[Soundest]

It seems that every large company is guilty of this to some extent. I used to work at Intel and they had this exact problem when they tried to shrink the work force. The dynamic goes like this: Managers find it easier to use the performance management tool to make everyone happy rather than to follow the policies and procedures in place. So you end up with lots of quirks on an individual level -- someone wants more pay and less stock so you stick them on a low stock grant and high pay increase. Or the work in a given team simply isn't that difficult and so as your traditional journeyman gains more experience they get more expensive but not more useful- so they become at risk.

Then HR comes in to do the mass headcount cut, look at performance reviews and just cut all the people with low performance reviews. Because it's done on a mass scale of 1,000s of people they really can't do it on a case by case basis. The problem is that to safely fire staff you need to have treated them fairly and that's where it all comes out of the woodwork. You put all the data together and it turns out you've fired way more people over 50 because the organisation is a pyramid and older workers aren't value for money at the bottom of the pyramid and there's not many places at the top.

Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 older engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 younger engineers. It's the easy option.

Not to mention the fact that if you've been at a company a long time you've most likely had your salary rise during the good years and stay flat in the bad years, either way when you get to a bad cycle again suddenly you look very expensive to the organisation.

[markbnj]

Yeah I tend to think this is the more likely explanation, as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work. In any case, as a 57 year-old working engineer it is somewhat against my nature to delegate responsibility for my being able to make a living to any company. I learned a long time ago to take responsibility for it myself by constantly staying engaged, challenging myself, and learning new things. If I'm let go by an organization for whatever reason I will have the skills needed to land a new position, and I'd much rather spend my time keeping them sharp and acquiring new ones than wondering why BigCorp (who I probably won't work for anyway) didn't keep me around for the rest of my working life. The only security is what you create for yourself, in my opinion.

[notacoward]

> as opposed to the idea that there is some ageist conspiracy at work

Any sufficiently common bias has the same effect as a conspiracy. While it's very unlikely that IBM had an actual plan to eliminate older workers, because that would be illegal and stupid, there could well have been enough culture and cues leading to myriad "independent" actions with the same effect. Bias is something that must be actively countered.

> as a 57 year-old working engineer it is somewhat against my nature to delegate responsibility for my being able to make a living to any company

That's a very reasonable attitude, but irrelevant. Whether people have other options or not does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong.

[rcoveson]

I think the question is whether or not the discriminating factor was age. Mass firing requires establishing some sort of discriminating criteria (unless you just fire at random), and some of those criteria might be correlated with age. That doesn't imply bias or discrimination against age. If the most heavily weighted criteria established for firing is based on salary, and salary is correlated with age, then people in some age groups may well be more likely to be fired than others.

[mirimir]

Right, some of the discriminating factors might just have correlated with age. If there are two workers with comparable skills for tasks at hand, it makes sense to fire the more expensive one. Or if there are too many workers with skills that aren't so relevant anymore, it makes sense to fire the more expensive ones.

It's worth noting that for at least some firms, there was traditionally age discrimination that favored high-seniority workers. We used to call it "loyalty". But there was also the reality that they knew important stuff, and played a role in training new workers. But with technology changing so fast, that's arguably less relevant.

[nitrogen]

Technology changes fast, but technology concepts do not. More experienced engineers can recognize when a new technology is repeating an old pattern, and (if they'll listen) keep their team from repeating old mistakes.

[mirimir]

That's an excellent point.

But the problem may be that HR just processes nominal data, without considering nuances like that. So they end up firing experienced engineers, based on superficial (and perhaps outdated) data.

I'm not a software engineer, or familiar with relevant business practices. I get that physicians, for example, are certified for various specialties. But is there a formalized system like that for software engineers?

For some stuff, I know there is, based on ads I've seen. But what about particular programming languages, toolkits, etc?

Edit: coherence

[TheOtherHobbes]

It appears to make sense. It doesn't necessarily make sense, because it assumes you're accurately able to gauge productivity.

This implies you have some reliable and realistic metrics for code quality, and/or that all workers in a team are functionally identical.

Neither are likely to be true in practice. This doesn't mean older = better, or older = worse, or older = identical. It means you need to assess the value of individuals in a team individually.

Otherwise you're just doing scorched earth HR, with predictable consequences.

