
Well, no one's ever been fired for buying IBM. Same can't be said if you're an oldie working for them !!!!
IBM has paid off 281 people who brought age discrimination claims against it in UK Employment Tribunals – leaving four more cases outstanding. In a judgment quietly published last week, Big Blue was said to have reached "confidential settlement terms" with 281 people out of the 285 who had raised employment law grievances …
Not sure its that much.
You could use as a formula that they are owed their base salaries and then some. But most are sales and they are highly leveraged in terms of compensation.
There are some stories I could confirm... ;-)
I even had one deal taken away from me because I was well in to my bonus and it would have meant an extra 75K in bonus on top of what i was making.
Posted Anon for the right reasons.
This seems a somewhat self defeating way of solving that problem, as any graduate who really is bright should realise that the IBM career ladder will end up with a sudden drop for them too once they have advanced for a sufficient length of time to be also thought of as yesterday's papers. They should also bear in mind the fact that the wisdom and experience of the older staff won't be there for them to tap into any more, or guide them away from foolish mistakes brought on by naive youthful trend following.
All of this gives IBM a faint aura of midlife crisis causing the desire to buy a sportscar, or a church deciding that the young people aren't interested any more so what they really need to attract the kids is some of that newfangled rock music with a bit of Jesus stuff in it.
The Christian Rock market is massive. Pretty sure it's not just to attract adolescent god botherers.
Even mainstream artists throw a pinch of Christ in every now and then because they know it will help them sell many, many records.
The bright college grad will realize that in the IT world, you end up spending somwhere between 24-36 months at a job before moving to the next big thing. Unless you're on the fast track, you are not destined for great things at the company. So you move out to move on.
IBM... slowly sinking and its doubtful that RedHat can save it.
Wow, nine years to finally get some justice, and a check. No wonder no one wants to go through the ordeal of fighting big companies. Good on them for sticking with it and getting paid. Much as I dislike attorneys, I can only pray they walloped IBM with nine years of fees (that sadly probably exceeded the settlement).
As a target of similar behavior I really hope this sets a precedent for the US complaints.
It's probably to prevent another wrinkly silver uprising.
I honestly don't see what the problem is though. Young people get discriminated against for having less experience, so why can't old people be discriminated against for age related reasons?
Let's face it, in a tech firm being a team of people of over 50s isn't very motivating for a youngster.
I'm in my mid thirties and consider myself old for the industry. There's certain things I just can't do anymore for various reasons (related directly and indirectly to age).
I have a family, so I can't do epically long shifts nor am I inclined to. I won't work at weekends and I couldn't give a flying fuck about my job title so I'm unlikely to care about picking up every cert that the industry throws at me...I don't have the time nor inclination.
Young, unattached, people on the other hand, have buckets of time, they do seem to care about their job titles and they'll work when you want them too. I think that's worth the extra money.
Experience is not something that should have massive sway on the amount someone earns.
In a capitalist market output should be proportional to input. Obviously, it doesn't work that way in reality but that is the spirit of capitalism.
'Experience is not something that should have massive sway on the amount someone earns.'
Really! So maybe you wouldn't mind a fresh youngster straight out of medical school carrying out a heart transplant on you?
It's called experience for a reason! not everything goes as planned and it is the experience that allows people to overcome obstacles that are not explained in a text book.
Jesus Christ man.
I wouldn't want a jaded 50 something with decades of long shifts and stress behind him whose wife just walked out on him after a 20 year shitty marriage full of neglect because he had to work long weekends operating on me either.
Experience matters, but only to a point. Youth, vigor and enthusiasm is equally as valuable.
I'd want someone in their early forties that still has steady hands, a stable life and hasn't yet been broken by decades of soul destroying repetition ripping me open and swapping my heart.
Last thing I'd want is an old boy that can hardly stand up that looks like he should be on the table with me.
Medicine is a really poor example of age being beneficial...it ain't. It's a fucking hard job, with long hours and usually costs you in your personal life.
