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Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I tend to think this is the more likely explanation, as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work. In any case, as a 57 year-old working engineer it is somewhat against my nature to delegate responsibility for my being able to make a living to any company. I learned a long time ago to take responsibility for it myself by constantly staying engaged, challenging myself, and learning new things. If I'm let go by an organization for whatever reason I will have the skills needed to land a new position, and I'd much rather spend my time keeping them sharp and acquiring new ones than wondering why BigCorp (who I probably won't work for anyway) didn't keep me around for the rest of my working life. The only security is what you create for yourself, in my opinion.

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> as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work

Any sufficiently common bias has the same effect as a conspiracy. While it's very unlikely that IBM had an actual plan to eliminate older workers, because that would be illegal and stupid, there could well have been enough culture and cues leading to myriad "independent" actions with the same effect. Bias is something that must be actively countered.

> as a 57 year-old working engineer it is somewhat against my nature to delegate responsibility for my being able to make a living to any company

That's a very reasonable attitude, but irrelevant. Whether people have other options or not does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong.

Not sure why you're trying to argue. OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior rather than requiring explicit intent to discriminate against older people and then shared his/her strategy to fight it.

Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile to people offering their perspectives, particularly when they are in the very class of victims under discussion.

The OP's strategy to fight, while clearly a valid approach, has the twin problems of survivor bias, and absolving corporations of their actions.

[IANAL] "Emergent behavior" is a pretty weak defense, because now you have to prove that you had no idea that the bad thing would happen. Getting into a trap of "You're either evil or incompetent, and we're just deciding which." is a bad place to be.

> OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior

Incorrect. OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias. I pointed out that it could still be bias even if it's not coordinated.

> Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant.

I was calling only that part irrelevant.

> they are in the very class of victims under discussion.

So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group. It doesn't matter whether any of us, or the IBM employees have alternative strategies. It only matters whether IBM discriminated against them.

> Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile

Advice best taken yourself. I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion. Please don't be so quick to take sides and attribute ill intent to anyone who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

This comment is ironic given your previous praise for Linus on acknowledging his rude behavior towards other developers.

The language you're using is pretty abrasive and it can come off as quite hostile even if you don't intend it. You also get defensive when someone interacts with your easy-to-misinterpret comments and you gaslight them by saying they shouldn't be quick to "take sides" about your ripe-for-polarization statement.

Maybe you could take a queue from Linus. As you said in your own comment in reference to Linus admitting he had an attitude: "Good for him. These are hard things to admit, and he's setting a great example."

If I'm so lucky, I look forward to a quippy response about how that situation is totally different.

> You also get defensive ... you gaslight them ...

Very general, very untrue, and very off-topic. Please re-read the comment guidelines.

> Maybe you could take a queue from Linus.

Cue.

I'm not sure what's abrasive about their comment.

If anything, it's a great example of direct-without-abusive, something I wish folk like Linus would adopt.

For what it's worth I did not read notacoward's post as abrasive or hostile. I understand the relevancy comment, but my goal in commenting was not to be morally opposed to ageism. I am, but being so is not a career strategy, which is more the direction I was going. My personal feeling is that if I have to care whether someone passed me over because of the dates on my resume I've already lost the game. Maybe there are people out there who will toss a resume despite it being replete with all the necessary skills and experience, simply because of the suspected age of the applicant. Honestly I think they're only harming themselves, and likely doing the applicant a favor. As for layoffs like the ones at IBM, I have no idea what motivated them. In my experience engineers who are doing relevant work on needed projects, who would have to be quickly replaced to keep things on track, don't get let go while there is a going business to pay them. IBM is facing some major challenges so the reasons for these reductions are probably not buried so deeply.

>OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias.

Nobody said it was unrelated to biases except for you. What was being suggested is that it's not a conspiracy (a.k.a an explicit agreement) against older employees. Nobody is suggesting systematic biases don't exist, which is the strawman you are attacking.

