Intel accused of age discrimination
theverge.com
theverge.com
So, if the metric is "remove employees that cost the most but don't seem to justify the cost," it's going to look like age discrimination, even if it wasn't.
I don't know whether Intel did this or not, but the point is that you can't assume the intent by the result alone.
Would you feel differently if the case were about race instead of age? For example, if Intel laid off a population of people that was 22% African American while the population of the people remaining in the company was 10% African American, would you feel the same way?
(I definitely think such a gap has existed at various times and places. There was a UK enterprise software firm founded by a women which hired mainly stay at home mothers and did amazingly well.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
(There are a lot of jobs where 20 years gives better performance, or where being 51% good va 50% good would be worth a huge premium, but not all.)
Where this really gets complex is startups which are growing in headcount and shrinking in equity offer size. An early hire there might be objectively worse than a new marginal hire but has an equity vesting package which makes him vastly better paid for each month today. IIRC it was Zynga which tried to forcibly renegotiate this (instead of just firing people who were presently underperforming, the usual route).
Good news then that this isn't how tech jobs work, where about 99% of all "technical revolutions" are just renaming old things which had fallen out of fashion and use them again.
Remember how thrilled web developers were when they discovered MVC the last couple times?
I say this as someone already over-the-hill age wise that we really need to find a way to allow people as they age to be able to accept a lower wage that matches their productivity. Far fewer old people would be made redundant if they got a wage cut every year instead of a raise.
Second, it is just taken as a given here that knowledge workers become less productive over time. Why are engineers downhill starting in middle age but not doctors, lawyers, professors, and professional coaches?
Third, it's also taken as a given that we can fairly cut the wages of individuals based on... what? Again, we're bad at measuring performance. Are we assuming they're less productive because they're older? How is that OK? It's possible that a 50 year old has become better at relevant things in the last year, surely.
Software engineers in particular. Computers really started to stabilise in the 2003 when single core clock speeds hit a wall. 'Rapid' change since then looks a bit glacial compared to what rapid meant in the 90s. I don't have anything to back it up, but I'm pretty suspicious that a lot of specific techniques that were important in the 90s are no longer important.
I know lawyers were in existence in ~500BC and the law famously changes slowly. Doctors, coaches, etc are in a similar boat where the situation now is basically the same as when they were 10 years old. No such similarities in software, the languages, bottlenecks, opportunities and best-practice mindset (in many areas) has changed. It makes sense why software engineers under the age of 30 would have an edge. If hardware continues to plateau (moderate if, given graphics cards) then the current generation will not have the same problem when they are 50.
ASIDE: I always wonder if it is really a coincidence that Apple started making inroads at the exact second that being able to quickly incorporate new parts stopped being an exponential advantage.
You just need to check your underlying assumptions (aka axioms) once every 5 years or so. But core CS is as the name says, science. It doesn't change every 1-2 years. Knuth wrote about searching and sorting back in the 60s, neural network (pardon me, machine learning) first appeared in the 80s :)
OTOH the GPU and advances in ML have had a pretty dramatic effect on the landscape. So I don't think any stalled computer architecture is the cause.
The biggest "edge" most engineers have in their 20s is an undue sense of loyalty to the corporation and the naivete to expect that sacrificing time and health will be proportionally rewarded. By your 30s you've typically seen the ugly truth and have a harder time spending 12 hour days driving somebody else's vision.
Usually we see the older engineers claiming that they were either 1) more effective in every way since X years ago; or 2) slower in some ways but experience more than makes up for it.
2. There is license requirement, taxi medallion like setup with lawyers, doctors which keeps overall supply low.
3. It's just not just your salary which company pays. There is a cost to company per employee if the ratio of your salary: cost to company declines, you are a problem for the company and company wants to invest in an employee with a better ratio.
Also, you are making an assumption that we can look at an employee's productivity in isolation.
No, there is a guy at our company. He is good at everything he does but no one wants to talk to him at a company due to his behavior issue. And whenever anyone finds a work which needs talking to him, they drag their feet, make excuses just to avoid him.
Maybe older guys don't fit in the band of recent graduates? Maybe they feel that new guys are reinventing the wheel and dismiss the idea outright?
Just imagine, if someone experienced (or old) (who has years of experience in payment processing) told Stripe founder that their idea is BS because they are tired of payment processing and have seen nothing new.
Similarly with stripe, I am aware of dozens of similar companies doing CC processing that failed, and stripe probably built a better answer after sleeping on the advice of grumpy old advisors while companies that lost everything in recreating with nothing new had no advice or chose to ignore it.
