Hacker News Reader

Comment by oldslowcorp | Hacker News Reader

Could it be a case of correlation vs causation?

Age discrimination is bad. Firing employees because of their age, or maybe more cynically, because if their elevated salaries, is a shit thing to do.

But what about getting rid of the employees who hold the company back? The ones who drag their feet. The ones who are more concerned about protecting their political standing than accomplishing good work. The ones who try to avoid change, sometimes literally defended by "Well that's the way we've always done it."

That breed of employee tends to have been at the company for a long time. Often that means they're older in age, too. Making a clean sweep of folks like that could appear to be age discrimination while actually being due to performance.

View on HN

These people don't have to be very old at all, actually. I've seen plenty of young people start acting like this at a company after working there only a year or two.

That being said, if it is an older person doing this, then it can be difficult to let them go without it appearing to be due to age discrimination.

But I've seen enough layoffs to know that for a lot of companies, it's all about saving money by getting rid of these people, not about their performance, at least every time I've seen it happen.

I've even been told directly in a layoff it was because I was one of the higher paid people in the company (it was a game studio, so I still wasn't being paid all that much). I guess I was old for someone in the game industry, since most people start fresh out of school and burn out of the industry in less than five years.

My manager got laid off as well, who was in his 60s, did excellent at his job, and had tons of amazing experience (I wish I worked on even just one of the cool games he was lead on), but it was definitely because he was one of the highest paid people there (if not the highest), not because of anything else.

> These people don't have to be very old at all, actually. I've seen plenty of young people start acting like this at a company after working there only a year or two.

I do remember a guy hired when we were in our twenties basically say something like "we're not paid to think/above pay grade," when trying to come up with solutions to problems. I was young enough to be surprised. :D

What I saw in common with the people who were laid off recently at my company was their shoehorned positions in the org chart.

As the money gets tighter, all these made up titles from some long dead project were huge red flags. Managers and directors with no one really reporting to them.

Added to that, most of them were paid 3x-4x of a newer hire and were mostly burnt out on trying to keep up with new technology.

That's why I support a more robust welfare state.

The reason that people are in positions like you describe is because of the dire consequences of losing employment. Being older doesn't mean that you don't know how to innovate or look for ways to improve the area you work in. People become super cautious because of the mortgage and college debt, car payments, on and on and on. Their "actual job" is to get money for those things.

If losing employment didn't mean complete loss of livelihood, the only people working at a place would be there because they actually wanted to be there. They would be interested in performance because it might be rewarded, not because failing would be punished.

I think that’s a good point. The chilling effects of ruin without a safety net make it hard for cteative individuals to develop their skills - and their economic potential.

I don't really understand why you would think that "avoiding change" is an offense to be fired for.

Your opinion seems to lack every bit of possible nuance: say i'm manager A trying to raise awareness about tech B in company. I have every right as employee C to be skeptical because if B is bad and pointless, I'll be punished for following A's decision. Of course A has every right to spread B even if bad, because it will make A seem awesome in the process.

My general point is: resistance to change is a spectrum and is often mixed with office politics and strong opinions on both sides. Trying to blame someone merely for wanting to keep the status quo is absurd.

who are more concerned about protecting their political standing than accomplishing good work.

Managers and bean counters you mean? They always seem to be spared the axe.

Bean counters are already outsourced to SSCs (shared service centers) around the globe. And everyone is a manager at IBM and big firms nowadays. (Except the real engineers at IBM Research, and a few good guys at BlueMix and other corps they bought over the years.)

Too many advisors, strategists, architects and analysts, too few people willing to do the actual work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com