>So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group.

It's relevant (to me at least) in discussions where you have opportunities to hear anecdotes from the victims. We aren't lawyers deliberating a case.

> I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion.

FFS, it's not an argument anyone was making. I don't know why you're being defensive because OP was not defending ageism or claiming that an age bias didn't exist. It was just a suggestion that it was a product of the complex layoff strategies rather than some backroom hand shake of "let's get rid of the olds".

>who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

You didn't present any facts and I don't have a perspective to support on this matter. I just pointed out that you're attacking people you appear to largely agree with because you're not understanding what they are saying.

I think the question is whether or not the discriminating factor was age. Mass firing requires establishing some sort of discriminating criteria (unless you just fire at random), and some of those criteria might be correlated with age. That doesn't imply bias or discrimination against age. If the most heavily weighted criteria established for firing is based on salary, and salary is correlated with age, then people in some age groups may well be more likely to be fired than others.

Right, some of the discriminating factors might just have correlated with age. If there are two workers with comparable skills for tasks at hand, it makes sense to fire the more expensive one. Or if there are too many workers with skills that aren't so relevant anymore, it makes sense to fire the more expensive ones.

It's worth noting that for at least some firms, there was traditionally age discrimination that favored high-seniority workers. We used to call it "loyalty". But there was also the reality that they knew important stuff, and played a role in training new workers. But with technology changing so fast, that's arguably less relevant.

Technology changes fast, but technology concepts do not. More experienced engineers can recognize when a new technology is repeating an old pattern, and (if they'll listen) keep their team from repeating old mistakes.

That's an excellent point.

But the problem may be that HR just processes nominal data, without considering nuances like that. So they end up firing experienced engineers, based on superficial (and perhaps outdated) data.

I'm not a software engineer, or familiar with relevant business practices. I get that physicians, for example, are certified for various specialties. But is there a formalized system like that for software engineers?

For some stuff, I know there is, based on ads I've seen. But what about particular programming languages, toolkits, etc?

Edit: coherence

Performance data never shows the complete picture. It should not be allowed to be used for definitive decisions, but it could be used to investigate.

(IMO the same is true for mass surveillance vs targeted surveillance.)

It appears to make sense. It doesn't necessarily make sense, because it assumes you're accurately able to gauge productivity.

This implies you have some reliable and realistic metrics for code quality, and/or that all workers in a team are functionally identical.

Neither are likely to be true in practice. This doesn't mean older = better, or older = worse, or older = identical. It means you need to assess the value of individuals in a team individually.

Otherwise you're just doing scorched earth HR, with predictable consequences.

I agree. I wasn't arguing for the validity of those approaches. Just that they could account for older workers being fired disproportionately, with no "intentional" age discrimination.

Which isn't to say that HR doesn't realize that their approach targets older workers. Just that they can say that it wasn't intentional.

> Bias is something that must be actively countered

But that assumes bias actually exists in the first place. This argument is eerily similar to the religious argument of "just believe [that god is real]". No, prove it first, then I'll believe. And inb4 "they fired more old old people so that's bias". Correlation does not equal causation. Show me the causation.

> does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong

Moral platitudes are irrelevant to this discussion.

It doesn't matter if a hurricane causes death or merely correlates with it, you have a responsibility to do the right thing. Failing to do so because you want an impractical distinction between causation and correlation is about as much an irrelevant moral platitude as any.

In any case, causation can look an awful lot like correlation when you've got many layers of indirection and noise to account for. So for practical purposes, they very well could be the same thing. You can shout "correlation is not causation" as loud as you like, but reality doesn't work on the basis of popular slogans.

And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.

> And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.

You lost me there.

> you have a responsibility to do the right thing

Exactly. Which is why I call out unsubstantiated claims (or "slogans", as you put it) whenever and wherever I see them. The most common places I've observed them happen to be with blanket leftist allegations of sexism/racism/ageism in the tech industry.

> that assumes bias actually exists in the first place.

