Feds: IBM did discriminate against older workers in making layoffs

It's disgusting. Hire someone based on their experience, not their age.

This is a big one. There are arguments for not hiring older experience programmers, then there is a different issue about hiring older people that want to be new programmers. I'd think the second group wont have much hope of getting hired.

Incentives matter.

However, the road certainly isn't easy for them. Despite the utility of these people being totally obvious to anyone whose ever worked with them, with each change of leadership comes another fight to keep their jobs.

The one that stuck with me was when I worked for one of the biggest companies in the world, and they laid off the man who had more patents than anyone else in the company, by a good margin. He was in his late 50s, and he came onboard after getting his Ph.D, leaving once to found a startup, which was acquired by the company after a few years. He was brilliant, humble and could have absolutely been a professor at MIT or a principal at Google. But he loved working for our company.

I got the hell out of Dodge after that.

I don't have any statistics to support this, but I've wondered if workers tend to congregate by age groups at different companies. That is, if employees prefer to work with coworkers around their same age, they'll tend to move to companies that match their own demographic. If you're not in that demographic, you'll see fewer of those people around you. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but it's a factor at some level.

Geography plays a big role, too. If you consider "the industry" to be high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley then people will naturally self-select out of the area as they start raising families and growing older. Move to a more family-friendly city and suddenly it's more common to see diverse age ranges working at companies.

1. The size of the field has increased exponentially over time. Far fewer programmers started their careers in the 80s or 90s vs the past 10 years.

2. Many older programmers have transitioned into upper management or other roles - for example, product/project/people management, sales engineering, customer success, technical writing and so on.

3. People leave the industry due to family or health reasons, windfalls/inheritances leading to early retirement, burnout, or career changes. The longer someone has been working, the likelier it is that people from their cohort have left for one of these reasons.

The second nuance is that I and the rest of Gen-X sit one the cusp of the desktop revolution and its transition to the internet revolution. Most of the desktop programmers 30+ year at that time, did not make the transition, they stuck with desktop and rode it into the twilight of their career and that is a big reason you just don't seem to see too many people over their mid 40's in the industry.

None of that negates the fact that ageism does exist in this industry, but there are other contributing factors as to why we don't see many programmers past the 40's cut off.

It doesn't help that IBM business leadership signs off on core IBM Cloud product/service attributes that are essentially old-style IBM remote enterprise data center contracts dressed up in new marketing language. Sign up with a variety of IBM cloud products, and you'll find some still have planned outages. In fact, the IBMid infrastructure sometimes still experiences outages. The notion of a "dial-tone service" is recognized by the IBM Cloud organization as necessary to compete, but that consistent lack across the board is one of many reasons they're a distant runner-up in cloud providers.

Totally anecdotal but I wouldn't be surprised if it were up there in the mid-high 30s.

I'm having trouble thinking of anyone I knew there under 30 that wasn't in HR, recruiting, support, or facilities. There were just a few engineers under 30, and definitely a bunch over 50. And of course management was almost all 35+.

I was at IBM during this time. As a consultant, my boss fought to keep us remote.

In some cases people were told to go back to the office but physically couldn't unless they packed up and moved. They were hired remote, so they lived in an area that had no office.

Are contractors cheaper than permanent employees? I always thought it was the opposite - that's why so many positions are "contract to hire". They'd rather have a perm employee, but they want to deal with contracting for a few months just to be on the safe side.

Younger workers can see older programmers getting paid more but don't neccesarily see much "better" from them (who is right varies by individual and field of course). It can come across as gatekeeping in "paying their dues" instead of actual capabilities or lack of them holding them back which breeds resentment.

Of course at large there are configurations every which way in practice across varied workforces: underpaying older hires in bias of new, overpaying old in bias, putting arbitrary caps on promption to upper management regardless of prior successes for being too young, refusal to promote elders for fear of their retitement disrupting despite the project being short term and all sorts of dysfunctions at scales small to titanic.

If it was that simple, why don't they use that strategy with young workers as well? It would be even easier to make up justifications (e.g. lack of experience).

To me, it seems plausible that you would find a correlation between people laid off and their age, absent of systematic ageism. And if there really was systematic ageism, IBM is just shooting itself in the foot. It's possible but not a given.

Most have been laid off, got a juicy check that translates into a good nest egg, but not enough to make it their only source of income until retirement. A good job with a steady (but lower than before) income makes them very happy, and provides us with very senior people for key positions.