[mirimir]

I agree. I wasn't arguing for the validity of those approaches. Just that they could account for older workers being fired disproportionately, with no "intentional" age discrimination.

Which isn't to say that HR doesn't realize that their approach targets older workers. Just that they can say that it wasn't intentional.

[pathseeker]

Not sure why you're trying to argue. OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior rather than requiring explicit intent to discriminate against older people and then shared his/her strategy to fight it.

Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant. Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile to people offering their perspectives, particularly when they are in the very class of victims under discussion.

[notacoward]

> OP was just explaining how it can happen as an emergent behavior

Incorrect. OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias. I pointed out that it could still be bias even if it's not coordinated.

> Then you were kind enough to just echo the initial part and call his/her attitude irrelevant.

I was calling only that part irrelevant.

> they are in the very class of victims under discussion.

So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group. It doesn't matter whether any of us, or the IBM employees have alternative strategies. It only matters whether IBM discriminated against them.

> Please read more carefully and don't be so hostile

Advice best taken yourself. I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion. Please don't be so quick to take sides and attribute ill intent to anyone who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

[markbnj]

For what it's worth I did not read notacoward's post as abrasive or hostile. I understand the relevancy comment, but my goal in commenting was not to be morally opposed to ageism. I am, but being so is not a career strategy, which is more the direction I was going. My personal feeling is that if I have to care whether someone passed me over because of the dates on my resume I've already lost the game. Maybe there are people out there who will toss a resume despite it being replete with all the necessary skills and experience, simply because of the suspected age of the applicant. Honestly I think they're only harming themselves, and likely doing the applicant a favor. As for layoffs like the ones at IBM, I have no idea what motivated them. In my experience engineers who are doing relevant work on needed projects, who would have to be quickly replaced to keep things on track, don't get let go while there is a going business to pay them. IBM is facing some major challenges so the reasons for these reductions are probably not buried so deeply.

[pathseeker]

>OP had set up an excluded middle between a conspiracy and an emergent behavior unrelated to bias.

Nobody said it was unrelated to biases except for you. What was being suggested is that it's not a conspiracy (a.k.a an explicit agreement) against older employees. Nobody is suggesting systematic biases don't exist, which is the strawman you are attacking.

>So am I, and that is also irrelevant. It simply doesn't matter whether you, I, or s/he are in that group.

It's relevant (to me at least) in discussions where you have opportunities to hear anecdotes from the victims. We aren't lawyers deliberating a case.

> I wasn't hostile to anyone, only to an argument that had no place in this discussion.

FFS, it's not an argument anyone was making. I don't know why you're being defensive because OP was not defending ageism or claiming that an age bias didn't exist. It was just a suggestion that it was a product of the complex layoff strategies rather than some backroom hand shake of "let's get rid of the olds".

>who presents facts that don't support your "perspective" on an objective question.

You didn't present any facts and I don't have a perspective to support on this matter. I just pointed out that you're attacking people you appear to largely agree with because you're not understanding what they are saying.

[maiybe]

This comment is ironic given your previous praise for Linus on acknowledging his rude behavior towards other developers.

The language you're using is pretty abrasive and it can come off as quite hostile even if you don't intend it. You also get defensive when someone interacts with your easy-to-misinterpret comments and you gaslight them by saying they shouldn't be quick to "take sides" about your ripe-for-polarization statement.

Maybe you could take a queue from Linus. As you said in your own comment in reference to Linus admitting he had an attitude: "Good for him. These are hard things to admit, and he's setting a great example."

If I'm so lucky, I look forward to a quippy response about how that situation is totally different.

[projektir]

I'm not sure what's abrasive about their comment.

If anything, it's a great example of direct-without-abusive, something I wish folk like Linus would adopt.

[notacoward]

> You also get defensive ... you gaslight them ...

Very general, very untrue, and very off-topic. Please re-read the comment guidelines.

> Maybe you could take a queue from Linus.

Cue.

[mfringel]

The OP's strategy to fight, while clearly a valid approach, has the twin problems of survivor bias, and absolving corporations of their actions.

[IANAL] "Emergent behavior" is a pretty weak defense, because now you have to prove that you had no idea that the bad thing would happen. Getting into a trap of "You're either evil or incompetent, and we're just deciding which." is a bad place to be.

