One's outlook and productivity changes with time and age, just like an athlete's fitness. I suppose the hard question is, if a productivity and alignment with organization attitude and culture index correlates indirectly with age, what is to be done?
We have 'protected characteristics' and we don't hire and fire people based on those characteristics, or proxies of those characteristics.
It might be less efficient for businesses, in some cases, but through the courts and our legislature, and within the bounds of our constitution we've decided it's a good trade-off for society.
Say a company has to fire 10% of it's work force and the people who are least fit for the culture and provide value happen to be over X years old. Should they fire n number of people under X too to balance it out? should they go halve-halve? don't fire and wait for bankruptcy?
However, there is data for age, so much that in many countries there is mandatory driving test with ever shorter intervals as you grow older. This isn't discrimination or a risk factor that jumps overnight once you pass certain age, it is simply decline of cognitive and physical capacity as we age.
I am not saying people should be fired because of their age, but if people who are subject to firing happen to be mostly aged, what is the solution?
You're just taking on faith that these employers are making completely rational judgements that just "accidentally" affect a disadvantaged group. First, that's shockingly naive: what they're really doing is preferentially terminating these people because they are paid more (i.e. punishing them for being part of the system that gave them those raises in the first place).
Second, it's directly refuted by the linked article! IBM didn't accidentally fire a bunch of older workers. They fired a bunch of old workers, knew what they had done, and tried to hide it.
I mean, it's not abstract: I'm in that demographic. And while my job seems stable right now, I'd like not to be fired because I'm 47, thank you very much.
Yet you're saying that the same thing is just fine if the business waits for a "lay-off" and then preferentially fires me for reasons having nothing to do with performance?
These kinds of policies subsidize relatively wealthy, disproportionately white workers at the expense of poorer and increasingly minority workers.
There is a very long history of exploiting labor in the U.S. This country was built on it (slavery, railroads, etc...). If this behavior is not curtailed, history tells us that it will be exploited more than it is engaged in innocently.
You cant make people do things they dont want to do. You can force them to pretend , or to not do them. But if there is a will, there is a way.
This is just a less fantastical example of that. And you can see how successful their attempt at hiding it was.
Given the international nature of HN, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the bewildered comments in this thread come from people who grew up in that kind of culture.
The question is a bit of a red herring. By all means, get rid of unproductive and troublesome employees. But if you try to use age as a simplistic predictive proxy for productivity or attitude, I think evidence shows that you'll fire a lot of the wrong people, as well as court the wrath of labor attorneys.
I think you were thinking of inversely proportional.
Searching Wikipedia, inverse correlation is also valid but I've always heard it called indirect or negative.
I knew what you meant and you were on the right track.
No.
> But if you try to use age a simplistic predictive proxy...
Well, that is obviously the wrong thing to do, but I am not sure how that relates to my question.
According to the former exec's claim, the workers laid off were over 40. The following is a list of 40 athletes over 40:
http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/14799377/who-cal...
Which should lay to rest any sweeping assumption about the fitness of athletes that are older than some arbitrary cut-off point after which it's all "downhill from there".
And that's not before pointing out what a huge assumption it is that your ability to perform office work declines at the same rate as muscle fitness. Or that having say 10 years of experience in an industry is rather more valuable than having firm biceps.
My intention was not to suggest that cognitive skills decline the same rate as muscle fitness, though, physical fitness certainly does impact cognitive health.
Nor I suggested that 40 or any age as a cut off point, but age related cognitive decline is a fact, specially in relation to complex tasks, so it is given that as people get older there will be a higher change in their productivity.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4767530/
The first is a neuroimaging study that is rather inconclusive and even poitns out that some cognitive abilities are thought to deteriorate with age, while others are thought to improve. The second is a discussion of various assumptions and results and asserts that the decline of cognitive abilities can be averted by engaging in certain activities. The last concludes that changes in cognitive abilities in the same individual over time do not necessarily reflect the results of aging ("maturation").
In other words, those studies do not support your assertion that "age related congitive decline is a fact". None of the studies discusses "productivity" (or "outlook" as per your earlier comment).
Business is not about twitch reflexes.
On what data do you make this statement? A quick cursory search shows its completely false and based on not much more than ignorance or prejudice.
Productivity: Maybe older workers can't / won't pull lots of all-nighters. The same is true of working mothers. But we plan ahead and get our work done.
The anti-discrimination laws aren't supposed to shackle companies to pointless costs and dead-weight people. They're intended to promote company culture that values people for what they bring to the table.
What is a company to do when external forces throw it into relentless decline? It takes a lot of guts to exit entire businesses or markets and refocus. Closing an office or shutting down an entire department isn't age discrimination. It's still nasty.
Look, western culture allows companies to have limited liability (to be corporations). The culture grants them patents for their inventions (hi IBM!). We trust them to take lots of risks to build their businesses, and give good rewards for success.
In return it's reasonable to expect compliance with laws.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4767530/
Slower reaction in terms of milliseconds and for reflexes.
Not for thinking and programming -- which experience helps you improve, understand computer systems more holistically, know to recognize tons of patterns that emerge again and again, and deep thinking is what makes the difference.
So unless programmers in your company also have to juggle balls or avoid daggers, the "slower reaction" is irrelevant.
Because anything beyond pushing a button N times per hour is going to benefit from experience, and it gets more important with task complexity.
I would much rather have someone with 30 years of experience writing code I depend on than a 20-something who can type 10 times as fast.
I wonder how much of it is that bad younger developers are more likely to attrition themselves, but older ones stay. So you get these old guys who, after five to ten years, it's really obvious they've got to go.
