IBM insists it's not deliberately axing older staff. Internal secret docs state otherwise... IBM is still refusing to turn over documents in a bombshell age-discrimination lawsuit that attorneys representing plaintiff Jonathan Langley believe will show Big Blue has deliberately and systematically shed older workers. "IBM simply refuses to produce any of [the documents] in violation of the requirements of open and …
Nope.
Curiously, the month before, though, he was warned privately by his boss's boss – Andrew Brown, veep of worldwide sales of IBM's hybrid cloud software – that he needed to look for a new job, it is claimed. At the end of March 2017, Langley was formally told he would be laid off at the end of June.
He was given an insider tip to look at another team within IBM before the freeze went in to place.
Mark85 wrote: I think it will get interesting if the "spokesperson" were suddenly let go at a certain age.
.
Yes but IBM has adopted a further proactive policy --really just an extension of its previous one-- ensuring this letting-go will not be seen for quite a while. Observe below my correction of ElReg's reporting:
.
WAS:
"IBM makes its employment decisions based on skills and business conditions – not age,” said IBM spokesperson Ed Barbini, in a statement.
CORRECTED:
"IBM makes its employment decisions based on skills and business conditions – not age,” said IBM spokesperson Ed Barbini, in a voice that broke repeatedly.
"According to the report, IBM is estimated to have rid itself of 20,000 workers age 40 or older between 2014 and 2018, representing about 60 per cent of job cuts since then."
If one were to assume the employee ages were evenly distributed ranging from 20 to 65, then the percentage of workers 40 & over would be 63.6%. So if you were laying people off indiscriminately over that population, you'd expect to see those 40 & over "... representing about 60 per cent of job cuts since then."
If one were to assume the employee ages were evenly distributed ranging from 20 to 65, then the percentage of workers 40 & over would be 63.6%. So if you were laying people off indiscriminately over that population, you'd expect to see those 40 & over "... representing about 60 per cent of job cuts since then."
That's the assumption IBM is counting on you to make.
If you look at the actual numbers you'll see that its not a safe or good assumption.
And it gets worse when you take a look at the full demographics.
BTW, you need to actually look at the population by country. Not all countries are equal.
You could almost apply the same argument to men.
Oh wait...
And it's illegal.
But hey, so long as you can lie and get away with who cares. Right?
The difference with gender discrimination is that companies who sexistly hire men at higher wages than women are, in effect, paying a sexist-pig tax to do so. In the case of age discrimination, it's really hard to differentiate between actual age discrimination and just cheap bastards.
Is no one seeing the contradictions in these positions?
Companies are accused of a) hiring more men, who cost more than women (allegedly), because they are sexist and give preferential treatment to said mem and b) fire older men because they are more expensive to maintain than younger ones.
Surely, if both of these things are true then what we'd see is companies hiring younger women by preference because they are cheaper.
I don't get it. Surely they can't both be true?
Thing is the older men they are letting go are worth sometimes 5 younger guys in productivity or results. Hell younger guys without the experience will cost more because consultants and meetings to figure out what the older dudes already know by heart will cost time and money and release dates of products along with product quality. In the long run IBM is shooting itself in the foot. If they let go of older salespeople and older purchasers that were their friends might just say I'm not interested and they will lose sales to because many times tech workers in different companies will show resistance to the companies that get rid of great people by doing little stuff that basically makes the company doing the layoffs cost money in more expensive cost or lost sales or lower sale prices since they'll be putting the screws to IBM and it's like.
@ Bernard Orwell
Yes you're correct but you're missing ivan5's reasoning, which was that axing more expensive resources was perfectly fine and reasonable. Whilst he was talking about older workers, I extended his rationale to men.
Today, as you state men are paid more, but in ivan5's world, they would justifiably be sacked.
If women were genuinely cheaper to hire than men for the same work, most men wouldn't get a job.
There is no gender pay gap. Likewise gender base pay discrimination has been illegal since the 70s so if it happening, employers should be in court for it.
Not anon because frankly I have a backbone AC.