Medical practitioners are heros in my book but older ones tend to a liability...
Last fucker I'd want operating on me is a Harold Shipman style nutter going rogue in my rib cage.
Experience is not something that should have massive sway on the amount someone earns.
Maybe you should try to evaluate what massive sway is and then, define in relation to what.
In today's globalised IT market, you will/can find a great many people with so-so credentials and very little experience who will work 10 hour days for a massive sway (below, obviously) with respect to the amount someone with decent credentials and years of experience would earn doing the same work and doing it well.
It seems that you are comparing fish with chips.
Yes, they are usually in the same bag but I'm sure that you are aware that they are definitely not the same thing.
This happens because in companies such as IBM (not the only one) those at the top don't give a monkey's toss about anything but their premiums and shareholder dividends.
O.
I'm not comparing fish to chips. I'm looking at the larger picture.
IBM has an image problem that will bite it in the ass down the line. They want younger people, I get it. Old people are harming their image.
The old IBM image of a guy wearing head to toe Marks and Spencer, cashmere jumper, white shirt and chinos, doesn't sell kit anymore. That's not what the mainstream perception of a techie is anymore.
We're not the cuddly, foppish, unassuming nerds that you'd be happy to take home to your mum anymore. We probably never have been.
We're the knackered, grumpy, scruffy, sweary people constantly raging about people clicking phishing links that your mum thinks is a waste of space.
Not only that in the last decade tech firms have gone from old and reliable to young and disruptive.
Granted, experience brings a lot of stability and reliability to a company but youth brings innovation and change...life.
Look at Tesla for example and their Cybertruck. Can I see my daft 70 year old Manc old man in one? Fuck no. He likes it and thinks it's cool..."looks like a Johnny Cab from Total Recall" he said...but he also said "I'd look a proper Charlie in that, pulling up at the pub".
Can I see myself in one? Probably not...can I see my lads in one in the future...yes, probably.
IBM is currently the firm that people my old man's age would choose...trouble is, people that age are retiring which means the people driving sales to IBM are dwindling.
Would I push sales to IBM? Maybe.
Will my kids drive sales to IBM? Without IBM gaining relevance with that generation in the future...no. They may only think of IBM in the same way we think of Sinclair, Commodore or Amstrad...vintage brands from days of yore.
"The old IBM image of a guy wearing head to toe Marks and Spencer, cashmere jumper, white shirt and chinos, doesn't sell kit anymore. That's not what the mainstream perception of a techie is anymore."
Good Diety, you are SO young! My dear father-in-law, may he rest in peace, a forty-year man at IBM, would never have been seen dead in anything but dark suit, conservative tie, and white shirt. In that kit he was just as happy talking to the CEO or crawling under a desk to trace wires (always brought a plastic tarp in his briefcase for the instances when the latter was required). I hope he is resting in peace, if he knew what IBM has become, you could power a small city off the dynamo of him spinning in his grave.
why should age matter at all? I'm over 50 and performing better than any of the 20-somethings that work for me.
About long shifts - I don't do them NOR do I expect or allow any of the younglings working for me to do them. Yes, we all have to sit through a night implementation or emergency, but age is not important there either.
being able to do something in 4 hours instead of 1 or 2 weeks counts. Experience counts. Age does not.
AC, you must be a pom or merkin. When I started in IT most of the older staff went out of their way to induct me into the folklore and wisdom/bitter experience of their times. That meant my newbie status was far shorter and the wiles of sales weasels much less effective. As I became one of the old timers I enjoyed mentoring the bright young things failed by the assembly line excuse of an IT degree so they became useful quickly. And yes, that was successful.
Some things like skepticism, proper cost/benefit analysis and assuming senior manglement always lie or are deluded just have to be learnt on the job. Yes there are IT knowledge hoarders, but usually those were outnumbered by adults.