Not really. It only assumes the possibility of bias. At the very least, one must look for it. There's a lot of subjectivity involved in deciding who to hire or fire, and unfortunately a lot of people in tech seem to think they're perfect rational machines immune to bias, so they never even look. Don't have to look far for examples.

That's a very reasonable attitude, but irrelevant. Whether people have other options or not does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong.

For the individual being affected, whether it’s “right” or “wrong” is an academic argument. Anyone in tech who got lazy and didn’t keep there skills current, hoping to retire and get a gold watch have themselves to blame.

I’m in my mid 40s and I’m a developer/consultant/architect depending on the month and I’m way to paranoid to let my skills become outdated to the point where I can’t keep a job.

One of my former managers is 60 and “self demoted” to a developer after his kids left home and can keep up with anyone when it comes to knowing the latest technology.

> For the individual being affected, whether it’s “right” or “wrong” is an academic argument.

Perhaps, but from a policy perspective that is far from the case. Wrongs needs to be addressed even if the victims recover.

> I’m in my mid 40s and I’m a developer/consultant/architect

Congratulations. I'm in my 50s and still going strong. But neither your age nor mine really has any bearing on this.

Yes it does. The people who are being “discriminated against” and can’t find a job are likely to not have kept their skills current. They are being “discriminated against” for the same reason anyone else would be - they don’t have the skills employers want. What “policy” needs to be put in place? How hard is it to keep a $35/month PluralSight subscription and watch the job boards to see what you need to be studying?

> The people who are being “discriminated against” and can’t find a job are likely to not have kept their skills current.

Why do you assume that 100% of the people affected by this action couldn't find other jobs? That's insane, but without that assumption your response is a total non sequitur. If you discriminate against me, even if I have no trouble finding yet another job making twice what you ever could, that's still discrimination. It's still forcing me into an involuntary action, disrupting my income stream (especially if options or RSUs are involved), abrogating agreements between us, and - most relevantly - breaking the law. I'd still have standing to sue, and I'd still win, for the same reasons that a thwarted robbery or assault is still a crime.

Are they being illegally discriminated against because of thier age or for valid reasons - they don’t have the skills the company needs going forward, their salary is higher than the company can get on the open market, etc.?

This exactly. Pay grade and composite sets of professional skills acquired are not protected classes. You can't prove it was age discrimination if you are paid higher and don't have skills that newer employees have (because both of those things also made you a target.)

That being said, I am probably younger than all y'all and I've been trained to remain in constant motion on the skills treadmill. I don't know if that's a good thing for either employers or employees. (I certainly feel under-utilized.)

Whether it is “good” or not isn’t relevant. It’s necessary.

With respect, this has to be demonstrated. Are the new skills better than the old skills?

(I am on the treadmill, so clearly I believe they are.)

It doesn’t matter if they are better. It just matters if they are more marketable.

More marketable to who, employers? Are they more marketable because people with those skills are younger and earlier in their careers, so can be paid less? That sounds potentially circular and I would need to hear more to come to agreement.

You're also not giving me much to go on here. I've had to infer 90% of what I think you meant. I think there's a solid argument that older skills are battle-hardened and therefore better for productivity and maintainability. I'm not going to try to make it though, because I'm on the treadmill focused on acquiring newer skills, and therefore would be arguing against my own self-interest. (Eg. why do we need to know capistrano if we have kubernetes?)

But maybe those older skills are not so much maintainable, if all the newer employees on the block are discouraged from acquiring those skills based on the treadmill. You see why I'm not so sure about this treadmill business? I already learned a bunch of skills that I'm afraid we won't use, because they are already asking for newer ones (serverless!) Maybe my employer would be better served by asking me to spend some time to learn Capistrano, if they're not going to let me use Kubernetes skills I went off and acquired on my own. (Let's make this real, I'm using a real example from my own life. I don't have to be convinced that Kubernetes is more valuable, but I do have yet to prove it in the context of my real job, where our deployments all still run on Capistrano not K8s.)