So what is new? Older long term workers cost more than newbies and since the company is run by has-been counters the older workers have to go - simples.
Fixed that for you.
Isn't it time for a shift in business ethics? So that the responsibilities of the company formally extend to their employees, and not just to the shareholders? It's interesting to watch the behaviour of some of these companies, from the standpoint of someone for whom a job leaving school could have a reasonable expectation of a job for life within the same company (though with no guarantee or expectation of it being the *same* job).
I was a thirty-year IBM employee back in the old days of the Watsons et al. Like the old HP, the old IBM did feel responsible to the employees.
I remember one time when the project I was working on was canceled, my manager came to me and said, "I don't have any work for you right now, but stick around and I want you on my team for an interesting project that is coming up." So for a couple of months, I reported for work daily and read technical books and magazines -- the hardest part was to keep from bothering my friends (colleagues) who did have real work to do....
Another time, during a time of tight budgets, the headcount in the department I was managing was cut below the minimum I felt was necessary to do the job, so I went to my manager and said "Get me out of here!". He helped me get one of the best jobs that I had in IBM. (Interestingly, three years later the department that I had left had twice the minimum headcount that I said I could run it with.)
Tom 7 wrote: Number of times I saved smart young employees from making stupid and very very costly mistakes.
BigSLitleP replied: The amount of times i've stopped older members of IT doing something stupid because "we used to do it that way" is a common phrase are too many to count.
Although there's no way to know their respective ages, the opinions suggest Tom 7 is the elder. Tom 7's comment is well-phrased and makes sense. BigSLitleP's reply is ungrammatical and incoherent.
QED.
Kubla Cant:
quotes BigSLitleP:Nah. Just clumslily phrased; a few commas might help, but perhaps it should have been ordered some other way. I'll try to illustrate which elements go together:The amount of times i've stopped older members of IT doing something stupid because "we used to do it that way" is a common phrase are too many to count.Although there's no way to know their respective ages, the opinions suggest Tom 7 is the elder. Tom 7's comment is well-phrased and makes sense. BigSLitleP's reply is ungrammatical and incoherent.
The amount of times i've stopped older members of IT doing something stupid [because ["we used to do it that way" is a common phrase]] are too many to count.
But, yeah, supports your hypothesis about their respective ages, AFAICS.
The amount of times i've stopped older members of IT doing something stupid because "we used to do it that way" is a common phrase are too many to count.
It's almost as if it's individuals and not a generic age thing.
I'll wager its half as many times I've had to mentor young pups who got their ideas and training from reading posts after searching Google.
Brain dead is Brain dead regardless of age.
Today's incoming IT bodies are neither trained to think or have been taught enough theory to do the job.
Most of their real learning comes from being 'on the job'.
I agree that is why experienced staff are valuable but a company doesn't need everyone to have a lot of experience. Just enough to catch the mistakes of the more junior staff. Somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 being senior works well in my experience.
I'm sure IBM's defence will be they have too many senior staff and will be more financially competitive if they have more (cheaper) junior staff. This does not have to mean younger. Junior could be people who have come to IT after a career in another industry. Of course there will be a strong correlation to age but if the reason is not age then it'll come down to the wording of the Texan law on whether the correlation still makes it age discrimination.
This is spot on! Likewise, homo sapiens significantly increases global warming (let's assume). So, once human-created AIs have matured, I'm sure they'll find a quick and thorough solution to the problem too. That said, who needs AI to get rid of pesky humans? Give us another 50 years of shitting all over the place and the folk from the flooded areas flood into the unflooded areas, and once the nukes start flying, the homo sapiens problem will sort itself, pronto. Yeah, it might take a couple of thousands years to get back to what the world looked like before us, but step back, it's nothing in a lifetime of a planet. ALWAYS look on the bright side.
So what is new? Older long term workers cost more than newbies.