This situation isn’t a simple question of age discrimination as the article suggests - therefore cannot be seen as some sort of vicarious revenge attack on Baby Boomers. The fact is, IBM U.K. put itself in serious breach of good faith by disguising a separation as a change to the pension scheme. The company handled the whole thing astonishingly badly and was clearly making it up as it went along. It was found guilty in a huge and complex court judgement. It appealed but not against the judgement - only against the punishment - leaving the way for these settlements. Of course that route was only available to those who left the company. Those of us still stuck on the headcount were hardly likely to sue. If they’d wanted to get rid of the “wrinklies” they could have funded a generous separation package. Or they could have offered early retirement. They’d been doing both for most of the 80s, 90s and 00s. Instead they came up with A Cunning Plan which cost them a fortune and alienated the generation that built Big Blue.
Grumpy, you a completely correct. IBM spent years paying people to take early retirement. I was a manager and one of my guys that volunteered to leave got a £60k cheque and some extra years added to their service, and that was actually lower than many others had. Then some bright spark came up with this great idea to stiff us on pensions and at the same time push people out of the company.
Whoever really made these and subsequent decisions is long gone including the Australian ahole and his chinless wonder of an HR Director at the time.
Happy days.
Today's Wall Street Journal has an article on how the IT workforce is skewed toward younger workers.
Not too bad of a tech article for the WSJ, but in addition to focusing on the hiring of younger workers, they could have addressed companies like IBM who are actively targeting older workers for layoffs.
"The alleged sack-all-the-oldies plan was supposedly given the internal codename Operation Baccarat, according to lawyers who successfully forced IBM to produce emails from CEO Ginni Rometty herself which referred to a project by that name. Baccarat is a card game played in casinos. In the North American variant's gameplay, "each player's moves are forced by the cards the player is dealt," according to Chambers Encyclopaedia."
Alternatively, the reference could just be that only old people know how the hell baccarat works :P
Less than a week after IBM was ordered in an age discrimination lawsuit to produce internal emails in which its former CEO and former SVP of human resources discuss reducing the number of older workers, the IT giant chose to settle the case for an undisclosed sum rather than proceed to trial next month.
The order, issued on June 9, in Schenfeld v. IBM, describes Exhibit 10, which "contains emails that discuss the effort taken by IBM to increase the number of 'millennial' employees."
Plaintiff Eugene Schenfeld, who worked as an IBM research scientist when current CEO Arvind Krishna ran IBM's research group, sued IBM for age discrimination in November, 2018. His claim is one of many that followed a March 2018 report by ProPublica and Mother Jones about a concerted effort to de-age IBM and a 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that IBM executives had directed managers to get rid of older workers to make room for younger ones.
IBM has quietly announced its first-ever cloudy mainframes will go live on June 30.
Big Blue in February disclosed its plans to provide cloud-hosted virtual machines running the z/OS that powers its mainframes. These would be first offered in a closed "experimental" beta under the IBM Wazi as-a-service brand. That announcement promised "on-demand access to z/OS, available as needed for development and test" with general availability expected "in 2H 2022."
The IT giant has now slipped out an advisory that reveals a “planned availability date” of June 30.
Updated ERP vendor Infor is to end development of an on-premises and containerized version of its core product for customers running on IBM iSeries mid-range systems.
Born from a cross-breeding of ERP stalwarts Baan and Lawson, Infor was developing an on-premises containerized version of M3, dubbed CM3, to help ease migration for IBM hardware customers and offer them options other than lifting and shifting to the cloud.
Under the plans, Infor said it would continue to to run the database component on IBM i (Power and I operating system, formerly known as iSeries) while supporting the application component of the product in a Linux or Windows container on Kubernetes.
Updated In one of the many ongoing age discrimination lawsuits against IBM, Big Blue has been ordered to produce internal emails in which former CEO Ginny Rometty and former SVP of Human Resources Diane Gherson discuss efforts to get rid of older employees.