[scarface74]

That's a very reasonable attitude, but irrelevant. Whether people have other options or not does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong.

For the individual being affected, whether it’s “right” or “wrong” is an academic argument. Anyone in tech who got lazy and didn’t keep there skills current, hoping to retire and get a gold watch have themselves to blame.

I’m in my mid 40s and I’m a developer/consultant/architect depending on the month and I’m way to paranoid to let my skills become outdated to the point where I can’t keep a job.

One of my former managers is 60 and “self demoted” to a developer after his kids left home and can keep up with anyone when it comes to knowing the latest technology.

[notacoward]

> For the individual being affected, whether it’s “right” or “wrong” is an academic argument.

Perhaps, but from a policy perspective that is far from the case. Wrongs needs to be addressed even if the victims recover.

> I’m in my mid 40s and I’m a developer/consultant/architect

Congratulations. I'm in my 50s and still going strong. But neither your age nor mine really has any bearing on this.

[scarface74]

Yes it does. The people who are being “discriminated against” and can’t find a job are likely to not have kept their skills current. They are being “discriminated against” for the same reason anyone else would be - they don’t have the skills employers want. What “policy” needs to be put in place? How hard is it to keep a $35/month PluralSight subscription and watch the job boards to see what you need to be studying?

[notacoward]

> The people who are being “discriminated against” and can’t find a job are likely to not have kept their skills current.

Why do you assume that 100% of the people affected by this action couldn't find other jobs? That's insane, but without that assumption your response is a total non sequitur. If you discriminate against me, even if I have no trouble finding yet another job making twice what you ever could, that's still discrimination. It's still forcing me into an involuntary action, disrupting my income stream (especially if options or RSUs are involved), abrogating agreements between us, and - most relevantly - breaking the law. I'd still have standing to sue, and I'd still win, for the same reasons that a thwarted robbery or assault is still a crime.

[gaius]

The people who are being “discriminated against” and can’t find a job are likely to not have kept their skills current.

Sounds like you are stereotyping them based on knowing nothing apart from their age.

[drb91]

Why bother speculating about whether this is about age or skills when it’s inherently a case of judgement? There’s no way to come to a deductive conclusion. Why the confidence? Where is it coming from? Seems a lot like age bigotry to me.

[Timmah]

> Bias is something that must be actively countered

But that assumes bias actually exists in the first place. This argument is eerily similar to the religious argument of "just believe [that god is real]". No, prove it first, then I'll believe. And inb4 "they fired more old old people so that's bias". Correlation does not equal causation. Show me the causation.

> does not change the fact that discrimination is wrong

Moral platitudes are irrelevant to this discussion.

[notacoward]

> that assumes bias actually exists in the first place.

Not really. It only assumes the possibility of bias. At the very least, one must look for it. There's a lot of subjectivity involved in deciding who to hire or fire, and unfortunately a lot of people in tech seem to think they're perfect rational machines immune to bias, so they never even look. Don't have to look far for examples.

[Retra]

It doesn't matter if a hurricane causes death or merely correlates with it, you have a responsibility to do the right thing. Failing to do so because you want an impractical distinction between causation and correlation is about as much an irrelevant moral platitude as any.

In any case, causation can look an awful lot like correlation when you've got many layers of indirection and noise to account for. So for practical purposes, they very well could be the same thing. You can shout "correlation is not causation" as loud as you like, but reality doesn't work on the basis of popular slogans.

And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.

[apetresc]

> And causation is pretty much completely irrelevant to law.

You lost me there.

[Timmah]

> you have a responsibility to do the right thing

Exactly. Which is why I call out unsubstantiated claims (or "slogans", as you put it) whenever and wherever I see them. The most common places I've observed them happen to be with blanket leftist allegations of sexism/racism/ageism in the tech industry.

[kk__]

As a profession we work in the fastest changing industry in the history of work.

Typically once I make a contribution to the framework or the language alarm bells go off in my head and I learn the new shiny. It's the only way to survive.

It's also complete lunacy. Doctors, scientists, lawyers and engineers in other fields are life long learners, still going to conferences and publishing papers in their 70s. Software however prides itself on the young eating the old. They learn new languages and then holy war everyone else that theirs is the one truth.