Reaction time and reasoning skills are cognitive skills that declines with age, specially in relation to complex tasks.
The studies are worth reading or skimming thorough at least, more importantly, everyone should look into how they can manage aging tax on cognitive skills, you can't stop it, but you can slow it down, just like physical health.
Cognitive skills are not, but they're not declining in any significant rate to make any difference (some of the best programmers are old), and are balanced by experience.
Also, let's see what tune you will sing 10 or 20 years down in your career.
What the companies mostly want is to eliminate people who have personal lives, and don't care for constant death marches and bro-ing it away at the office.
More importantly, I am yet to get my hands on any research that shows there is conclusive correlation between age and wisdom or experience. I would be keen to read up some!
If you’re going to argue that experience and age may be uncorrwlated then I have to conclude that you’re not making a sincere argument.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/016502599383739...
Consider a more obvious example. It is possible, even easy, to find a pair of people such that the older person has spent less time living in France than the younger person. Despite this, time spent living in France is highly correlated with age.
Is 'reaction time' relevant? Is 'cognitive decline' relevant on an individual basis?
What are the other variables that prove relevant to performance you're ignoring? And what is performance?
The reason I ask if this is your opinion or intuition is because of your simplistic argument. It looks like you're trying to defend an opinion. So I ask.
If you agree that experience counts for something, how do you find the equilibrium between experience and cognitive decline? Do you purport to know this without evidence? How can you make these claims?
You’re assuming that rate of production and reaction time are the relevant factors under consideration.
1. Minorites are just as valuable as white workers
2. Relatively economically efficient companies tend to prosper compared to inefficient ones
Which theory/axiom do you disagree with?
It sounds like trying to force people with $bad ideas to become even more wealthy and powerful by legislating they make better business decisions. That seems like the opposite of what I'd want to do.
You laid out two axioms. You’re claiming, if I understand correctly, that those axioms imply that racism can’t persist in business.
Racism demonstrably does persist in business. There are tons of examples throughout time and space. How do you explain that?
Theories based on simple worker based racism fall apart because they should result in an equilibrium of segregation within industries... for example some all white firms and some all black firms. However, this is generally not the case. Further evidence against the worker based theory is seen if we examine wages of managers. Let's assume (perhaps acknowledge?) that there are more white managers for historical reasons and (assume) that whites have a preference for working with whites. It should follow that any manager willing to work with black subordinates should be able to demand a higher wage for this (in the mind of the white racists) "less desirable work." Or conversely, (racist) white subordinates should be able to demand a premium for working under a black manager. However, that's simply not the case.
I think this is also evidence against the Marxian models of divide and conquer which suggest that there are micro-economic efficiencies/benefits to racial discrimination. The argument here is that racial segregation reduces the market power of both whites and blacks, therefore reducing the wages of all workers. Even though whites are a larger group and therefore have greater market power to demand higher wages, it could still make sense to deny hiring a lower wage minority because the group of whites + minorities would have even greater market power to demand higher wages. While I think there might be some merit to this theory, I think the lack of aforementioned market segmentation -- all white firms and all black firms -- is strong evidence against this being our primary culprit.
We didn't discuss shareholders, but the anonymous shareholders who are not involved in day to day interactions at large enterprises surely have no incentive to discriminate. Their preference is going to be closer to the model of simple profit maximization. Racist workers certainly exist, but basic economic theory and observed realities contradict such a simplistic explanation, aggregation of individual racist workers should result in a different labor market than the one we see as explained above.
East Asians also confound the racism based theories of wage bias, since they're simultaneously a racial minority and outperform whites in virtually any economic measure you can think of including wages. Asians do not have exactly the same historical experience with racism in the US as blacks obviously, but there's plenty of racism against them and they do have a history that includes indentured servitude, the near slave-like conditions building the trans-continental railroads, etc. And yet again, they outperform whites in wages on average.
In short, I acknowledge racism exists, but I don't think it sufficiently explains the wage market. Instead, I think the best explanation is likely the network model of labor allocation. Simply put, a huge number of positions are filled from people's existing social networks and not random members of the labor market. To the extent that racial preferences impact social networks, it can be said that this is racism. But it's not racism in the sense that I think most people who talk about racist business practices/employers/etc are meaning. Also, I believe network effects have real economic benefit in the workplace. People who are more familiar with each other will have fewer communication barriers, etc. And that is why this behavior which results in the appearance of racial discrimination persists so broadly, because the network effects are economically valuable. Again, I'm not denying the existence of racial discrimination, only that racial discrimination is not a viable explanation for the wage market today.
Okay, your turn. What is "everything else?"
Maybe racial discrimination is not a viable explanation for the current wage market, but that’s pretty far from the claim that we don’t need to care about racism in business because racist businesses are bound to fail. There are too many examples where that just didn’t happen.
E.g if your customers assume only your male retail workers can help them with their electronics, you can make sure everybodies name badge says "Certified $PRODUCT expert".
The problem is when you have a situation like this, where the protected trait is likely the cause of issue (we all get slower and less intelligent as we age), or where you have government idiots say that you can't discriminate on traits that are correlated with a protected trait.
In the latter situation businesses will do so anyway, they will just do it secretly and try to cover it up.
Statistically, as the world currently is (even if it's due to cultural or economic reasons), it might also change with race and sex.
Should companies also hire less blacks/women/etc?
Under budget, exceeding targets, so when you say changes with time and age, do you mean gets better? Or what?
As a consulting company IBM makes more money when their customer's projects are running over budget whilst being under performance targets.
"my group" is always the best.
-- every group ever.
next, on hacker news: "why nobody makes children anymore"
Asking the question with different nouns instead of "age" so you can see what is wrong with it.