Yes younger employees cost less, but they have to be trained and training has a cost. Once it is clear that the company may get rid of the workers on a whim all of them are more likely to jump the ship and usually those who go away are the best ones leaving the ranks filled by those not skilled enough to attract new employers. It may pay on the short term, but it is a company culture that hurts on the long term, however it ensures that there are a lot of people easier to exploit, it's easier to push younger workers to work overtime and to do what the managers ask without asking too many questions, moreover they are less likely to organize or to join union ranks, it's not just a matter of money, but a matter of power. This is how corporations end up having enormous pay gaps between the high level management and the rest, it may also end up with the numbers showing big profits, but when you look at the dividend paid off year after year often you notice something strange, not only the workers are paying this strategy, but also the shareholders, those who should be considered the owners, are getting just s small share of the money flowing around. Big corporations have become self serving entities that benefit just a small network of managers (who often have second roles as board members of other corporations).
The ol' "yes, but". Younger employees, especially fresh-outs are far more expensive. They have to be trained, they make mistakes, the are more likely to call in sick, they may be starting a family and taking lots of family leave, etc. Older workers have made or seen most of the silly mistakes, any training they might get it going to be on an advanced level rather than needing to cover basics or be taught at a level that doesn't assume years of experience, they've had their kids and don't call in "sick" as often.
It's good to be bringing in young talented people to fill out the ranks, but most of them aren't going to be coming to the job with very many skills other than regurgitating answers on test forms. What they will need is to be added to departments with older, more experienced people that will mentor them or at least review what they are doing to prevent costly mistakes.
"Older long term workers cost more than newbies"
That depends on how you're measuring. Per hour, yes, more experienced engineers are more expensive. However, if you measure the development costs in terms of work units, more experienced workers tend to be less expensive, because they tend to produce higher quality work in less time.
I hope these cases turn into class actions (if they aren't already) and IBM has to pay out a ton of money. ANYONE who knows anything AT ALL about employment law knows this is totally illegal and has been for many years (even here in the U.S. where we have few rights compared to workers in many other countries).
IBM has no excuse. I'd like to add I hope they fire Ginny, but when CEO's get fired, unlike working people, they generally get enough in payouts to live comfortably for life, so not much suffering for her, unlike what she and her fellow PHBs have done to IBM's older employees.
IBM has no excuse.
And neither has anyone. Has anyone seen the CEO of a multi-million dollar get thrown in jail for corporate crimes? In America?
Remember the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, India?
Maybe not? How about GFC? How many CEOs have been thrown in jail for their company's role in GFC? One? Two? None got to see the inside of a jail, however, they did get a fat paycheck for it! Thanks, y'all!
Ginni is going to get away with this. She just might even get to keep that blue helicopter of hers.
Off to get me coat, thanks.
Itsy Bitsy Morons mismanagement would be improved by firing them and replacing them with PHBs. PHBs would do less damage. The 'problem' with older workers is experience. After you have been around the hype block a few times you tend to be pretty good at smelling marketing bullshit. Plus you are less likely to put with crapware that does not work because you have learned that constantly fiddling with it will never solve the underlying problem. Plus older staff tend to know or understand why something was done a certain way 20+ years ago as they were around when during that time. Thus they are less likely to tolerate mindless, pointless bullshit. Companies often fail to realize the value of the grizzled veterans who have there and done more than a few times.
If we assume that the baseline workforce, if there is such a thing, is evenly distributed between the ages of 23 and 65, and layoffs are likewise evenly distributed, then you would expect 60% of layoffs to be of people over 40. Welcome to maths.
And the much-ballyhooed private documents refer explicitly to hiring decisions. Not firing decisions.
Much as I'd like to see a smoking gun here - hey, I'm no spring chicken myself - I don't.
then you would expect 60% of layoffs to be of people over 40.
Except that it's the people with greater knowledge and experience who tend to survive layoffs, because most rational businesses recognise that they need those people most when they are under pressure. When the business recovers or the market expands once more, the business can quickly build up their numbers by hiring and training up young people from the large pool straight out of university.
quickly build up their numbers by hiring and training up young people from the large pool straight out of university
Yes, but then the problem is retaining them! Young starters (I was one once) tend to job-hop to get experience both in technologies and different companies.
@RatFox; "people over 40 have no more experience than youngsters in the technologies ... like cloud and containers."
