or is going to make will be much better than anything the U.K could negotiate on it's own.
It's not just stuff the U.K has ratified pre-Brexit, because the U.K wants to stay in the EU common market they have to keep ratifying EU laws like this even after leaving the EU itself. Brexit with staying in the common market really is one of those things where there's little practical change apart from no longer having much of a say in what laws the EU passes apart from trying to lobby other member states and members of the EU parliament to vote one way or the other.
As for leaving the common market, that's practically economic suicide as not only is about 40% of the U.K's exports to other common market countries, that have to negotiate as a single common market block, the common market block has way more leverage and can thus negotiate way better trade deals than the U.K can ever hope to negotiate on it's own.
A doubling in energy density since the first ones to be mass produced is still a big leap in the first few years of those 30 years and then a pretty unimpressive improvement over the next quarter of a century. That works out at an average year-on-year improvement of only about 2.5%.
Maybe you're impressed by an average year-on-year improvement of about 2.5% over a quarter of a century, but I sure as hell am not.
You do know that nobody even tried to make a mass market electric car before Tesla did? Sure, GM had the EV1 as a technology demonstrator available to the public in very limited quantity, but that's about it when it comes to mass market cars that ever got off the drawing board.
As for the use of older battery types in uses like power and gardening tools, there's a good reason for that and it's the inherent instability of lithium ion batteries, particularly when well charged. This is also the reason why car manufacturers, and airplane manufacturers as well for that matter, have been so hesitant in using lithium-ion batteries before Tesla spent years and millions of dollars proving they could be made to vent in a safe-ish manner when they catch fire. To be specific about the gardening tools, there's the fact that manufacturers have obviously invested in their gasoline powered tools and the manufacture of pre lithium-ion batteries for their electrical tools so they're obviously not going to throw out this investment at the drop of a hat.
In actuality there really hasn't been that much actual technology development going, just improvements to various products by applying pre-existing battery technology to them.
The main problem with UBI programs that I've seen is that they're just not financially viable without a major external source of funding or a massive growth in the productivity of labor. All of the UBI schemes that I've come across actively incentivize people to work less or not at all, thus significantly increasing the share of net recipients and as a result necessitating significantly reduced payouts or increased taxation of net payers, which in turn further incentivizes net payers to work less and thus pay less tax.
In other words the only UBI system that I can think would actually be financially viable is one where payouts are not even close to being enough to support someone, particularly not when they've got a family, or ones where there's a very large tax surplus due to something like a massive increase in worker productivity with a proportionate increase in average incomes and taxable corporate profit.
Only problem with that argument about how far we've come in the last 30 years in terms of battery technology is that we made the leap from NiCd and NiMH to Li-ion in the first few years and we've since then been pretty much stuck. The first mass produced Li-ion batteries came on to the market in 1991 and that's 27 years ago already, but we still haven't seen any new technology that improves upon it despite talk about it for at least the last 20 or so years.
Thus the "look at how far we've come in the last 30 years"-argument is kind of bung considering all the real advances were made in the first few years of that.
In my experience the managers who decide which applicant(s) they're going hire are the technical managers and thus are the ones that understand the actual job the best. The involvement of HR or recruiters is mostly to put up the job listings and help narrow down the applicant pool so that managers can still spend most of their time actually working on the product(s) while recruitment is going on.
Oh and before you ask, I've interviewed for everything from dozen person startups to 10k+ employee multinationals with offices on every continent.
If there really are 5x improvements to be had to the efficiency of a particular task, then those should be something any qualified person will know or figure out. Hence I'm highly skeptical of your claim.
As for the tests that a lot of tech jobs put workers trough, those are there to easily weed out the truly incompetent applicants with minimum effort from the people in charge of the recruitment. After you pass those you then get to the real assessment of your suitability to for the job and it gets a bit less "Do they think I'm stupid or something".
The plain sense answer is just one of "No" for the very simple reason that companies have limited resources and have to get as much work done with what they have. There simply is no such thing as a manager who doesn't have to consider money when deciding who to hire and fire the same way they have to consider money when considering other things that can cost or save them money.
When you consider that, managers who are actually trying to do their jobs and looking out for the interests of their employer will obviously try to maximize what they can achieve with their allotted budgets. This is the fundamental reason why so many companies are going for H1B workers and avoiding over-qualified workers
You do realize that the article may in fact be just plain wrong? The whole age discrimination thing suggests just that and the direction this particular discussion is heading in is clearly one of the article just being plain wrong.
As for the point I'm trying to make; Older engineers too expensive compared to younger engineers and I'm pretty sure we all know that there hasn't actually been a lack of actual engineers (i.e not H1B workers), particularly software ones, ever since the dot.com bubble burst.
Sounds a bit like my previous job... Thou there the noise was mostly a system test rig with an old, not-currently-in-production-use, version of a system we were in the process of re-engineering running a stability test in case a customer wanted our system on site in an expedited manner running in the "engineer room" with me and 3 co-workers. I tried asking my boss, whose idea it was to have the old system running a 24/7 stability test and to have all the engineers in this room, if this was absolutely necessary and he insisted it was, but refused when I suggested we move it to his personal office or another office used as storage space (until a new marketing guy got hired and we had to empty it out for him).
The really annoying thing about the test rig, generating a constant hum at about 68db, was that it turned out to be completely pointless as we were able to get the new system production ready by the time the next customer was ready for us to come on-site and install our equipment. The other 3 people weren't even that big of an issue as we all knew it was mostly to save space in a small office as we were running on a shoestring budget until we got external funding, which never came as our parent company had a few years prior been in charge of a pretty badly failed project and ruined it's reputation in the process.
Thankfully after that employer went belly-up this spring I quickly found a new job where I have better pay and an actual office for myself (thou I had to put up with just a small corner for the first month until we moved to a larger office in the same building). I don't even have enough stuff in my office to fill even half of it and only put together a single shelf as I didn't even have enough stuff to fill that single shelf. Put in a 40" flat screen TV as a monitor for the small git server on the shelf and data visualization when I'm showing off my work to multiple co-workers just to make the room feel less empty (and find use for a TV that had lying in the corner after we emptied an unused office at a nearby site).