IBM as recently as February denied any "systemic age discrimination" ever occurred at the mainframe giant, despite the August 31, 2020 finding by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that "top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the headcount of older workers to make room for Early Professional Hires."
The court's description of these emails between executives further contradicts IBM's assertions and supports claims of age discrimination raised by a 2018 report from ProPublica and Mother Jones, by other sources prior to that, and by numerous lawsuits.
HCL has given users of versions 9.x and 10.x of its Domino groupware platform two years warning that they'll have to upgrade or live without support.
Domino started life as Lotus Notes before IBM bought the company and milked the groupware platform for decades then offloaded it to India's HCL in 2018. HCL has since released two major upgrades: 2020's version 11 and 2021's version 12.
Now it looks like HCL wants to maximize the ROI on those efforts – a suggestion The Register makes as the company today emailed Domino users warning them that versions 9.x and 10.x won't be sold as of December 1, 2022, and won't receive any support as of June 1, 2024.
IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna says it offloaded Watson Health this year because it doesn't have the requisite vertical expertise in the healthcare sector.
Talking at stock market analyst Bernstein's 38th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference, the big boss was asked to outline the context for selling the healthcare data and analytics assets of the business to private equity provider Francisco Partners for $1 billion in January.
"Watson Health's divestment has got nothing to do with our commitment to AI and tor the Watson Brand," he told the audience. The "Watson brand will be our carrier for AI."
After freezing operations in Russia earlier this year, IBM has told employees it is ending all work in the country and has begun laying off staff.
A letter obtained by Reuters sent by IBM CEO Arvind Krishna to staff cites sanctions as one of the prime reasons for the decision to exit Russia.
"As the consequences of the war continue to mount and uncertainty about its long-term ramifications grows, we have now made the decision to carry out an orderly wind-down of IBM's business in Russia," Krishna said.
IBM's self-sailing Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS) has finally crossed the Atlantic albeit more than a year and a half later than planned. Still, congratulations to the team.
That said, MAS missed its target. Instead of arriving in Massachusetts – the US state home to Plymouth Rock where the 17th-century Mayflower landed – the latest in a long list of technical difficulties forced MAS to limp to Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The 2,700-mile (4,400km) journey from Plymouth, UK, came to an end on Sunday.
The 50ft (15m) trimaran is powered by solar energy, with diesel backup, and said to be able to reach a speed of 10 knots (18.5km/h or 11.5mph) using electric motors. This computer-controlled ship is steered by software that takes data in real time from six cameras and 50 sensors. This application was trained using IBM's PowerAI Vision technology and Power servers, we're told.
RSA Conference IBM has expanded its extensive cybersecurity portfolio by acquiring Randori – a four-year-old startup that specializes in helping enterprises manage their attack surface by identifying and prioritizing their external-facing on-premises and cloud assets.
Big Blue announced the Randori buy on the first day of the 2022 RSA Conference on Monday. Its plan is to give the computing behemoth's customers a tool to manage their security posture by looking at their infrastructure from a threat actor's point-of-view – a position IBM hopes will allow users to identify unseen weaknesses.
IBM intends to integrate Randori's software with its QRadar extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities to provide real-time attack surface insights for tasks including threat hunting and incident response. That approach will reduce the quantity of manual work needed for monitoring new applications and to quickly address emerging threats, according to IBM.
IBM and Dell are the founding members of a new initiative to promote sustainable development in IT by providing a framework of responsible corporate policies for organizations to follow.
Responsible Computing is described as a membership consortium for technology organizations that aims to get members to sign up to responsible values in key areas relating to infrastructure, code development, and social impact. The program is also operating under the oversight of the Object Management Group.
According to Object Management Group CEO Bill Hoffman, also the CEO of Responsible Computing, the new initiative aims to "shift thinking and, ultimately behavior" within the IT industry and therefore "bring about real change", based around a manifesto that lays out six domains the program has identified for responsible computing.
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