Who the Flying F*** do you think defined the need for, developed, and implemented these things?
They did not appear like some frikking monolith for us to dance around waving femurs at each other.
I did have an early hiccup in a job interview after leaving IBM, when the interviewer asked me what the next big trend was going to be. I think I said "Grid" at the time, since in IBM I was trying to bring more CPU horse to a single DB2 instance than existed in one box at the time. He said "No, you're wrong. Virtualisation!" I nearly choked on my coffee. Only been doing that for 25 years.
You're making an assumption about deviation from a baseline. We would need evidence to support that assumption.
(And then we should also consider valid business goals, such as cost saving, that would militate in the opposite direction. Given a choice between a 25 year old earning $50k and a 50 year old earning $100k with the same transferrable skills, what's wrong with firing the older person? Sure you can say (speculate) that s/he actually has a great many more skills that aren't being properly valued - but on the other hand, they may also have a lot of baggage/bad habits that are actively holding them back. We just don't know.)
> Except that it's the people with greater knowledge and experience who tend to survive layoffs, because most rational businesses recognise that they need those people most when they are under pressure.
This is SO wrong my eyes are bleeding. You clearly have never sat in on any large corporate's senior mgt's decisions. Typically the name of the game is maximising your own headcount while toeing the line of shedding costs, so you sort your payroll in descending $order and draw a line across the page far enough down to add up to your required cost-reduction. Everyone above the line gets fired.
Seen it bloody done, mate. Several times.
Capital-C Corporates are NOT rational. They are an internally-directed GAME played by PARASITES using the original company as a HOST.
And yes, the host dies. Compared to what it was, should have been, or sometimes just entirely.
The game-players simply move their game to a new host.
.
A VERY common pattern in tech.Corporates is for hightech or highR&D or similarly long-sighted industry leaders who achieved that status by actually Creating Value, to mysteriously have all their core competencies' profits shrivel to nothing over time after the founders leave/are bounced, whilst the new leaders valiantly save the ship by turning its focus to M&S/growthbyacquisition on the one hand, but more importantly Professional Services on the other.
eg IBM
(Not necessarily or always professional services ; but the replacement WILL be purely linear and WILL be donkeywork by comparison.
eg HP, now a forwardlooking cuttingedge world champion of... mass-producing printers ink.)
And the point is that if someone is over 40 and still doing the job, it's likely that he/she has survived previous layoff attempts - they have demonstrated that they are good at their job.
Basically, you would generally NOT expect layoffs to be spread evenly across a workforce.
If your initial assumptions are wrong, your answers tend to be wrong as well. As you say - welcome to maths.
Sure, if my initial assumptions are wrong. But I have no reason to believe they are. You've made an assumption, but haven't presented any supporting evidence for it.
I see nothing wrong with adopting "uniformity" as a baseline assumption. If you want to deviate from that, then make arguments and put together evidence to support them, and we can discuss them. But don't just go claiming that your particular non-uniform distribution assumption must be correct because it's just obvious. That's not how evidence works.
I read it the same way as you.
If you fire people with outdated skills, you're likely to fire a lot of old people.
If you hire graduates with the skills you want, your age average will come down.
It doesn't mean there is age discrimination.
The policy of relocation home workers etc does look quite dodgey though. A version of "freeway therapy" the LAPD use to get rid of officers they can't fire but want rid of
"If you fire people with outdated skills, you're likely to fire a lot of old people."
Maybe. But in my experience, age is not a good predictor of whether or not someone's skillset is up to date. Everyone in the industry (and particularly those who've been in the industry for a long time) with half a brain knows that if you aren't constantly updating your skillset, you become obsolete very quickly. Age has nothing to do with it.
Well it does have something to do with it.
A lazy person like me leaves University with up to date skills and then they gradually become obsolute.
So when I was 24 my skills were up to date. When I was 34 they were 10 years out of date etc
If you're doing the same job on the same product, new skills are of no use to you.
