[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.

[scarface74]

Are they being illegally discriminated against because of thier age or for valid reasons - they don’t have the skills the company needs going forward, their salary is higher than the company can get on the open market, etc.?

[yebyen]

This exactly. Pay grade and composite sets of professional skills acquired are not protected classes. You can't prove it was age discrimination if you are paid higher and don't have skills that newer employees have (because both of those things also made you a target.)

That being said, I am probably younger than all y'all and I've been trained to remain in constant motion on the skills treadmill. I don't know if that's a good thing for either employers or employees. (I certainly feel under-utilized.)

[scarface74]

Whether it is “good” or not isn’t relevant. It’s necessary.

[yebyen]

With respect, this has to be demonstrated. Are the new skills better than the old skills?

(I am on the treadmill, so clearly I believe they are.)

[scarface74]

It doesn’t matter if they are better. It just matters if they are more marketable.

[yebyen]

More marketable to who, employers? Are they more marketable because people with those skills are younger and earlier in their careers, so can be paid less? That sounds potentially circular and I would need to hear more to come to agreement.

You're also not giving me much to go on here. I've had to infer 90% of what I think you meant. I think there's a solid argument that older skills are battle-hardened and therefore better for productivity and maintainability. I'm not going to try to make it though, because I'm on the treadmill focused on acquiring newer skills, and therefore would be arguing against my own self-interest. (Eg. why do we need to know capistrano if we have kubernetes?)

But maybe those older skills are not so much maintainable, if all the newer employees on the block are discouraged from acquiring those skills based on the treadmill. You see why I'm not so sure about this treadmill business? I already learned a bunch of skills that I'm afraid we won't use, because they are already asking for newer ones (serverless!) Maybe my employer would be better served by asking me to spend some time to learn Capistrano, if they're not going to let me use Kubernetes skills I went off and acquired on my own. (Let's make this real, I'm using a real example from my own life. I don't have to be convinced that Kubernetes is more valuable, but I do have yet to prove it in the context of my real job, where our deployments all still run on Capistrano not K8s.)

My situation is likely a bit unique and I don't think my employer engages in age discrimination in any way but we have to capitalize on these newer skills to give them value. An abstract sense of "having skills with high marketability" does not deliver any value to the employer (or employee) unless they are capitalized somehow.

In any case, we're arguing about nothing, because

> get a $35/month PluralSight subscription and watch the job boards to see what you need to be studying?

we don't have any numbers on how many of these canned IBM employees actually did this and got canned anyway. Its relevance as a factor is questionable, if the employees with advanced age are simply more well compensated like you said that has also made them a bigger target. They may have kept their skills current and been terminated anyway. This is a 100% speculative argument.