And that's fine, but I know plenty of older developers who are astoundingly good and many who are garbage and the general difference is whether their company valued learning or whether it aimed to burn out their developers and replace them with younger developers. Supporting the second type of company is a strange masochism that is widely prevalent in the industry with the "Adapt or Die" mantra.

[ergothus]

I agree with your positions above and nothing below is intended to counter that.

> Doctors, scientists, lawyers and engineers in other fields

Careful there - Doctors notoriously fail to adopt (as a group) newer lessons until they are replaced, and lawyers have a similar problems when new areas of law open up (often in tech) - those areas are just fewer because law tries to define everything in terms of existing procedures. And I'm sure science has plenty of ageism problems that are similar enough. Note that the continuing ed classes for doctors and lawyers do not prevent this.

> Software however prides itself on the young eating the old

Software has a cycle we've not learned to defeat, and I think that's the root cause. Specifically (ish): To solve a tech problem in a clear context is easy and quick, so you adopt that system. Adoption means more reliance, dependencies, complexities. Soon, a problem arrives that is not easy to solve with all the baggage you've collected...but solving it OUTSIDE of that baggage is easy. Cycle repeats.

At a large scale: Software is a bit unique in that we get to code our own tools. What I can do in an hour after 5 years on a problem is far more than I can do in an hour with nothing - that learning and those tools get encoded into a library/framework/language, which becomes the hot thing. But now it can't itself change without violating assumptions relied on by everything using it, which means the rate of adding learned knowledge to it slows, while the rate of adding to "competing" systems does not. Eventually they are just plain faster/easier/better, and they become the hot thing.

The reason this is significant is that we're still learning how to program. We're actually REALLY BAD AT IT - programs are to translate between humans and computers, and those two do not think alike. We're embedding complexity and then suffering because there is complexity.

We're learning, but that is an iterative process- eating itself, as you say. Once the field approaches the age of medicine or law, we'll be as good (or as bad) at managing change as they are, but until then we're can't really compare directly.

[Edit: their/there mixup]

[kamaal]

>>Doctors notoriously fail to adopt (as a group) newer lessons until they are replaced, and lawyers have a similar problems when new areas of law open up (often in tech)

Even as individuals they need to adopt to newer lessons. If anything its harder in their case. Gaining a new skill or learning something new is way easier for an old programmer than for an old doctor to learn something new in their practice.

If you have chosen a knowledge based profession, you have to learn all life. Or its over.

These are like the fundamental rules of this game.

[jforman]

Importantly, though, intent isn't required to make a discrimination claim under the Civil Rights Act. If a policy is apparently neutral, but it has a disproportionally negative impact on a protected class, it is illegal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

IBM's lawyers are surely aware of this. This is likely going to be painful for them and they did it anyway knowing the liability.

[adrianratnapala]

Not sure why you thought that was news to markbnj, or relevant to the point made.

[austhrow743]

They talked about an "ageist conspiracy". Above post is saying an ageist conspiracy isn't required.

[dunpeal]

This is a great attitude, but it doesn't change the fact that discrimination exists and hurts real people in a very real way.

No matter how skilled and engaged you are, there are plenty of places that will do their best to eliminate you from any hiring process before you even get to the onsite, and they will make absolutely sure you will not pass the onsite if you somehow get there despite their best efforts.

I'm thankfully not at that stage in my career yet, but I've seen hiring managers casually tossing excellent resumes just because the bachelor's graduation year implied the candidate was "too old".

[lazyllama]

I think this is the reason Intel's 10nm chip production is a disaster. They did their systematic lay-offs 2 years ago and got rid of all the key senior people and management replaced them with recent college graduates (since you know we're all easily replaceable "resources") and this is what happens. I'm pretty sure this is also part of the reason behind BK getting fired.

[Soundest]

I disagree, the 2016 layoffs were organisational in nature. Basically they canned the Mobile CPUs, a big chunk of the GPUs and several other areas they decided they weren't performing. They didn't really touch the core chip design teams.

[sjg007]

This is a SQL query.. in terms of a large organization, you should expect a large-scale performance review based firing to follow the demographics of the company. If your query has enriched for older people you have a problem. Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier. I would find it very suspicious if you said they performed poorly this year vs last year and that is why they were fired as most big companies have processes to improve performance over a time period. The statistics will tell the story. IBM needs to made an example of.