The general problem is that absurd hope may get you an IPO and a worse is better solution that experts can fix for you later. Building and maintaining a good company is hard and requires expensive experienced workers that lower your quarterly productivity by telling you the truth.
Software being in the crisis it is in is no surprise, but the speed that hardware is joining the negligence for productivity club is more alarming.
Just because it is hard to measure productivity doesn’t mean it can’t be measured. Most employers have a reasonable idea of the price/productivity of their employees.
What we have done by not allowing the cutting of wages with age and declining productivity is introduce a lottery event. Some employees as they age “win” by getting pay rises every year until the retire, while other are thrown on the scrap heap early. Collectively the decline in productivity is reflected in average wages, but the human cost is very unevenly distributed.
People in every profession decline as they age. You certainly don’t want an old surgeon operating on you. Job productivity is a story of rapid rise until a certain point, a plateau, and then decline; slow at first and then faster. I wish it was otherwise as I am now past the plateau :(
When I had gallbladder surgery a few years ago, it felt VERY reassuring to have a surgeon in his 50s who could cite a track record of hundreds or thousands such surgeries, with a minuscule complication rate.
You do NOT want a surgeon fresh out of med school who hacked a GAN into a surplus Tesla industrial robot to perform the procedure, no matter how bleeding edge that would be.
I do agree that you don't want to be one of a younger surgeons learning cases.
Supreme Court appointees aren't in their 20s. Neither are Premier League coaches. Same for granting tenure to university professors.
And citing price/productivity is ignoring the points I made about productivity being both hard to measure with any accuracy and being a bad measure of value besides.
Just because something is hard to measure with certainty does not mean that it can't be measured. While your boss might not be able to precisely measure your productivity they will likely have a pretty good idea.
> While your boss might not be able to precisely measure your productivity they will likely have a pretty good idea.
You've repeatedly asserted both of these points but haven't pointed to any evidence to back them up.
I think most commenters here are being particularly polite in talking about the imprecision or difficulty in measuring performance. The less polite assertion is: people managers are, in general, downright incompetent at the part of their job. We've routinely seen reports of CEOs being extremely highly-compensated despite not actually running a company well. There have even been articles suggesting that there's no difference in performance between the more highly-sought-after (and paid) CEOs and other ones, but nothing rigorous. There's no reason to believe the ineptitude wouldn't extend all the way down.
As for your assertion about everyone declining as they age, I think you only need to look at any recent research on dementia, as that has debunked the notion that cognitive decline is a normal part of aging. If cognitive decline isn't to be expected merely from age, it doesn't stand to reason that the productivity caused by that cognition would be expected to decline, either.
Once again I can’t believe that people think their boss(es) don’t know how productive they are. While it is not easy and mistakes are often made, it is not difficult to know approximately how productive your reports are. If as a boss you don’t know this you should be fired for incompetence.
Everyone declines with age, but not everyone gets dementia. You have made an extraordinary claim that there are some people that don’t suffer cognitive decline as they age. Are you able to provide any evidence to back up this claim?
You don't have to believe it. Actually, I happen no to. I'm pretty sure the human liver is remarkably good at regenerating itself and so, as an organ, does not decline stricly with age.
>as for evidence start with the wiki page on this topic
Oddly, you've linked a Wikipedia page whose first sentence is "Age is a major risk factor for most common neurodegenerative diseases" but then you point out that not everyone gets dementia.
So, let's broaden my claim from "dementia" to "neurodegenerative diseases". Absent one of those (what's the prevalence in the population?), how many people decline? Still 100%?
> Once again I can’t believe that people think their boss(es) don’t know how productive they are.
It's tough to tell if you're being disingenuous here or not. Many commenters on here have a remarkable amount (years if not decades) of first-hand experience of working for managers who clearly did not know, in some cases seeing them bamboozled by other employees successfully taking credit for others' work.
These aren't isolated incidents, and it's why there are reasoned, thoughtful discussions on here about what it even means to be productive as an engineer, as well as how to be a good technical manager who encourages the most productivity in the (now well-understood) absence of the ability to measure it.
>While it is not easy and mistakes are often made, it is not difficult to know approximately how productive your reports are.
"Not easy" and "not difficult" are contradictory.
> You have made an extraordinary claim that there are some people that don’t suffer cognitive decline as they age. Are you able to provide any evidence to back up this claim?
Actually, it's you who've made the extraordinary claim, since it requires showing that every single human declines. To falsify it, I need only a single piece of anecdata, which can be pulled from the comments of this thread or the one about IBM's age discrimination.
You now seem to have veered off into some kind of far more general discussion of "decline" (aging), which I was not addressing, as the original commenter (and, arguably, TFA) was referring, specifically to "knowledge workers".