"If you're doing the same job on the same product, new skills are of no use to you"
My mind simply cannot wrap around this statement. Learning new skills is essential whether or not you'll use them in you day job. It's not necessarily about the skills themselves, it's also about maintaining the ability to be a creative problem-solver. When you learn a new skill/language/technology, you are also learning things that make you better in employing the skills you already have.
If we assume that the baseline workforce, if there is such a thing, is evenly distributed between the ages of 23 and 65, and layoffs are likewise evenly distributed, then you would expect 60% of layoffs to be of people over 40
You are starting from an assumption that should be verified. IBM has regularly had this cycles of layoffs for decades, there are a lot of old workers, but I'm not so sure that the average workforce is so old.
And the much-ballyhooed private documents refer explicitly to hiring decisions. Not firing decisions.
What about the relocations designed to be more acceptable by younger workers?
The last time I worked for a Fortune 500 tech company (one that gets name-checked frequently here), they had a policy in place of laying off 5% of their workforce every year. The people were selected to be fired by upper management -- in-the-trench managers (the ones who actually know which workers are gold and which ones are lead) were not part of the decision-making and had zero say.
It didn't escape anyone's notice that the people fired were mostly the most experienced (and thus expensive) engineers. Everyone dreaded layoff day because it meant that, every year, there was a substantial loss of product knowledge and available skill, and it made life hell for those who remained while everyone scrambled to overcome the loss.
I can relate to that. Back in eatly 00's I was made redundant "due to restructuring and based on performance I was the weakest (ie I was paid the most)" after merely 18 months of service. When they told me regardless of service one gets 3 months pay, I asked them where to sign and whne can I get the hell out of there.
Alas, before long (few days) I had a phone interview for another job to start the day after I finished my employment - thank you very much!
For the past 20+ years my motto is "career for life - jobs come and go".
"For the past 20+ years my motto is "career for life - jobs come and go"."
Yes, this has been true for my entire career (spanning about 30 years now). It took me about 20 years to realize how true this was, and to realize that it's OK to quite a position that's making me unhappy. There's always another job.
Where I worked there used to be a "Decimation Spreadsheet" which identified the 10% of employees that should be strongly encouraged to leave - of their own accord, of course; no funding of firings there. They would be put into an uncomfortable, lonely existence until they "self-selected out" of the company.
Apart from the correct use of the word Decimation, a truly unadmirable, and probably illegal practice.
I won awards at Xerox, but that didn't stop me from getting dumped at 55. What with the ProPublica and Mother Jones collaboration, I'm dreaming of 50% salary and pension contribution to 65 in wrongful dismissal awards to those over 50. Might be on the way in Canada.
And yes, it's a real bitch for a techie over 50 to get another job.
My advice to anybody aspiring to an IT career is it ain't worth it unless you can cash out at 35.
>> Anyone now over 50 still working in IT should have made their $Ms day-trading during the .com bubble. Simples.
> For that you need good friend at the high levels. It's all based on insider trading.
Actually, it wasn't. It was all based on hysteria. The people who made the most were those who were the most hysterical and the least stable: got in earliest and hardest, then hystinstabilitied out and off into another bubble early.
Christ, I can remember the local radio and TV ads at the time in SF down to at least Mountain View (where I heard the first one), raving things like "How can I dotcom my business!!??" The pizza place on the way to work had been the first to buy food.com. Etc.
Literal madness, led by the children of the rich and privileged who had nothing to lose in money terms and everything to gain in peergroup coolpoints. Much like VCs and unicorns now.
I was managing split devel (et al) between there & London at the time, but coupla years earlier had been trading $2bn out of Sydney on a quant basis. So the sheer lunatic contrast of the lunacy was... bemusing/bewildering. And don't think any of the BSDs are geniuses either. I can remember Wells Fargo's ex Head of Options Trading proudly announcing he'd just gone long Dow on his Personal Account because NASDAQ had jumped. This is like buying imitation chocolate sprinkles because iron ore went up. Or UBS's ex Head of Investment Banking who retired with well over $100m in the bank and proudly set himself up as a tech.investor and VC ; I met him again 2yrs later, he'd blown his entire investment pot and more, and was a very chastened man. Etc.etc.etc.etc.