[rtkwe]

One thing I'm worried about is if companies will be able to argue that the older workers weren't fired because of their age but because their pay relative to their work was higher than other employees doing similar work. That is is there ruling that would prevent them from just trimming the top earners in every job post which should be a fairly accurate proxy for experience/age in the industry?

[cannonedhamster]

In which case the same employees could turn around and point out that CEO pay, which is ostensibly tied to performance, is only getting higher despite any real provable impact on company performance for most of them. The problem for any company comes when it is driven more by the economics of the company than the mission of the company to product something good.

[rtkwe]

I agree with your sentiment but I'm not sure that'd actually affect their case and the company's argument that 'we didn't look at age at all just price per position and started at the top (for the positions we were looking to cut).'

[gaius]

large-scale performance review based firing

But that’s not a layoff. A layoff is when the job doesn’t need to be done anymore. It’s completely orthogonal to the performance of the person doing that job. And as you say, performance review based shafting is a very easy thing for a company to do, and many do do it under the guise of “stack rankings”

[adrianN]

If you have a thousand people assembling doodads and the demand falls by 50% you eventually need to get rid of 50% of the doodad manufacturers. How do you choose who to fire?

[gaius]

Usually companies do that by closing an entire factory and/or shifting production offshore. The performance of any individual at a location that is closing is irrelevant to the decision makers.

[Soundest]

Under Intel both happened, sites were shut with people relocated to the main hubs (Portland in the US, Poland in Europe, somewhere in India too) and anyone with 'bad' (less than the median grade) were laid off too.

[solveit]

>Also when you do fire people who have a longer tenure it begs the question as to why you didn't fire them earlier

I mean, presumably they were cheaper in the past.

[Rowaway45]

Also as you get older your possibilities to get sick go up. So maybe that person had sick leave more often this year. Maybe other person had family issues this year and year ago it was great for them. Some people might have worse periods. But for HR you are just as good as your last 6 months...

[AnimalMuppet]

If you fire the 20 younger engineers, you're also firing the people who will be the "10 older engineers" in a decade. You're killing the future.

But firing the 10 older engineers, you may be killing the present. Even with no bias, it's not easy to know what the right answer is.

[dj-wonk]

You've made two good points. I would suggest the next step is to synthesize them. As with many things, moderation is important. A strategy that balances the two downsides is probably better.

[rosege]

Odds are that each group has a bit of dead wood so taking some from each group would be best - identifying that is the harder part for those several rungs higher

[dunpeal]

As if in today's job market, keeping any engineer provides any sort of guarantee that the engineer will stay with the company "for the future".

Most likely he'll stay until he gets a better offer (if he's a good performer) or gets laid off in a couple of years (if he's a poor performer).

[chii]

you'd fire 5 older engineers, and 10 young ones.

[zentiggr]

Fire 5 old and 10 young? QED

[outside1234]

I would buy that except that they do a massive amount of analysis to make sure they aren't cutting diversity.

They need to do the same sort of analysis to include age and make sure there isn't a bias towards older workers.

[logicfiction]

It seems odd that age wouldn't be a dimension of diversity, unless that was shorthand for a very specific type like ethnic.

[mr_toad]

> engineers on higher salaries

By that logic, men should also be disproportionately represented in the group that got fired.

I’d be curious to know.

And does that count as sex discrimination?

[notacoward]

> does that count as sex discrimination?

In a practical legal sense, generally no. Discrimination against a class that many believe is already over-represented is almost never prosecuted. It can happen, in fields (e.g. nursing) or workplaces where men are the minority, but it's rare. Otherwise, the attitude is that no social good comes from prosecuting such cases. Not saying it's right or wrong, and undoubtedly such discrimination can create real victims, but that seems to be the prevailing view.

[yardie]

Good thing they've got Watson. "Hey Watson we need to lay off X,000 employees but need to control for age." "I'll get right on that, Rose."

[tabtab]

"Sorry, Dave, you've been fired and the pod bay doors are locked. I hope you remembered your helmet. Oh, and that was a great sketch you did of Dr. Otherdeadguy."

[codeonfire]

"Obviously it's also true that if you can fire 10 black engineers on high salaries lots of managers will choose to do that simply because it means they don't need to fire 20 white engineers. It's the easy option."

That's how 22-35 year old you sounds.