However, it was hell to get it past HR, as they all saw it meant we were not a “agile” IT department. Facepalm.

Simple: the experienced older programmers will call out management for bullshit because they recognize bullshit when they see it.

Fresh, new ones won't object when management says "we're on the NoSQL train now, so that we can attract more fresh talent (and funding sources)!!!", which makes the managers happy, but by the time that the failure modes of new fancy tech (e.g. no ACID compliance, bazillions of edge cases, insecure defaults like MongoDB had) become apparent, the managers have already made their millions in bonuses and went off to ruin another company.

It's all about keeping us programmers as replaceable cogs - and to prevent as many of us as possible from rising in the "chain of command". Simply put, the supply of programmers is way bigger than there is a demand for managers or higher-level programmers. This will bite the whole industry in the ass when all those 20-somethings who make decent careers now after some coding bootcamp suddenly find out that there won't be any pay rises or opportunities...

edit: also, new programmers won't complain if you push them past everything legally allowed - many don't know the laws or don't care, so 80 hour work weeks with no paid overtime (=40 "free" hours of work!) can be done on young people, but as soon as they hit ~30 and want to settle down a bit (especially if they want children) companies get in trouble.

They are in various technology roles, especially at a place like IBM often aligned with some IBM-specific corner of tech. Definitely happens with other companies too. HP used to have an "up or out" policy where they would fire SMEs systematically for some stupid reason. I remember laughing my ass off when they flew some guy in to tell me that they were firing 8 people on one of my teams, which I replaced with the same people employed at a smaller company for 50% of the cost. The employees got a 25% raise in that case. HP lost 100% of the revenue, which probably earned some bureaucrat a bonus somewhere.

If you mean having a deep understanding of how this stuff works and an ability to solve very hard problems, older programmers are usually better.

If you mean knowing the latest fad language or framework, then no. That's because older programmers have seen fads come and go and have learned to recognize one, and they don't waste their time learning or using them.

I also see a lot of resistance when I go to customers for cloud migrations, the IT teams will lie to me or withhold information, some even refuse to attend meetings. Which leaves me in a very awkward position because I know the project sponsor, typically a VP or Cxx, who is paying $300/hr for my time but I don't want to say anything bc I know the IT ppl are just afraid they are going to be seen as irrelevant and lose their job, as much as that isn't usually the case, if I say something about the resistance it could be a resume generating event for them. My point being they don't want to embrace the technical direction the company is headed too. The younger ppl in IT don't typically react this way and often times want to spend as much time learning from as they can and have some previous experience with cloud.

My real point being that I can point to several customers ranging in size from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand where the 'old guard' doesn't want to get with the new technical direction or does their best to drag their feet doing so. It's too bad, there is a ton of tribal knowledge that can be lost - or hidden - in these situations, and years of experience that still applies to cloud that is lost too.

Sounds like you're claiming there is less discrimination at startups?

I've just had people from other departments compliment me on this new hire's first ticket. Had to check for sarcasm, but they were genuinely SO happy they sought me out to tell me what a great job he did.

The ticket was simple, the programming trivial and could have been done by a fresh grad (everyone's first ticket is deliberately simple so they can concentrate on the process and how to build and test and everything else), but the way he handled all the stakeholders and went beyond the bare ticket betrayed decades of experience. Like some kind of holistic software engineer.

If anybody thinks there aren't a lot of young people at large tech companies just collecting a paycheck, I have some bad news for them...

IBM is also a joke, just like Oracle.

Edit: Now that the vein has stopped bulging on my forehead, I agree with your point that experience is valuable. However it comes in many packages and dismissing someone because they're 50 or 25 is equally wrong and you just did the same thing you're ranting at IBM about.

Instead of engaging in direct forms of discrimination, you build systems of arcane hurdle-jumping, whose outcomes produce the intended discrimination. That way, you always have a story about how this or that person “just didn’t measure up.”

We don't have a rabid pro-worker EEOC, we have an EEOC that is notoriously hard to convince of anything and that process itself requires production of evidence, so when the EEOC makes a determination, that is not just "an accusation", it is the result of a fact-finding process by a third party expert. It is true that an EEOC finding of fact is not the same as a judicial process and it will be ultimately decided by courts, but let's not minimize what has been accomplished here.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2020/09/08/an-e...