@ J J Carter: " made their $Ms day-trading during the .com bubble"
hahahah, except far too many people were left holding stock when the music stopped.
Working for an ISP during the noughties, that got an over valued stock market valuation, I saw this bollocks first hand. We weren't employees, no, we were 'associates' we had a casual dress policy, we got stock options allocated each year, varying on years of service. As the company had grown by acquisition, some members of staff had very long TUPEd length of service, and had large allocations of stock options,.... one was almost a paper millionaire.
Except stock options had to 'mature' ie, we couldn't exercise them directly, buth had to wait two years, then could only realise 20% of that years allocation, and the same for each subsequent year.
Except the stock price had gone from it's peak at around $100 a share on the NASDAQ to sub dollar, and got booted, in less than those two years. Banks swooped, there was a debt for equity deal in which private investors got shafted, and the company only just survived.
This wasn't rare, remember Palm? Valued at more than the Ford Motor Co back in the noughties.
Remember all those web sites that were snapped up for Meeeellions of dollar? Where are they all now?
If you made money, it was probably largely down to luck, than judgment.
Most investment bubbles are created to fill the pockets of the 1% of the 1%, feeding on the greed of the 99% who think they are on to a good thing, but don't realise they are there to shore up the pyramid scheme. Otherwise we'd all have cranked up our CPUs and GPUs and made out like bandits when Bitcoin was a baby.
the truth is much more embarrassing: they DON'T KNOW what factors are considered in "its employment decisions", it's because "althorithm did it!", and the althoritm responsible for monitoring and supervision of the employment decision-making algorithm has been "streamlined" (out). At least Mr Trump is not driven by an algorithm... well, let's not go into this one!
You might be onto something here,
according to rumor they have not been doing so well for the last few years...
(ZDNet
IBM increased revenues by a real 1 percent in its latest financial quarter, but annual results were down for the sixth year in a row. The company is almost back to where it was 20 years ago, excluding inflation.)
> don’t understand why any clients hire IBM if you aren’t getting experience and expertise
Clients are not buying IT, the individual client Managers are buying Irresponsibility. Or Career Protection is another way of looking at it. It's not whether the job gets done properly, it's whether YOU PERSONALLY can be blamed for YOUR PERSONAL decisions regarding it.
Well, if your decision is to hand off the whole thing to experts, you're in the clear, aren't you?
Note that the Big 4 accountants work on precisely the same principle. They are strictly third-rate, hideously expensive, and perfect cover for clients who wish to avoid responsibility but be seen to be doing the opposite. If you actually want topflight accounting work, you should hit 2nd-Tier, eg PKF etc.
The general syndrome and these examples are an interesting practical example of what's called Agency Theory.
Once you navigate your way through the fog and obfustication of IBM's financial reports it becomes pretty clear that the only real profits are from z/OS mainframes and the associated software and facilities management.
So they are firing the expertise running the only profitable operation -- duh.
They have invested heavily in Watson -- no profits (and very few paying customers) so far.
They are investing heavily in Blockchain ( the worlds most successful snake-oil brand.).
Oh and they make a lot of noise about cloud computing. Where they have lots of customers. Customers like me who spent 20$ in 2011 on a DB2 benchmark and have spent nothing
in the last 7 years -- but cannot find any way to close my customer account.
At least Unisys faded gracefully milking there DOD accounts.
This post has been deleted by its author
The company is reducing costs ... it's been on this trajectory for years. If they can replace one employee earning $200k with three, each earning $30k, then the department managers will get a bonus ($10k) then the net result is that corporate costs go down ... along with the quality of service.
Except you get 3x the possibility of a sexual harassment suit. More possibility that confidential information will be leaked. More office space required, more bathrooms, parking spaces, holidays to schedule, training....... The $30k employees are also going to jump ship for $31k where the $200k employee has probably topped out in their role and isn't as likely to be offered significantly more money to take a job elsewhere. The more expensive employee probably owns their own home too and moving is a pain. They've had years to amass tons more junk where a younger pup might only have a few pieces of Ikea furniture and a couple of suitcases of clothes.