My situation is likely a bit unique and I don't think my employer engages in age discrimination in any way but we have to capitalize on these newer skills to give them value. An abstract sense of "having skills with high marketability" does not deliver any value to the employer (or employee) unless they are capitalized somehow.

In any case, we're arguing about nothing, because

> get a $35/month PluralSight subscription and watch the job boards to see what you need to be studying?

we don't have any numbers on how many of these canned IBM employees actually did this and got canned anyway. Its relevance as a factor is questionable, if the employees with advanced age are simply more well compensated like you said that has also made them a bigger target. They may have kept their skills current and been terminated anyway. This is a 100% speculative argument.

Two parts. I guess as a mid 40s developer I could share what you shouldn’t do and should do based on my experience. I’m also nowhere near Silicon Valley startup or FAANG culture. I have lived in a major metropolitan area for 20 years where there has always been a vibrant job market for developers.

I spent 9 years at a company in the 200x’s that stayed stuck in 2002 - C++, VB6, Perl hosted on IIS, classic ASP, etc. I didn’t know anything about modern development practices. Can you imagine what would have happened if I stayed another 10 years like another developer did? Last I heard they were transitioning to VB.Net and were still using Perl. So yeah, I know first hand what it looks like to let your skills stagnate and find yourself barely marketable.

When I finally left, I took a job as what for all intents and purposes was a junior .Net developer instead of a higher paying position as a C++ developer because I knew the market was moving away from C++ (at least the local market).

I spent the next decade watching the job boards, talking to recruiters and making sure my resume was matching the skills in demands and changing jobs about every two years as I learned all I could from one company and always for nice bump in salary.

I didn’t mean to jump on the “newest” technology just to keep up with industry trends. As much as I love Hashicorp’s Nomad and so used it since it worked with more than just Docker, I would never suggest anyone learn it if they already know kubernetes. That’s where the market is.

So yeah, it is about being able to find a job quickly and being more marketable to employers.

My own m.o. is to be a true “full stack developer/architect”. By full stack knowing a marketable technology on each layer -

- web

- server

- database (RDMS/NoSQL)

- cloud hosting and knowing netops/devops/ and development using their cloud native features.

- continuous integration/deployment best practices.

- and just general best practices.

You don’t have to jump on the new and shiny, the further you go down the stack, the more stable it. Sure things are always being added at each level but you don’t see the rapid changes like you do in JS land.

As far as learning things that pay less, I’m not a strong front end developer. Companies pay me because I can go very deep in the stack and can guide development and architecture from the back end. Web developers are a dime a dozen and pay seems to be stagnating for them. But I still want to learn the latest web frameworks to be more marketable in a pinch even though they are getting paid less than what I make now.

we don't have any numbers on how many of these canned IBM employees actually did this and got canned anyway. Its relevance as a factor is questionable

I wasn’t thinking about keeping thier skills up so they could keep their job at IBM, jobs are disposable and interchangeable if you stay marketable. Someone in technology with marketable skills can have a job before thier next mortgage payment is due if they are either in the right part of the country or are willing to move.

The people who are being “discriminated against” and can’t find a job are likely to not have kept their skills current.

Sounds like you are stereotyping them based on knowing nothing apart from their age.

If I get laid off and can go out and get another job quickly, yeah I might participate in some sort of class action suit because why not? But I wouldn’t personally waste energy to get a lawyer, and go through the whole process. Instead, I am going to focus on my future instead of dwelling on my past employer.

Why bother speculating about whether this is about age or skills when it’s inherently a case of judgement? There’s no way to come to a deductive conclusion. Why the confidence? Where is it coming from? Seems a lot like age bigotry to me.

Whether it’s age or lack of skills can’t be the primary concern for someone who needs to provide for their family. The only thing that matters is if they can get another job. I’m in my 40s and if I got let go tomorrow. I am going to be reflective enough to make sure that there wasn’t anything I could have done differently and learn from mistakes on my next job, but as soon as I get to my car, I’m going to send my continuously updated resume to my list of recruiters so I can get another job.