If "talking past each other" means that I've been trying to keep my commentary specific to so-called knowledge working productivity and cognitive abilities, while you keep trying to expand the conversation to overall aging, then, yes, that's what's been happening.
What we want to avoid is leaving employers with only one way of solving the declining productive issue as their employees age. I think it is better to have a job that pays less than no job at all.
Also I think it's an simplification to think that it's all about productivity. I guess at Intel as everywhere managers tend to become younger on average because senior management thinks it's the only way to face the future challenges of digitalisation or whatever.
Then you have the grumpy senior like myself who doesn't believe in the n-th iteration of some web framework or microservices or containers. So that guy becomes deadweight to dispose of.
When an employee is at the best position (age wise), they hop jobs a lot and negotiate higher pay even at the detriment of the company. Yes, it does cost a lot when an employee hops too much. Employers have no option here.
This system will always have winners, you can definitely improve the situation but you'll have to tax the winners, it has never worked well in past.
Employees hop because of wage stagnation -- there is an option here, prevent wage stagnation.
Considering employers hold the vast majority of the power in the relationship, that's a rather extreme conclusion.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's easily within the employers' abilities just to pay more money (and/or offer better terms to increase job stability, like meaningful severance packages or usable retirement plans). This actually used to happen routinely, but employers stopped valuing employment longevity, so job-hopping is what they got.
Additionally, as another commenter alluded to by mentioning job growth, working environment matters, too. Although not every employer can offer every employee (enough) growth, other forms of respect and opportunities (not just lip service) make a difference.
Companies like Southwest Airlines make it something of a point of pride that they keep their turnover low by keeping their employees happy, so it's not as if the principle has somehow aged out of applicbility.
The far likelier explanation, to my mind, is that everyone else is concerned with short-term incentives over long-term value.
People routinely hold negative stereotypes of groups that they belong to.
This is the most exemplary statement of naive (very probably American) class unconsciousness I’ve ever seen on HN. The distinction is between owners/managers and workers. First, an older member of the petty bourgeoisie is “bought in” as an effective part of the machinery of control. An older worker is viewed as an expensive and worn out “human” resource by that machinery. Managers don’t have to hate old managers to fire old workers. Second, “hate” is a hopelessly blunt instrument to use to understand systemic age discrimination. It’s not “hate” that drives older workers out; it’s a race to the bottom that needs to be regulated and penalized out of existence. Third, and finally, the “economic reasons alone” are exactly the pressures toward discrimination. To let them off for that would be like letting a slasher off on the grounds that they liked to spill blood.
We really need people to think in a more nuanced way if we’re to have any hope of avoiding a global race to the botttom with a maximally impoverished populace. I don’t hold out much hope.
Older workers as a group are fired for one reason; they are as a group more expensive and less productive than younger workers. Denying this reality does not help anyone, most certainly not older workers.
The "disparate impact theory" in legal reasoning says the opposite, more or less:
(A) 22
(B) 26
(C) 31
https://digitopoly.org/2017/07/17/the-young-entrepreneur-myt...
But I'm not sure how that converts to the skills you need to have to be an employable Intel worker, which are most certainly a lot different
<snark>
Perhaps being a successful founder doesn't require as much neural plasticity as being an older worker at Intel. ;-)
</snark>
Anyways - I probably wouldn't want to fire all managers. But based on the directives they come up with, I feel managers and executives have lost touch with their product and process. It would be nice of they could have a dose of "Undercover boss" and be forced to do some worker bee work once in a while. Then their directives would probably be closer to reality.
I work in the internal integration space and work with lots of teams. Very often they'd come up with some requirement, or a date that is far fetched and it all comes from above. I'd need to talk some sense into people and tell them why their idea is bad, or their timeline poses a risk.
Lines-of-code/time is a terrible measurement.
I fully agree with that last comment.
Why should I or anyone else believe this about older and more experienced programmers? I can't think of many fields where more experienced practitioners are generally worse...
We aren't slower. We only move in the right directions.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/joop.12031
Well, maybe you are just speaking for yourself or your peer group.
I would be a little more inclusive in my terminology and more likely to say "The average person can be less innovative after they have aged excessively."
One of the interesting things about natural-born innovators is that they are very seldom average people.
> Everyone starts out at a relatively low level, rises to a max and then decline as they age
When it comes to native innovative ability, it starts out at a relatively high level, is capable of growing exponentially over time, and only declines in growth rate AFTER the subject has aged excessively.
Innovation itself is one of the extreme cases where the only viable substitute for starting early and decades of experience, is to have a windfall of good fortune.
Which is why most innovation occurs due to a windfall of good fortune rather than the result of a goal being reached as planned.