I don't really understand what's the drive for IBM to get rid of older staff.
On the one hand, I'm guessing they may carry higher healthcare costs, but on the other hand, they generally have a lot more experience and they're much less likely to take their training and depart after a couple of years to find greener grass elsewhere.
The only thing I can think of is that it's tied into tenure and/or pensions, as per UK companies such as BT, which are frantically trying to find ways to reduce the financial black hole in their final-salary schemes...
Well, because their business is dying. People don't want longstanding business products that are reliable. They want the fast new, trendy software that doesn't work but looks nice and has an app.
Even Gov.uk is caught up with this. Throwing out working websites to replace them with Web 2.0 trimmed down, fancy looking websites that don't contain the information you need.
Getting rid of the old people who say "You can't do this because...." and replacing them with people who say "Let's do this despite...." is there way of trying to become a modern inovative company instead of a dinnosaur.
Also when you give old people a problem to solve they come up with old solutions. They build relational databases on Unix servers, instead of Hadoopy whatevers in "the cloud".
Having an indept knowledge of products doesn't matter anymore since products only last about 18 months because they're full of holes and crap anyway.
And to be honest they do kind of have a point. I'm 37 and couldn't give a damn about all the stupid ideas kids have these days with your fancy Tinders and Ubers and Twitters.
The younger employee isn't likely to stick around for 30-40 years where the older one might be there the 5-10. What happens is the young employee gets the training and a certification and can use it to get a 10% pay rise by taking a job someplace else?
I was first introduced to it back in 2015 when I applied to transfer to a team where I could work more up to date technologies (i.e. cloud). But my transfer had to be approved by WW, and they rejected with with that I was considered old hire. So when I asked my manager what that meant, she quite openly told me that there's a policy to get rid of old hire even through I had only worked in IBM for 9 years was just 39 years old.
So I just spent the next few years finding a place of work that was happy to get an experienced IT professional, and that pays a lot better. And these days I'm spending most of my time getting rid of everything labeled "IBM" in my current company - Which is quite easy since IBM and their products are completely irrelevant these days.
"In fact, since 2010 there is no difference in the age of our US workforce, but the skills profile of our employees has changed dramatically due to our heavy investments in skills and retraining."
A cynic might say that if the age of the workforce hasn't changed in 8 years, that they're removing the oldest and hiring the youngest every year to maintain this status quo?
Which would also result in the skills profile of the employees changing dramatically...
Yes, IBM. Rest assured that it is the grey hair that repels Millennials and not anything else about the company.
For giggles, I turned to the Millennial next to me and asked. His response: "I have friends who work for Google and Facebook. I know those companies and their products. I can't think of anything IBM makes that I can buy or want to buy."
I'm thinking the kid has managed to put his finger on the problem (he is a bright guy with a great future in front of him).
Good point, what does Itsy Bitsy Moron make that anyone with a couple of functioning brain cells knows about or wants. Google, AWS, Slurp all have products that are potentially (or actually) useful to me personally and professionally. And there are others. I've Been Moved - crickets.
Odd that, I took VR nearly four years ago now,.... and about two weeks after I was clear, I got a prod via Linkedin asking me to apply for a role doing exactly what I had been doing, for IBM Germany. Given I'd been WFH, I could have supported IBM Germany from my Home Office too. Of course Hell hadn't frozen over, so I wasn't going back.
So if skills were short, how does that happen? IBM used to have 'The Bench' where you'd get a grace period to re-deploy, but it seems that level of self determination is gone, and a hand is now moving the pieces. Seems obvious how they are being selected.
From the article: "According to the report, IBM is estimated to have rid itself of 20,000 workers age 40 or older between 2014 and 2018, representing about 60 per cent of job cuts since then."
Whilst like most others I do suspect IBM of this practice, I'm slightly baffled by how this stat helps the argument:
If people are in the workforce from 18-65 (more likely 21-65 for graduates) then a random age distribution means 25% of staff are under 40, and 75% of staff are over 40.