As a profession we work in the fastest changing industry in the history of work.

Typically once I make a contribution to the framework or the language alarm bells go off in my head and I learn the new shiny. It's the only way to survive.

It's also complete lunacy. Doctors, scientists, lawyers and engineers in other fields are life long learners, still going to conferences and publishing papers in their 70s. Software however prides itself on the young eating the old. They learn new languages and then holy war everyone else that theirs is the one truth.

And that's fine, but I know plenty of older developers who are astoundingly good and many who are garbage and the general difference is whether their company valued learning or whether it aimed to burn out their developers and replace them with younger developers. Supporting the second type of company is a strange masochism that is widely prevalent in the industry with the "Adapt or Die" mantra.

I agree with your positions above and nothing below is intended to counter that.

> Doctors, scientists, lawyers and engineers in other fields

Careful there - Doctors notoriously fail to adopt (as a group) newer lessons until they are replaced, and lawyers have a similar problems when new areas of law open up (often in tech) - those areas are just fewer because law tries to define everything in terms of existing procedures. And I'm sure science has plenty of ageism problems that are similar enough. Note that the continuing ed classes for doctors and lawyers do not prevent this.

> Software however prides itself on the young eating the old

Software has a cycle we've not learned to defeat, and I think that's the root cause. Specifically (ish): To solve a tech problem in a clear context is easy and quick, so you adopt that system. Adoption means more reliance, dependencies, complexities. Soon, a problem arrives that is not easy to solve with all the baggage you've collected...but solving it OUTSIDE of that baggage is easy. Cycle repeats.

At a large scale: Software is a bit unique in that we get to code our own tools. What I can do in an hour after 5 years on a problem is far more than I can do in an hour with nothing - that learning and those tools get encoded into a library/framework/language, which becomes the hot thing. But now it can't itself change without violating assumptions relied on by everything using it, which means the rate of adding learned knowledge to it slows, while the rate of adding to "competing" systems does not. Eventually they are just plain faster/easier/better, and they become the hot thing.

The reason this is significant is that we're still learning how to program. We're actually REALLY BAD AT IT - programs are to translate between humans and computers, and those two do not think alike. We're embedding complexity and then suffering because there is complexity.

We're learning, but that is an iterative process- eating itself, as you say. Once the field approaches the age of medicine or law, we'll be as good (or as bad) at managing change as they are, but until then we're can't really compare directly.

[Edit: their/there mixup]

>>Doctors notoriously fail to adopt (as a group) newer lessons until they are replaced, and lawyers have a similar problems when new areas of law open up (often in tech)

Even as individuals they need to adopt to newer lessons. If anything its harder in their case. Gaining a new skill or learning something new is way easier for an old programmer than for an old doctor to learn something new in their practice.

If you have chosen a knowledge based profession, you have to learn all life. Or its over.

These are like the fundamental rules of this game.

Importantly, though, intent isn't required to make a discrimination claim under the Civil Rights Act. If a policy is apparently neutral, but it has a disproportionally negative impact on a protected class, it is illegal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

IBM's lawyers are surely aware of this. This is likely going to be painful for them and they did it anyway knowing the liability.

Not sure why you thought that was news to markbnj, or relevant to the point made.

They talked about an "ageist conspiracy". Above post is saying an ageist conspiracy isn't required.

This is a great attitude, but it doesn't change the fact that discrimination exists and hurts real people in a very real way.

No matter how skilled and engaged you are, there are plenty of places that will do their best to eliminate you from any hiring process before you even get to the onsite, and they will make absolutely sure you will not pass the onsite if you somehow get there despite their best efforts.

I'm thankfully not at that stage in my career yet, but I've seen hiring managers casually tossing excellent resumes just because the bachelor's graduation year implied the candidate was "too old".

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