IBM bid to unmask age discrimination whistleblower goes down in flames The judge hearing an age discrimination claim against IBM in Texas on Wednesday issued a withering denial of the company's motion to unmask the source of internal documents at the center of plaintiff Jonathan Langley's case. Langley, who served as worldwide program director and sales lead of IBM's Bluemix cloud service, was …
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Reasonable - maybe. Illegal (if age is the deciding factor and not a job requirement) - absolutely.
Don't know how it's done in the UK, but including anything in an application that could be grounds for prohibited discrimination will get that application deleted faster than you can click "Send".
That includes date of birth, gender, age, photos, and the like. Nowadays employers could theoretically obtain such information from social media, but it is still illegal to base hiring decisions on it.
The company, he wrote, "regularly runs commercials touting its 'Watson' AI technology, which also has the ability to process immense amounts of data. Surely, IBM has the ability to locate the originals, drafts, and original authors of the 'leaked' slides and reports – assuming it has not already done so."
Tread very carefully how you argue with that, aren't there rules governing truth in advertising?
Surely, IBM has the ability to locate the originals, drafts, and original authors of the 'leaked' slides and reports – assuming it has not already done so.
That would require people who know how to run the systems and make the queries. Who are likely the people being "resourced".
If the "W3" intranet is any clue of IBM's ability to mine it's *OWN* internal data, there's no hope for them.
"If the "W3" intranet is any clue of IBM's ability to mine it's *OWN* internal data, there's no hope for them."
As an ex-employee booted at at age 64, I can attest to the uselessness of IBM's own search mechanisms. Not actually sorry they got rid of me however: it had become a most unpleasant place to work.
"HR may be able to tell you your rights as an employee"
HR's job isn't to tell your your rights as an employee - or even to protect your rights as an employee
If you believe that they are then you have some learning to do. HR's function is to limit the company's legal exposure. Everything else is window dressing.
The Judge "got it" though - they want to find the leak - they're not disputing the authenticity of it. They know d*mn well who wrote the stuff and at whose direction.
As the judge said - they want to plug the leak. Surely no one here thinks you have to have written something - particularly something that was a message to many - to leak it?
As with other cases worldwide, we want to shoot the messenger (Assange? DNC? Others?) rather than discuss that it was the content not created by the leaker, that's the problem.
Autonomy is now part of Micro Focus, as part of HPE's software spin-off. I don't know much about how the former-Autonomy products are doing, but I think IDOL is the main one (or is that from some other portfolio?), and there are a couple of big IDOL sales called out in the most recent "annual" report. (That report is actually for 18 months, due to the change in financial year after the merger.)
Man, that would have been such a good name for the Cambridge Window Manager (created by IBM ACIS in Cambridge, MA), since it provided a non-overlapping "paned" layout.
Of course CWM was used primarily at ACIS itself and by some Project Athena users, who were probably running AOS (the BSD port) if they were using a PC RT at all. I'm guessing CWM was rarely run under any of the AIX versions.
Unless something drastically changed since IBM "retired" me in 2016 most presentations and documents could be stored in internal cloud data repositories or intranet web based team rooms with controlled access based on author provided security levels.
Datamining these repositories with the internal IBM search engine usually came up with mind boggling results that had very little to do with what you were looking for.
It was also not uncommon for internal websites to disappear after a year or two when management pulled the trigger on various reorgs.
IBM attorneys would often request assistance from IBM subject matter experts to retrieve data for use in legal actions.
Many of these subject matter experts are long gone due to IBM "resource actions".
Bloated Goats are too bloated at this point to do anything useful :)
IIRC IBM released something called BloodHound at one stage, which was something out of this world, especially when searching for documents etc. It was shelved and is all but forgotten by now.
They were a 20th century technology company that much like the rest of the large tech companies gave up on technology to become a financial vehicle for “investors *” interested only in the next quarter earnings and no interest in anything beyond that.
* they’re not really investors because buying 2nd hand shares in an existing company isn’t investing, it’s just servicing debt that the company got into when they first went public.
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OK, this is anon for obvious reasons...
First off, I am not defending their practices here. That being said....
Having some inside knowledge of IBM workings, one of their main problems isn't so much the age of their workforce as it is the older workforce, especially the sales force, is very set in the "IBM way" -- the obnoxious, pushy, overselling approach that has gotten them most of their bad reputation over the years. There's an effort underway to adapt IBM into a different kind of company, but these people keep getting in the way and in many cases actively undermine the new efforts. This is all amplified by the fact that younger people don't want to work there any more due to said reptuation, and it all has the effect of concentrating the business-undesireable (NOT age-undesireable, it's a mentality problem, not an age problem) employees and making the problem hundreds of times worse.
So how do you get rid of those people that are mainly older, stubborn, dyed-in-the wool dinosaurs actively killing your business and reputation without inviting a lawsuit like this? For starters I imagine not circulating illegal documents would help, but even setting hiring and firing criteria as "not the old IBM way" would invite an age discrimination lawsuit regardless based on appearances?
I note Google and similar Sillycon Valley megacorps have the opposite problem, not enough old blood. Somehow they've managed to keep themselves from getting sued though, despite pretty obviously being guilty of age discrimination the other direction.
I'd wager there's more to this story, possibly involving the infernal "good old boys club" of car salesmen that IBM was nurturing for decades looking out after itself. That might include HR and their legal team in this case, I have no idea. It's almost at the point where a breakup might be a good thing, except for one thing: the new megacorps in Silicon Valley would then eat the pieces, then well and truly put everyone over the age of 40 out of work. I also shudder to think of what a hostile Microsoft or Google armed with some of the IBM copyrights and patents would do to make the world absolute hell on earth. We all might be going back to punchcards or have no choice but to sign up to "willingly" feed Microsoft our personal data and train Google's AI forever if they get control of copyrights of things like the POSIX API or the C++ stuff (see Google vs. Oracle).
Don't just break up one - i. e., IBM, break up all the conglomerates, and outlaw mergers and acquisitions. It's economic market competition that's been stomped out with such devices, and needs to be restored. That's heroic and gargantuan I know, but the alternative is being eventually taken over by the government, one way or another, as they become too big and powerful to tolerate, and that would be an even worse outcome.
"First off, I am not defending their practices here. That being said...."
There are legitimate ways of dealing with people who cause problems. However, preferring inexperience to experience isn't one of them. Deliberately turning someone down for a job on the grounds that they are only looking to take on new graduates rather than those with relevant techincal experience, as happened to me at IBM, is one of the reasons they turn out fancy **** which doesn't work.
Politely disagree.
IBM under Thomas J Watson was a scrupulously ethical company to the point of boredom. As well as investing in people and research its third business strategy was to nurture long term relationships with its customers based on trust, making sure the products were appropriate and worked correctly. This included sucking up the loss if they got it wrong.
Somewhere in all the mis-managed takeovers and mergers (Here's looking at you PWC) this culture was lost and the total focus was on the next quarters revenues (not even profits!), and, screwing the customers became the norm.
Now that this strategy has failed the new strategy seems to be screw the employees.
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