Therefore if people over 40 represent 60% of job cuts, this would suggest a bias towards protecting older staff, not persecuting them.
Clearly either some information is missing, or I have misunderstood, but the statement as it stands isn't massively helpful.
If you've got an out sourced project currently being developed by IBM and it's all going tickity-boo, then their recruitment and retention policy is spot on.
In those rare, atypical cases (snigger) where your outsourced project is waaaaay over time and waaaay over budget with a chaotic mess of "go getter" development and design teams, then you might think that IBM are not on the badger with their staffing "policy".
And if you've made your old, fuddy-duddy dev team redundant you're a bit round the U bend as there is no easy way back. ("Didn't Mike know how that worked? If Mike was till here, we'd have got the answer right away instead of a week long back and forth with IBM "dahn saaf" and the off shore "development team").
I imagine.
IBM has a worldwide campaign to recruit new mainframe talent, but only Early Professionals. This supports the view that IBM is trying to reduce the average age of its workforce. The question is whether early professional hires will have the experience to be credible in front of clients. I suspect not, unless IBM invests in serious amounts of education for them.
I was 42 when I was first told by my IBM manager that I was effectively past it. I was told at the age of 46 by another manager that my career was effectively over, and I should step aside to give valuable opportunities for career advancement to the younger ones. I left IBM at the age of 49. Haven't looked back with anything but regret I didn't leave sooner.
I am an old techie. Do you know that means working on electronic things and writing computer code? I hope you do because I had forgotten until I read the article. Nobody has trusted me to work for them for twenty years now and who can blame them? I saw this coming and put my cash where it could earn a profit for me without a lot of work. I doubt that I could even do that now but I don't care. I covered my posterior before it was too late. At my age it is downright inhuman to expect cutting edge productivity. Only a politician or a prat, same thing I suppose, could expect an older person to be as sharp as a younger person. I do know some exceptions but they were professors in their halcyon days and even they have slowed down a bit.
The UK government expects people to work skilfully until they are over sixty. What was it I said about politicians in the previous paragraph? I have forgotten already.
Get real people. Plan your life for your own future realistically. By the time you reach thirty you will know your natural level in the world and by the time you are forty you will be sure you know hoe fat your mental abilities are declining. Unless you are an NHS manager you will need to adapt.
I don't know why, but as and engineer it seems that management types with an MBA were lobotomized at some point. While older workers have climbed the compensation ladder they are also less likely to job hop due to all of the age discrimination that goes on own a home they've been in and are comfortable with so they aren't hard to retain and tend to value stability. A younger worker may spend a year and be just up to speed when they decide to take a position elsewhere to get that 5%-10% rise in pay/benefits and a few more chances to add more certifications paid for by the company. Older staff that have been around have seen more things that didn't work out and will know why they didn't work so when the wild idea rolls around again, they can point out why it's a dead end. Things that work get documented. Stuff that doesn't work rarely does. Older workers are quicker to spot solutions to problems. They may also be able to see things less emotionally and respond more rationally. No more heated email exchanges that require a censor. Since people in their 50's that aren't cinema stars rarely spawn more children, they won't be taking the 6 months of leave that governments keep pushing. A twenty something might have a large family in mind and be spending half the year out for new babies and to take care of sick little plague carriers as well as never being able to work late due to football, ballet etc etc.
Older workers are often far more stable and more efficient. If you look at an institution such as NASA and see the stories where an engineer is trying to solve a complex problem and a colleague only has to think a couple of minutes to suggest something elegant, it's easy to see why losing the older staff is seen as a problem. The ones that manage to retire are often asked to come back to oversee projects to keep them on track. Read "Roving Mars" by Steve Squires for an excellent narrative about the MER rovers and how the old guard was instrumental at crucial times to get the rovers done and to Mars.
HP has driven off anyone over 45+ ; After they laid off my 60 yo director , I was demoted and moved to a group to produce paper work for vendors even though I was a principle SW engineer ; my next review has 2 sentences : "Does not meet expectations " after 24 years of excellent reviews ; I was gone 2 months later.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
